The Skin of Our Teeth

by Thornton Wilder

  The “Abel—my son—my son—Abel”—I beg you to go back to my original stage direction—she rises, sits again, rises . . . give the actors time to extract the maximum legitimate effect from these things.

  Henry comes down the stairs with chairs or whatever it is and causes distraction at a vital moment.

  Freddie does both his moment of despair in the chair and his Build up the Fire superbly, but it would be still stronger if the momentum about him had not been so rat-tat-tat uniform. Urge him to prepare the moments with even longer pauses, if he likes.

  As Arthur Hopkins [a producer and director who admired the play and knew Wilder] said at the end of the First Act—“It’s as though they had no faith in the play”—galloping as though the most they could hope for was the collection of a few laughs.

  Controversy: The Playwright Finally Speaks

  When Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson leveled their charges, Wilder was an acknowledged authority on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and his expertise in deciphering it was widely known in literary circles. Here in its entirety is the letter he wrote but did not send to the editor of The Saturday Review of Literature at the time of the first article, believing his rebuttal would only lead to further accusations and debate. The letter was found in Wilder’s legal files and first published in 1999.

  To the Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.

  Dear Sir:

  Many thanks for your telephone call and your request that I comment upon the article in the Review pointing out some real and some imagined resemblances between my play, The Skin of Our Teeth, and James Joyce’s novel, Finnegans Wake.

  At the time I was absorbed in deciphering Joyce’s novel the idea came to me that one aspect of it might be expressed in drama: the method of representing mankind’s long history through superimposing different epochs of time simultaneously. I even made sketches employing Joyce’s characters and locale, but soon abandoned the project. The slight element of plot in the novel is so dimly glimpsed amid the distortions of nightmare and the polyglot distortions of language that any possibility of dramatization is out of the question. The notion of a play about mankind and the family viewed through several simultaneous layers of time, however, persisted and began to surround itself with many inventions of my own. If one subject is man and the family considered historically, the element of myth inevitably presents itself. It is not necessary to go to Joyce’s novel to find the motive of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Lilith and Noah.

  From Joyce, however, I received the idea of presenting ancient man as an ever present double to modern man. The four fundamental aspects of Finnegans Wake were not to my purpose and are not present in my play. Joyce’s novel is primarily a study of Original Sin and the role it plays in the life of the conscience. Its recurrent motto is St. Augustine’s “O felix culpa!” Nor could I use its secondary subject, the illustration of Vico’s theory of the cyclic seasonal repetitions of human culture. Nor could I find any place for its primary literary intention, the extraordinary means Joyce found for representing the thoughts of the mind while asleep, the famous “night-language.” Nor could I employ his secondary literary intention, the technical tours-de-force whereby through puns and slips of the tongue he was able to represent several layers of mental activity going on at the same time and often contradictory to one another. If I had been able to transfer to the stage several or any one of these four basic aspects of the book, wherein its greatness lies, I would have done it and would have gladly published the obligation at every step of the way.

  The germ of my play, once started, began to collect about it many aspects which had nothing to do with Joyce. It fixed its thoughts on the War and the situation of the eternal family under successive catastrophes. It grouped to find a way to express dramatically the thought that the great “unread” classics furnish daily support and stimulation even to people who do not read them. But principally the play moved into its own independent existence through its insistence on being theatre, and theatre to such an extent that content was continually in danger of being overwhelmed by sheer theatric contrivances. I can think of no novel in all literature that is farther removed from theatre than Finnegans Wake.

  The writers of the article in the Review list a long series of resemblances. Only those who have pored over the novel can realize how patiently the authors must have searched through that amorphous dream texture to assemble them and how surprising it is to find them confronting the concrete theatrical material they are supposed to parallel. Maggie Earwicker’s letter buried in the rubbish heap behind her house becomes the letter of proud and indignant self-justification that Maggie Antrobus throws into the sea over the heads of the audience? Well, all the Margarets in the world can be presumed to have written letters that were important to them. In the most wonderful chapter in the novel, Anna Livia Plurabelle, river and woman, looks for a match to search for some peat to warm her husband’s supper. The authors of the article quote this passage and tell your readers that it resembles Mrs. Antrobus and Sabina asking for fuel to warm the household against the approaching glacier. By such devices your authors could derive “Junior Miss” from Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The ant-like industry of pedants, collecting isolated fragments, has mistaken the nature of literary influence since the first critics arose to regard books as a branch of merchandise instead of as expressions of energy.

  Should a group of men of letters represent to me that the dependence of my play on Joyce’s novel is so close as to justify adding a note of acknowledgment to the theatre program, I would willingly accede to their opinion. I have placed such a note twice before—once in The Woman of Andros, though Terence’s riotous farce had been changed into a reflective tragedy, and once in The Merchant of Yonkers, though its principal personage did not appear in the Austrian prototype at all. The first of the credentials of my advisers in this matter, however, would be that they had decoded all six hundred pages of Joyce’s crowded and mighty novel and realized how great were its differences from my three act comedy.

