Thornton Wilder (22 page)

Throughout September and October, Amos would be hospitalized in various convalescent camps and field hospitals, depressed, wondering if he would ever regain his strength, thinking himself “on the point of insanity once or twice.”
⁵²
One September day he was allowed to get out on a baseball field at a convalescent camp, and after the exercise he felt more nearly himself than he had for two years. In mid-October he was declared well enough to make the seven-hundred-mile journey back to join his battery—a trip made miserable by freezing rain, cold victuals, and cramped, crowded conditions (the men in Amos's compartment would awaken “every hour” with foreheads “frozen from the window pane, or neck warped, or a leg paralyzed”).
⁵³
By October 20, 1918, Amos was back on the Western Front.

 

THORNTON WAS
haunted by the tragic story of another hero—French flying ace Georges Guynemer, who died on September 11, 1917, at the age of twenty-three. Just as Thornton vividly imagined his own death in the trenches, he could graphically envision Guynemer's fatal plunge to earth in the
Vieux Charles,
his feisty SPAD, one of the experimental airplanes he had used as deadly weapons in fifty-three heroic sorties against the enemy. Guynemer was immortalized in the Panthéon in Paris.
⁵⁴
On lined sheets of notebook paper, Thornton wrote a three-character playlet as his own tribute to the young French hero. “The scene is laid upon a medal, struck in honor of the aviator,” the playlet begins, offering one of Thornton's most original settings. The characters: the Victory, the Horseman, and the Man.
⁵⁵

Sometime in the summer or fall of 1918 Thornton wrote a second playlet on the same subject, entitled
In Praise of Guynemer
, this time with only two characters—Senex and Juvenis, the classical old man and young man. Juvenis describes his initial idea for a tribute to Guynemer—an idea that echoes Thornton's first draft of the playlet—but, Juvenis explains, “the idea suddenly lost all its color.” Senex then gives the young man directions about how to write his tribute: Above all, he must feel deeply about his subject. Senex predicts that “in after time Guynemer shall rise, like Hector undoubtable, from a mythic war.”
⁵⁶
This playlet was published in the December 1918 issue of the
Lit,
and Thornton's classmates liked the piece well enough to include an excerpt as one of five reprints from the
Lit
in the
History of the Class of Nineteen Hundred Twenty
.
⁵⁷

 

DR. WILDER
and his wife carried a burden of worries about their sons—brave Amos suffering in France, inept Thornton embarking on military service, full of his strong “writing passion” and writing plays that were “certainly on a high plane.”
⁵⁸
Thornton had also reviewed a play he saw in Washington and sold the article to the
Boston Transcript
. His father found it “unquestionably full of promise” with its “sure touch in the use of words and formations.” Thornton was “certainly a writer,” Dr. Wilder told Amos. “His judgments are penetrating and close; when one recalls that he is but 21 and has been his own teacher, I am impressed.”
⁵⁹

Even so, like the father Polonius to his son, Laertes, in Shakespeare's
Hamlet,
Father Wilder lavished advice on Thornton, often in the form of platitudes. He had done so all Thornton's life; he saw no need to desist just because his son was twenty-one, a Yale student, a budding writer, and now a military man. “Live economically as becomes your circumstances, otherwise your dignity will suffer, you will be unfitted to live modestly later, as you must; and you will be worried,” Dr. Wilder admonished Thornton that summer. “Wars, Washington experiences come and go; but character and obligation to God abide.”
⁶⁰
And in another letter: “I am praying that the decadence in high-minded youth I know so well may not be yours. You can't keep your enthusiasms and fine, irresistible fun and confidence in the goodness of life if you drag your mind and soul thro' the sloughs of comic opera and the like.”
⁶¹
And still another: “Let us have a true man, a patriot, a Christian, a gentleman, Thornton dear, and all else shall be added.”
⁶²

Dr. Wilder, the son of a dentist, knew that dental problems could be a detriment to good physical health. He warned Thornton to take good care of his teeth—apparently in the wake of reports about trench mouth, a common and painful affliction for military personnel in the trenches during World War I, deprived of even basic sanitary conditions.
⁶³
Brush your teeth, Dr. Wilder cautioned his son, even though he was laboring far from the trenches. “Public work is barred those whose dentality is a poor, stuffed, faulty thing. Such are put on other work, perhaps ushering or moving chairs. Poor Amos is far from a dentist; his teeth and those of millions of men must go as a sacrifice.”
⁶⁴

