I dined with Mrs. Forrest Friday where it was asserted that Mrs. Mannie had given over her gallantries and had decided even to let the choice of her chauffeurs to the disposition of her husband. It will be almost a pity if there is not another Restoration lady left in the colony. Unfortunately she has never served as an object-lesson to younger lasses; her health is all but insolent, and her beauty, in spite of a certain
éclat emprunté
Dont elle a soin de peindre et d’orner son visage
Pour reparer des ans l’irreparable outrage.
However one cannot regret these week-ends where the humours in an exchange of garters and pinch-her-ankle while ascending stairs were too highly rated.
The Princess Antoine Bibesco has been staying with Mrs. Fogg at Shingles. She is even less liked by the New York flock than her mother, though the Washington and Philadelphia parties cannot see too much of her. While Mrs. Asquith was here Mrs. Fogg gave an immense dinner for mother and dinner. There were many refusals, several of which were not formally worded. What was the astonishment of the guests on arriving to discover a great legend pasted over the door; it was an impious perversion of what is to be found over the entrance to all Roman churches. The butlers hustled it down you may be sure, but not before a good dozen guests had read the words IMPUDENTIA PLENARIA. No one has the remotest notion who had it put there; though Edward Sandys is continually being censored for having too mordant a wit. Mrs. Asquith has brazened the thing out, as you would have expected, and tells the story herself with a wealth of assumed lightness. . . .
Sources: A Sketch and, a Preface
A Sketch
The figure of Theophilus North emerges out of a series of sketches Wilder began writing in 1968 about events and places in his life, of which this extract from “S.S. Independenza” is an example. The story recalls Wilder’s departure for a year-in-residence (1920–1921) at the American Academy in Rome, an actual event in his life, as was his friendship with Gertrude Stein. Theophilus appears here in both the original sketch and the paragraph affixed to it (see illustration on page 388). The affixed paragraph is written in a different ink and appears to be the handwriting of a still-older author.
“S.S. Independenza”
Fathers and Sons is a painful subject, even in a country of distinct ethos. (China coped with it draconically; a son is totally obedient and subservient to his father and father’s father until death and after.)
Gertrude Stein and I were once discussing a friend who had recently lost a father. “Well, you know,” she said laughing, “I’ve often noticed that when a man’s father dies his son tends to feel and behave ten years younger.” Gertrude’s laughter was never (in my hearing) malicious, destructive, savage; even on a subject as painful as this it had the buoyancy of that kind of release from cant that is expressed in the phrase “Let’s tell the truth.” It contained no indictment against any specific father, against any category of malevolent tyrants. Her idea was that that was the way the world was and always had been. . . .
During my years in New Haven my father was a stone’s throw [from] my successive rooms in the dormitories. I was much under his eye. . . .
From the moment I embarqued on the Independenza I breathed an emancipated air. I was deracinated and on the ship and later at the Academy in Rome I was largely in the company of young men who had left their father at home. Very exciting it was. Theophilus, who had been quiescent . . .
Now Theophilus had been dormant for some time. During the years in New Haven he had been very much under his father’s eye. . . . Though he had (“through sheer military genius,” as he put it) [risen] to the rank of corporal, had been very much under his sergeant’s eye. But from the moment the ship Independenza pulled out from the dock at Hoboken he began to revive. There was no one over him.
A piece of “S.S. Independenza,” in the author’s handwriting.
A Preface
Among Wilder’s papers is a document titled “Preface,” from which this extract is taken. While it is unclear why Wilder chose not to complete and use the Preface, it is likely that this piece of the Theophilus puzzle served him, as did his journal, as a method for testing ideas. Spaces are left blank and words are missing; this is, after all, a writer at work.
The opening lines of Wilder’s draft of a Preface for Theophilus North, the text of which appears below.
Throughout a long lifetime every man acquires a certain number of generalized ideas about human experience that he feels to be peculiarly his own. They are his own not necessarily because they are original with him but because he has lived with them—applied them, modified them, tested them, rejected them then readopted them. The sign that they are not merely notions is that they have the capability of growth—observation confirms them—and of consolidation, they are like snowflakes on a window pane; they form clusters and patterns. Some he received as a child from tradition (and from among these he rejected many); some from reading; some from chance remarks overheard. Some long latent within him were clarified by crisis and distilled by reflection. Some, though considerably developed, were discarded as the result of an enlightenment.
He has given to them a name—a private and absurdly pretentious name: they are “deposits of radium.”
This book is constantly informed by a number of these “clusters of energy.”
Here are some of them:
All men aspire to excellence. All men strive to incorporate elements of the Absolute into their lives. These efforts are doomed to failure. Every man is an archer whose arrow is aimed to the center of the target; but our arrows are leaden, their feathers are ill [——] our eyesight is imperfect; our education has failed to distinguish the true from the false targets; the strength in our arm is insufficiently developed. All men aspire to incorporate elements of the Absolute into their lives.
