Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  In his memoirs Guthrie recalled that the production of the play went like clockwork, but behind the scenes there were the usual convolutions and crises inherent in pulling a play from script to stage. At first Wilder revised his original script extensively, only to return to most of the original text, filling the “wastepaper baskets of Europe” with rewritten pages.44 In the end he produced a retitled script that was, he wrote to his dramatic agent, “merely a cut, trimmed, original, touched up YONKERS.”45

  The Matchmaker—the first American drama to be staged at the Edinburgh Festival—was launched to mixed but largely positive reviews. “It does not add up to anything at all in the end except an over-long, over-dressed, over-elaborated bore,” wrote Alan Dent in the Edinburgh News Chronicle.46 For Derek Granger in the Financial Times, however, the play was “consistently ebullient and daisy-fresh,” and full of “those little saws and scraps of home-spun wisdom with which Mr. Wilder has enriched American comedy.”47

  Behind the scenes of his farce about love and money, Wilder was worrying about his own financial situation. His lawyer had informed him in 1954 that his 1952–53 income was about seven thousand dollars less than the year before, while his expenses were about six thousand dollars more, not counting the now-doubled cost of supporting Charlotte—more than four thousand dollars from May 1953 through April 1954.48 To make ends meet, Wilder had to draw about nine thousand dollars from his savings. But, he assured his lawyer cheerfully, the British production of The Matchmaker was going to make him “very rich.”49

  The Matchmaker went on to great success and a long run in London, not as a retread of an old play but as a fresh, lively new production. This was a different time, a different production, a different director, a slightly different script, and most of all, a different Dolly Levi. According to Binkie Beaumont, the acting was impeccable in the London engagement, most of the reviews were “jolly good,” and the audience “burst into rounds of applause on countless occasions out of sheer ecstasy of joy.”50 Furthermore, Beaumont wrote to Wilder, Ruth Gordon was “very definitely the toast of the town, a pillar of strength, and the most wonderful actress to work with that one could ever hope to be lucky enough to meet.”51

  From London The Matchmaker moved on to New York under the auspices of the Theatre Guild and the producer David Merrick. It opened on Broadway on December 5, 1955, and ran for 486 performances—Wilder’s Broadway record. In 1964, transfigured once again, this time as Hello, Dolly! with star turns by Carol Channing, Ginger Rogers, Betty Grable, Pearl Bailey, Ethel Merman, and others, the musical played 2,844 Broadway performances.52

  SOON AFTER The Matchmaker’s success at the 1954 Edinburgh Festival, Ian Hunter, the director of the festival, asked Wilder to contribute a play in 1955 for the “problem hall” in Edinburgh—the Assembly Room of the Presbyterian Church on the Mound, a large auditorium with pewlike rows of seats rimming three sides of a central platform. It was absurd even to consider the invitation, Wilder wrote in his journal, because he was facing “so many unfinished projects,” as well as his “increasing inability to carry through a project in a prolonged effort of concentration.”53 Still he began to think seriously about it. Perhaps he would write a science-fiction drama in the manner of Aristophanes. He could see a spaceship heading for another star, and Martians wanting to immigrate to earth, and people inhabiting caves on earth. He would call it “The Martians,” or perhaps, “Fifty Billion Acres.” In the flush of his initial enthusiasm, he pitched the idea to Binkie Beaumont, who was “bewitched” by it and immediately saw Helen Hayes in the lead role of the mother of eleven children, including four sons who went off to war.54 By mid-November, however, Wilder abandoned the idea.

