Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  Does the American sublimate easily? Yes. But the term sublimation is misleading: it implies only a higher transference of the sexual drive. The American sublimates into business, into infatuation with celebrities, into philanthropies.82

  This was only “a first skirmish with a deeply complicated subject,” Wilder concluded.83 As he neared sixty he was preoccupied with these questions about the nature of love and its manifestations in the American experience and the universal human experience, including his own family, perhaps trying to put them to rest in his literary life and in his personal life, once and for all.

  IN THE fifties Wilder roamed, as usual, from Europe to the United States, writing as he moved about, searching for just the right place to work on his new series of “Four-Minute Plays for Four Persons” and his Norton lectures. As challenging as it was, he even tried to work in the house on Deepwood Drive during the spring of 1956. He wrote from Hamden to the noted modernist composer Louise Talma,

  What do all of these long stays abroad mean, but my eternal effort to find a time and a place when I can follow an idea through? . . . I know, in a way (but one part “of oneself” is always refusing to see what one knows) that I shouldn’t have tried to return to Deepwood Drive these last months. But I was trying to do an amiable thing for Isabel. Word had reached me (though I needed no word from outside) that rightly or wrongly she felt in a mortifying position—that was my home and she was its chatelaine—why, then, was I never there? What was the matter? Translate this into terms of the set she moves in . . . was she a bad housekeeper . . . was she this or that? Anyway, I’ve done my duty.84

  Throughout the fifties Wilder was caught in a tug-of-war between his duty to others and his duty to himself, and between his plays in progress and his stalled nonfiction work. He found comfort, he said, in the fact that the eminent art historian Erwin Panofsky took seven years to ready his Norton lectures for publication. Actually Panofsky took five years, but others took much longer, and Robert Frost, Eric Bentley, and a few other Norton lecturers joined Wilder in never submitting the complete series for publication at all.85

  He had been so preoccupied with innovations in form for The Alcestiad and The Emporium that he abandoned his usual strategy of coaxing a play’s form from its subject and themes. Instead he sought to impose the form on the subject matter, and this artificial scaffolding ultimately failed rather than supported the life of the drama. His struggle with The Emporium involved a shifting of subject and theme as well as a search for form. In Wilder’s cosmic G. and S. Emporium, the best department store in the world, his characters “sold” or “shopped for” answers to the questions of the meaning of existence, of identity, faith, love, alienation, the presence or absence of a divine plan—the questions that had long permeated Wilder’s work as well as his personal philosophical and spiritual journey. His struggles with the play in part reflected the twists and turns of his own personal search for answers that remained stubbornly elusive. “I hate allegory, and here I am deep in allegory,” he had written in his journal in the early years of his work on the play.86

  Wilder wanted to mask his own investigation of the boundless misery of the human condition in comedy. To that end, during his six years of work on The Emporium, he kept hunting for the “right form—the right statement for this cosmological comedy.”87 He worried that his form was not “bold and splendid and revolutionary enough,” and that left him “inhibited and tentative and scratchily groping.”88 Ultimately, however, he was defeated by his search for the hero and for the crux of the hero’s journey, and he laid the blame at Kafka’s door. “I have been too much drawn into the Kafka hero, the frustrated pre-condemned struggler,” Wilder wrote. “That’s not my bent: I’m not the stuff of which nihilists are made.”89

  He never finished The Emporium, putting it away for good in 1954, but saving the manuscript among his papers. He knew before The Alcestiad opened in Edinburgh that it would not succeed and, most important, that he had failed to write the play he wanted to write. In his earlier work as a dramatist, he had aspired to achieve innovations in form, and he did so—but those plays were driven by their characters and themes, and the structure emerged organically from the marriage of form and content. In the fifties, try as he might to write about the “misery of the human condition,” Wilder could not do it without cloaking his characters and themes in history and myth. Although he had long ago vowed not to repeat Our Town, he wanted once again to write “a really original play—original not in the sense that it is filled with novel devices,” he said, “but that it makes people see for the first time things that hitherto they had known without being aware that they knew them.”90

