Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  For the time being his focus was on his new one-act plays, especially one that had just come to him—The Rivers Under the Earth. In keeping with his habit of recycling characters and ideas from his unfinished work, Wilder imported Tom Everage from the Norton manuscript, renamed him Tom Carter, and planted him firmly in the center of this new one-act play. He noted the connection in his journal: He wondered if he could write the play out of the “train of thought” he was experimenting with in the Norton lectures—“that often far-reaching decisions of our life are made on the basis of irrational promptings hidden from us.” He believed that “the most powerful of these are in the erotic, and in the magnetic field of the Oedipus complex.”26 The play was developing, he wrote, “along the lines of Tom’s relation to his mother; I planned it to arrive at a culmination illustrating—so recurrent in me—the relations between a daughter and a father. After today’s work it looks as though the boy’s story will be oh! quite sufficient.”27

  BY EARLY September, Wilder was in Germany for a series of special events—first the opening of the new Congress Hall in Berlin, a spacious cultural hall and auditorium built for West Berlin by the United States, working with the government of West Germany. For the launch of the new auditorium, seven one-act American plays were performed for an appreciative audience of twelve hundred—plays by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, William Saroyan, and Wilder. Lillian Gish, Ethel Waters, Eileen Heckart, and Wilder led the roster of actors for the evening, which marked the world premieres of two of his new one-acts–Bernice and The Wreck on the 5:25. The finale of the evening was Wilder’s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, starring Waters as the mother and Wilder as the Stage Manager.28 “I cannot conceal from you the fact that I was the dear little whammo of Berlin,” Wilder wrote to Thew Wright.29

  Wilder was in Frankfurt on October 6 to deliver an address and to receive the peace prize. His speech, written in English, was translated, and he delivered it in German to the audience of two thousand, including such dignitaries as Albert Schweitzer and Chancellor Adenauer. Titled “Culture in a Democracy,” Wilder’s remarks were provocative. He noted that in a democracy, the “leadership of elites” was being replaced by the “leadership of majority opinion,” and one’s perspective depended on one’s belief “in the potentialities—the so-to-speak intuitive capabilities—of the average man existing in a democracy.”30 He named T. S. Eliot among other literary critics who believed “that only elites can produce an excellent thing.”31 He reflected on what he termed the “Feudal Fiction”—the confused images and metaphors surrounding the nature of God, and hence of mankind. Wilder suggested that this “inextricable metaphorical confusion of God—King—Father—Above” gave rise to another confusion—the assumption that “we are low, base, subject, childish, common, ordinary and vulgar.”32

  He cited the “thousand-year-old lies that are gradually disappearing” in the democracies in which women now had equal responsibilities in civil life; married women had property rights and rights regarding their children; slavery was abolished; poor children could not be made to work “from dawn to sunset”; no person could be deemed “an inferior creature” because of race, color, or religion; no longer were most men viewed as “God’s stepchildren.” Wilder concluded: “Democracy is not only an effort to establish a social equality among men; it is an effort to assure them that they are not sons, nor subjects, nor low—that they should be equal in God’s grace.”33 Culture in a democracy had dangers, but it also had hope and promise, he said. “Democracy has a large task: to find new imagery, new metaphors, and new myths to describe the new dignity into which man has entered.”34

  “I’VE RAISED a little hornet’s nest,” Wilder wrote in his journal on October 19. The unorthodox structure of his Frankfurt speech, built on questions and speculations rather than answers, offended some listeners, and some of his linguistic nuances and metaphors and his implied humor apparently suffered in translation. One critic charged that Wilder had a “pernicious effect on the German psyche.” Yet Wilder remained widely esteemed in Germany.35 “My speech in Frankfort raised a veritable stink in certain quarters,” he wrote, “but the province of Hesse has ordered 20,000 copies for a distribution in the schools and populace.”36 His enduring popularity in Germany can be explained in part by the fact that he was a man of letters who knew and deeply appreciated European literature, especially the work of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Kafka. Coupled with that was his facility with the German language.