  Sincerely yours,

  Thornton Wilder

  Washington, D.C.

  December 17, 1942

  More on Joyce

  Why did Wilder admire Joyce and Finnegans Wake so deeply? These excerpts from a talk given at a meeting of the James Joyce Society in New York on February 2, 1954, offer clues. His subject was “Joyce and the Modern Novel.”

  First we would seek for our place in myths. Myths are the dreaming soul of the race, telling its story. Now, the dreaming soul of the race has told its story for centuries and centuries and centuries, and there have been billions of stories. They’re still telling them. Every novel for sale in a railroad station is the dreaming soul of the human race telling its story. But the myths are the survival of the fittest of the billions of stories most of which have been forgotten. No chance survival there. The retelling of them on every hand occurs because they whisper a validation—they isolate and confer a significance—Prometheus, Cassandra, Oedipus, Don Quixote, Faust.

  Joyce not only drew on myth; he used history as though it were myth. He made a hero who was Everyman, and to describe him to us he played on the vast repertory of myth and history as upon a clavier. . . .

  The hero of Finnegans Wake is the most “generalized” character in all literature, but he is also completely a unique and individualized person. We overhear and oversee him in bed above his tavern at the edge of Dublin. His conscience is trying him for some obscure misdemeanors committed—or perhaps only partially envisaged—during the day. He is in disgrace. He identifies himself with Lucifer fallen from heaven, Adam ejected from Paradise, Napoleon defeated at Waterloo, Finnegan of the old ballot laid out for his wake. It is the Book of Falls, and as the night advances he plunges deeper and relives all the crimes of which man is capable; he stands trial (the very constellations of the night sky are sitting in judgment). He submits his defense and extenuation. Finally dawn arrives; the sun climbs through the transom of the Earwickers�
�� bedroom. The last chapter is a wonderful sunburst of Handelian rhetoric; all the resurrection myths of the world are recalled along with Pears’ soap advertisements and the passing trains and the milkman. The phoenix is reborn; Everyman re-awakes.

  Wilder on Drama More Generally

  Wilder completed the most extended statement of his views on the nature of drama, “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” just as he began writing The Skin of Our Teeth. (The statement was first published in 1941.) These two excerpts focus on “acting” and “pretense” in drama, for which Skin is a laboratory specimen.

  [Fundamental Conditions]

  Four fundamental conditions of the drama separate it from the other arts. Each of these conditions has its advantages and disadvantages, each requires a particular aptitude from the dramatist, and from each there are a number of instructive consequences to be derived. These conditions are:

  I. The theater is an art which reposes upon the work of many collaborators;

  II. It is addressed to the group-mind;

  III. It is based upon a pretense and its very nature calls out a multiplication of pretenses;

  IV. Its action takes place in a perpetual present time. . .

  [The Actor As the Dramatist’s Chief Collaborator]

  The actor’s gift is a combination of three separate faculties or endowments. Their presence to a high degree in any one person is extremely rare, although the ambition to possess them is common. Those who rise to the height of the profession represent a selection and a struggle for survival in one of the most difficult and cruel of the artistic activities. The three endowments that compose the gift are observation, imagination, and physical coordination:

  1. An observant and analyzing eye for all modes of behavior about us, for dress and manner, and for the signs of thought and emotion in oneself and in others.

  2. The strength of imagination and memory whereby the actor may, at the indication in the author’s text, explore his store of observations and represent the details of appearance and the intensity of the emotions—joy, fear, surprise, grief, love, and hatred—and through imagination extend them to intenser degrees and to differing characterizations.

  3. A physical coordination whereby the force of these inner realizations may be communicated to voice, face, and body.

  An actor must know the appearances and the mental states; he must apply his knowledge to the rôle; and he must physically express his knowledge. Moreover, his concentration must be so great that he can effect this representation under conditions of peculiar difficulty—in abrupt transition from the non-imaginative conditions behind the stage; and in the presence of fellow actors who may be momentarily destroying the reality of the action.

  A dramatist prepares the characterization of his personages in such a way that it will take advantage of the actor’s gift.

  Characterization in a novel is presented by the author’s dogmatic assertion that the personage was such, and by an analysis of the personage with generally an account of his or her past. Since in the drama this is replaced by the actual presence of the personage before us and since there is no occasion for the intervening all-knowing author to instruct us as to his or her inner nature, a far greater share is given in a play to (1) highly characteristic utterances and (2) concrete occasions in which the character defines itself under action and (3) a conscious preparation of the text whereby the actor may build upon the suggestions in the rôle according to his own abilities.

  Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in—not entirely blank, for a number of indications of individuality are already there, but to a far less definite and absolute degree than in the novel.

  The dramatist’s principal interest being the movement of the story, he is willing to resign the more detailed aspects of characterization to the actor and is often rewarded beyond his expectation.

  The sleepwalking scene from Macbeth is a highly compressed selection of words whereby despair and remorse rise to the surface of indirect confession. It is to be assumed that had Shakespeare lived to see what the genius of Sarah Siddons could pour into the scene from that combination of observation, self-knowledge, imagination, and representational skill, even he might have exclaimed, “I never knew I wrote so well!”

  [The Theater As Pretense]

  It lives by conventions: a convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.

  Illustrations: Consider at the first performance of the Medea, the passage where Medea meditates the murder of her children. An anecdote from antiquity tells us that the audience was so moved by this passage that considerable disturbance took place.

  The following conventions were involved:

  1. Medea was played by a man.

  2. He wore a large mask on his face. In the lip of the mask was an acoustical device for projecting the voice. On his feet he wore shoes with soles and heels half a foot high.

  3. His costume was so designed that it conveyed to the audience, by convention: woman of royal birth and Oriental origin.

  4. The passage was in metric speech. All poetry is an “agreed-upon falsehood” in regard to speech.

  5. The lines were sung in a kind of recitative. All opera involves this “permitted lie” in regard to speech.

  Modern taste would say that the passage would convey much greater pathos if a woman “like Media” had delivered it—with an uncovered face that exhibited all the emotions she was undergoing. For the Greeks, however, there was no pretense that Medea was on the stage. The mask, the costume, the mode of declamation were a series of signs which the spectator interpreted and reassembled in his own mind. Medea was being re-created within the imagination of each of the spectators.

  The history of the theater shows us that in its greatest ages the stage employed the greatest number of conventions. The stage is fundamental pretense and it thrives on the acceptance of that fact and in the multiplication of additional pretenses. When it tries to assert that the personages in the action “really are,” really inhabit such-and-such rooms, really suffer such-and-such emotions, it loses rather than gains credibility. The modern world is inclined to laugh condescendingly at the fact that in the plays of Racine and Corneille the gods and heroes of antiquity were dressed like the courtiers under Louis XIV; that in the Elizabethan Age scenery was replaced by placards notifying the audience of the location; and that a whip in the hand and a jogging motion of the body indicated that a man was on horseback in the Chinese theater; these devices did not spring from naïveté, however, but from the vitality of the public imagination in those days and from an instinctive feeling as to where the essential and where the inessential lay in drama.

  The convention has two functions:

  1. It provokes the collaborative activity of the spectator’s imagination; and

  2. It raises the action from the specific to the general.

  This second aspect is of even greater importance than the first.

  If Juliet is represented as a girl “very like Juliet”—it was not merely a deference to contemporary prejudices that assigned this rôle to a boy in the Elizabethan Age—moving about in a “real” house with marble staircases, rugs, lamps, and furniture, the impression is irresistibly conveyed that these events happened to this one girl, in one place, at one moment in time. When the play is staged as Shakespeare intended it, the bareness of the stage releases the events from the particular and the experience of Juliet partakes of that of all girls in love, in every time, place, and language.

  The stage continually strains to tell this generalized truth and it is the element of pretense that reinforces it. Out of the lie, the pretense, of the theater proceeds a truth more compelling than the novel can attain, for the novel by its own laws is constrained to tell of an action that “once happened”—“once upon a time.”

  The Skin of Our Teeth on Broadway (1942–1943)

  Skin’s original Playbill. Left to right: Sabina (Tallulah Bankhead), Mrs. An
trobus (Florence Eldridge), Mr. Antrobus (Fredric March), Gladys (Frances Heflin), George (Montgomery Clift).

  PLAYBILL.® All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  At the opening of Act I, George Antrobus arrives home in Excelsior, New Jersey, carrying his latest discovery, the wheel. He is greeted by his adoring daughter, Gladys, and the lovable dinosaur and mammoth.

  In Act II, the newly crowned Miss Atlantic City moves in on the recently elected president of the Ancient and Honorable Order of Mammals, Subdivision Humans.

  At the end of Act II, George Antrobus leads his family to the ark and to safety. Behind him: Gladys, Henry, Mrs. Antrobus, and Sabina, with the Fortune Teller (Florence Reed) pointing and proclaiming, “They’re safe. George Antrobus! Think it over! A new world to make—think it over!”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Sabina (former camp follower) says to Henry (the former enemy) in Act III.

  “In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the earth. . . .” Mr. Tremayne (Ralph Kellard), playing twelve o’clock, passes behind the Antrobuses, who are spending a quiet evening at home at the end of the play . . . and starting over once more.

  Acknowledgments

  The Afterword of this volume is constructed in large part from Thornton Wilder’s words in unpublished letters, journals, 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 my thanks for helping me to accomplish this task, for which, of course, I bear full responsibility. Space permits me to extend thanks to only a few: Hugh Van Dusen, David Semanki, Barbara Whitepine, and Celeste Fellows. Four individuals deserve a special salute, and I am honored to give it: Barbara Hogenson, Paula Vogel, J. D. McClatchy, and Penelope Niven.