  IN 1956 Wilder’s mail brought an unexpected invitation: “The Miss America Pageant cordially invites you to serve on our 1956 Panel of eleven Judges to select Miss America 1957.” The committee promised to “leave no stone unturned” to provide a “memorable visit” to the Atlantic City resort. Somebody there clearly knew that George Antrobus had been a beauty pageant judge in Atlantic City in The Skin of Our Teeth, which had enjoyed a revival in 1955 starring Helen Hayes as Mrs. Antrobus and Mary Martin as Sabina. But, Wilder wrote in response, while he believed that “Thornton George Antrobus Wilder” had inherited Mr. Antrobus’s “expertise,” he also felt that as president of the Albert Schweitzer Hospital Fund, he would have to “restrict the range” of his interests. Therefore he declined.91

  35

  “THE HUMAN ADVENTURE”

  As a child of the Twentieth Century and particularly of America, I grew up in a world which—as never before—was aware of the vast extents of time and space that surround the human adventure on one planet, the multiplicity of souls, and the innumerable repetitions of any typical occasion.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  journal entry 742, June 2, 1957

  The United States and Europe (1950s and 1960s)

  Wilder’s journals throughout the 1950s and early 1960s provide a remarkable road map through the terrain of his interior life and its exterior expression in drama, fiction, and nonfiction. Hundreds of pages are full of ideas, sketches, and drafts—experimental passages of work in progress; reflections on his reading; analyses of his occasional dreams, relying at times on Freud, at times on Jung; ruminations on the masses of Palestrina and Schubert; a detailed account of getting “sick as a dog” from food poisoning in Milan and a subsequent discourse on pain; now and then a stride forward with his Lope work; but most of all documentation of his intentions as a writer, and his prolonged and futile efforts to finish writing the Norton lectures and to write a series of short plays.1

  For the published Nortons, Wilder searched for an innovation in nonfiction form, inventing a character he first called Tom Everedge, the avatar of the average American, the everyman living his individual version of the human adventure. The name soon modulated to Tom Everage, and then to John Everage—and back to Tom again. By April 3, 1956, Wilder had established a table of contents for the Norton book, which he titled American Characteristics. He had arrived at an intricate plan: He would intersperse the lectures with “interludes” narrating the “Amazing Saga of Thomas Everage,” illustrating an aspect of his hero’s life that would contrast the old world of European letters with the new world of American literature. He would compare Everage’s American life with the lives of his contemporaries in “the Old World.”2

  Wilder was fascinated with Tom Everage’s infancy and childhood, and his relationship with his parents—especially his fixation on his emotionally distant mother—and wrote lengthy passages about them. He thought he could actually make a whole “astonishing” book about the life of Tom Everage, although he continued to subordinate that story to the Norton chapters. He thought of having the serial essays and the serial Everage story printed on different-colored paper, but was told it would be too expensive. He also envisioned writing “Lay Sermons” for the book to help illuminate his “thick and many-layered rich subject matter.”3 Wilder’s plans for th
e Norton book grew increasingly ambitious and complex until it collapsed under the weight of his extravagant vision and expectations.

  He wrote in his journal on April 8, 1956, “I hadn’t meant to use this Journal for this kind of ‘first draft of the final text’—it is rather for a ‘let’s look around and see what we’ve got’—but I keep running away with myself.”4 Then there was a six-month hiatus in the journal in 1956 until Wilder decided to write his series of “Four-Minute Plays for Four Persons as a continuation of the Oberlin-Yale-and later Three-Minute Plays” because he always found the “self-imposition of a schema” helpful, even when it became “an appallingly exacting discipline.”5 Now he decided to create fourteen new one-act plays, two cycles of seven each, intended for the arena stage. In them he would explore the much-traveled territory of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Ages of Man. Once again, as he had often done in the past, he resurrected ideas from his portfolio of unfinished work: “I have salvaged literary ventures which appear to have been discards,” he wrote. For instance, two characters in his new one-act play Bernice were “salvaged’ from his screen treatment for Vittorio De Sica. He would “ransack” his other past projects for ideas and material for new plays, and snatch new ideas out of thin air—or out of his reading. A Henry James short story prompted the idea for Wilder’s play In Shakespeare and the Bible.6