In the midst of these admonitions, Dr. Wilder also praised Thornton's
Centaur,
and asked if he could submit his son's work to the
Atlantic.
No, Thornton replied. He was “very happy” to have his father's words, but he doubted the magazine would be interested in such “an extravaganza-fantasia.” But his father's appreciation had “stirred” him, Thornton said, and “I cannot write a line in the two bigger plays I am at work on without asking myself whether you would be disappointed by it.”
⁶⁵

 

PVT. T. N. WILDER
was hard at work as an office orderly at historic Fort Adams, Rhode Island, in September 1918. His uniform didn't fit, and he was afraid he had the flu, but he enjoyed his morning and evening walks by the bay to and from his office. “Last evening I was there when the sudden noisiness and swishiness came that denotes the turn of the tide,” he wrote to his mother. “I hadn't heard that since Chefoo. Knives of joy went through me.”
⁶⁶

His duties over for the day, Thornton had time to write, and he was engrossed in a “big flaming character study” based on the legend of the pagan heroine Hypatia. He was working on an increasingly larger “stage,” broadly expanding his vision of the dramas he could create. In fact, he confided to his mother, he had written “a magnificent fierce love-scene,” and was “almost frightened at the size” of his “canvas” and the explosive nature of his “
dramatis personae
.” If he could only transfer his vision to paper, it would be “the most brilliant play” on his list.
⁶⁷
The play would “ferment” in his mind “like sodium in water—explosions,” but if he ever finished it, no copy survived.
⁶⁸

 

EVERYWHERE THAT
autumn there were rumors of peace. On November 11, 1918, at eleven o'clock in the morning, U.S. time, the armistice was signed to mark the beginning of the end of World War I. In France, Amos spent the days following the armistice trying to sort out fact and rumor, and translating the French communications that came into the radio room at Beaumont, on the Meuse above Verdun. Thornton, back at his desk at Fort Adams, was promoted to corporal on November 12. He struggled with stacks of paperwork and criticized the circus atmosphere in the United States following the armistice news, when France was left “mortally weakened” and England “dreadfully awakened.”
⁶⁹

Amos longed for home, and Thornton longed for normalcy. The Wilder boys were not going home anytime soon, however, for there was army work remaining to be done, and then the long, unpredictable mustering-out process. Thornton would not get home for Christmas, and he hoped Santa Claus would send him something to wear on his head because, he said, “I'm getting abjectly Bald. Not a day goes by without some colleague suddenly noticing and exclaiming, ‘You're losing hair man!' ”
⁷⁰

Father Wilder was tempted to try to pull strings to get his boys home, but Thornton warned him: “Nothing on earth can get me out of the Army that doesn't originate in this very building so please don't try.”
⁷¹
He believed he would be out in January for sure, so that he could return to Yale to begin the new term. He was not enthusiastic about resuming his college work, however. His father thought he must get his college degree, but Thornton did not believe there was anything more for him at Yale. “Last year he slurred the work and his credits are low,” Dr. Wilder worried in a letter to Amos. There had been a possibility that Thornton would flunk out of Yale, but he had managed to pass his courses. His father pointed out that “the college is good to heroes” and if Thornton could return to Yale in January, he might be admitted to the junior class.
⁷²
As for Amos, he would have his father's support, financially and otherwise, if he wanted to stay in Europe to study for a year.

Dr. Wilder wrote to ask for Amos's help with Thornton:

 

You surely will not encourage any talk of quitting study now, tho you may feel that you need not get into the dispute very deeply. Mother admires his
genius
so much that she thinks Yale has nothing further for him, etc. If he does stop now it means a cheap room in N. Y. and hanging about newspaper offices with an occasional interview with a celebrity etc. However, I am not pressing him—“merely suggesting”; and it will work out all right
.
⁷³

 

FOR THORNTON,
dreading the return to Yale and longing for the freedom to write, there was another interlude of hero worship. “Forgive this long silence,” began a letter he received in December 1918. It came from another handsome young actor who had caught Thornton's interest and imagination. He was Glenn Hunter, age twenty-four, and, like Thornton in 1918, struggling to find his way in the theater. Born in New York City in 1894, three years before Thornton, Hunter was beginning to appear regularly in productions mounted by successful producers Marcus Klaw and Abraham Lincoln Erlanger, in casts headed by the leading actors Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, George Arliss, and Helen Hayes, among others. The two men apparently met in Rhode Island during the war. By 1922 Hunter was the star of a Broadway hit,
Merton of the Movies,
and the film that followed it in 1924.
⁷⁴
But in 1918 Glenn Hunter and Thornton Wilder were kindred spirits, dreaming of big careers in the theater, Glenn as an actor and Thornton as a playwright. They also dreamed about working on projects together. Glenn was reading Thornton's playlets as well as synopses of plays he planned to write, and predicted that Thornton would have a great career as a playwright.
⁷⁵
He hoped Thornton would write a big play just for him, and promised he would “work like hell” to be ready for such a role.
⁷⁶