  That fall, in Aix-en-Provence, he was rereading, in French, Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Scraps (Wilder’s rendition of the title most commonly translated as Philosophical Fragments)—the philosopher’s meditations on the nature of truth. In this book Kierkegaard questioned whether truth lies within the subconscious or the “true self” of an individual, waiting to be discovered, or whether it is external, waiting to be learned. He raised the possibility that there are universal truths that cannot be fully known or understood, and posed questions about the nature of love and of faith. At the same time that Wilder revisited Kierkegaard, he picked up the manuscript draft of The Alcestiad, which he had accidentally brought along to Europe in his baggage. He was almost immediately caught up in the script again, “with full conviction.”55

  The Greek legend of Alcestis has long been a magnet for dramatists, beginning with Euripides and including, in the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot as well as Thornton Wilder. Eliot drew loosely on the legend in The Cocktail Party, a play Wilder saw in New York in 1950 and heartily disliked. It made him “angry as a boil,” he had written to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. “No, sir, life is not restricted to two choices only—dreary inconsequentiality or absolute sainthoood. No, sir. T.S. Eliot does not like people.”56

  Wilder’s drama, set in the mythical time and place, depicts the full saga of Alcestis, the daughter of a king, who was wooed and won by another king, Admetus. When the gods proclaimed that Admetus would be spared death if someone would die in his place, Alcestis willingly stepped in. Wilder made it clear on the title page of the manuscript that his Alcestiad is a play of questions. Alcestis does not want to go to her grave “loved and honored,” but ignorant. She does not want to reach the end of her life “knowing as little of why we live and why we die—of why the hundred thousand live and die—as the day we were born.”57 In his journal Wilder examined ways of posing the questions to “express the incommensurability of the human and the divine, the ambiguity to which all human reading of a divine would be subject.” He wondered if he could “mould the story in such a way that it left in doubt whether the Supernatural had spoken to men or whether Men had sublime promptings which they immediately ascribed to the Supernatural?”58

  One reason Wilder had put the play aside in 1953 was that he grew bored “with writing a ‘beautiful’ saint’s legend,” and wanted to make it all “wider, newer, crazier.” He considered introducing a “company of twentieth-century archaeological trippers surveying under a guide the site of the palace at Pherai.” They would be invisible to the ancient characters in the play, who would likewise be invisible to them. “Ladies and gentlemen, please stay together in a group,” the tour guide would say to the modern tourists. “Here, it is believed, was the palace of Admetus.” He abandoned the idea, but wished that he could achieve in the play a tone of “high comedy—lyrical, diaphanous and tender—just because it threatens so to be sententious and didactic.”59 While he was not a poetic dramatist, Wilder wrote in his journal, he was a poetic dramatist, and he kept his “darks and lights” in “continual juxtaposition.”60

  In 1954, after time away from the play, Wilder could see the problems that had stalled his work, and even better, he saw how to fix them.61 For one thing, King Admetus had come alive for him, and he could now picture his good friend Montgomery Clift in the part. Wilder wrote to Thew Wright, now one of his lawyers, that The Alcestiad would “play to shaken and sobbing audiences for years to come. It’s a mixture of religious revival, mother-love-dynamite, and heroic derring-do. You can’t beat that combination.”62

  In private, however, Wilder doubted the play, and himself. “What have I got now?” he wrote in his journal. “A play of faith which is not a very good or radiant or convinced play of faith. . . . What I should have written is a play of scepticism which is continually shot through with an almost violent and demanding invocation to interpret the actions in the light of faith.”63 He fell short, he believed, because the “silly life” he had been living since the war had “dulled and dimmed” his “capabilities for intellectual passion” and a “clearer, harder intellectual structure.” He had been a lazy artist for the past few years, he wrote, and he feared he could no longer summon his “total concentration” to write an entire, unified play.64

  In some
of his earlier work, especially his fiction, Wilder had confronted the question of how we live. In The Alcestiad he turned to the question of why. In the questions posed and the answers offered, The Alcestiad may be read as a sequel to Wilder’s novels, especially The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and to his depiction of death in Our Town. Unlike Emily, who is granted her wish to revisit one day of her life, Alcestis is brought back from the underworld by Hercules to live again. Although death brings “great grief,” she has learned that the bitterness of death is not the parting. Instead, she says, “It is the despair that one has not lived. It is the despair that one’s life has been without meaning. That it has been nonsense; happy or unhappy, that it has been senseless.” She speaks of the dead in the underworld—“all those millions lie imploring us to show them that their lives were not empty and foolish.”65

