Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  But there were rivers to cross, he wrote, before he could drive into the desert, and one of them led to the Circle in the Square, the pioneering off-Broadway theater founded in 1951 by the producer and artistic director Ted Mann and the director José Quintero (later joined by the producing director Paul Libin). First located on Sheridan Square, Circle in the Square moved to Bleecker Street, also in Greenwich Village. By then Mann and Quintero had led the way in establishing off-Broadway theater as a robust force in the theater world, producing a variety of experimental new plays, as well as revivals of classics and standards. A few plays, including some of Wilder’s new one-acts, were written expressly for production in Circle in the Square.

  One night in 1959 Wilder had slipped into the audience at Circle in the Square to see a production of Our Town, directed by Quintero. Ted Mann spotted Wilder in the audience that night, appearing to enjoy the play. Afterward Mann introduced himself to Wilder, who was indeed pleased with what he had seen.67 The Circle in the Square production of Our Town was adapted for a television performance that aired on November 13, 1959, with the Stage Manager played by the popular television actor Art Carney, famous as Jackie Gleason’s sidekick on The Honeymooners and other formats of Gleason’s television shows.68 Wilder’s Our Town was such an American icon that there were two television presentations of the play in the fifties. The 1959 production, with its off-Broadway roots, was preceded by a ninety-minute musical Producers’ Showcase version, broadcast on September 19, 1955. Delbert Mann directed, with Eva Marie Saint as Emily and the young Paul Newman as George Gibbs. Frank Sinatra starred—and, of course, sang—as the Stage Manager. A number of Sinatra’s hit songs were written by Sammy Cahn, one of the most successful lyricists in American movies and theater, and it was Sinatra who had connected Cahn with composer James Van Heusen in 1955 and who brought them on board to compose the music for Our Town—including the hit song “Love and Marriage.”69 So it was that Wilder found himself, by association, on the national hit parade in 1955, although it was Dinah Shore, not Sinatra, whose cover made the list.

  About a year and a half after the Our Town production at Circle in the Square, Mann recalled, Wilder wrote to him about his new one-act-play cycles and asked if Mann and Quintero would be interested in seeing them. Wilder sent them Infancy, Someone from Assisi, and Childhood. They were “honored and thrilled” when Wilder named them “Plays for Bleecker Street,” and the three one-acts opened on January 11, 1962, to mixed reviews.70 Wilder and Mann hoped to stage the remaining eleven plays in Wilder’s two cycles, but they were never finished to Wilder’s satisfaction. Quintero did go on to direct a well-received production of Wilder’s Pullman Car Hiawatha in December 1962.71

  Also in 1962—a year jam-packed with projects—Wilder and Talma finished their opera. He had worked closely with Talma, who for six years had poured herself heart and soul into The Alcestiad. He was with her for the opera’s premiere in German translation at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, Germany, on March 2, 1962, with the great soprano Inge Borkh singing the title role. Afterward there was an “unprecedented ovation . . . curtain calls for 19 minutes.”72 Talma’s elation gave way to dismay, however, when the reviews came in, many of them attacking her music. “These things don’t affect me (an old battered ship),” Wilder wrote, “but it is especially hard for Louise with her first large work and coming after that undoubted appreciation by the audience.”73

  “With our opera we had the damndest experience,” Wilder wrote to Irene Worth afterward. They had a full house, wonderful singers, “a noble conductor” (Harry Buckwitz), countless rehearsals of the “devilishly difficult” twelve-tone score, and a superb performance followed by forty curtain calls. Then the negative reviews appeared, partly because the composer was an American, and a woman at that, the director thought. The opera still played to full houses but, “damn it,” Wilder wrote, “those reviews have so far prevented other opera houses from picking it up and a Publishing House from adopting it. Damn, damn, double damn. Anyway it is beautiful music and in time it will be rediscovered.”74

  At the State Department auditorium in Washington on April 30, 1962, a black-tie audience gathered for “An Evening with Thornton Wilder,” part of a cultural series sponsored by President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet. Wilder appeared onstage that night in a “baggy old suit and a lumpy felt hat,” his costume for reading lines as the Stage Manager for Our Town.75 In press interviews for the event, he announced his plans for a two-and-a-half-year sabbatical in the desert of Arizona. He also shared the news with friends. “I shall soon be far away. Farewell, O world. Arizona desert—2 ½ years. A bum. Loaf, read, learn Russian, polish up my Greek . . . and finally start some writing of my own,” he wrote Irene Worth on March 18, 1962. “Go for weeks without saying a word (oh blessing) except buying avocado pears and helping to close bars at 2:00 a.m.”76 He wrote to Glenway Wescott that he was going to Arizona to be a “hermit—without shoe-laces necktie or telephone.”77

  On May 11 Wilder was one of 162 guests at a White House dinner, where he stood in line between the Robert Penn Warrens and Tennessee Williams to shake hands with the president, who thanked him for his State Department program. He was seated at Vice President Johnson’s table with Anne Morrow Lindbergh and the poet Robert Lowell. The food was perfect, he said, and the first lady was “glorious in a white and pale raspberry Dior.” After dinner Isaac Stern, Leonard Rose, and Eugene Istomin played Schubert. “I finished the evening at the Francis Biddles with the Edmund Wilsons, the Saul Bellows, Balanchine, and Lowell,” Wilder wrote. The following Friday he visited Charlotte at Amityville, and on Sunday, May 20, 1962, with his Thunderbird convertible packed full of baggage and books, Wilder set out on his way to be a hermit in the desert, “Don Quixote following his mission.”78

  HE WAS driving across the country for the sixth time, loving “the gas stations, the motels–the fried egg sandwich joints”—and the Road itself.79 (He enjoyed the motels the way he had loved Pullman upper berths when he was a boy, he had written to Charlotte in 1960 when he was driving to New Orleans. When people asked him if he would be lonesome on such a journey, he replied, “I hope so.”)80 He was fed up with “academic and cultured society,” with people asking him what he thought of T. S. Eliot, with public demands, with the fettering burden of correspondence and obligations that wore him down.81 Arizona might not be paradise, but it would be freedom. With each passing mile his weariness diminished. He was a sixty-five-year-old vagabond, adventure bound.

  When he and his siblings were children and forbidden to swear, they never said, “Go to hell.” Instead, thinking of the region in South America, they said, “Go to Patagonia.”82 Wilder had looked at a map of Arizona and announced that he would go to the town called Patagonia. When that word had gotten out in the press he was inundated with real-estate offers, and soon decided Patagonia would not provide the anonymity he longed for. He would simply head west to Arizona and see what happened. Just as he reached the crest of a hill where a sign welcomed him to Arizona, the T-Bird began to sputter and stall. He made it to the bottom of the hill and saw another sign: Douglas, Arizona.

  This was either destiny or as good a place as any—and far more private than Patagonia. He stayed for twenty months. “No phone,” he wrote. “Made my own breakfast and lunch. Closed the local bar (midnight in that State),” meaning, he said, that he stayed in the bar till it closed and “had to be cajoled out.”83 Census records of the time counted 11,925 citizens in Douglas in 1960, although Wilder wrote that there were five thousand people in that Arizona border town in 1962—three-quarters of them Mexicans who crossed the border from Agua Prieta and other villages to put their children in Arizona schools.84 A few ranchers lived in town, as did engineers and other workers at the Phelps Dodge Company’s gigantic Copper Queen smelter two miles outside the town limits. Most Douglas citizens had no idea who Wilder was, and didn’t care. They started calling him Professor—or, in some cases, “Perfesser”—and treated him as they
treated everybody else.

  Wilder went to the desert to finish his plays and work on some other projects, staying first in the fading grandeur of the historic Gadsden Hotel. In late summer he rented a three-room apartment on the second floor of an apartment building at 757 12th Street, and settled into one of the happiest, most productive periods of his life. He felt completely free from the push and pull of the life he had left behind. His days were his own—no appointments; no telephone calls, unless he called Isabel from a public telephone; no demands. He walked the wide streets in town to buy a newspaper, pick up his mail, shop for food. At the risk of life, limb, and eyesight, he cooked simple meals in his small kitchen, afraid all the while he’d make the oven explode. “Several times I’ve almost lost an eye from far-spitting fat,” he wrote to Isabel, “and that lifting hot water from one place to another.”85 He washed and dried drinking glasses obsessively because, he said, he had inherited from both the Wilder and the Niven sides of the family “a compulsive perfectionism. I can never believe that the glass is clean and dry.”86

  For variety, meals in good restaurants, provisions, nightlife, and bars, he drove to nearby Arizona towns—Nogales, Bisbee, Tombstone, or Phoenix—and often to Tucson, 118 miles to the northeast, where he could stay at the Arizona Inn and do research in the University of Arizona library. Almost every day he took the T-Bird out for sunset drives in the “glorious desert.”87 He admired the “frontier” qualities of his fellow citizens—“Ready courtesy and much reserve. A real deference for women, immediately recognizable as different from big city politeness. As frontier, very church-going.”88 (There were, in fact, thirty-six churches in Douglas and the immediate area.) He spent his first months in his desert hermitage resting; clearing his mind; walking; driving; listening to people talk in restaurants, shops, and bars; but most of all enjoying the solitude. Sometimes he felt a “pang for friends and conversation and music,” but that abated when he took his late-afternoon drives into the desert, where the silhouettes of the Chiricahua Mountains and the fanciful shapes of cactus came to life in the drama of the sunset.89 Once, when he found himself longing for the sea, he drove all day to Guaymas, Mexico, on the gulf the Mexicans called El Mar de Cortés, and spent two weeks watching the waves come in to the shore.90

  It took him three months “to blow the cobwebs of self-conscious genteeldom out of my head,” he wrote to a friend, but, finally refreshed, he eased gradually into a writing schedule. He focused on The Seven Ages of Man and The Seven Deadly Sins, the plays he had told a journalist he envisioned as a reflection of “the tendency of the mature artist in all ages to forge a definitive statement of his crystallized philosophy.”91 In addition to the one-act-play cycles, Wilder, as usual, kept a list of ideas and works in progress in his journal. Letters to and from Isabel and their occasional telephone talks kept Wilder as connected as he wanted to be to the outside world. His “Plays for Bleecker Street” were a “sensational success” in Milan.92 Plans for a “musical Matchmaker”—the work in progress that would become Hello, Dolly!—were “coming along great.”93

  Wilder was proud to hear from friends that Edward Albee had been telling interviewers that a conversation with Wilder “long ago made him turn playwright.” Albee had sent Wilder a copy of the text of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Wilder thought it was “fine to have a new dramatist who speaks in his own voice.”94 Later Wilder would nominate Albee for membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, endorsing him as a “dramatist of distinguished quality, high seriousness and notable technical accomplishment” who had “fulfilled his early promise and taken his place in the first rank of American dramatists.”95

  By December 1962 Wilder was still not able to do any sustained work. He spent some time before Christmas reflecting on the past few months. The decision to escape to the desert was not a “light one,” he wrote to Louise Talma. Instead, it “sprang from deep sources—and I’ve discovered that I was more shaken than I thought.” He tried to work on his projects, only to find them “powder away” in his hands. He could not finish things. He could not make commitments, especially to any schedule that involved other people. “It is above all a date-line that inhibits me,” he wrote. He hoped that “the turn for the better—the recovery of the full self” would occur any minute.96

  He was chronically torn between his need to be with people and his need to be alone. “I’m getting to be a growly-smily grouching-chuckling old humbug curmudgeon,” he had written to Charlotte in 1960. “I don’t hate people. I merely hate to be in groups of over four.”97 He was a writer with a unique and reverent grasp of the billions and billions of souls who had inhabited the universe, and a man with a growing aversion to seeing his fellow human beings in groups. He wrote to his nephew in December 1962:

  The sense of the multitude of human souls affects every man in a different way: It renders some cynical; it frightens many; it made Wordsworth sad: me it exhilarates. I must go back and submerge myself in it from time to time or I go spiritually sluggish. What I have fled to the desert from is not the multitude but the coterie.98

  In his desert retreat the Professor was alone and lonely that Christmas of 1962 but only because he chose to be. Townsfolk had invited him for Christmas dinner, but he declined. Wilder gave himself a record player for Christmas, and three records—Bach’s Magnificat, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, and a Lotte Lehmann lieder recital. The music gave him great pleasure and helped him in his work. He spent Christmas in Santa Fe and Taos, wanting to see snow—as well as to see his old friends the poet Witter Bynner and British-born artist Dorothy Brett, who had lived in Taos since 1924, painting landscapes and portraits of Native Americans. There were ghosts in Taos, and Wilder and Brett reminisced about the old days, and old friends, especially Mabel Dodge Luhan, who died in August 1962 after several years of illness and senility. Tony Luhan died a few months later.99

  AS HE stepped into the new year, Wilder realized he was not “a 100% hermit.” He wrote Thew Wright that he now had a “considerable acquaintance,” but they were the “type of persons that closes the bars.”100 Whether it was all fact or mostly fancy, Wilder wrote a whimsical newsletter of Douglas “Society Notes” for Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, mainly highlighting his own activities. With an engineer named Louie and a highway patrol officer named Pete, Wilder had allegedly crossed the border into Mexico for dinner, dancing, and “smooching” at the Copa, followed by a visit to a “house of ill-fame” from which all concerned emerged with virtue intact. The Professor took flowers to Vera, a waitress, who was in the Douglas hospital for an operation. He danced with a waitress-turned-cook at Dawson’s on the Lordsburg Road, helped a traveling salesman write a letter to a lawyer and judge in hopes of reducing his alimony, and listened to the life story of a woman who was wintering at the Hotel Gadsden.101

  Whether the events were true or imagined, they foreshadowed details that would later emerge in his last book, Theophilus North. Theophilus interacted with the populace of Newport just as Thornton did with the inhabitants of Douglas, mingling with people from an intriguing variety of backgrounds, listening to their life stories, dispensing advice. By February 1963, three months short of a year since his arrival in Douglas, the Professor was surrounded by local friends. In a letter to his dear friend Catherine Coffin in New Haven, he identified them with names and significant details—Louie the engineer; Rosie the hotel elevator girl; Gladys the cook at the Palm Grove; his best friend, Harry Ames, who had been going through a “terrible time,” being ousted from his Round-Up Bar and liquor store.102 Wilder was fascinated with his new town and his new friends, content—even happy—in this unlikely setting.

  The new freedom in his personal life released him to work with new zest and energy and new material. His old projects had wilted away, he said, but he threw himself into a new one after Christmas—something entirely unexpected. He thought that his new record player helped to set things in motion—the music of Mozart and some Bach organ works. Not
hing he had ever written had “advanced so fast.”103 This was a secret he kept entirely to himself until March 1963, when he wrote Isabel about it:

  Well, I won’t stew about any longer but come right out with it that I’ve written what must be 90 pages or more of a novel. I can’t describe it except by suggesting it’s as though Little Women were being mulled over by Dostoevsky. It takes place in a mining town in southern Illinois (“Anthracite”) around 1902. And there’s Hoboken . . . and Tia Bates of Araquipa, Peru, transferred to Chile. . . . . and there’s the opera-singer Clare Dux (Swift) . . . and Holy Rollers. . . . and how a Great Love causes havoc (the motto of the book could be “nothing too much”) and how gifts descend in family lines, making for good, making for ill, and demanding victims. You’ll be astonished at how much I know about how a family, reduced and ostracized, runs a boarding house. But mostly it’s about familial ties, and, oh, you’ll need a handkerchief as big as a patchwork quilt. The action jumps about in time, though not as schematically as in The Ides. The form is just original enough to seem fresh; it’s not really like usual novels.104

  He added that between the lines there were “lots of Wilders.”105 He was liberated, rejuvenated, exhilarated. “Every new day is so exciting,” he wrote to his sister, “because I have no idea beforehand what will come out of the fountain-pen.”106

  By mid-November 1963, still in Douglas, Wilder believed his novel was nearing its final draft. He still cooked most of his meals, still helped close the local bars, sometimes just going down for the last half hour to enjoy two highballs to help him sleep. But soon he had to head north to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by John F. Kennedy but to be conferred after his death by Lyndon B. Johnson in December. Wilder was sorry to leave the desert. “It’s done a lot for me,” he wrote to his dramatic agent, Harold Freedman. He was not yet ready to resume his life in “urban civilization,” but when he did, he told Freedman, he would “go theatre” again.107