On September 23, 1945, when Lieutenant Colonel Wilder received his honorable discharge from the US Army Air Force at Fort Devens in Massachusetts after slightly more than three years of active duty—two of them spent overseas in North Africa and Italy—he naturally began planning more travel. After a rest, he intended to return to Europe to serve as his country’s cultural attaché in Paris with writing worked in. But when he failed the health examination for this highly visible post, he found himself once again facing the more solitary life as teacher and author. Instead of going to Europe, the exhausted ex-soldier decided to become reacquainted with his own country, using his countrymen’s now favored means of long-haul transportation: his own automobile. That October, after seeing doctor and dentist, purchasing a new civilian wardrobe, and attending to management details involving his literary works (especially international performances of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth), Thornton Wilder leaped into his 1939 Chrysler convertible, with unreliable tires—war time rubber rationing still being in effect—and headed for Florida.
At the top of his writing agenda was The Alcestiad, a play he had begun before the war. But it was on this trip south, and probably in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that his priorities changed. He wrote his sister, Isabel: “Just for the fun, I began the Caesar-Clodia-Catullus-Cicero novel in letters, the hardest writing I’ve ever done.” The “fun” quickly turned into a serious work. By January 1946, Isabel wrote to Wilder family members that she was planning a gathering at her home for twenty-six guests to hear Thornton read from the growing Caesar manuscript. By May 1946, after short trips to favorite writing haunts in Newport, Rhode Island, and Atlantic City, New Jersey, he had completed the first two books of the novel and was reading it to friends.
Work came to a standstill when Wilder’s mother died in late June 1946, and he needed to give attention to family affairs. (In 1946, Wilder was the sole support of his mother and two of his three sisters, one of the latter hospitalized with mental illness.) His writing was disrupted further by his decision to star as Stage Manager in two summer theater productions and a national radio broadcast of Our Town. Many months later, in January 1947, he broke free again, this time aiming the Chrysler with new tires for the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, then spent a month (a boat trip at last!) to Mérida on the Yucatán Peninsula, followed by an easy motoring trip home. The novel was growing again. On his way home he stopped in Washington, DC, where he spent two weeks in late April and early May at the Library of Congress reading works on the conspiracies against Caesar, because that piece of the book, as he wrote to an actor friend, Joe Layton, “I can’t so easily spin out of my head.” From Washington he also wrote his attorney that he had decided to title the work “The Ides of March,” adding, “It will stir up a considerable shindy, I expect. It’s like nothing else.” In the fall of 1947, he delivered the novel’s final pages to his publisher, Harper & Bros., where a secretary had been typing the manuscript as he submitted parts of it.
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Like The Alcestiad that he had put aside, Wilder’s “The Caesar-Clodia-Catullus-Cicero novel in letters” had a long history across the life of its author, a history one can easily trace back to growing up in a family in which knowledge of the classics and Greek and Roman history was venerated. Wilder’s news-editor father believed so passionately in the efficacy of classical languages that he wrote an editorial, “The Passing of Latin,” that is said to have “forced the Yale Corporation [trustees] to stay its hand before throwing out the classics” as part of the Yale College required curriculum. From his mother, who learned Italian and translated Carducci and Dante, Wilder inherited a rich background in Italian letters and culture, a useful prelude for his own formal education in Latin language and literature. With his brother and sisters, young Thornton participated in crowd scenes at the open-air stage of the Greek Theatre in the hills of Berkeley, California, near where they lived.
Wilder first formally encountered Julius Caesar on the page in the classroom in 1910–1911, at the China Inland Mission School in Chefoo, when he was thirteen years old. According to the winter term report card in 1911 he stood sixth in a form of twenty-three students in “Selections from Caesar.” Always reticent about his five-year undergraduate academic record (during his college years, Wilder was often writing, reading, attending, and even reviewing plays for a Boston paper—passions that yielded, sadly, no formal credits), he was a fine Latin student when he wanted to be. With the exception of one real and one near disaster in grammar courses, Wilder received grades of at least B+ in four of six Latin courses taken at Yale, and his submission for his graduating class’s “Ivy Ode” won this notable honor serving as an early prelude to his translation of Catullus’s poems in The Ides of March.
Wilder’s record in the classics opened the door for his seven-month stay as a self-supported “visiting student” in the Classical School (archaeological wing) at the American Academy in Rome in 1920–1921.* In addition to wanting Thornton to have an experience abroad, a Wilder family goal for each child, his father funded his son’s stay at the academy to enhance his credentials for becoming a secondary school Latin teacher. The experience proved a formative one for Thornton Wilder’s life as an artist. It inspired his first novel, The Cabala (1926), a story set against twentieth-century Rome. It was also during this stay in Rome that he got the idea for his fictitious autobiography of Julius Caesar.
