Thornton Wilder (32 page)

He wrote to Mrs. Isaacs about his plans for graduate school and the “secret writing” he hoped to do, reflecting that he was not going to “plunge into intensive literary life” until he could feel sure that his efforts would not be “full of odd rushes, superlatives, meaningless excitements and ridiculous adverbs.”
⁴⁷
Thornton shared his news with Edwin Arlington Robinson: “I'm leaving teaching and going to the Princeton Grad. College for an M. A. in Old French and the leisure for surreptitious masterpieces.”
⁴⁸

Unknown to Thornton, his Princeton acceptance was granted with minimal enthusiasm: “Teaching French in Lawrenceville—seems a fair but not brilliant case,” someone typed on Thornton's official record.
⁴⁹
When she heard of Thornton's acceptance, Isabel was disappointed, but he tried to reassure her: “Don't jump to the conclusion that our retreat next year is off.” He told Isabel that “all that can be said for Princeton is that of all the plans it's the cheapest & safest. If I go there it will be because I shall have had to
fall back upon it
.”
⁵⁰

Graduate school acceptance in hand, Thornton was soon alight with high hopes about writing. In the absence of her regular drama critic, John Mason Brown, Edith Isaacs offered Thornton the chance to write the annual roundup of winter openings of new plays for
Theatre Arts
Monthly
, a major publication in the drama world from 1916 until it ceased publication in 1964. Alternately thrilled at the assignment and afraid that he would fail, Thornton saw nineteen plays in New York, and then worried and worked over his article—“The Turn of the Year,” published in
Theatre Arts Monthly
in March 1925.
⁵¹
He feared that the piece was too long at 2,500 words, and urged Mrs. Isaacs to cut and edit it as she saw fit. “If it turns out to be longer than most,” he wrote to her, “please compress any payment down to the average without regard to the number of words.” He was “proud and happy to have done it at all,” and hoped the review would not disappoint.
⁵²
“The article is really very good indeed,” she replied, and she was “immensely pleased.”
⁵³

Thornton's long, self-directed apprenticeship in the theater amply prepared him to write the review. He had a near-photographic memory where theater was concerned. His wide-ranging knowledge of dramaturgy and his years of sitting attentively in theater audiences equipped him to roam a spacious landscape, from classics to contemporary plays, and to offer informed views of the success or failure of the writing, the acting, the scenery, the direction, even the adaptations or translations. He could be witty and acerbic: He noted after one play, given in translation, that he “came away thinking of how rare and eloquent it would have seemed, if one had only been deaf.”
⁵⁴
He gave special praise to the actress Ruth Gordon (who would later become one of his closest friends) for forcing the audience “to breathless attention” despite her minor role in Philip Barry's
The Youngest,
which Thornton gave a mixed review.
⁵⁵
His crisply written, candid, and authoritative article garnered good reviews itself, and introduced his name and credentials to a large, informed theater audience.

He was now working industriously to get his own plays and fiction out into the world as well. He was forging ahead with
Geraldine de Gray,
planning to send it out to directors at two theater groups who had asked to see it. Most promisingly of all, however, there was some interest in his novel. The overture came from his Yale classmate Lewis Baer, who had been impressed with Thornton's stories in their college days. Since graduation, Baer had worked at the
New York World,
and then in the advertising and publicity departments at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. In 1924 he joined Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., a new publishing company founded by brothers Albert and Charles Boni in 1923, becoming secretary and treasurer of the firm.
⁵⁶

Albert Boni, previously of Boni & Liveright, brought significant publishing experience as well as a literary sensibility to his work, and would directly or indirectly launch some innovative publishing ventures. He had owned the Washington Square Bookshop in New York, and founded the Little Leather Library, publishing short versions of classics in a small, inexpensive format, and marketing them through Woolworth's stores. In 1917 he had sold his shop and gone into the publishing business full-time with Horace Liveright. The Boni & Liveright Publishing Company initiated the popular Modern Library of the World's Best Classics series. (One of their best salesmen was Bennett Cerf, who eventually bought the series, and went on to found Random House.) From the outset of their new publishing venture Albert and Charles Boni sought to publish contemporary authors. Their edgy list included Colette, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Upton Sinclair, Leon Trotsky—and soon, Thornton Wilder.