  Most of all there was the German appreciation for Wilder’s work, especially The Skin of Our Teeth, The Ides of March, and The Alcestiad. The German-born comparative literature professor and author Horst Frenz, writing in the American-German Review in the fall of 1957, called Wilder “probably the best known and the most highly regarded living American writer in all of Western Germany,” and believed Wilder “helped correct, to clarify, to widen and to deepen the concept of the United States in German minds.”37 He rose to Wilder’s defense again in 1961, commenting that after World War II, Our Town had given German audiences the “hope of finding a new order in themselves” and that Wilder’s “predominately optimistic and hopeful plays” spoke to them in those bleak postwar days.38 According to Amos Wilder, “both the scholars and the audiences of Germany were well situated to appraise, on the one hand, the new dramaturgy and, on the other, the old moralities in Thornton’s plays.”39

  Wilder was awarded an honorary degree from Goethe University in Frankfurt that fall, and received three additional international honors in 1957 and 1958—the Medal of Honor for Science and Fine Arts from Austria, a medal from the government of Peru, and a Polish embassy award in honor of a 1957 production of The Skin of Our Teeth in Warsaw. By 1960 he had accepted nine honorary degrees, and counted as his “best three” the degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Goethe University. His brother, Amos, had also been awarded multiple honorary degrees, including one that beat all of his, Thornton observed—the one from the University of Basel on its five-hundredth anniversary.40

  “ALMOST A year has gone by,” Wilder wrote aboard the SS Vulcania, approaching Barcelona on November 24, 1958, as he resumed the journal he had put aside in November 1957. He was not given to looking backward, he said, so he would not “try to give the reasons for the intermittence.”41 He was still struggling with his one-act plays. He was pouring his excitement and energy into “The Melting Pot,” a film project with the legendary designer Norman Bel Geddes, who had made his mark on theater and film design, creating sets for more than a hundred movies and plays. After seeing Our Town in 1938, Bel Geddes had written to Wilder that it was encouraging for a dramatist to break the theater free visually from some of its “hidebound” traditions so that the audience could participate imaginatively in the production of a play.42 In January 1958 Wilder and Bel Geddes began talking about collaborating on a motion picture—an American epic that would dramatize the history, ancestry, and events of the national experience. Bel Geddes suggested that they could make significant use of the new wide-screen movie technology—photographing a scene from several directions, yielding a kind of movie “in the round.”43

  By late February 1958 Wilder had written three “episodes” for the movie, building on the theme of “America’s responsibility for safe-guarding the values of civilization throughout the whole world, illustrated by the racial mixtures of the American people.” 44 He planned to dramatize the lives of the descendants in one family from 1600 to the present day, a coming-to-America saga that would demonstrate “the problems and rewards of the mixed bloods in the Melting Pot.” 45 He forged ahead with a script, six “episodes” in all, but gave up the writing after Bel Geddes died on May 8, 1958. Wilder was not involved in writing the treatment or any part of the screenplay for another film made that year—the movie version of The Matchmaker starring Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins, and Shirley MacLaine.

  During this time Wilder was once again compulsively absorbed in his study of Finnegans Wake. Since June 1
951 he had enjoyed a detailed correspondence with a colleague as obsessed with the novel as he was. She was Adaline Glasheen, an independent scholar and part-time librarian who was at work on A Census of ‘Finnegans Wake,’ published in 1956 in the United States. For twenty-five years the two exchanged letters and notes—enough to fill a 732-page book.46 They were companions on a literary archaeological expedition, the first ones, Wilder wrote to Glasheen, to “sift, sift, sift.”47

  On April 23, 1959, Wilder spoke on Joyce and Finnegans Wake to the Yale Romance Language Club, joined by the university’s German and Slavic clubs. Wilder called his talk “Finnegans Wake: The Polyglot Everyman,” and emphasized that in Joyce’s novel “each man carries Everyman within himself.”48 In a revision of his talk Wilder wrote of Joyce that “his subject is Man, his instincts, the operation of his mind, the institutions he has created, and, above all, the documents he has made in an effort to give an account of himself.”49 He noted Joyce’s allusion to the seven deadly sins in the novel, a device at the crux of Wilder’s play cycle.