Although set aside in favor of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and The Woman of Andros (1930)—both inspired, especially the latter, by the classical record—his Caesar story idea was by no means forgotten. In 1931, we find him corresponding with the translator and classicist Sir Edward Howard Marsh about “a conversation-novel I want to do some day, turning on the famous profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea—with Claudius, Clodia, Catullus, Caesar, Cicero.” In 1935, it appears on his project list with a working title: “The Top of the World—(Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Clodius, Clodia).” A few paragraphs of this project exist in Wilder’s papers, written in a traditional narrative style as well as in his journal entry of January 9, 1939:
Suppose I wrote “The Top of the World” and prefaced it with this note: “In this novel I have put into Julius Caesar’s mouth words gathered from many authors in many ages. The discourse to Catullus on nature is a paraphrase of Goethe’s Fragment of 1806. The arguments on the immortality of the soul in the conversation with Cicero are from Walter Savage Landor and he in turn was indebted for several of them to Plato and Cicero.”
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The Ides of March’s prehistory in the 1930s also includes a rich amalgam of fact and conjecture. In interviews and letters after the publication of Ides, Wilder credited the focus of the book to probing conversations he had with Gertrude Stein in the 1930s about the nature of greatness and power as exhibited in various professions from Hollywood stars to political leaders, a rich topic for anyone in that period observing world leaders and their supporters wrestling with outmoded belief systems and governmental practices.
In the realm of conjecture is the precise role that his talks with Stein played in his belief that the novel in its traditional narrative form, as told by an omniscient author, was losing its vitality as a vehicle to speak to the modern mind. The future would henceforth be drama, an art form that held the potential for all but eliminating the storyteller in favor of “pure action without comment.” Wilder conveyed this view to a reporter from the New York Sun when disembarking from an ocean liner in New York on his return from Europe in November 1935, adding that he would no longer write novels but only plays. News that the author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey had abandoned fiction was news, and the story was picked up by newspapers throughout the country.
It was a pledge Wilder kept when he wrote two highly experimental plays, Our Town (1937) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), as well as a full-blown farce, The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), later to be revised as The Matchmaker in 1954. Moreover, it was also a pledge he kept, as he saw it, wh
en he wrote The Ides of March, a book composed of seventy-two letters and other written fragments, each, by definition, “pure action without comment,” and thus a present tense, stagelike and intimate way to reach an audience of one person at a time. The author, in fact, did not even call The Ides of March a novel, but rather, a “fantasia,” although “novel” was the banner under which it was published, marketed, and has been remembered ever since.
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Where in the realm of fact and conjecture does Wilder’s own World War II experiences as an Army Air Force Intelligence Officer come into the making of his fantasia about a soldier-dictator? The first point to make is that Wilder had an atypical wartime experience for a man of his credentials, now having been awarded three Pulitzer Prizes. He was forty-five when he volunteered for service in 1942. He did not spend WW II in an information posting, but as a combat trained officer. During Wilder’s “90-day Wonder” basic training course in Miami Beach in July 1942, he met the writer Paul Horgan, who assumed that Wilder was headed next for an assignment such as writing war manuals. Wilder quickly corrected the assumption, “Never! I shall not write for my country!”
And he did not. His Army Air Force duties, for which, after Miami, he trained in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and with four Fighter Squadrons at Hamilton Field in Northern California, led to two years abroad in field intelligence duty split between Tunisia and Caserta (outside Rome), running the gamut from debriefing pilots and interviewing prisoners of war to planning air campaigns for the invasion of Italy and strategic air plans involving Romania, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Germany. He also played an important role as coordinator of plans and actions between the Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces and British Commonwealth air units in Italy. His biographer Penelope Niven wrote that Wilder “proved to be a highly effective administrator with a knack for strategic planning. He found the preparations for the Italian campaign ‘fascinating’ with the focus on maps, reconnaissance photographs and computations.” Captain Wilder was discharged a Lieutenant Colonel with the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, and the Military Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) in September 1945. Other than saying in asides that he was never in real danger and that living in tents was not always comfortable, Wilder rarely talked about his wartime experiences and chose not to write about them directly. “But god forbid,” he did write in his private journal, “that nothing I write will ever fail to contain what I experienced there.”
It is thus no surprise that during a week’s leave in Rome in September 1944, he began to turn the Julius Caesar story over again in his imagination. Nor is it surprising that his thoughts returned to another warrior in another time of war. During a State Department-sponsored goodwill tour of four Latin American countries in 1941, Wilder had enjoyed an “unforgettable” literary encounter with the letters of the revolutionary soldier Simon Bolivar (1783–1830). In a 1948 interview, Wilder would note that “Bolivar’s mind worked something like Caesar’s” and observed that his disillusionment, too, “was without cynicism.”
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A final point of more than conjecture on the influences at play on Wilder when he wrote Ides of March: Existentialism.
After the war Thornton Wilder plunged, as did many artists and intellectuals, into the new existentialist thinking making its way across the Atlantic in journal articles, pamphlets, plays, and books. He compiled and absorbed materials from bookstores and the periodical room of the Yale Library. Hardly alone in this enthusiasm for the chief progenitors and subsequent architects of existentialist expression in the postwar period, Wilder’s encounter was notable for the depth of its impact. It can be measured in part by his numerous notations in his volumes of philosophical discourse and by his personal friendship with Walter Lowrie, the preeminent Kierkegaard scholar in this period, and with Jean-Paul Sartre himself for whom he translated Morts sans sépulture, produced off-Broadway in 1948 as The Victors.