To the impassioned will all things be possible. The founder of the Christian faith is reported to have said, “If you have faith [——] mustard seed, you shall say unto this mountain, be removed, and it will [——] and [——] and it shall be open to you. And all things are possible to those who love God.” That is, of course, absurd. Something must be the matter with all “the terms of reference.” As I have often amused myself by saying, “Hope never changed tomorrow’s weather.” Yet. . . yet. . . history abounds with achievements that fill us with wonder.
All men aspire to excellence. The very crimes against the human race are derived from the “dream” of establishing an orderly existence. War itself is the “dream” of eliminating bad men and bad societies. All energy is the corruption of an aspiration to excellence. Gold is exhausted radium and lead is exhausted gold.
It is a basic condition of the human mind to wish to be free. The desire is noble and wreaks a large part of the harm in public and private life.
What does a man do with his despair?
Greek myth tells us that a direct view of Medusa’s head turned a man to stone. Perseus gazed only at her reflection in his shield, cut off her head and rescued Andromeda.
Pascal said: “Neither the sun nor death permit themselves to be looked at fixedly.”
At the margin of every man’s consciousness is the knowledge that he must die and that the universe must have an end; i.e. the possibility that all the efforts to achieve an orderly world are doomed—that existence is an absurdity and a farce.
What does a man do with his despair, his rage, his frustration?
There is a wide variety of things he does with it.
One or other of them is pictured in each of the chapters of this book. . . .
Envoi: Two Voices
An Enthusiast
In this excerpt from an interview with a Los Angeles Times reporter in October 1973, an ebullient Wilder speaks his mind about the age he is living in and his own age.
NEW YORK—“In a nutshell,” said Thornton Wilder, the 76- year-old Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and playwright, “this is an age of transition.
“An age
of transition is difficult for everybody—difficult for parents, difficult for children, difficult for you in the journalistic world. But it is an exciting age. Something is straining to be born.”
If this is cause for pessimism, it has been lost on the author of such works as Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and the friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.
“I am of an optimistic nature—a grasshopper,” he said in an interview the other day. “I enjoy hoppiting around. I’m happy every day. I don’t view with alarm every day. Having lived so long, I have seen many things. All history has been troubled, but when you are in the kind of transition we are in now, the trouble is more apparent than at other times.”
We met in the lounge of the Algonquin. Wilder, his eyes twinkling through horn-rimmed glasses, sat down gingerly, rather than with the abandon of a grasshopper. He had recently come from a spell in the hospital for treatment of a bad back.
“Sacroiliac,” he explained. “It’s called slipped disk now. It used to be called lumbago. It changes its name every 30 years.”
Wilder’s first published writing appeared half a century ago in the literary magazine of Oberlin College in Ohio, where he studied for a couple of years before going on to Yale. His latest work, a novel called Theophilus North, a partly autobiographical story set in Newport, R.I., is being published by Harper & Row this month.
“I worked on the book for one year—my 75th—April to April, after I thought I had laid down my pen,” he said.
“Is creative work difficult in the mid-70s?” I asked.
“If you get a concentrated idea,” he replied, “all your writing blocks disappear. Writing at this age is not hard, not if you have the right idea—an idea deeply relative to yourself. Verdi wrote Othello at 78 and Falstaff at 79. Picasso was a beaver until his death in his 90s. He kept his paintings in a back corridor because if he put all his work—three a day—on the market, it would reduce the price. He was getting $25,000 a sketch.
“Sophocles at 90 was hauled into court by his grandchildren, saying the old man was non compos and might will his estate to somebody else. When he went before the court the judge said, ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ ‘I’ll tell you something,’ Sophocles replied. ‘I wrote this morning the great chorus from Oedipus at Colonus.’ This work is a treasure. ‘Either I am crazy or you,’ the judge said. ‘Case dismissed.’
“This is an attractive story for us old men. . . .”
A Friend
Robert Hutchins (1899-1977), Thornton Wilder’s oldest and closest friend, to whom Theophilus North is dedicated, spoke at Wilder’s memorial service in New Haven on January 18, 1976, as did the actress Ruth Gordon. (Her husband, Garson Kanin, was an usher.) Hutchins’s tribute is printed in its entirety. Amos (1895–1993) and Isabel (1900-1995) are Wilder’s brother and sister.
Thornton and I first met when we were freshmen at Oberlin College, sixty years ago. After the First World War separated us, we were reunited at Yale. When I went to the University of Chicago, we were reunited again and spent six years there together. After that we had to rely on the mails and such meetings as we were able to arrange. It wasn’t so bad. We met in London, Paris (where we saw the Kanins), New York, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Albuquerque, and other places.
It was a family affair, more or less, at the start. My father was one of Thornton’s teachers at Oberlin. His father employed me as a typist when I got to New Haven. Thornton’s friendship with my mother continued long after the families had scattered. And then, of course, there were Isabel and Amos: Isabel at New Haven and by correspondence thereafter, and Amos at Oberlin, Yale, and Chicago, too. And to my children—like so many other people’s children—Thornton was always “Uncle Thornton.”