When Baer approached Thornton about whether he had a book in progress, Thornton sent him a draft of the Roman memoirs. He waited half in excitement, half in dread, to hear what Baer would have to say. Biding his time as long as he could stand to, Thornton wrote to Baer in February to inquire about the manuscript, convinced that the Boni firm would turn it down.
⁵⁷
Two weeks later came a heartening letter from Baer. He and the Bonis had “cleared away some of the piles” of manuscripts on their desks for the spring season, and had managed at last to read Thornton's manuscript—the first book of the Roman memoirs. “I am more than delighted to report that we are all crazy about it,” Baer wrote. “Albert Boni feels so strongly about your style that he is very anxious to see more.” He asked Thornton to send along more of the manuscript, as well as anything else he wanted them to see. “I do hope we will be able to get together a book which can mean the start of your career as an author (in print! I mean). No one would be happier than I.”
⁵⁸

Elated, Thornton was “all a-whirr with the news that the Boni Brothers are most enthusiastic about the fragment of the Roman Memoirs.” He was “hurriedly patching up” additional material to send to New York.
⁵⁹
Now he was on fire to submit all his work for publication, but because he had the bad habit of sometimes entrusting his only copies of drafts to other people, he had to round up manuscripts to send. Bill Benét and Elinor Wylie had one folder, he thought, and Mrs. Isaacs had a gray folder of manuscripts that he needed back, he told her. By mid-March he was working feverishly on the Roman memoirs so that he could send another segment to the Bonis. He was now calling the book
Marcantonio,
after one of the principal characters.

Slowly but steadily his work was being recognized, even sought after. He kept a rough list of his appearances in print: He had published “many plays and one essay” in the Oberlin College literary magazine, “many plays and two book reviews” in the Yale
Lit,
“seven or eight dramatic criticisms and one play [
Centaurs: A Footnote to Ibsen
]” in the
Boston Transcript,
and “many plays, sketches, etc.” in
S4N.
His sonnet “Measure for Measure” had been included in
The Book of Yale Undergraduate Verse,
and he had been published in the
Double Dealer
and
Theatre Arts Monthly.
⁶⁰
Now there might actually be a book in the offing.

Thornton wrote to his good friend Bill Bissell, “Life's begun.”
⁶¹

 

PLEASED AS
he was at the prospect of having his novel published, Thornton was still eager to concentrate on his plays. Thanks to his success at
Theatre Arts Monthly
, Thornton was invited to give a talk at Goucher College in Baltimore on the next ten years of American theater. He did not charge a fee because “the experience is valuable enough for me in that it will teach me further how to find my tongue.”
⁶²
All he asked for was a place to stay overnight. This event could be seen, in retrospect, as the launch of his career as a lecturer.

Despite his hectic schedule Thornton managed by mid-April, on the eve of his twenty-eighth birthday, to finish part 2 of
Marcantonio
. Because he hated the mechanics of preparing a manuscript, he hired a typist, and as soon as he had the manuscript typed and bound, he mailed it to New York. “There will be a good deal to recast if they decide to publish,” he wrote to his mother, “but on the whole I can say that this thing which I began in Paris and which has dragged on behind me ever since is done tonight.”
⁶³

As much as Thornton wanted to concentrate on his plays, the novel dominated his literary work that spring. He thought he must clearly indicate that
Marcantonio
was the first volume of a larger series called
Notes of a Roman Student.
His vision of the structure of his book was, in a significant way, Proustian: Marcel Proust's
In Search of Lost Time
included seven volumes.
⁶⁴
Thornton envisioned his book on a far more modest scale, and was writing with greater economy, but the concept of related volumes was similar. His book as a whole would be constructed of a series of “novelettes that flow, so to speak, from the personality of each one of the demigods” who were emerging as central characters—Alix d'Espoli, the Cardinal, Marcantonio, Elizabeth Grier, and Astrée-Luce.
⁶⁵
His reading of Proust also liberated Thornton to break away from linear time, and to explore such dark subjects as incest and suicide. He felt free as well to experiment with irony, comedy, and farce. He told Baer that he believed that the second part of his novel needed “more craziness, more high preposterous impudence, perhaps even some freaks of pagination and some grotesque interruptions. The thing is not to be mistaken for an Edith Wharton.”
⁶⁶

Thornton worked out a narrative structure to which he would return again in fiction—a series of loosely connected “portraits” with enough interaction between characters to be welded together in a novel, but enough independence to stand alone, if need be. As it turned out, his first novel, finally titled
The Cabala,
and his last novel,
Theophilus North,
would be remarkably similar in their reliance on this device.