  Wilder took another detour in August 1959 to Williamstown, Massachusetts, to play the Stage Manager in Our Town one last time. After this performance Wilder the actor retired from the stage. He was still working on the libretto for the operatic setting of The Alcestiad with Louise Talma. He was trying to simplify and focus his life, however, and to that end he made an “immeasurably important decision” in November 1959: He resolved to close Finnegans Wake for five years, realizing that “like some will-undermining narcotic, it was sapping not only all interest in any writing I might do myself, but the very springs from which come reflection, observation, and my very attention to the people and events about me.”50 He had enjoyed the satisfaction of being “a pioneer” on an “unfolding journey,” he wrote in his journal, and the researches made him happy, but he realized that his new one-act plays were written “from the peripheral areas” of his will and imagination—“the small area left half-alive beside the bewitched devotion to Lope and Joyce.”51 That devotion had to stop, immediately. He was sixty-two, rapidly growing older—and squandering time and energy as if he possessed boundless quantities of both.

  He notified Adaline Glasheen about his decision: “I’m writing you with a mixture of sorrow and relief. I’m giving up Finnegans Wake.”52 In his journal he wrote:

  It may take a long time to re-fire the center of the mind, and I am old. And with dismay I recognize that it is not merely a matter of finding subjects and presenting them as literature; it is a matter of re-awakening the fields of observation and reflection that alone nourish and give significance to the fictions. I return as one from an illness or from a long journey into a remote territory to make my house and hearth again.53

  MORE AND more often Wilder received requests to adapt his work, and most of the time he turned them down. For years, he wrote, “I’ve said no to many requests to make operas, musical plays etc. etc. out of the plays and novels.” An opera based on The Bridge of San Luis Rey was occasionally performed in German opera houses, but that began during the war, he said, and “I now pretend I don’t know about [it].”54 An opera based on The Woman of Andros “got quite a ways,” he said.55 Mary Martin wanted to do a Cleopatra musical based on The Ides of March, and Aaron Copland and Richard Rodgers approached him about other properties. Wilder declined to grant them permission, and also disappointed a composer who had already finished twenty songs “for a Musical Matchmaker.”56 Over the years Wilder turned down requests from composers he admired, including Ned Rorem, who would eventually compose the music for an Our Town opera, and Leonard Bernstein, who wanted to make an opera of The Skin of Our Teeth after the collapse of a proposed musical version.57

  In 1960 Wilder turned down a request from the State Department that he undertake another cultural relations tour, this time to lecture in conjunction with international performances of The Skin of Our Teeth on a multicountry jaunt in 1961 throughout Europe, followed by a tour of fifteen cities in thirteen weeks in eleven Latin American countries. “If your invitation had come a number of years ago I would have accepted it gladly,” Wilder wrote to the State Department official who extended the invitation. “I talked often in foreign countries for the Department, as you probably know. . . . But I have given my last lecture and taught my last class. With what time and energy that remains to me, I must devote myself to writing only.”58

  The international tour of The Skin of Our Teeth starred June Havoc as Sabina and Helen Hayes as Mrs. Antrobus. Wilder was pleased that his play was part of the tour, and had great confidence in the producer Lawrence Langner and the Theatre Guild American Repertory Company, who would do the play in English. He was surprised that they wished to take abroad such a large cast and all the “specialized machinery” necessary for staging Skin. This very successful State Department–sponsored production traveled to theaters in Germany, Italy, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Greece, Sweden, Yugoslavia, Israel, Turkey, and then South America, with Hayes and Havoc joined by Leif Erickson as Mr. Antrobus.59 The show was a hit almost everywhere, with packed houses and glitzy receptions and parties in one city after another.60