Thornton used to say that he and I were brought up in the “late foam-rubber period of American Protestantism.” And the worst of that, he said, was that we didn’t have the courage to think what he called “window-breaking thoughts.” He quoted Karl Marx as saying, “Tell me in what neighborhood you live, and I’ll tell you what you think.” Thornton thought we had lived too long in the wrong neighborhood. In fact, in his view I had lived in two of the wrong neighborhoods: the neighborhood of late foam-rubber Protestantism and, as a semiprofessional money raiser, in the neighborhood of the very rich. “The rich,” he said, “need to be lapped in soothing words.” What was required was window-breaking thoughts. The enemy was philistinism, parochialism, narrow specialization. The object of education—indeed of the whole of life—was the expansion of the imagination. This could lead to window-breaking thoughts.
As late as last August, Thornton wrote to me, “I continue to be crazy about the new frontiers in microbiology and astronomy. They expand the imagination.” When we were in college I showed him a book of critical essays that I had bought, and he said, “Short cut to culture.” No window-breaking thoughts here. He tried to open the world of music to me by giving me the first symphonic record I ever owned, Mozart’s 34th; and his correspondence and conversation were full of Goethe, Kierkegaard, Teilhard de Chardin, Joyce, Nietzsche, Gertrude Stein—all of whom had broken some windows in their time.
But there was more to the expansion of the imagination than removing old obstructions and opening new vistas. There was the object of it all, which was to elevate and unite humanity by enabling the dwellers of one neighborhood to understand those of others and to share their ideas, hopes, and fears. So Thornton never joined in my admiration for Gibbon. He said that the Romans and the English were “cold-hearted”—that is, they were short on imagination. “Gibbon,” he said, “gloats at the Colisseum. He sics the animals on.” Thornton’s ultimate word of condemnation was “cruel.” Cruelty was a failure of the imagination.
For sixty years he was my teacher. His pedagogical methods were irresistible. They were deep personal concern and laughter. When I was ill or suffering from any misfortune, the letters were faster and funnier, but the lessons were not missing. Here is Thornton’s account of meeting a President of the United States in a receiving line:
Thornton Wilder (right) with his older brother, Amos, at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, April 1975. This is the last known picture taken of the author, who died on December 7 of that year. Amos’s status as a clergyman and a prominent tennis player—he was the Intercollegiate Doubles Champion in 1920—is mentioned in Theophilus North.
The President gave me the gimlet eye and vice versa. The President said, “Still scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr. Wilder?”
And I said, “Man dressed in a little brief authority performs such tricks under the high heaven as make the angels weep. See Measure for Measure.”
“Next,” the President said peremptorily.
This is his version of what happened when he got a bad review:
It’s terrible to be humiliated that way. My barber lost his tongue and cut my hair in silence. The waitress at my stammtisch at Howard Johnson’s murmured, “Never mind, dear. Maybe you’ll do better next time. You’ll be wanting the eighty-five cent blue-plate lunch. It’s hash today.” My dog hid behind the woodpile when I called him, and when I spoke to the little girl next door, her mother called through the window, “Come inside, Marguerite. I think it is going to rain.”
He was the best of teachers and the kindest of friends.
Acknowledgments
The Afterword of this volume is constructed in large part from Thornton Wilder’s words in unpublished letters, papers, business records, and publications not easy to come by. Readers interested in additional information about Thornton Wilder are referred to standard sources and to the Thornton Wilder Society’s website: www.thorntonwildersociety.org.
Many Wilder fans deserve thanks for helping me to accomplish this task, for which, of course, I bear full responsibility. I thank Barbara Whitepine and Celeste Fellows for helping with housekeeping details. For their assistance and support throughout, I am honored to give a special salute to R
obin Wilder, Jackson Bryer, Barbara Hogenson, J. D. McClatchy, and Penelope Niven. Christopher Buckley’s enthusiasm for Thornton Wilder has been a joy to be around. Finally, I am deeply indebted to the helpful people at two institutions that care about good books: the staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and all those at HarperCollins who have made this volume and this series possible.
Letters and Journals
The quotations from Thornton Wilder’s letters and other material in the Foreword and Afterword, including the quotation from Isabel Wilder’s letter in the Afterword, are taken from one of two sources: the unpublished letters, manuscripts, and related files in the Wilder Family Archives in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the Wilder family’s own holdings, including many of Thornton Wilder’s legal and agency papers. Minor spelling and punctuation errors have been silently corrected. All rights are reserved for this material by the owners.
Publications
Excerpts from published sources are identified in the order of their appearance in the text, with permissions noted as required: Amos Wilder’s view about his brother’s status as a twin appears in Thornton Wilder and His Public (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), p. 10. Copyright © 1980 by Amos Niven Wilder. Reprinted by permission of Tappan Wilder. Robert J. Donovan’s interview with Wilder, “Thornton Wilder on Life Today: ‘It’s an Age of Transition—and It’s Exciting,’ ” appeared in the Los Angeles Times on October 15, 1973, and is reprinted in Jackson R. Bryer, Ed., Conversations with Thornton Wilder (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), pp. 106-109. Copyright, Los Angeles Times. Reprinted by permission. Robert Hutchins’s tribute appears in the published record of the author’s memorial service, Thornton Niven Wilder (New Haven: Yale Printing Service, 1976), pp. 8-10, and is reprinted here with the permission of Clarissa Hutchins Bronson.
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