Thornton's letters to Glenn Hunter have not been located, but the handful of Hunter's surviving letters to Thornton hint of infatuation, if not intimacy. Hunter wrote that December that he hoped their relationship could grow through letters.
⁷⁷
There was an invitation to Thornton to come and live in New York, to rent rooms on the floor of his apartment building so that they could be together.
⁷⁸
On December 26 Hunter wrote to Thornton that he wished for a long talk so that he could share his dreams and hopes. He told Thornton he had loved being with him “that night,” more than he could know.
⁷⁹

For years there would be speculation about Thornton Wilder's sexuality and his sex life, but he left behind little evidence of that very private matter. There has surfaced no other record of the nature of his relationship with Glenn Hunter, or what it meant to Thornton, except for these saved December letters, printed in Glenn Hunter's distinctive holograph, full of dreams and ambiguity.

 

CPL. THORNTON WILDER
was discharged from the Coast artillery on December 31, 1918. Cpl. Amos Wilder received his discharge orders on June 12, 1919. On June 14, 1919, in the town of Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven, citizens gathered to welcome 150 returning soldiers, all hometown men. The homecoming parade—“the most spectacular parade ever held in Hamden”—was followed by speeches and songs, and a spirited address by Dr. Amos P. Wilder.
⁸⁰
There was a banquet that evening, followed by a grand march and dancing. For the Wilder family, the Great War, finally, was over.

12

“HIS OWN TUNE”

Thornton is light-hearted; I am pleased. Of course he studies not at all; yet is bright enough to “get by” as do many less bright. . . . On him too is the Puritan mark less affirmative than in you and me but let each singer choose his own tune.

—AMOS PARKER WILDER TO AMOS NIVEN WILDER,

April 25, 1919

 

Connecticut and Italy (1919–1921)

M
ilitary service leads to a man's asking questions of himself,” Thornton wrote in an unpublished article titled “Student-Life at Yale Since the War”—a personal assessment of the unprecedented postwar challenges facing his generation, as well as a statement of his own discontent. He had reluctantly returned to Yale for his junior year after his discharge from military service. Yale men came back from the war “not only with a sheaf of particular problems,” Thornton wrote, “but with the determination of acquiring in general, something of the power of clear thinking and the wide reading that would of [
sic
] helped them in the days they needed it most.” He noted that while Yale seemed to be returning to the normalcy of prewar days, “Post-War Curriculum must take into account” that students returning from wartime service in the spring semester of 1919 were “restless” and “curious” about “knowledge in a very real, and in almost a new sense.”
¹

His own restless prewar desire to go to New York to write, or to travel in Europe, had intensified, but his father objected to the first plan and was unable to implement the second, even though he was sympathetic. Amos, Isabel, and Janet had spent long periods of time in Europe but Thornton and Charlotte had yet to cross the Atlantic. For the time being Thornton resumed his classes at Yale. Meanwhile Charlotte was finishing her last semester at Mount Holyoke, where she would receive her B.A. in June 1919, a year ahead of her brothers at Yale.

She had been lobbying for more than a year to go to Europe. “Father does not talk much of your going to Italy,” Thornton wrote her. “He lives in terror of Mother's dissuading you. Mother (who is averse to the trip as you know) has suddenly burst into a brilliant acquaintance with the distressing economic condition of lower Europe; she can tell you the national debt down to a
lira
, and is full of disturbing intimations of panics, revolutions and wars.”
²
Finally, thanks to their aunt Charlotte Niven, now one of the national YWCA secretaries in Italy, plans were made for Charlotte to work for the YWCA.
³
By August 1920 she was in Paris, awaiting her assignment to a YWCA youth hostel in Milan.
⁴

Amos was still in Europe in the spring of 1919, on duty with the Allied Army of Occupation at Bendorf and Coblenz, and then taking courses at the American Army School Detachment at the University of Toulouse.
⁵
After his discharge on June 28, he spent the summer decompressing and attending a Workmen's Educational Institute at Balliol College at Oxford University in England, followed by Oxford's regular summer session. Finally, after three years away, he came home to the family and to Yale, where he and Thornton roomed together in Connecticut Hall throughout the 1919–20 school year, both finishing their senior-year courses.