Word came back from Boni that the novel needed revision—more development, more clarity in certain sections, better proportion. Disappointed as he was, Thornton agreed with these assessments, although he estimated it would take him two years to accomplish some of the revisions and the additional writing. “As to the close of
Marcantonio,
” he wrote, “I now see that by dint of trying to be arch and elliptical I have merely been ununderstandable. The boy suddenly discovers that his hatred of his half-sister is another disguise of passion. He gratifies it and with the revulsion that comes toward morning kills himself in the garden.”
⁶⁷

A letter from Baer clarified what the Bonis expected, and Thornton wrote back that he had “resolved to write the rest for you,” and had already begun, although he still longed to get back to work on his plays.
⁶⁸
He and Baer began to talk about a possible edition of Thornton's playlets, which “morally,” Thornton said, he owed to Norman Fitts of
S4N.
But Fitts was gravely ill. Thornton proposed to send the playlets to Baer and, if Fitts, recovered, to offer him his full-length plays instead. Thornton and Baer also began to talk about the contract with the Bonis for the novel.
⁶⁹

 

THORNTON THE
writer paced the Davis House floor after lights-out, or sat at his desk or on the foot of his bed, wrestling with his Roman portraits, stealing time as he could to work on his plays.
⁷⁰
“I am still on Alix d'Esp's story. I hope it will move some people as it does me,” he wrote to his mother.
⁷¹
Meanwhile Thornton the schoolmaster worked in a frenzy to finish his term at Lawrenceville and prepare to move himself and his few earthly possessions to nearby Princeton in the fall. And there was the summer job awaiting him in New Hampshire.

Before he left Lawrenceville, Thornton found himself the inadvertent star of a real-life comedy. The daughter of the man who owned the local soda fountain shyly approached “Dr. Wilder,” as she called him, asking him to come to the local firehouse where members of the Village Congregational Church were rehearsing a play,
The Adventures of Grandpa
. They hoped that the newly famous drama critic from
Theatre Arts Monthly
would give them “a little advice.” Thornton obliged, listening to the rehearsal, and telling “the Irish policeman and the heavy-comic Swedish maid not to turn their backs on an audience, to learn their lines, and to speak up.” He attended two more rehearsals before the performance. When local newspapers reported that “Professor and Doctor Thornton Wilder” was directing the play, people who knew him bought tickets to the production, expecting something far more erudite than
The Adventures of Grandpa
was meant to offer. “Any suspicion of mortification however was appeased,” Thornton said, “when I discovered that the little group was presenting me with a fountain-pen heavy with gold.”
⁷²

16

“THE ‘WAY WITHIN'”

I don't know when or how or where I shall go. . . . My urge to go comes from way within and the “way within” knows just what it is doing.

—THORNTON WILDER TO AMY WERTHEIMER,

February 7, 1926

 

New Jersey and New Hampshire (1925–1926)

D
uring his last month at Lawrenceville in 1925, Thornton was thinking deeply about James Joyce's
Ulysses,
a novel he had just finished, and one that he idolized.
¹
While he was reading this revolutionary book, Thornton reflected, he was “a little staggered by its audacities,” but that all had “merged into vast admiration.” As he analyzed the craftsmanship in Joyce's novel, he was struck most of all by the book's “architectural plan.” “Did you know,” Thornton wrote to musician Bruce Simonds, one of his Yale friends, “that each of its inner chapters had not only its counterpart in Homer, but its own colour; its presiding virtue, in the scholastic sense, and its complementary vice; and its own element?” (After he read this Thornton made a fleeting attempt to identify the colors of his own chapters in progress.) He went on to say that because Joyce had taken such good care of the novel's form, he could afford

 

to pack it with a million odd details, a writer's love for mere Shop, crazy whims, parading of scores of authors, rare old Anglo-Saxon words. Leopold Bloom turns on a faucet and we get a page from the encylop. on water; a 20-page conversation in a library about Shakespeare's private life; a screaming climax of all the most horrible thoughts one could entertain about death.
²

 

These were matters to ponder as Thornton tried to finish his own novel. In his early years of work on the book he had characterized his imaginary memoirs as “formal portraits” with occasional commentary “dropped into [the] current, told by some character, like Canterbury pilgrims.”
³
Now if he could, like Joyce, discover a clear, organic form—the solid “architectural plan” for his book—perhaps he could give his imagination freer rein and indulge himself in the “million odd details” that filled his mind and memory—the “writer's love for mere Shop. . . .”
⁴

He took a summer job tutoring boys at Ira Williams's tutoring camp at Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, just outside the village of Newbury. Williams was a math teacher at Lawrenceville, and many of Thornton's charges were Lawrenceville students preparing for college entrance examinations or making up academic deficiencies. “I tutor painfully all morning,” Thornton wrote from Lake Sunapee to a friend—“good meals, distance swims in the afternoon, my belated athleticism; in the evenings, solitaire, movies or dancing at the Granliden,” the resort hotel that sprawled comfortably on the western shore of Gardner Bay near Newbury.
⁵
Built in 1905, the hotel was noted for its modern conveniences, its excellent food, and its almost nightly dances. Handsome bachelors such as Thornton Wilder were encouraged to come to the dances, and numerous romances allegedly began on the polished Granliden dance floor or in the shadows on the spacious lawns surrounding the hotel.