Wilder’s letters from this period are full of excitement about a new way of thinking. For example, an encounter with Sartre for the first time at a Yale French Department-sponsored event in February 1946, led to a private talk about which he wrote his brother, Amos, a New Testament scholar, poet, and literary critic also deeply engaged in studying the intellectual currents flowing from Europe:
Dammit—had a 5-hour field day with Sartre. Tough and gay. Yes—we now Cher Maître one another . . . Yes, liberty is ours precisely by virtue of our limitation and misère; the fact that we die, and know we are to, gives the transcendence; sin is the refusal of freedom and freedom is attained by engagement in the world, by the chaining ourselves with responsibility.
And to his friend Dr. Joe Still, in a letter written a month later about Sartre’s existential ideas:
Baby, you’ll sit up. There is no God; there is the concession of the absurdity of man’s reason in a universe which can never be explained by reason; yet there is freedom of the will defended for the first time on non-religious grounds, and how.
Documented fact: Wilder’s intellectual encounter with Kierkegaard and Sartre provided him with the philosophical underpinnings of The Ides of March. He was particularly drawn to Kierkegaard—and had been even before the war—by that thinker’s moral ethical worldview, and it was this position that informed the way he depicts Caesar. In an interview published in Cosmopolitan in April 1948, Wilder usefully summarized his intellectual voyage in this period, depicting it partly as a family affair:
On returning [from the war] I took up a theme which I had already partially developed before the war. I spent almost a year on it, only to find that my basic ideas about the human situation had undergone a drastic change. I was not able to define the change myself until the writings of Kierkegaard were called to my attention by my theologian brother. All my life I have passed from enthusiasm to enthusiasm and gratitude to gratitude. The Ides of March, my new novel, can be said to be written under the sign of Kierkegaard.
In a talk about the book’s publication reported with some care and length in the Boston Herald in March 1948, he put it this way:
Modern man has taken such pride in the exploration of his mind that he has forgotten there must be some laws governing that exploration. Whether it comes under religion or ethics or mere judgment such laws must be found and respected. Otherwise the mind leads him straight to self-destruction. So, my book is Caesar’s groping in the open seas of his unlimited power for the first principles which should guide him.
The book’s epigraph (or “motto,” as Wilder called it) seems more like Kierkegaard but is actually Wilder’s gloss on lines from Goethe’s Faust. They might also be considered a more literary way of characterizing Caesar and his circle: “Out of man’s recognition in fear and awe that there is an Unknowable comes all that is best in the explorations of his mind,—even though that recognition is often misled into superstition, enslavement, and overconfidence.” In an interview in June 1948 for the Berkshire Eagle (with Ides on the bestseller list), Wilder explained in more popular language an implication of his “motto” as it pertained to Caesar’s leadership:
Julius Caesar is the archetype of the genius ruler. He made so many good laws that he bored the Romans. The world was in his hand. But he was so free himself that he forgot to allow the exercise in freedom to others. Liberty is an accumulating discipline. People must be given practice in choice.
The two men to whom Ides is dedicated represented for Wilder two different models of individuals who courageously made choices against all odds and thus exercised their freedom to be. Both were personal friends. Wilder first met the poet Lauro de Bosis (1901–1931) when he was at the American Academy in Rome in 1920. Later de Bosis served as the Italian translator for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. To protest Mussolini and Fascism, he purchased a plane and learned to fly. Soaring over Rome, on October 4, 1931, he scattered 400,000 anti-Fascist leaflets, and then headed out to sea, vanishing forever. (Wilder has the aircraft pursued by those of the Duce; this is not accurate; his plane simply disappeare
d.)
Edward Sheldon (1886–1946) was the other person to whom Ides is dedicated. In his twenty-ninth year, this highly successful playwright began progressively to lose his sight and voice and become hideously more and more crippled by a disease now suspected of being ankylosing spondylitis. Despite his physical condition he remained to his death an effective and beloved friend, critic, and mentor to writers and actors, among them Thornton Wilder.
Tributes to both men appear as characteristics of dramatis personae in Ides. De Bosis is portrayed as the figure of Catullus (and the broadsides against Caesar), and Sheldon in the figure of Lucius Mamilius Turrinus, the badly maimed solider living on Capri.
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The Ides of March was published on January 16, 1948, by Harper & Brothers. At the last minute, Wilder allowed his publisher to submit it for consideration to the Book-of-the-Month Club. He was surprised when they accepted it as the March 1948 fiction selection.
What did reviewers say about Wilder’s fifth novel, his first in fourteen years? Where the documentary form of the book was concerned, he was hailed repeatedly for writing a “tour de force” (a much-employed phrase) or for the book’s “sheer wizardry.” Beyond form—and much space was taken up rehashing Wilder’s explanation of his intentions and chronology as he laid them out in the book’s untitled preface—favorable reviewers made many positive points about his use of a historical setting to explore timeless ethical and deeply philosophical questions about power and corruption, art and life. There was also much positive commentary about how Wilder had avoided the pedantic, despite his obvious erudition.
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