  Wilder asks in his early novels if love is sufficient to give life meaning. “But the love will have been enough,” the Abbess says in the unforgettable conclusion to The Bridge of San Luis Rey; “all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”66 In the play produced twenty-eight years after The Bridge was published, Alcestis says, “Yes, but love is not enough. Love is not the meaning. It is one of the signs that there is a meaning—it is only one of the signs that there is a meaning.”67

  LONG BEFORE his play opened, Wilder wrote a dispassionate critique of it—and he anticipated the largely negative responses by theater critics that would follow the play’s debut on August 22, 1955, at the Edinburgh Festival. Still, much of the public was quite moved by it. “If the play were written by someone else, what would I have to say about it,” he wrote in a journal entry on January 25, 1955. “First, that Wilder has again tried to succeed in a vast undertaking and has fallen conspicuously short.”68

  The great American actress Irene Worth, distinguished in Britain as well as the United States, played Alcestis in the Edinburgh Festival production, and Wilder hoped that Montgomery Clift would take on the role of Admetus. At first Clift agreed and began growing a beard for the role. Guthrie and Beaumont knew that Clift would be “a very tempting plum” for the part, and, happy to meet his demands, leased a private home for the duration of his stay in Scotland.69 However, Clift changed his mind, apparently on the grounds that the script needed major changes because some of the dialogue was “forced and pedantic.”70 Wilder told the press that Clift had withdrawn from the role because he felt it wasn’t the part for him.71 A second actor, Michael Goodliffe, was cast in the part. He withdrew after a few rehearsals in a dispute with Guthrie, who quickly replaced him with Robert Hardy, fresh from his acclaimed Old Vic performance as Prince Hal in Henry IV, Parts I and II.

  Concerned that the title of the play might not attract an audience, Guthrie and Beaumont, with Wilder’s permission, changed it to A Life in the Sun. Irene Worth was “sublime” as Alcestis, according to the critics, and to the actress Rosemary Harris, who was performing at the festival with the Old Vic Company, playing Desdemona to an Othello portrayed on alternate days by Richard Burton and John Neville. She would slip over to the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall between her own performances especially to see Worth in Wilder’s play.72 Reviews of The Alcestiad were mixed, with some of them highly critical. Others praised the acting but disliked the play’s lack of unity. One critic applauded Wilder’s “good honest prose, often with more than a touch of colloquial usage and frequently with a decided stroke of humour.”73

  LIFE ON the road could be lonely, especially for someone getting along in years, and whether he was in company or in solitude, Wilder’s affinity for alcohol became more of an issue as he grew older. His usual ability to drink freely without much obvious detriment seemed to wane. From the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1952 he had written to Thew Wright, “The New Hampshire laws about liquor are perfectly fantastic. You have to sign a pledge never to touch liquor before you’re allowed to take a drink. It’s worse in Vermont: There you have to get four doctors to swear that you’re a vicious alcoholic and that only a drink can save you from DEATH.”74

  His father had coerced Thornton into taking that temperance pledge when he was a boy, but college and travel had introduced him to the pleasures of good wine and whiskey. (While most of his Wilder relatives may have been teetotalers, his Niven ancestors hailed from Bowmere on the Scottish island of Islay, home of some of the best distilleries in the world.) Wilder’s incessant travel during the 1950s led to more solitary and social cocktails and bottles of good wine, especially in Italy, Germany, and France. He usually wanted to drink after a hard day’s work, or a speech, or some other public obligation. Most of the time he drank a lot with few visible effects. He frequently enjoyed an abundance of alcohol at social hours or leisurely dinners with Olivier and Leigh, or Clift, or Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, or other friends and strangers. While Wilder seldom appeared to be drunk, he usually grew more animated and loquacious the more he drank. In 1957, when an interviewer asked him to explain how liquor helped some writers write, Wilder replied, “I drink a good deal, but I do not associate it with writing.”75