“Let me describe some diversions of wistful bachelors,” Thornton wrote to his mother.
⁶
He did the foxtrot with a beautician from New York, and danced with a medical illustrator from Maryland and a New York clothing designer who looked “exactly like Katharine Cornell.”
⁷
In addition to waltzing and foxtrotting with unattached young ladies, Thornton found himself a popular dinner guest at various summerhouses around the lake, especially among the wives whose husbands, preoccupied in their offices in Boston, New York, or elsewhere, were in attendance only on weekends. One of the “merry wives,” as Thornton called them, would become his lifelong friend. He wrote to his mother about Amy Weil Wertheimer, age thirty-five, describing her as a “proud sad Jewess with literary yearnings.”
⁸
She was immediately drawn to Thornton and profoundly interested in his writing projects. She began inviting him to dinner and to social events, and showering him with gifts and letters. He found her attractive, stimulating, and—perhaps to his comfort—already married and therefore unavailable. They discovered an affinity of mind and interests and began a correspondence that lasted until her death in 1971.

Amy was infatuated with Thornton from the first, and soon fell in love with him. Aware of this, he wrote tactfully and whimsically—but candidly—about what he needed from her: “I'm looking for a wise intelligent and fairly tranquil friend. I should like it to be a lady, somewhat older than myself who will understand me so well (so humorously and with a touch of superiority) that I can write her conceitedly and she will understand that that's only my way . . . tragically, and that that's my nerves.” He assured her that he would write her “long and frank” letters, however infrequent, about his life and work.
⁹
But he tried to establish the parameters of their relationship: He wanted to be sure that she too had “suffered at some time or other, and has come through,” he wrote, as that would “constitute a bond, for enthusiastic carefree Thornton had an awful experience in Europe that left him so marred with woe that it is unimaginable that he will ever love again.”
¹⁰
(The details of that heartbreak in Europe have never come to light, but, as will be seen several times in his letters, journal entries, and early fiction, he alluded to it and to at least one other disillusioning romance .)

Thornton tried to catch up on his letter writing that summer. He was carrying on a “clandestine correspondence,” he teased Amy, with the beautiful blond aspiring actress Rosemary Ames, nineteen, whom he had met when she attended a prom at Lawrenceville School, a houseguest of Mather Abbott and his wife.
¹¹
Rosemary was the daughter of Knowlton Lyman “Snake” Ames, a wealthy Chicago businessman.
¹²
When Thornton met Rosemary, nine years his junior, she told him that her family was not enthusiastic about her desire to become an actress, and she sought his advice. After all, he was a published theater critic, and he told her he was “going into criticism for earnest next year” and might be of use to her as she assailed “the citadels of—ah—stardom.” He cautioned her, however, not to break her family's heart “unless you feel you have a real vocation for real high stormy art. It's not worth leaving a happy even home life to be merely an adequate average Broadway actress. A great actress or a great lady in daily life; but nothing in between is good enough for you.”
¹³

Caught up in his summer social life and his correspondence—and juggling the affections of at least two women—Thornton was neglecting his writing. “My conscience hurts me hourly for not writing on my Memoirs—especially as I have at last found the subject for the third and last nouvelle,” Thornton wrote to a friend from Lake Sunapee.
¹⁴
Despite the fact that he could “see the whole thing quite clearly,” he was having trouble with part 3.
¹⁵
But he was also working on a play, and could report that he “suddenly finished the Second Act of Geraldine de Gray the other day, the obstinate, the insoluble Second Act. It finished with unexpected simplicity and I begin to see the mists rising from the Third.”
¹⁶

The author was also considering options for his professional name. How should he sign his work? T. N. Wilder? Thornton Wilder? Thornton N. Wilder? Thornton Niven Wilder? That would be it, he decided, writing to Amy Wertheimer, “The Niven is going to stay.”
¹⁷

 

THORNTON AND
Amos paid a late-summer visit to the Wilders in residence at their new address, 75 Mansfield Street in New Haven. “We moved for more rooms and it is luxury indeed,” Isabel had written about the family's new home:

 

Sun and light too. We have the second and third floors of a double house and the use of the garden. It had been redecorated and I think we shall be comfortable. It's more decent than we've been in years and years and years. With a heavy sigh I resigned all my jobs and I am taking Prof. George Baker's new Drama Course that Yale grabbed from Harvard. I'm lucky to get in. . . . It seemed best for me to stay home. This house is more than Mother can manage alone so the course will be some compensation. . . . However I'll have a chance to take the play-writing course too, and it's a venture. My heart isn't quite in it yet, but expects to be.
¹⁸