Thornton had lived in his brother's shadow at the Thacher School and at Oberlin. At Yale he stood out on his own. Reginald Marsh, one of Thornton's friends and classmates, aspired to be an artist, was already moving in that direction while he was at Yale, and would carve out a distinctive career as a painter associated with the Social Realism movement. In 1919 he sketched a solemn portrait of a bespectacled Thornton—pensive eyes, cleft chin, sensuous mouth, dark hair combed slightly forward because he was starting to go bald. Thornton was beginning to be taken quite seriously as a writer. The legendary Yale professor William Lyon Phelps, who had known Thornton since he was a child, noted that he “showed remarkable versatility” as a Yale student. “He composed and played music on the piano, he wrote plays and short stories, he wrote professional dramatic criticisms for the newspapers.”
⁶
However, at least one Yale professor looked askance at some of Thornton's work, observing of one of his proposed
Lit
pieces that he needed to learn grammar and spelling.
⁷

His short story with an Irish mystical theme was passed over for the 1919 John Hubbard Curtis Prize, which went to Stephen Vincent Benét, then a senior. But Thornton was concentrating on drama, and working hard on
The Trumpet Shall Sound,
a full-length play that was published in four successive issues of the
Lit
, beginning in October 1919. His allegorical religious play in four acts, with its interwoven allusions to Plato, Prometheus, and the classics, received the college's Bradford Brinton Award in playwriting. He revised the play in years ahead until he felt it was strong enough to show to prospective producers.
The Trumpet Shall Sound
would eventually see the light of day in an off-Broadway production at the American Laboratory Theatre in New York in 1926, directed by Richard Boleslavsky, the theater's cofounder, with the legendary Russian actress Maria Ouspenskya. Boleslavsky would later try and fail to sell Thornton's play to the movies.

In 1928, in the foreword to
The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays,
the first published collection of his plays, Thornton wrote that most of his early dramas were religious—“but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer's concession to a contemporary standard of good manners.” He hoped “through many mistakes, to discover the spirit that is not unequal to the elevation of the great religious themes, yet which does not fall into a repellent didacticism.”
⁸
He had grown up surrounded by religious didacticism—at Chefoo, at Thacher, at Mount Hermon, at Berea, at Oberlin, and in his father's house, or in his father's shadow during Dr. Wilder's prolonged absences from home. Religious didacticism, however well intentioned, offended the young writer's intellect and his spirit. Thornton wrote in his 1928 foreword, “Didacticism is an attempt at the coercion of another's free mind, even though one knows that in these matters beyond logic, beauty is the only persuasion.”
⁹
At Yale after the war he was wrestling on paper with questions of spirituality and belief, striving for persuasion, not coercion, and most of all, striving for beauty of expression.

 

“AT NEW HAVEN
, I frequently visited classes in which I was not enrolled,” Thornton wrote decades later in an unpublished semiautobiographical fragment. “I was never officially a student at Professor Tinker's Age of Johnson, but I heard all the lectures—many of them twice.” During the first term of his senior year, when Thornton learned that a few very advanced students were being offered a course called The Fragments of the Lost Plays of Aeschylus, he decided to audit it.
¹⁰
Thornton appreciated the fact that “Yale was a vast emporium of lectures many of which were more tempting than those one was under obligation to attend.”
¹¹
Officially he majored in English and Latin, but he took full advantage of the “emporium.”

During Thornton's senior year, Steve Benét, class of 1919, returned to Yale as a graduate student after a brief, unhappy stint as a copywriter in an advertising agency. Thornton and Benét were part of Henry Seidel Canby's advanced English 40 class, Literary Composition—a small seminar with very limited enrollment, and admission based on the submission of examples of the student's literary work. Canby, Yale class of 1899, had earned his Ph.D. at Yale in 1905. He taught at Yale beginning in 1903, and was an assistant editor of the
Yale Review
from 1911 to 1920. By the time Canby taught Wilder and Benét, his book
The Short Story in English,
published in 1909, had become a standard college and university text. Canby came to the English 40 classroom as a well-known teacher and editor on the brink of a national literary career: Beginning in 1920 he would edit the
Literary Review,
the literary supplement of the
New York Post
; and in 1924 he became one of the founders of the
Saturday Review of Literature.