  Wilder did not go around the world with his play in 1961, but he soon set off on another long journey into a “remote territory”—the desert of Arizona this time—where he could escape, rest, and do his work: as it turned out, some of the best of his life. But it took some time to get there. First he had to take care of other commitments with certain collaborators. There was the actor and playwright Jerome Kilty, who was adapting The Ides of March for the stage, with Wilder’s approval and assistance. The two men met at Harvard in 1950, and Wilder admired Kilty’s successful play Dear Liar (1960), based on the correspondence of George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Wilder was also collaborating with the composer Paul Hindemith—adapting The Long Christmas Dinner so that Hindemith could stage it as an opera. “Of all my plays it is the one that has found the widest variety of receptions,” Wilder wrote to Gertrude Hindemith, the composer’s wife.61 Hindemith’s opera was success, but even with John Gielgud and Irene Worth on board, Kilty’s The Ides of March was not well received when it opened in London in 1963. “I wrote some new scenes for it,” Wilder told his New Haven friend Catherine Coffin; “then my will-power broke down. It’s tedious work to rewarm yesterday’s porridge.”62

  In addition to these collaborations, Wilder was a mentor to a number of gifted people over many years—former students and new friends and acquaintances alike. He encouraged Timothy Findley when he showed Wilder one of his plays and ask for comments. Findley never forgot the night Wilder summoned him to the Savoy Hotel in London to render his verdict. First he fed the nervous young writer—shrimp cocktail, filet mignon, roast potatoes, and broccoli, accompanied by a bottle of wine—because, Wilder told him, writers had to eat. “You are your body’s servant. Feed it. Eat!” Wilder commanded. Then Wilder proceeded to talk to Findley, writer to writer. Pacing, smoking, and drinking Scotch and water, Wilder gave Findley a compressed graduate seminar on writing—and a good deal of encouragement. “He was all great teachers in one,” Findley remembered. “In writing—the craft is all,” Wilder told him. He encouraged Findley to start something new—and to keep on writing. Put the pages of his play away in a drawer, Wilder said. “Ordinarily, I say the wastepaper basket is a writer’s best friend—but keep these pages as a reminder of how intentions go awry.”63

  After the young Edward Albee gave Wilder a sheaf of his poems to read, and then sent Wilder a play, Wilder encouraged Albee to concentrate on drama. He urged Albee not to read “too much contemporary prose and poetry,” but to read “some of the great writing of the past” for a short time each day—Baudelaire or Rimbaud or Mallarmé. “And,” Wilder wrote, “remember: don’t only write poetry; be a poet.”64 When Albee sent Wilder The Zoo Story in 1958, Wilder commended his content and criticized his form. “The trouble is that your content is real, inner, and your own, and your form is tired o
ld grandpa’s.” He asked Albee the very question he was asking himself during that time: “Why does your sense of form, your vision of the how lag so far behind your vision of the what? It’s as tho you were frozen very young into the American ‘little theatre’ movement.” At present, Wilder said, Albee had no style, but he had “much to say.” Wilder urged him to “write much, write many things. Only that way will your [imagination] teach you to make your mode as original as expressive as your thought.”65

  Wilder stood at the center of an ever-expanding circle of friends, collaborators, and protégés who enriched his life as he did theirs. But beyond the circumference of these personal relationships were the incessant demands of the public—the strangers or friends of friends who wanted him to read manuscripts, give talks, perform, and write prefaces, introductions, or letters of reference; and the stream of supplicants who sought permission to produce, publish, or adapt his work. He knew himself to be too obliging and, as he had been for a lifetime, he was too eager to please. He suffered from a “stern parent-to-child complex,” he reflected in the late sixties. “I was obsequious and servile . . . even when I was a Colonel in the Army I had an aim-to-be-adequate tension. I hated it in myself, but that’s the way I am.”66 But he had finally recognized that his life was finite—that there were only so many years left; only so much more time for living, for writing; only so many unwritten words left in him; only so much breath and energy left to empower and express them. He wanted peace and privacy to write. He wanted to retire from every other endeavor. He wanted to get away. He decided to be a hermit in Arizona.