 

Amos, meanwhile, hoped to settle down and become a minister. He had recently enjoyed nearly a year abroad as a traveling tutor and companion for two teenagers, a job that took him to Egypt, the Holy Land, Russia, India, and elsewhere. Dr. Wilder proudly published many of Amos's letters home in the
New Haven
Courier-Journal.
Back in New Haven, Amos applied for two pastorates, including one at the First Church of Christ (Congregational) in North Conway, New Hampshire. He waited anxiously for the outcome, even though he knew his credentials were strong: He had studied theology in Europe, had done some occasional preaching there, had received his Bachelor of Divinity degree cum laude at the Yale Divinity School in 1924, and had been ordained in the Congregational ministry in 1926.
¹⁹

As usual Dr. Wilder was hovering, intensifying Amos's worries about what lay ahead, “taking the matter foolishly (so desperately hard)” that he added to Amos's stress. Thornton offered Amos his encouragement and support: “You must not let the deliberations of these committees worry you. I'm now sure that you're not meant to be a preacher at all; I've been rereading your poems. Now I think that some passages in them are so fine that writing more should be your only business.” Thornton urged his brother to spend six months with the family on Mansfield Street in New Haven, and write full-time. “Anyway,” he concluded, “don't you be afraid of anything on earth. You have the goods.”
²⁰

According to Isabel, Janet, now sixteen, was “an original girl”—“lean and lanky” and “stubborn, Oh!” Just entering high school, older than her fellow students because the family's constant travels had thrown her behind academically, Janet still loved horses, and had a new hobby—raising chickens, four “pedigreed hens.” Her ambition, which surely pleased her father, was to go to an agricultural college and then to run a farm.
²¹
Charlotte, her M.A. safely on her résumé, was working as “private secretary/daughter-in-the-house” for Mrs. J. Malcolm Forbes, the widow of a wealthy Boston businessman and sportsman noted for his avid interest in racing yachts and breeding horses. Isabel thought the change from “third floor backs and everlasting female colleges” had done Charlotte “a world of good.” She had been “so desperately poor for two years,” Isabel wrote. “To take this job she had to get a nice wardrobe so she borrowed and did so and good food and no cares have done worlds for her.”
²²
Charlotte hoped to move to New York to take over Isabel's job at the literary agency, and to sell the “junior stories” she had been writing, all in support of her serious work as a poet.

Thornton was headed to Princeton to work on his graduate degree, while Amos still awaited news of his fate. In the fall of 1925 he accepted his first pastorate, as minister of the First Church of Christ (Congregational) in North Conway.
²³
With Amos and Charlotte gainfully employed, and Thornton on his way to Princeton, Dr. Wilder now concentrated his attention on Isabel. He was not pleased that she would be studying drama. “At present struggling with Father has left me flattened,” she wrote. “He considers the theatre an agent of evil and degeneration, etc. . . . How can I let him crush every atom of enthusiasm and interest I have [?]”
²⁴

Like Amos, Thornton, and Charlotte, Isabel was eager to get away from New Haven and home. She was saving her money so she could go back to England, as far away as possible.

 

“THIS PLACE
is too good to be true,” Thornton wrote from Princeton in the fall of 1925. “It may be spoiled by my having to work a little; they've signed me up for a course called Historical Grammar that makes my head sweat to write it down.”
²⁵
Despite the often tedious work his classes required—the work was “very hard and dry-as-dust,” Thornton complained—he could spend far more time writing than was possible at Lawrenceville.
²⁶
By November, Thornton Wilder the writer had superseded Thornton Wilder the graduate student.

At twenty-eight he had been writing seriously for nearly half his life, and at last he could call himself a professional novelist and playwright, thanks to good fortune on two fronts: The Boni brothers definitely wanted to publish his first novel and drew up a contract, and Richard Boleslavsky chose his
Geraldine de Gray
as one of four plays for the 1926–27 repertory season at the American Laboratory Theatre. This was unexpected good news, as Thornton had sent the newly finished play to Boleslavsky at the end of October, not expecting him to select it for production but hoping it would at least interest him in reading other plays in the future.
²⁷
“He sent me the reports of the playreading committee,” Thornton wrote to Amy on November 23. “They all conceded that it was good construction and [an] interesting subject, but asserted that it had
no literary value
. The sauce of them! That's almost as bad as my French professor who announced to me at the close of my analysis of an old sonnet that
I had no imagination.
”
²⁸