The Ides of March

by Thornton Wilder

  After “sumptuary laws” six lines from bottom: “Rome was passing through a financial depression. These are Caesar’s laws against luxury; jewels; rich clothes; elaborate food, etc.” An internal note reads: “(i.e. against poisoners.)” after “in the old days.”

  * * *

  XXV. . . . Pompeia to Clodia: “we’re way back in August again—Clodia’s dinner party hasn’t taken place yet. Some readers hate this time-scheme of mine, but that’s the way I see life.”

  III. . . . they felt they had been lied to and they promptly flung themselves into a public demonstration of their liberation from hypocrisy: “Tallulah Bankhead—the first family of Alabama—descended from all the governors of the Confederacy—daughter, granddaughter, niece of governors and senators—brought up in the lying myths of Southern gentry: every Southern woman a magnolia of purity; every man a perfect knight—discovered in time the appalling TRUTH—and broke loose with a yell.”

  III. . . . that the crown of life is the exercise of choice: “TNW is getting going; a recurring theme in the book.”

  VI. . . . nor Penelope, to boot: “One of the themes of the book: that love can idealize the Beloved to an extent that can only end in tragedy.”

  I-B. . . . Am I sure that there is no mind behind our existence and no mystery: “Here begins the cornerstone of the book: Does life have meaning? Or is it just slapdash?”

  XXI. . . . of whom Cicero had said that “only her dearest friends are in a position truly to detest her”: “I shouldn’t have put this in; it’s Mrs. Nicholas Longworth [Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter]. Famous epigram about Tom Dewey [GOP candidate for president in 1948].”

  XXI. . . . Neither the sun nor the situation of man permit themselves to be gazed at fixedly: “I stole this from la Rochefoucault; ‘Neither the sun nor death permit themselves to be gazed at fixedly.’ Oh, I’m a busy shoplifter.”

  At conclusion of Wilder’s introductory note:

  So it’s a kind of crossword puzzle. Many of the events we traverse four times.

  They’re like a statue that you view from four sides.

  Hence the book only begins to speak at its second reading.

  But in this way I get (for my own interest, anyway) a sense of the density of life—its intermixedness, its surprises,—its mysteriousness.

  The way of telling a story chronologically, from beginning to end, bored me—seemed too slick—not rich and complicated and true enough.

  In life we often learn much later what really took place.

  A Gold Medal Bestowed (1952)

  “To gaze at [life] is to be struck with awe.”

  On May 28, 1952, with The Ides of March in print and very much in mind, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Wilder one of the great honors of his career: its Gold Medal for Fiction. In making the presentation, Pearl Buck, a Nobel Prize-winner, hailed Wilder for his “contrast between the awfulness of illimitable time and the endless space and his defying emphasis upon the value of the human being.” Buck went on to see in many of Wilder’s fictional characters, “including even Caesar in The Ides of March,” features of Wilder himself: “the perceptive feeling, articulate man, the complex simplicity, the interpreter and correlator between eternal time and now, endless space and here.” In his informal acceptance remarks, appearing here for the first time outside the Academy’s records, Wilder, practitioner of the omniscient narrator novel, now celebrates it with its related “two essential requirements” and the meaning of a German word that sounds like it might describe a young Wilder or a young Caesar. In his remarks, Wilder mentions his plans to begin a new novel within the year. In fact, nineteen years passed before his next novel, the National Book Award—winning The Eighth Day, was published in 1967.

  Acceptance by Thornton Wilder

  “This expression of approval on the part of so many artists and writers makes me very happy. I am not one of those natures who pause from time to time to take stock, to ask themselves what they have done and what they have failed to do. More than that: I shrink from looking backward. Consequently, this generous expression comes to me as a surprise—as a pleasurable one and as an inspiring one.

  I began writing my first novel [The Cabala] thirty-one years ago—in a small hotel on the left bank of the Seine, where so many American novels have been begun. I hope to begin my sixth next winter—fortified by the encouragement which has been given to me today.

