Thornton Wilder (43 page)

On July 7, when Wilder boarded the
Adriatic
for the journey to England, a telegram from Tunney awaited him aboard ship, wishing him well.
⁷⁸
Isabella, Isabel, and Janet had gone on ahead, and had rented Axeland House near Horley in Sussex. There was room enough for the whole family, although Dr. Wilder would stay behind in New Haven to carry on his work at the newspaper, and Charlotte would spend the summer teaching English and literature in the Barnard College Summer School for Women Workers in Industry.
⁷⁹
She had been teaching at Wheaton College for two years and would begin a new job as assistant professor of English at Smith College in September 1928. Joining the family in England would be houseguests, including Tunney and the three Lawrenceville students Wilder accompanied to England, Clark Andrews, Henry Noy, and Duff McCullough. Wilder wrote to Ernest Hemingway about his plans:

 

Sailing for 2 months in Eng. (Adriatic July 7); then walking tour with Gene Tunney (vide press passim) [see the press here and there]. As fine a person as you'd want to meet; not much humour, but I've always had a taste for the doggedly earnest ones. Then another tutoring job from Oct 20th on with Xmas in Egypt, then some readings & lectures in America (March and April.). Hawaii to write two plays. But I dread and lose my enthusiasm before all this leisure. I need routines.
⁸⁰

 

Some of those plans would change, but this was Wilder's tentative agenda as he looked ahead in that summer of the most dramatic, most successful year of his life thus far: Literary success beyond his dreams. Financial success beyond his imaginings. Friends who lived visible lives on the world stage—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Tunney—and treated him as if he belonged there, too. Friendships that meant the world to the man who had been a shy, awkward boy—the man who had far more confidence in his work, as he had told Fitzgerald, than he had ever been able to extend to his person.
⁸¹

20

PREPARATION AND CIRCUMSTANCE

I know now that the [lecture] tours are Preparation. I don't know quite what they prepare for: I prepare and Circumstance fulfills.

—THORNTON WILDER TO SIBYL COLEFAX,

February 20, 1930

 

Europe and the United States (1930s)

I
n the fall of 1928 sixteen of Wilder's three-minute playlets were published in
The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays.
He knew the playlets were “frail,” he had told Lewis Baer, but he would “love to get these little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably” so he could get “those Juvenilia” once and for all off his chest.
¹
When Boni did not choose to publish them, Wilder turned them over to Coward-McCann, a new publishing house in New York. In his foreword to the collection Wilder noted that almost all of his playlets were religious, “but religious in that dilute fashion that is a believer's concession to a contemporary standard of good manners,” and pointed out that the final four plays in the book, written in the past year and a half, “plant their flag as boldly as they may.”
²

With
The Angel That Troubled the Waters,
Wilder the playwright rode unabashedly on the coattails of Wilder the novelist. In advance of publication two of the playlets were published in the October 1928 issue of
Harper's Magazine
.
³
The issue also included an advertisement for
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
—
“
The most popular book in our generation. Now in its THIRD HUNDRED THOUSAND.”
The Angel That Troubled the Waters
received mixed but largely positive reviews in England and the United States, far more attention than the young Wilder could have imagined when he was writing most of the playlets back in his high school and college days. According to the
New York Times Book Review
on November 18, 1928, “Mr. Wilder's miniature plays will yield most to those readers who bring the most to their reading of them. They have the perfection of intaglios, the delicate beauty of finest lace, the spiritual significance of poetry, the elusive music of the distant bird.”
⁴

The Bridge
still reigned over the bestseller lists, Wilder's short plays were in print, and he was all of a sudden a man of wealth. Looking forward to joining his family abroad, he left the new and sometimes disconcerting public visibility of his life in the United States only to find himself thrown into the limelight big-time in England. The international press and paparazzi were bent on covering the forthcoming Tunney-Wilder walking tour of Europe—not so much because of Wilder's Pulitzer Prize and his international bestseller as because of Tunney's recent boxing victory and the announcement of his engagement to Polly Lauder. Tunney had defeated Tom Heeney (who had Jack Dempsey in his corner during the fight) on a technical knockout in the eleventh round of the July 26 world heavyweight championship bout in Yankee Stadium. Tunney immediately announced his retirement from boxing—the first champion to retire while still holding the crown—and soon afterward, Polly Lauder's mother announced her daughter's engagement to Tunney.

The forthcoming marriage of the beautiful heiress and the world heavyweight champion was called the romance of the century. Mobs of fans, reporters, and photographers tracked Tunney wherever he went, and stalked the bride-to-be and her family as well. Wilder, still unaccustomed to his own public visibility, disliked the hubbub intensely. “All the newspaper racket and the literary introductions leave a bad taste in my mouth,” Wilder wrote from London to Bill Nichols (now a dean at Harvard). “And I wish the noble Gene wasn't so famous. I'm gnawing a curious discontent. Wish I were in Hawaii (one of the lesser islands) with dirty flannels, sunlight, surf, the works and correspondence of Jonathan Swift, and you.”
⁵

