Thornton Wilder
Authors: Penelope Niven
THORNTON WILDER
A Life
PENELOPE NIVEN
WITH A FOREWORD BY EDWARD ALBEE
To Jennifer, my daughter,
who shares the journey and lights the way
Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.
âTHORNTON WILDER,
“On Reading the Great Letter Writers”
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“How does one live?” he asked the bright sky. “What does one do first?”
âTHORNTON WILDER,
The Woman of Andros
CONTENTS
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Preface: “The History of a Writer”
10. “Flowering into Literature”
14. “All My Faults and Virtues”
19. “The Finest Bridge in All Peru”
20. Preparation and Circumstance
28. “Seeing, Knowing and Telling”
32. “Post-war Adjustment Exercise”
33. Searching for the Right Way
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W
henever I'm in a theater group and the discussion turns to the essential American playwrightsâthe ones whose accomplishments define our cultureâI'm always startled and confused that Thornton Wilder's name comes to the fore so infrequently.
Eugene O'Neill is there, of course, in spite of his frequent tin ear.
Long Day's Journey into Night
is a great play, perhaps the only one of his in which everything comes together fullyâthe mind and the earâin a way the other best ones only occasionally approach.
Tennessee Williams is there, naturally, for the poetry of his language, the intensity of his dramatic structure, and the three-dimensionality of his characterizations.
Arthur Miller is included as well, as much as anything for the sociological and political importance of his dramatic concerns.
But why is Thornton Wilder so infrequently placed up there where he belongs?
If I were asked to name what I consider to be the finest serious American play, I would immediately say
Our Town
ânot for its giant Americanness but because it is a superbly written, gloriously observed, tough, and breathtaking statement of what it is to be alive, the wonder and hopeless loss of the space between birth and the grave.
While I prefer
The Skin of Our Teeth
âanother first-rate playâto most of Wilder's novels, he was no slouch there either.
This new biography of Wilder, comprehensive and wisely fashioned, gives us sufficient view of his methods, his public and private life, and the reaches of his mind to begin to understand with what intellectual and creative sourcings he was able to write so persuasively about things that greatly matter.
This book is a splendid and long-needed work.
A side note: I was a twenty-two-year-old very mediocre poet when I met Thornton Wilder at the MacDowell Colony. I forced my poetry on him. He read it and took me to a small lake where he plied me with bourbon and told me to stop writing poetry, that it was no good. He suggested perhaps I start writing plays instead.
I wonder if he knew that one day I'd write forewords as well.
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Edward Albee
New York City, 2011
The history of a writer is his search for his own subject, his myth-theme, hidden from him, but prepared for him in every hour of his life, his
Gulliver's Travels,
his
Robinson Crusoe.
âTHORNTON WILDER,
“James Joyce, 1882â1941”
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W
hen he was in his seventies, Thornton Niven Wilder wrote a story about an American teenager running alone through the countryside near the school in Chefoo, China, where he had been sent to live and study. The boy had sought special permission to run long distances by himself outside the China Inland Mission School boundaries, near the Bohai Sea. Awkward at the competitive team sports the other boys enjoyed, he was an outsider, a misfit in a crowd. He was most at home in books and his imagination, and these solitary runs freed him to think and to daydream.
This unfinished, unpublished self-portrait was a fusion of memory and imagination, fiction and fact. “Already at that age I had the notion I would be a writer,” Wilder reflected many years later, after he had written books and plays that resonated for countless people in the United States and around the world.
1
His history as a writer spans three-quarters of the twentieth century, and he left behind a tantalizing trail of evidenceâthousands of letters, journal entries, manuscript drafts, and documents that reveal his evolution as a person and an artist. “Art is confession; art is the secret told . . . ,” he said when he was thirty-one and suddenly famous around the world as a novelist. “But art is not only the desire to tell one's secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.”
2
It is challenging enough for a biographer to attempt to do justice to the visible, exterior lifeâbut where to turn for revelation of the “whole drama of the inner life”?