  I have no one theory about the novel; perhaps it is because I have so many theories about it—many of them conflicting things and subject to change from year-to-year—that I have been unable to construct any description of my aims in such writing.

  But the older I grow the more clearly I see two essential requirements of the novelist. He must be more interested in human beings than in forming generalized ideas about human beings; and he must believe profoundly in the principle of freedom in the life of the human mind.

  Between the two wars I was often in Europe taking long walking trips. This led to my being a visitor in many homes. And one day in the German home I heard a woman say, pointing to one of her children: that is my Menschenkenner? And I discovered that the Germans had a word, which is unfortunately missing from our language. A Menschenkenner: one who is instinctively understanding of, and attentive to, how human beings feel and think. And therefore, in other German and Austrian and Swiss homes I would ask mothers: which of your children are Menschenkenner And they always seem to know at once what I meant.

  Now there is nothing particularly praiseworthy—nor even desirable—about being a Menschenkenner. Some great criminals and many a destructive nature in our own circles belong to that category. Iago was a simply wonderful Menschenkenner, as was his creator. And many a person whom we admire and love, in history and in our own community, has not a drop of Menschenkenntnis, but it is a quality, which is certainly indispensable to a novelist, and not always present.

  The novel, even more than drama, is an expression of a belief in the freedom of our human nature. For this reason, we are uneasy when we are aware that a novelist is forcing his characters to illustrate a principle or theory. By definition a novelist claims omniscience: the mind of Tolstoy’s is like a great eye above the house, above the city, above the planet, from which nothing is hid. He seems to be merely reporting life, not rearranging it. Life is more surprising, more varied, more unpredictable than any general idea we may hold about it—sociological, philosophical, or religious. To gaze at it is to be struck with awe, an awe which leaves no room for our enclosing it in theorems, in demonstrations of personal grievance, or in self-consolatory constructions of the life as we wish it to be.

  The older I grow, the more I would wish to write novels that reflect this awe before the condition of human freedom. And I thank you for your encouragement of this project.”

  Foreword

  The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922–2007) greatly admired Thornton Wilder, a fellow member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His tribute to Wilder, which opened The Ides of March in the 2003 edition, is now retained in the back matter as part of the edition’s record.

  * * *

  CAN you name an excellent American novelist who was equally adept as a playwright, or the other way around? Forget Ernest Hemingway. Forget Eugene O’Neill. Isn’t Thornton Wilder the only one? That native of the university town of Madison, Wisconsin, was fifty-one when this, his fifth novel, was published. With twenty-seven more years to live, he had by then seen four of his full-length plays, including the Pulitzer Prize 1938 masterpiece Our Town, produced as well.

  As it happens, as I write in August 2002, Our Town is being performed by professionals before a packed house in a summer theater only six miles due north of here. Thornton Wilder’s reputation is in no need of revival. When he died in 1975, his body, to say the least, was not chucked nameless and penniless into a pit of quicklime, as had been done to that of Mozart. He was wonderfully prosperous and is still popular as, in my opinion, the calmest, least strid
ent, most humane and scholarly and forgiving and playful and avuncular American storyteller of the twentieth century.

  He started out as a teacher at a prep school in New Jersey and went on from there, with a B.A. from Yale, to study at the American Academy in Rome, to an M.A. from Princeton, to teach literature at the University of Chicago and then Harvard and elsewhere. Once a teacher, always a teacher. In his writings he seems a teacher still, amiably, patiently encouraging his readers or auditors, as though they were students, to enjoy knowledge and a life of informed reasoning as much as he had. He is doing that tonight, six miles due north of here. He will do it to you as you read this book.

  The subject he taught at the prep school wasn’t literature but French. So he surely knew by then this famous plaint about history by the French writer Alphonse Karr: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” In any case, Thornton Wilder obviously believed that, for the Julius Caesar in this book, literate, well read, unburdened by ignorance and superstition, is in all respects a modern man. The Ides of March, while set in Rome, might well be about a brilliant and all-too-human dictator in modern times, and what it could be like for the men and women who are close to one.

  This book’s lesson, and the lesson taught even more didactically by his 1942 Pulitzer Prize play The Skin of Our Teeth, is that it is human nature which does not change, no matter the era or situation.

  Thornton Wilder was born in the same year as my father, in 1897. Three American writers born within twelve years or less of them won Nobel Prizes for Literature. They were Sinclair Lewis, born 1885, Eugene O’Neill, born 1888, and Ernest Hemingway, born 1899, quite a hot trick, one might say, for the USA. That Thornton Wilder himself did not get one may have been due to the lack of immediacy and urgency and astonishment and suspense in all he wrote, although he otherwise wrote as well as anyone.

  Writing about the glamorous dictator Julius Caesar, and in an era of horrifying new Caesars named Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini, Thornton Wilder chose the most placid of all literary forms! You have here a so-called epistolary novel, by definition without dialogue or narrative scenes or scenery, or flesh-and-blood characters. It is nothing but a collection of documents, whether real or imaginary, from which you are expected to draw your own conclusions!

  Contrast, if you will, such a dusty archive with the vociferous pageantry of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, or Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw. And yet an epistolary novel turns out to serve to perfection a favorite plaything of Thornton Wilder. He showed off the plaything for the first time in 1927, in his best-selling, Pulitzer Prize novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is the possibility that some if not all human beings have inevitable destinies. What better way than by means of imaginary private journals was there for Thornton Wilder to create a Julius Caesar who expected to be assassinated, and who was startled on occasion by whom and what he had somehow become?

  Yes, and as he wrote this, his fifth novel, Thornton Wilder himself was surely entitled to feel gaga from time to time about what a prominent person, albeit the most benign celebrity imaginable, he, the son of a newspaper editor in Madison, Wisconsin, had become.

  Three Pulitzer Prizes so far! What the heck is going on?

  One thing he had already become when only a student in the public high school in yet another university town, Berkeley, California, was a person who could read writings by Julius Caesar and Cicero and on and on in Latin. My father, the same age, became such a person in a public high school in Indianapolis, Indiana. So did tens of thousands of members of their generation nationwide. It was generally believed by American educators and parents back then (no longer the case) that studying useless Latin strengthened young people’s brains, just as the useless labor of calisthenics firmed up their physiques.

  So we have the book you are holding now.

  I myself never had to study Latin, although I went to the same high school that shaped my father. I was the Class of 1940. I am sorry now to have missed the two-thousand-year time trip he and Thornton Wilder took. That I didn’t have to learn Latin if I didn’t want to was a part of America’s response, I think, to the menace of brutally pragmatic and scientific European dictatorships. We weren’t at war with them yet, but it seemed high time for American education to strip itself of anything—for instance, Latin—that appeared remotely ornamental.

  Even so, this much Latin I may have been able to recite when I was a kid, having heard it muttered or snarled so often by my father whenever he heard somebody really awful had died: “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” That is not literature, I am told, but folk wisdom from ancient Rome.

  All historical novels are science fiction since they are about time travel, and I am now put in mind of the trip Mark Twain took while writing A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Mark Twain found the human beings at Camelot laughably inferior to Americans of his own time. Thornton Wilder could not have made such an odious comparison in a million years.

  Yes, and if somebody were to offer me a million dollars to say something bad about the late Thornton Wilder, not a single word in any language would come to mind.

  “Apolitical” is not an ugly word.

  —KURT VONNEGUT JR.

  SAGAPONACK, NEW YORK

  Acknowledgements and Sources

  THIS Afterword has been designed to serve as an overview, told largely from the novelist’s point of view, of how The Ides of March came to be written, its reception on publication, and a brief history of the book down through the years.

  NARRATIVE

  Unless noted otherwise, quotations from Wilder’s correspondence are taken from records in the Wilder Family Archives, located in The Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) on deposit at The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale and used with permission of the Wilder Family LLC. Wilder’s letter to Sir Edward Howard Marsh is found in the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature in the New York Public Library; his correspondence with Lady Sibyl Colefax in the Thornton Wilder Collection, Fales Manuscripts, Fales Library, New York University; his correspondence with Brooks Atkinson in the Billy Rose Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The assistance of these institutions is gratefully acknowledged. Amos Niven Wilder recounts the story of his father’s editorial “The Passing of Latin” in Thornton Wilder and His Public (Fortress Press, 1980) p. 54; Paul Horgan’s encounter with Wilder in July 1942 in Miami Beach is taken from his reminiscence “Captain Wilder, T.N.” published in The American Scholar (Vol. 59. No. 4, Autumn 1990) p. 572; Penelope Niven’s summary of Wilder’s WW II experience is found in Thornton Wilder: A Biography (HarperCollins, 2012), p. 556. The author picture was used in the original 1948 edition of the novel and reproduced with permission of the Wilder Family LLC. Thanks are extended to Jean McClure Mudge, author of The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America (Praeger, 2002) for her valuable portrait of this patriot. The Envoi quotation is taken from Thornton Niven Wilder: The Memorial Service (Yale University Printing Service, 1977, p. 15). READINGS. “The World’s Best” (New York: Dial Press, 1950), pp. 104—110, is reprinted with the permission of Whitney Burnett; “Pearl S. Buck’s quotation from her “Presentation to Thornton Wilder of the Gold Medal for Fiction” and “Acceptance by Thornton Wilder” are taken from the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Second Series, Number Three, (New York, 1953) pps. 20—25), reprinted with permission of the Academy.

  Bibliographical Note

  When HarperCollins first published The Ides of March with back matter in 2003, a definitive biography and formal treatment of Wilder’s letters remained to be written or collected. Both works exist today, both drawing on significant records never before available to researchers. It is most useful to refer today’s readers wishing to learn more about Thornton Wilder’s life, work, and family to the Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer edited The Selecte
d Letters of Thornton Wilder (HarperCollins, 2008), and Penelope Niven’s Thornton Wilder: A Biography (HarperCollins, 2012), as well as the resources for general reader and specialist alike found on The Thornton Wilder Family website (www.thorntonwilder.com) and the Thornton Wilder Society website (www.thorntonwildersociety.org.)

  THORNTON WILDER, THE CLASSICS, AND THE IDES OF MARCH

  Wilder’s “Fantasia” on Caesar’s last days is one example—albeit a significant example—of uses Wilder made of the classical record throughout his fiction and drama. Those wishing to learn more about this aspect of Wilder’s artistry are referred to the aforementioned websites. The Ides entry on thorntonwilder.com includes a short list of works focusing specifically on The Ides of March.

  WITH THANKS

  No editor works alone. I express gratitude to Barbara Hogen-son, Rosey Strub, and Jim Knable on the Wilder side, and Jennifer Civiletto, Thornton Wilder’s committed and gifted editor at HarperCollins, for invaluable editorial assistance. Stephen Rojcewicz Ph.D., a classicist and Wilder specialist, has provided invaluable help with bibliography. If there are errors in the Afterword, I take responsibility for them and welcome corrections. A final and special bow goes to Jeremy McCarter, writer and producer, for contributing an Introduction to a fantasia by a writer he cares about deeply.

  About the Author

  In his quiet way, THORNTON NIVEN WILDER was a revolutionary writer who experimented boldly with literary forms and themes, from the beginning to the end of his long career. “Every novel is different from the others,” he wrote when he was seventy-five. “The theater (ditto). . . . The thing I’m writing now is again totally unlike anything that preceded it.” Wilder’s richly diverse settings, characers, and themes are at once specific and global. Deeply immersed in classical as well as contemporary literature, he often fused the traditional and the modern in his novels and plays, all the while exploring the cosmic in the commonplace. In a January 12, 1953, cover story, Time took note of Wilder’s unique “planetary mind”—his ability to write from a vision that was at once American and universal.