Thornton Wilder (33 page)

Still Thornton was elated—and then very quickly inundated with work preparing the novel manuscript for publication and revising the play for production. He was especially eager to get the novel off his hands. “I long to be free of it; it's become a fretting burden,” he wrote.
²⁹
In his view it was a cluster of intertwined “novelettes,” or books.
³⁰
That fall he was wrestling with book 4, which would be entitled “Astrée-Luce and the Cardinal,” although, as the manuscript was taking shape, the woman Astrée-Luce was called Mlle de Homodarmes.
³¹
He had written enough of book 4 to send it along for his mother's review. “I am very unhappy about the middle of it,” he wrote to her.

 

The more I look at the whole thing the more I see it as a bundle of notes that I should work over for months yet. But I must hurry. “It will have to do.” I never thought I should have to say that of anything of mine, but I am frantic to finish this five-year thing and get back to my plays.
³²

 

When Boleslavsky offered 10 percent of gross receipts, and asked for extensive revisions to
Geraldine de Gray,
Thornton promised to do all he could to make his play succeed.
³³
His melodrama, set “at the edge of Woodsville, Indiana,” in 1872, stars Geraldine de Gray, a governess, beautiful and pure, who falls in love—like Jane Eyre—with the brooding master of the house, father of the little girl whom Geraldine is hired to tutor. Wilder explained to Boleslavsky, “My hope in casting the play into the form of a burlesque on dime novels was, partly, to see if I couldn't somehow force an eloquence out of the funny old romantic diction.” But he had such confidence in Boleslavsky's “judgment and experience” that he would “gladly accede to any alterations” needed.
³⁴
Thornton worked hard on the revisions in December, including rewriting the opening of the play. He was also touching up
Exile
and reworking a comedy he called
The Pilgrims,
planning, with Edith Isaacs's encouragement, to submit both full-length plays for Boleslavsky's consideration, along with
The Trumpet Shall Sound,
the four-act play he had composed at Yale.

Boleslavsky was a crucial link in the chain of theater history—firmly connected to Konstantin Stanislavsky, who had collaborated with Tolstoy and Chekhov in the nineteenth century, and who introduced new theories and methods of acting early in the twentieth century that would still resonate in the twenty-first. Born in Poland in 1889 and educated in Russia, Boleslavsky had been schooled in Stanislavsky's famous Moscow Art Theatre, beginning in 1906. Boleslavsky starred in Moscow Art Theatre productions around the world, and his effectiveness as an actor, teacher, and director led him to be named director of the First Studio of the Moscow Art Theatre. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Boleslavsky returned to Poland, taught and directed in Germany, and by 1922 was living in the United States, where he founded the American Laboratory Theatre in 1923. “The Lab,” as it came to be known, rigorously trained a repertory company of actors to perform classical as well as new, experimental plays. Boleslavsky was a gifted teacher who transmitted Stanislavsky's philosophy in Europe and the United States, and enhanced it with his own theories, articulated in the book Edith Isaacs would publish for him—
Acting: The First Six Lessons
(1933).

Thornton was surprised and “very proud and happy” when he heard the good news from Boleslavsky about
Geraldine de Gray,
although Boleslavsky soon changed his mind and decided instead to produce
The Trumpet Shall Sound
. This was the first big break for Wilder the dramatist. The play would have an audience in New York—off Broadway, but even so, a significant launching ground for a new playwright.

As he migrated from novels to plays to French grammar that fall, Thornton kept “groping about for the subject of a new play,” he wrote to Amy. “There are beautiful walks these days along the Raritan canal,” he told her,

 

and almost every day (and twice a day) I push my feet before me among the leaves, constructing a whole new play every day from old germs of plots, and then discarding it when the excitement has ebbed. . . . Anyway, I'm hunting for my next play a happy subject and to fit myself for it I am running every morning at seven, renouncing cigarettes, avoiding artistic people, speaking slowly, refraining from frowns and trying to be good. Surely those charms cannot fail to work.
³⁵

 

When he wasn't writing, running, or studying, he was going to the theater. That fall he was “thoroly [
sic
] excited” by Pirandello's
Six Characters in Search of an Author,
which he had first seen in Rome; Chekhov's
The Cherry Orchard
;
Ibsen's
The Wild Duck
; and Aristophanes'
Lysistrata,
among others.
³⁶
He found occasional escape in a longtime hobby—one he had enjoyed for years—collecting the records of German repertory theater. “I can hardly wait until the Univ. Library receives its weekly batch of foreign newspapers. I tear open the great Zeitung and fill out a diagram,” he wrote to Amy. In red ink he charted openings of plays; in pencil he jotted down dates of the season's performances.
³⁷
His new indulgence was movies. “I am a movie-goer and very enthusiastic,” he wrote to his mother, encouraging her to see “Griffith's
Sally of the Sawdust
(you mustn't miss that), Lubitsch's
Kiss Me Again
and
The Gold Rush
.”
³⁸

 

ON NOVEMBER 19, 1925
, Thornton put his signature on his first publishing contract, for the novel he called
The Caballa
(at first using the preferred spelling of the
Concise
Oxford English Dictionary
), and then changed to
The Cabala.
The Boni brothers scheduled the book for publication in the spring of 1926 by their firm, Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. “Tonight I am signing a heavy legal contract for the publication of my novel,” he wrote to Rosemary Ames.
³⁹
Despite his sensitivity over their age difference he had accepted her invitation to a dance later in November, and in spare moments, he teased, he was brushing up on his “polka and schottische,” telling her to “hope for the best.”
⁴⁰