Canby remembered that it was a highlight of his teaching career to work with the class that included Thornton, Steve Benét, Walter Millis, William C. DeVane, who later became dean of Yale College, Briton Hadden, and Henry Luce
,
among others
.
They gathered around a long table, with Canby at the head.
¹²
Each student—whether an advanced undergraduate or a gifted graduate student—wrote constantly in the genre of his choice. Canby also instructed his students in literary criticism and literary principles. Much of the teaching took place in individual conferences, but the members of the class met weekly to read their work aloud, with lively discussion following. Already, Hadden and Luce were working their way toward their joint conception of the magazine that would become
Time,
and wrote journalistic prose in Canby's class. Benét the poet started working on a novel that became
The Beginning of Wisdom,
published in 1921.
¹³
In 1961, when Wilder scholar Donald Haberman asked Wilder if any of the three-minute plays or parts of
The Trumpet Shall Sound
were written in Canby's class, Wilder replied, “No—I vaguely remember a short story,—best forgotten.”
¹⁴

Like fine athletes who rise to greater performance in company and competition with other fine athletes, talented writers often profit by a catalytic relationship with other talented writers, especially in the presence of a challenging and skillful mentor. Canby demanded his students' best work, and Wilder and Benét brought out the best in each other. (To the end of his life, Thornton held on to a signed manuscript that Steve Benét gave him—a parody of Thornton's three-minute playlets titled “Passing Out.”) Because Canby wanted his students to be able to place and sell what they wrote, he fostered a literary professionalism in them, as well as a practical knowledge of the literary marketplace. As Charles Fenton, another Yale professor and Benét's biographer, later observed, “Canby's English 40 was thus in effect a vocational training in the practice of letters.”
¹⁵

In 1919 and 1920 an ambitious original magazine made its debut at Yale through the auspices of literary-minded Yale men, energetically led by Norman Fitts of Northampton, Massachusetts, who set out to publish “True art,” which, he wrote, “is unafraid, all embracing, multivarious, self-sufficient.”
¹⁶
The journal was almost accidentally named
S4N
—a corruption of the note to the printer to leave “Space for Title,” which evolved into “Space for Name,” then “(S for N),” and, ultimately,
S4N.
Steve Benét was a driving force in the early years of
S4N
, along with other Yale men. The magazine—four by six inches for most of its life span—would be published for five years, and its roster included Benét, e. e. cummings, Jean Toomer, poet Ramon Guthrie, Malcolm Cowley, and Thornton Wilder, among other young writers. Three of Thornton's three-minute playlets appeared in the pages of
S4N—Proserpina and the Devil (A Play for Marionettes)
in January 1920;
The Death of the Centaur: A Footnote to Ibsen
in April 1920; and
And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead
in January–February 1923—and he and Fitts discussed the possibility of a book-length publication of Thornton's playlets and fiction.

Thornton was writing prolifically at Yale despite the heavy course load he carried. He also participated actively in campus life. Since his first year at Yale he had been an active member of the Elizabethan Club. He was also elected a member of Alpha Delta Phi, one of the oldest junior fraternities at Yale, founded in 1836; and Chi Delta Theta, founded in 1821 as a literary society whose members were seniors and often involved in the
Yale Literary Magazine
. He served on the
Lit
staff, and was elected to the Pundits, an acknowledged group of class wits, serving in 1920 as secretary.
¹⁷
Thornton and Amos would not approach their father's status as a big man on the Yale campus, however. Amos Parker Wilder had been elected to that pinnacle of undergraduate achievement, the secret, elitist Skull and Bones, an enigmatic presence at Yale since 1832. But Thornton followed the trail of his keen interests, and in his senior year, when his classmates voted for superlatives, although he did not win, he received votes as “Most Scholarly,” “Most Brilliant” (an honor won by his former Chefoo schoolmate and Yale classmate, Henry Luce), “Most Original,” and “Most Entertaining.”

 

“WHEN I
graduated from Yale College in 1920 my father was faced with the problem of what to do with me,” Thornton wrote decades later in an unpublished semiautobiographical manuscript titled “SS
Independenza
.” His father may have had doubts, Thornton recalled, but he himself knew exactly what he wanted to do: write. Dr. Wilder despaired that Thornton would ever be able to earn a living in any profession, much less as a writer. While Dr. Wilder and his wife did not doubt their son's literary gifts, they thought that the only steady, income-producing profession realistically open to Thornton was teaching, and even this was not very promising. Thornton believed that his father's deeper concern had to do with his character: “I had been constantly reminded that I lacked concentration and perseverance,” he wrote. “I was a woolgatherer. I was a dilettante.”
¹⁸
To make matters worse, his father had warned Thornton that he feared that Amos would turn out to be “commonplace” and Thornton, “wayward.”
¹⁹