  Wilder made a study of the history of the arena stage and embarked enthusiastically on his ambitious project. He originally intended each play to represent “a different mode of playwriting: Grand Guignol, Chekhov, Noh play, etc., etc.”7 By the end of 1956 he had finished six plays, counting The Drunken Sisters, the satyr play he wrote to accompany The Alcestiad, in keeping with the tradition in Greek theater of following a tragic drama with a short play “in the spirit of diversion—even of the comical.”8

  His enthusiasm soon faded, however, because he simply couldn’t “catch fire” on some of the new plays, perhaps because he was “straining so hard” to find a lighter comedic one to accompany the more somber dramas. Nevertheless he persisted. “I grope,” he wrote in his journal in January 1957. “In the meantime, I suppose the best thing to do is to write more,----to put them in the oven and to hope that two out of four (my average so far) will come out well-baked; to inform my subconscious that that is what I am doing, and leave the rest to the mysterious operation.”9

  Meanwhile, The Alcestiad was “going on journeys,” Wilder reported to friends.10 He revised the script and, translated into German, it would be performed at the Zurich Festival in June 1957, accompanied by Wilder’s new satyr play. Then came a tour of German-language countries, from Frankfurt and Munich to Zurich and Salzburg—sixteen venues from June 1957 to September 1959.11 Wilder took the drafts of his one-act plays with him to Switzerland, where The Alcestiad, or Die Alkestiade, translated into German by H. E. Herlitschka, would be produced in Zurich’s great Schauspielhaus beginning on June 27, 1957. In addition Wilder’s friend Louise Talma, whom he had met at the MacDowell Colony in 1953, began composing a twelve-tone opera based on the play, with Wilder contributing the libretto.

  In May he received a signal recognition—induction into Germany’s Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. He was honored at a luncheon with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and other distinguished guests, and then was back in St. Moritz preparing for the premiere of The Alcestiad. Sadly he no longer believed in the play, he wrote in his journal. “It never found its way into the center of my stresses. . . . The reading of Kierkegaard had not penetrated into me deeply enough. Like an ill-baked cake only portions of it are fitfully touched with heat.” He had intended his play to say “that the road on which we tread has been paved by the sufferings of innumerable anonymous souls who have been guided only by their own half-understood ethical intuitions, and those intuitions have been derived from the heart of the universe, which is an ethically oriented source.”12 Although in Wilder’s judgment his play did not succeed, he was moving closer to his own answers to the questions about the “heart of the universe”—questions he had examined over a lifetime. He was so disappointed in The Alcestiad as a stage play, however, that he decided to withdraw it.

  WILDER TOILED away that June in St. Moritz, where he had worked so well in the past. In his journal he sketched tentative drafts to fulfill various writing and speaking commitments. He drafted “First Gropings” for a speech he would make in Frankfurt in the fall, when he would receive the prestigious annual Peace Prize of the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, given annually to an author whose work advanced the cause of world peace. Since its inception in 1950 the prize had been given to such luminaries as Martin Buber, Albert Schweitzer, and Hermann Hesse; and Wilder, the first American to receive it, was relieved to hear that he did not necessarily have to center the speech on world peace. “What I would wish to do is to redeliver those two or three notions which I have thrown together a number of times as the ‘planetary man,’ ” he wrote in his journal on May 26, already looking ahead to the address he would deliver October 6.13