Because of the magnitude of his surviving papersâfrom childhood until his death in 1975âwe can witness close-up Wilder's search for his own subject, his own myth-theme, his own true self. He left a richly detailed record of his lifelong education, much of it self-propelled. He left revealing portraits of his pivotal friendships and of his extraordinary family. This biography concentrates on his history as a writer and the drama of his inner life, but it is also a family saga, starring Thornton Wilder, with strong supporting roles played by his father, mother, and siblings.
He was a multifaceted manâson, brother, student, teacher, scholar, novelist, playwright, actor, musician, soldier, man of letters, international public figure. He was also enigmatic, intensely private. A twinless twin, he was schooled in solitude, accustomed from boyhood to living in self-doubt and shadows. He belonged to a close-knit, complicated familyâtwo brilliant parents, five gifted children, and, for him, the specter of the twin brother lost at birth. From the year when he was nine until he was twenty-two, his family lived scattered around the globe, bound together by letters. Providentially most of those letters were saved after making the rounds from one parent or child on one continent to another parent or child oceans away.
The compelling evidence of Wilder's life, public and private, is contained in thousands of his papers housed in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as well as in countless other papers and documents released or discovered in the years since his death. His sister Isabel, the keeper of the flame, died in 1995 at the age of ninety-five. Until the end of her life she was working on her own book about her brother and their family, and so had withheld crucial papers, records, and photographsâenough to fill nearly ninety banker's boxes. After her death, these resources went to the Beinecke Library as well. This uncataloged trove includes artifacts that ignite the imaginationâthe mother's fading album of memories and dreams, kept when she was a teenager; the father's worn brown leather diaries written in China; the family's passports stamped with ports of call around the world; and their intimate letters and papers.
When Tappan Wilder became the manager of his uncle's literary estate, he opened additional resources to Wilder scholars and students, and on his watch many more papers have been discovered, released, and collected. There are papers and documents enough to keep a throng of biographers, scholars, and critics busy for at least the next few decades. This biography, the first to emerge from that vast archive, narrates Wilder's life, private and public, and provides the history and context of his creative work, published and unpublished. This is
not
, however, a volume of literary criticism. The exhaustive documentation in the endnotes is a guide for readers, and may also be a compass for future students, scholars, and critics.
Just as Wilder took liberties with form and style in drama and fiction, he played with the mechanics of writing, especially punctuation. His letters and manuscripts were often animated with bold underscores in ink or colored pencil; with paragraph symbols; and with the equal signâmore emphatic, he thought, than the ordinary colon. But because Wilder the writer was far more attentive to substance than to mechanics, and because he could be cavalier about spelling and punctuation, occasional silent corrections have been made. Otherwise, you will encounter Wilder's words on the page exctly as he put them there. Thanks to the profusion of his letters and journals, and the generosity of his literary executor, much of Wilder's story is told here in his own voice.
In addition to the voluminous record of his later lifeâthe celebrity yearsâextraordinary records document the first four decades of Wilder's life and work, the years that are the foundation for all that follows. I have examined those pivotal years with a virtual microscope. I have put a telescope to the nearly four decades that come afterward, a period of flourishing art and life illuminated by the seminal years.
Among Wilder's unpublished papers are handwritten reflections on biography, and I have taken them to heart. He wrote, “To BIOGRAPHIZE = means TO WRITE A LIFE = . . . TO BIOGRAPHIZE IN THE HIGHEST SENSE OF THE WORD: TO REVIVIFY. . . .” He went on to say,
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The most intimate feeling of living
is the perpetual alternation
of hope and dejection
of Plans and Defeat
of Aspiration and Rebuff.
3
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How to revivify such a life? How to understand the “hope and dejection,” the “Aspiration and Rebuff”? Much of the drama took place in Wilder's mind and spiritâ“the inward life,” he called it. Fortunately he left deeply private revelations of that life in his journals, letters, and manuscripts. Other facets of his life are embedded in his published novels and plays. All told, he left behind countless “signposts, footprints, clues” that can lead us deep within his extraordinary mind and spirit.
4
He was a refined gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for and about “Everybody”âa fact his audiences around the globe have embraced. Within the circumference of his creative work there stands the person, his private, inward self, sometimes hidden and sometimes revealed in his art and in his papers.
Thornton Wilder became a man, like the boy in China, running alone, transcending the boundaries, searching for his Gulliver, for his Robinson Crusoe, for himself.