A month later he wrote to congratulate his brother, who was preparing to preach his first sermon to his own congregation in North Conway. Like most siblings the Wilders were grateful for those moments when a brother or sister deflected parental concern, giving even a brief respite from their father's hovering. “I am happy that in spite of Father's 5 months of hysterical, fainting in coils on the hearthrug every time you got a letter and other demonstrations, all is well,” Thornton told Amos. “He has now devoted his anguished attentions to minute brooding over Isabel's dramatic callers and the clauses in my publisher's contract.”
⁴¹

The brothers, especially Amos, did some hovering of their own over their sister Charlotte that year. She had proved herself a brilliant student at Mount Holyoke and at Radcliffe. She was a good editor, and would prove to be an effective teacher. But most of all she wanted to write. However, Charlotte increasingly felt the stress of her own self-imposed mission: to earn enough money so she could live on her own and write. She was constantly writing poetry, and Thornton had recognized and encouraged her gifts early on. He told their mother, “If she keeps on right she may discover herself as something of a very high order, that will scatter our magazine poetesses as a hawk does the hens.”
⁴²
Charlotte confided in Amos the worrisome news that she had discovered that the stimulating lectures and concerts she had always enjoyed now “really churned me up and gave way to periods of depression. I was being over-stimulated all the time. I could hear a rattling in my head when my thoughts, like rats, scuttled about.”
⁴³

She was twenty-seven years old, more of a loner than any of her siblings, and most likely facing a more difficult struggle for independence than her two brothers because she was a woman, and, furthermore, a woman who longed to be a writer. Her struggle was intensified because she was beginning to suffer bouts of what would eventually become chronic depression. Charlotte tried her best in 1925 to ward off her melancholy and the “rattling” in her head by avoiding two pleasures she prized—the intellectual engagement of lectures and the emotional comfort of music.

 

THORNTON ENDURED
an “awful crisis” during the Christmas holidays in 1925, and unrequited love was the crux of it. Only cryptic details of the experience survive in a few enigmatic letters and, almost a year later, in a startling entry in his journal. He first shared some of the experience in early January 1926 in a letter to Amy:

 

Just when I'd made the resolution to never think about anything else for the rest of my probably brief life than goodness and art. Yes, madam, I had an awful crisis over Xmas. You remember when I met you I let escape that I was coming to discover that Life slapped me sharply when I ventured outside those two pathways?

Well, that was no pose. At last I resolved to do of my own free will what circumstances would presently force me to do anyway. And I killed myself. I am no longer a person. I am a heart and a pen. I have no brain. I have no body. I have no pride (oh what an amputation was there!) I have no fear (wish that were true!) There is something of all this in the Epilogue to The Cabala. Je n'existe plus.
⁴⁴

 

Amy wrote back immediately, full of concern. “My dear Amy,” Thornton replied, “I just meant I was awfully upset. It has nothing to do with you. I am in the middle of a kind of nervous breakdown.” He wanted to run away to Florida or somewhere, he told her. He hated his work, dreaded his exams at Princeton, couldn't sleep, couldn't find the time to write. “How naughty of you to get so excited over mere phrasing,” he scolded her, seeming to rationalize. “
To Kill oneself
in that sense, is a sort of religious idiom for shaking off one's old lazinesses and trying again. I'd quote you
its loci classici
[he used double underscores] only it would look like lecturing.”
⁴⁵
But Thornton's distress seemed to anxious Amy to be more than mere phrasing. She offered him comfort and affection.

“There is no affection in the world that I would be stupid enough to refuse,” he answered.

 

All life is made possible by it. You have so much of mine. But the only kind I am ready for now is a clear serene understanding affection. When I see among my friends the kind that is touched with suffering I understand, but I draw back. I loved with all the exaggeration one can imagine; but I was not only not loved so in return. I was laughed at. The cleverest humiliations were set for me. And for a long time I am going to be the most cautious the most distrustful (of myself) man in the world. Again you find further hints of this in the Memoirs, most indirectly stated.
⁴⁶

 

No trail of clues or facts leads to the identity of the person who failed to love Thornton in return, who “cleverly” humiliated him in 1925, and who wounded him so deeply. The impact was profound and enduring, however, leaving him by his own admission extremely cautious and doubtful about relationships, stripped down to “a heart and a pen.” Regardless of the identity or the circumstances, Thornton responded by deliberately “killing” within himself the propensity to love with “exaggeration”—to idealize, to trust, to connect intimately with another person.

The experience continued to haunt him, and to be transmuted into his literary work, as his 1926 journal and certain letters reveal. These passages open a window on his innermost life and the often-shrouded revelation of self in his work. Months after his letter so alarmed Amy Wertheimer, he wrote in his journal about his intention in his first two novels—a passage that appears to have been wrung onto the page, if words scratched out are any indication. In that journal entry he resurrected words he had written to Amy in January 1926:

 

The Cabala
was written because I brooded about great natures and their obstacles and ailments and frustrations.
The Bridge
was written because I wanted to die and I wanted to prove that death was a happy solution. The motto of
The Bridge
is to be found in the last page of
The
Cabala:
Hurry and die!

In
The Cabala
I began to think that love is enough to reconcile one to the difficulty of living (i.e. the difficulty of being good); in
The Bridge
I am still a little surer. Perhaps someday I can write a book announcing that love is sufficient.
⁴⁷

 

The interval of a few months had at least restored in him a little hope that love might be someday be “sufficient” to “reconcile one to the difficulty of living,” and Thornton began to embed in his fiction allusions to his “most secret life.” In a letter to Amy he revealed the autobiographical shadows in his work, and so offered the key to others who might be curious about his inner life. He cautioned Amy not to think that he had disguised himself as the cardinal in
The Cabala
: