Theophilus North

by Thornton Wilder

  I go to villages where I am little known (Arizona, 20 months; Saratoga Springs; Stockbridge, Mass.). Or I go abroad.

  Many months of the year I live and work in hotel rooms or on slow ocean ships. These are my places of business, my “offices”—essential to my profession.

  Before I acquired the cottage on Martha’s Vineyard (which I cannot live in during July and August because of the harassments I have described) I lived in remote hotels (in America or abroad) for eight months out of the year. That cottage is not a “pleasant summer residence”; it is an essential working hideaway.

  Wilder had written many stories in these “places of business,” and after the cheers had subsided for The Eighth Day he started writing a series of sketches in which he began to live through the stories and dramas that had composed his public and private life. In November 1968, he described his new project to his close friend Catherine Coffin as “a semi-autobiographical collection of chapters—semi-fictional—dipping into stages of my life.” He listed four, each of which corresponded to actual experiences: “1908–1909 China Inland Mission School, Chefoo, China. 1919–1920 Yale. 1937 Salzburg. 1943 Allied div. Headquarters Caserta, Italy. Like that.” (These sketches and others would remain fragments only.) His letter continued that one of the themes “that subtends [the collection] is that old question—what does a man do with his despair (his rage, his frustration)! What does every different kind of person ‘store up’ to evade, surmount, transmute, incorporate those aspects of his life which are beyond our power to alter. It would seem to be a depressing subject, but it’s not. It’s sad and bracing.” What he did not explain in the letter was that the “semi-fictional” theme in each sketch was represented by the introduction into the story of a fictional character.

  While Wilder may have wondered privately if he had another book in him, by 1970 the idea of a novel growing out of discrete experiences, filtered through memory and an imagined character, had taken hold of his imagination with a vengeance. As explanation for his travels in 1970 to Italy and Switzerland, he informed the IRS that he had begun work on a new book that, like his last, would require four or five years to write. “It is largely autobiographical,” he went on, “and will require my revisiting the places where I have lived and worked. These travels are devoted to documentation, research, interviews, and supervising photography.”

  Wilder explained further that chapters in the new work would focus on his year as a student at the American Academy in Rome in 1920–1921; his posting in 1944 near Naples with Army Air Force Intelligence in World War II; and his experience as chairman of the U.S. delegation to the UNESCO Congress in Venice in 1949. He concluded that he had also visited Zurich, Switzerland, “where I wrote my play Our Town.” He added that one chapter would be devoted to “that city and its environs,” and closed by saying that he expected to return to his task in 1971 in England and France.

  In the end, a book set in only a single locale, Newport, emerged from this exercise in memory and imagination. It was not the first time that ambitious artistic schemes had not worked out exactly as Wilder had conceived them. In 1937, he had traveled to Zurich and “its environs,” committed to writing as many as four plays before returning to the United States. It was a fair exchange that he returned with Our Town all but completed and a strong start on The Merchant of Yonkers (later, The Matchmaker). This time, Wilder had created Theophilus North as the fictive protagonist for a projected Newport chapter of his book-in-progress—and Theophilus had opened so deep a dam of feeling and artistic passion that he completed the novel in only one year: from April 1972 to April 1973.

  He was seventy-six when Theophilus North was published in October 1973 in the United States by Harper & Row and as a Literary Guild alternate selection. One journalist asked him if creative work was difficult for a man in his mid-seventies; Wilder said no, not for a man with “the right idea—an idea deeply relative to yourself.” The novel was published in England in June 1974, where it was also a book club selection, and enjoyed great success with readers and critics there as well as in the United States. It remained on the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-six weeks, and was translated for publication in France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, Sweden, Brazil, Japan, and Hungary. At Wilder’s own suggestion, the German edition carries the title Theophilus North, order Ein Heiliger wider Willen, which translates, “Theophilus North, or A Saint Despite Himself.” This reference picks up one of the deep, underlying themes in the novel: the depiction of selfless service, or even love, that seeks no reward in return.

  The novel was “deeply relative” to Wilder in intriguing ways. First, it was partly autobiographical, although Wilder revealed few personal details in public or often in private. He acknowledged that like his fictional hero, he had spent a summer as a tutor in Newport, Rhode Island. Like Theophilus, Wilder was a graduate of Yale. To his friend Sol Lesser, the movie producer who had brought Our Town to the screen, Wilder wrote in June 1973, “I shall never tell which portions are fact!” He was playful and coy in a 1974 letter to his Yale classmate MacLean Hoggson: “Do you know who lies behind ‘Rip’ Van Winkle . . . not his private life story but his persona? Our days at Yale?” And he would tease others with playful references to people from Oberlin and New Haven, among other institutions and places.

  Wilder openly acknowledged a second biographical thread: the character of Theophilus represented the imagined life of Wilder’s own twin brother, who had died at birth. He phrased it this way in an interview with Manchester Guardian reporter Simon Blow in 1974: “I was born an identical twin, and the twin only lived a few hours, but would have been called Theophilus; so this is my other self.” Wilder was a bit more expansive in his letter to “Mac” Hoggson: “You know and I know that that book is mostly wish-fulfillment fantasy. There’s no law against dreaming. I was born an identical twin; he lived an hour; if he had survived he’d have been named Theophilus—second sons have been so named for generations in the Wilder line—so I wrote his memoirs.”

  Thornton Wilder and his twin brother were born April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, and only Thornton survived. Theophilus was indeed an honored name in Wilder’s family, traceable back to Captain Theophilus Wilder (1740-1821), who had established the Wilder family in Pembroke, Maine, on land received in payment for service in the Revolutionary War. Throughout his life, Wilder was fascinated by twins, and often wove twins into his writings. Notable examples include a brief mention of twins at the beginning of Act I in Our Town; a deeper psychological portrait in The Long Christmas Dinner (one twin dies); and a rich and detailed treatment of identical twins and twinship in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (again, one dies).

  Was something deeper than mere fascination present in Wilder’s psyche and, consequently, his art? In an opinion that psychiatrists have found persuasive, Wilder’s older brother, Amos, wrote in 1980 in his book Thornton Wilder and His Public:

  As himself a twin who lost a brother at birth, he was predisposed to fascination with this relationship. Indeed, one could hazard that he was haunted all his life by this missing alter ego. Thus he plays with the afterlife of this twin in the dual persona suggested by the title of his last novel, Theophilus North, “North” of course representing an anagram for Thornton. In this way, he was able to tease both himself and the reader as to the borderlands between autobiography and fable.

  There are autobiographical textures in setting as well as characterization in the novel. The playful mention of the Nine Cities of Newport in Theophilus North is not constructed on a casual acquaintance with the city, but upon the foundation of Wilder’s long association with and knowledge of Newport. This began on September 18, 1918, when he entered the army at Fort Adams as a private in the Coast Artillery section of the National Army, 5th Company, Narragansett Bay Regiment. Wilder had a quick war; three months later, on December 31, he was honorably discharged in time to resume his studies in January 1919 at Yale.

  It is also true that Wi
lder spent a summer tutoring in Newport, although not in 1926 as an exhausted teacher who had resigned his position, but rather in 1922 after completing his first year teaching French at the Lawrenceville School, a job he quite enjoyed. Common to both Thornton and Theophilus was the reality of living at the YMCA on Mary Street, while dreaming of writing. Witness the last paragraph in the novel: “Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants’ Ball or even write a book, if that’s what they want to do.”

  In the case of the real Thornton, this actually happened. In 1922, he was laboring on his first novel, The Cabala, which was not published until 1926. For two weeks in the summer of 1927, he returned to Newport and, once again, to the Y. During this sojourn, he completed the final pages of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which would be published that November. Newport was now in Wilder’s blood, and to it he would return often, although his growing literary success soon permitted him to stay in hotels, of which the Viking and especially the Castle Hill were his favorites.

  Theophilus North was Wilder’s last book, written against mounting medical odds, including growing blindness in one eye and circulatory and back problems. The writing of his novel proved to be the best of medicines. As his sister, Isabel, recalled in a 1976 letter to Wilder’s agent, “He wrote Theophilus North as a Hover-craft rushes forward on a bed of cushioned, moving air. Thornton lived that year, his seventy-fifth year, from April 17th to April 17th, on a level above his daily failing level of health. It was extraordinary to watch him. He was so happy that year. He was bewitched with his hero and the excitement of his task. He held up until the final proofs were corrected.” As Theophilus says near the end of the novel, “I am never so happy as when I’m inventing.” At his death Thornton Wilder was working on a sequel, Theophilus North—Zen Detective, and had hopes for still more volumes beyond that.

  As noted, Theophilus North was a success with both readers and critics. Even if they did not like the novel’s didactic tone, reviewers found it difficult to deny its literary merits, or easy to knock a seventy-six-year-old literary icon. (The Times Literary Supplement was bold enough to say in print: “It comes, indeed, as something of a shock to find that he is still alive.”) In review after review, the words “witty,” “entertaining,” and “[full of] wisdom” recur when substance is discussed, as do “old-fashioned” and “traditional” when form is addressed. New York Times daily reviewer Anatole Broyard, hardly overwhelmed by Wilder’s grasp of class structure, nevertheless enjoyed the read and found it “spiced with erudite hors d’oeuvres.” Other critics also hinted at the erudition in the book.

  The theme of education and expansion of the intellect and spirit is another key element of the novel, and inspired Wilder’s dedication of it to Robert Maynard Hutchins, his fellow student at Oberlin and Yale. It was Hutchins who, as president of the University of Chicago, lured Wilder to teach there beginning in 1930, and it was through Hutchins that Wilder became involved in other educational ventures, among them the founding of the Aspen Institute in 1949 and the reestablishment of American ties to higher education in postwar Germany. To mine the buried scholarship in the book, a tribute to this oldest and among the most learned of friends, is to glimpse the range of Wilder’s reading and learning—from Shakespeare and Dante to Henry and William James to Chaucer, Cervantes, Goethe, Goldsmith, Milton, Poe, Freud, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Byron, Darwin, Homer, and Herodotus.

  The novelist Kit Reed in Wilder’s hometown paper, the New Haven Register, struck a therapeutic note when she proclaimed: “I am exaggerating only slightly when I say Theophilus North kept me from hanging myself in the closet after a particularly hard week.” In perhaps the two most prominent reviews, both Granville Hicks and Malcolm Cowley, senior figures in literary circles, spoke of Wilder as the last survivor among a brilliant galaxy of twentieth-century novelists.

  In 1988, the Samuel Goldwyn Company released a film version of the novel under the title Mr. North, starring Anthony Edwards as Theophilus with a supporting cast including Lauren Bacall, Anjelica Huston, Robert Mitchum, and Tammy Grimes, among others. To date, unlike The Matchmaker which became Hello, Dolly!, and other properties which translated successfully into other art forms, including a number of televised versions of his major and short plays, only two of Wilder’s seven novels have been turned into feature films. These two memorable novels, Theophilus North and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (in its “talkie” version), were turned into less than memorable films. (Bridge’s part-sound version of 1929 is not available to the public.)

  Mr. North, which typically earns two or so stars in film guides, is remembered less for the quality of the adaptation than for the extraordinarily effective way it conveyed the atmosphere of Newport’s great homes and streets of the 1920s. (It is also remembered as the last film of John Huston, the film’s executive director and originally cast to play the part of Dr. James McHenry Bosworth. He died in Newport during production, with Robert Mitchum taking over his role.) In a different guise, Theophilus North is the subject of a 2003 dramatic adaptation written by the young playwright Matthew Burnett and produced jointly by the Geva Theatre in Rochester, New York, and Arena Stage Company in Washington, D.C.

  * * *

  Finishing what would be his last book and nearing the end of his life, Thornton Wilder wrote an unfinished, unpublished preface to Theophilus North. It promised to be far more than “Just some scribbling to pass the time,” as Theophilus modestly describes his own writing in the novel. The incomplete preface offers a deeply thoughtful introduction to the “extraordinarily entertaining” novel hailed by the New York Times and many others. In it, Wilder reiterated the question he had posed in that letter to Catherine Coffin: “What does a man do with his despair, his rage, his frustration?” We do a wide variety of things, he tells us, and “One or other of them is pictured in each of the chapters of this book.” With a sure symmetry, these words recall a similar sentiment he penned in 1930 to a friend and fellow writer about the underlying theme behind his first three novels, The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and The Woman of Andros: “It seems to me,” he wrote forty-three years before the appearance of Theophilus, “that my books are about: What’s the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it.” Can we not say that one “resource” Wilder turned to in dealing with life’s closing troubles was to deploy his creative imagination through the mysterious dilemma of the twinless twin, enshrined in the fictive character of the young Theophilus, to continue to explore tracks of himself down to his death?

  —Tappan Wilder

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  Readings

  A Young Man in Newport, Summer 1922: Extracts from Two Letters

  On July 20, 1922, on vacation after his second year of teaching at Lawrenceville, Wilder writes his mother from the YMCA in Newport, Rhode Island. He is working on The Cabala, not to be published for another three years. Three weeks later he writes in a different voice to “Trixina,” Gilbert Troxwell, a close friend from their Yale student days and a librarian.

  The YMCA, Newport, R.I.

  July 20, 1922

  Dear Mother:

  I came here just to pass through on my way to Truro and to look at the old battlefield [Fort Adams, where he served in WWI], and here I am still, rent paid through my second week.

  There’s a small dormitory on the top floor of the YMCA with rooms for a few clerks and dentists’ assistants, with abundant showers, clean beds and a weekly payment of only four dollars. I have the use of the large well-equipped Gym, all to myself apparently, with a swimming pool attached. Every day in the Gym I can be found hurling crowbars and fleeing among the trapezes. Up in my room I have this Underwood (I must apologize for the fact that it has no fractions; it’s only a #4) and here I sit several hours a day typewriting my book. . . .

  (To continue with the day’s routine) almost every day I go bathing at Newport Beach, a place a little commoner than Idora P
ark. (The monde has long since restricted its own beach at the other end of the coast, where every cubicle in the bathhouse bears its owner’s name traced in platinum wire.) This is sort of fun, though I’m for the first time in my life a little aware of being alone so much. The surf is very high and menacing and I derive a certain Aunt Hatty type of fun out of rushing into a curling breaker. Then I lie in the sand and think about nothing while my shoulders tan for me. I have a very smart bathingsuit, and I don’t think I look as plain as the son of Syocrix, to judge from the bevies of manicurists that exclaim “Let’s throw sand at that man!” or ask shyly and unnecessarily “Is it very deep where you are?” I like to walk home by the Cliff Walk, and as I never can break off when once I’ve begun it, I generally end up by doing all four miles. I bring a book along and read a hundred pages in every one of my favorite retreats, while the sun goes down and the almost-Italian sea goes through a series of enchanting metamorphoses between its headlands and rocks. The homes of the rich are all but on the Walk and almost all open now, but never once have I encountered a Real One out walking. . . .

  There’s a nice restaurant at the Army and Navy YMCA down the street, but one can’t go there often unless in uniform. There’s a Chinese Restaurant with reasonable table-d’hots; this is very good, but I can’t go all the time to a place like that. There are left the innumerable Greek lunches with fly-specked pies and grange coffee, where my heavy spectacles call surprised attention (I have to wear them in order to see, pasted high, their recommendations to delectation). My other embarrassment is the fact that the public library here has few books or none.

  Box 282, Newport, R.I.

  August 12, 1922

  Dear Trixina:

  You should know that Mr. and Mrs. Max Oser have taken the Millais Cottage and have already appeared several times at Bailey’s beach. All the world is dying to know if it is a ménage qui marche. Large bets were laid at Mrs. Raynam’s garden fête, both for and against. Mrs. Ogden Kindred was so eager to hear that she sent her gardener, borrowing over the hedge, Ohio-fashion, to find out the opinion of the servants’ table. Apparently the answer was favorable. Fortunately they have not had the presumption to issue invitations; there are in town not a few ladies who took riding-lessons at Geneva, and came through it with family conclaves and red eyes.