  He wrote a “Sketch” in his journal for a preface to his three major plays, to be collected in a new edition in 1957. The journal version differed completely from the ultimately published preface, recapitulating in some detail Wilder’s intentions as dramatist and novelist. “I have long felt that to each of us is accorded one, two, or three native notions,” he wrote in the journal. “These cannot be acquired from books though later reading may confirm, modify or destroy them. They arise from the deepest well of individuality and are developed by continual counteraction of our self and the things that befall us . . . we should be aware of them as being capable of sufficient exploration and unfoldment to last us for a life time.”14 For him the “notions” took the form of questions about destiny, fate, and chance; about the myriad forms of love, and its power to uplift as well as to harm; about faith and doubt, hope and despair; about “the vast extents of time and space” surrounding the “human adventure on one planet, the multiplicity of souls, and the innumerable repetitions of any typical occasion.”15 Wilder wrote that the central question in his own search had been “how can we justify a validity for any one moment in the homely daily life? Is that more difficult than to justify even a high experience, of passionate love or loss or hate?—in a universe where innumerable beings have claimed a meaningfulness for their ecstasy or anguish, and now are dust.”16 As readers of his plays would see, he wrote, “I stake my wager not on the supreme crises of the soul; I have wanted to say, for dignity, what is humble.”17

  He summarized his evolution as a playwright: Looking back, he wrote, “I entered this school from which one never graduates with determination and circumspection. I wrote one-act plays; I translated plays from foreign languages; I worked in the motion-pictures (all entertainment business is one); I harassed directors for permission to attend rehearsals; later I acted on the stage.”18 The Skin of Our Teeth, Wilder continued, “is another extension of my principal preoccupation. It is an attempt to set the situation of the family, that nexus of attraction and repulsion, that arena of dependence and independence, against the dimensions of ten thousand years of human history.”19 The play’s last act was indebted, he wrote, to his one-act Pullman Car Hiawatha. The whole play was “much indebted to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, as it is to the books [to] which Finnegans Wake is in turn indebted.” The first part of that acknowledgment of Finnegans Wake would make it into the published preface.

  In his unpublished preface Wilder wrote, “To those who love literature and who follow it closely as a tradition and a craft, it presents itself in the image of a torch race, rather than as a jealous and airless patent office. I hope that in turn others will find occasion to acknowledge an indebtedness to me.”20 The reference to the debt and the torch race also made it into the published preface, which reads: “The play is deeply indebted to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I should be very happy if, in the future, some author should feel similarly indebted to an
y work of mine. Literature has always more resembled a torch race than a furious dispute among heirs.”21

  Wilder also included in his journal a detailed passage on farce as a dramatic form, especially in The Matchmaker, wherein he tried “to extract a believability, by sheer surprise, from a form that at first glance was childishly unbelievable.”22 He noted that “parody is the letting of fresh air into stale rooms,” adding that he had parodied conventional farce in The Skin of Our Teeth.23 Effective parody of a dramatic form could lead to freedom of expression—for the playwright and his characters, for everyone who wants to escape “society’s tiresome tyrannies.” He was speaking for the man as well as the writer when he said, “There is no adventure in life equal to that of being and asserting one’s self.”24

  He wondered if a writer could effectively parody serious subject matter. “Romantic eloquence and formal tragic elevation are dead as a door-nail in our time,” he wrote. “Could they be recovered by a [discreet] use of parody? I have long planned a play or novel which would move against a background imitating the ‘Gothic novels’ of the mid-Nineteenth Century—‘East Lynne and Lady Audley’s Secret’ and the ‘Last of the Dobervilles.’ ”25 The published preface to the edition of Wilder’s three plays would be almost entirely different from the draft in his journal—much shorter, much more general, devoid of the lively examples and telling reflections. But on that June day in St. Moritz, in the privacy of his journal, Wilder at sixty summarized his intentions as playwright and novelist, and although he could not have known it at the time, his words also foreshadowed one of the major achievements of his writing life. In latent dreams, memories, and imagination, he was already moving toward his epic novel The Eighth Day. Everything Wilder had written and was writing pointed him in the direction of that novel—but he would have to follow an evolving path to get there.