  He had met and befriended the young Canadian actor and writer Timothy Findley when Findley played Rudolph in the original production of The Matchmaker, and he became Findley’s mentor as well as his drinking companion. In his memoir, Inside Memory, Findley described the pub crawls he and Wilder enjoyed in the midfifties. “These could take place anywhere,” Findley wrote. “You named a street—a district—a town—and you tried to drink in all its pubs and bars. Highfalutin hotel bars were out.” Once he and Wilder started on Fleet Street in London, imbibing “many glasses of wine and many tumblers of Scotch.” If you started at the Temple Bar (the old gate to London), Wilder told Findley, and ended at Saint Paul’s Churchyard, you could “practically touch the whole of English literature.” Wilder knew that Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys, John Dryden, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, William Makepeace Thackeray, and even Charlotte Brontë had been on Fleet Street, not in the pubs but in the buildings lining the street—Child’s Bank, Temple Hall—or simply driving down the street. Dr. Johnson lived just up the alley.76 Wilder drew a verbal picture of how Fleet Street would have been in Shakespeare’s day—“the color of it all—the dawning of universal knowledge.” As Wilder praised Shakespeare and Johnson and the rest, Findley thought, “Thornton tooted every horn but his own.”77

  Perhaps his drinking accelerated during the fifties as an antidote for loneliness, or as a by-product of it, or perhaps by now as an addiction. But alcohol did not figure in Wilder’s exploration of loneliness as an American characteristic. He had explored the American loneliness through the prism of the lives of Dickinson and Thoreau. He chose Melville and Whitman as filters for his reflections on sexuality and the breakdown of love in the American experience. He noted in his journal that many human problems are attributed to the failure to “make ‘harmonious sexual adjustments.’ ” Wilder believed, however, that it had “to do—more deeply and first—with love.” There was a risk, he wrote, in failing to recognize that “sheer emotional devotion” is qualitatively different from “the libido element in parental and sibling love.”78 He examined the “sort of vibration of homosexual feeling and intimation” in Melville’s Billy Budd. Melville’s use of “feminine similes for Billy” made him uncomfortable, as did Melville’s apparent preoccupation with phallic symbols, and Wilder thought that Melville “almost lost his story through his own infatuation with Billy Budd.”

  Wilder wrote in his journal that he would leave for later consideration a number of “aspects of this neurotic overturn,” such as “the off-center sexuality in a number of these writers to the total American character; even the consideration that extreme ideality may always arise . . . from a strain and tension proceeding not from a serene ‘rising above’ sexual love but from a fear-laden repudiation of it—a shrinking
from it which inevitably constitutes a fretting relation to it.” Nevertheless, he wrote, “it is very remarkable finally how little this element though radical and omnipresent harms this work or renders it ‘special.’ ”79

  In the legally and socially repressive 1950s, new and often opposing theories about sexuality, including homosexuality, were emerging, espoused by researchers such as Alfred Kinsey and psychoanalysts such as Anna Freud, who took issue with some of her deceased father’s theories. Wilder knew Freud’s views of the repercussions of an infancy and childhood “starved of the environment of love,” especially the “demand and command to be loved.” Immediately following that observation in his journal, Wilder wrote in parentheses that he was “more and more willing to agree with certain authorities that homosexuality is negative—that it is, even when apparently aggressive, a submission to solicitations. These solicitations are not necessarily those coming from the outside; they come from within also, from an exorbitant need for tenderness, i.e., to be valued by another.”80

  He wrote in his journal that he was now ready to alter his views that “man, such as he is, has no choice but to believe, to insist on believing, that the world is grounded in love—love as affection. Which brings us back to the main premise of Christianity. The human soul must feel that it is loved.”81 And how did this relate to Melville and Whitman and American characteristics in the New World—and perhaps to Wilder himself? He noted that the American’s “love-object” is usually and conventionally a person of the opposite sex. “But,” he wrote in his journal,

  as we saw that an American does not fix himself upon a concrete sense of place (one place, my own), and submit to one situation in society (that station to which God and the social order have assigned him) and correspondingly does not feel himself enclosed in one moment of time—so his erotic emotion is capable of a wider focus than the European’s, not as polyandry, but as sublimation. . . . He has unfocused affection to dispose of and cannot find durably any object. This is combined with his independence to take a certain autoerotic color (as in Thoreau and Melville—not, I think, Poe). . . .