Even so, the Tunney-Wilder trek was, for the most part, exhilarating. “Actually,” Wilder wrote to Isabel, “We do everything in an auto!! I long for walking and resting and staying somewhere. But at least we saw some splendid mountain roads.”
⁶
Wilder had hoped that he and Tunney could visit out-of-the-way places in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Italy, and enjoy “literary walks” and the wide-ranging talks that were typical of their time together. Afterward he wanted to write a travel book full of their conversations and ideas as well as impressions of their favorite places. In Paris, Wilder and Tunney met Fitzgerald for drinks at the Ritz bar, and Wilder introduced Tunney and Hemingway. Tunney reported later that Wilder could “out-walk him, out-climb him and out-eat him.”
⁷
Wilder was among the small, select gathering of wedding guests when Tunney and Polly Lauder were married at the Grand Hotel de Russie in Rome on October 3, 1928. Afterward the couple was besieged by the paparazzi in a mob scene that left some journalists with clothes ripped and cameras destroyed. Wilder was thankful to slip away to join his sister Isabel in the relative quiet and privacy of Munich, and then Wengen, Switzerland.
⁸

 

AFTER A
lifetime of the family's relentless frugality, he was thrilled to be able to take his mother and sisters to Europe, and to try to ease his father's habitual financial anxiety. After their summer together in England, Isabella had taken Janet home to New Haven in the fall of 1928 to enroll her in her final year of high school. Thornton and Isabel stayed on to travel in Europe, for Isabel had received her certificate from the Yale Drama Department in June of 1928, and Thornton's graduation gift to her was a tour of European theaters. He and Isabel discovered that they were congenial traveling companions. When they arrived in a new city he bought the local newspaper and pored over the theater and concert advertisements, circling the plays or concerts he wanted them to see, and plotting their cultural schedule. They spent their daytime hours separately—Isabel sightseeing or shopping or writing, and Thornton deep into work on his new book,
The Woman of Andros
—a novel he may actually have begun writing as a play.
⁹
In the evenings they went to the plays or concerts he had marked as events they would enjoy.

Some evenings were given over to another kind of pleasure: Thornton and Isabel loved to dance. He was a “very good dancer,” Isabel recalled, but he “wasn't a disciplined one.” He especially enjoyed the waltz and the tango, and frequently started out on the dance floor with a tango and wound up improvising, with Isabel gamely following, happy to see that her brother's delight in his unorthodox dance steps seemed to help him “relax completely.” The Wilders danced their way through Europe in 1928 and early 1929, and Isabel remembered fondly that back in the times when “things were going so bad” for the family financially, Thornton would say, “Oh, well, it's all right. Isabel and I are going to be a dance team.”
¹⁰
Her brother was so “mad about music,” Isabel related, that he bought a traveling “talking machine” in Munich, along with a number of records so he could listen to music whenever he wished in his hotel room, or in his compartment on an overnight train trip from one European city to another.
¹¹

By January 1929 Thornton and Isabel were in London, where Isabel stayed with their aunt Charlotte, still world general secretary of the YWCA. Thornton tended to literary business, meeting with his London publishers, Longmans, Green, and being feted at literary dinner parties. Even amid the dancing, socializing, theatergoing, and traveling from place to place, he kept working on
The Woman of Andros.
His first glimmerings of the novel had come to him in the spring of 1928, he wrote on a manuscript draft. He had dashed off a note to his mother with the gist of the idea: “The Woman of Andros—after play by Terence—Aegean island. Paganism with premonitions of Xianty.”
¹²

He worked on his novel all over the map. He had written the first two conversations in the novel at Axeland House in Horley, Surrey, during the happy commotion of that summer with his mother, his sisters, and assorted houseguests. He copied completed portions of the manuscript into a notebook on October 11, 1928, while he was staying in the Pension Saramartel in Juan-les-Pins, France, one of his favorite places to retreat and write.
¹³
During the spring of 1929 he wrote passages on his lecture tour—snatching hours to work in hotels and on trains from Kansas and Missouri to Louisiana and Texas to California and Calgary. He worked on Chrysis's monologue in the Yale Law School dormitory at 76 Wall Street in New Haven in April 1929. He concentrated on the novel at the MacDowell Colony during the summer. “Lots more Andros done,” he wrote to Amos from Peterborough, “but confused about the direction to take in the fourth quarter of it. No hurry, and no worry.”
¹⁴
He told his brother that
The Woman of Andros
could actually be considered his first novel “in the sense that the others were collections of tales, novelettes, bound together by a slight tie that identified them as belonging to the same group.”
¹⁵

But before he could truly concentrate on finishing the third novel, he had to deal with the financial repercussions of the second one. Accustomed as he was from boyhood to accounting for almost every cent, Wilder now faced the staggering challenge of managing an unexpected fortune. All his life, guilt had stained every coin he spent—and now there were many dollars to spare. In 1927 he had earned less than six thousand dollars—about three thousand for teaching at Lawrenceville, a few hundred for tutoring, and the rest in royalties from
The Cabala.
In 1928 he reported taxable income of $89,915.77—with $79,128.31 coming from royalties on
The Bridge
.
¹⁶
(Wilder's almost $90,000 of income equates to $1.15 million when measured by the 2010 consumer price index, and $13.6 million when measured by the 2010 relative share of gross domestic product.)

Dr. Wilder was still highly skeptical of his son's ability to handle money, convinced that Thornton would spend it extravagantly. As it turned out, Thornton was conscientious about the stewardship of this fortune and sometimes overly generous in sharing it. As he assumed financial responsibility for his parents and two younger sisters, and accepted the role of chief family breadwinner, he was becoming the actual if not the titular head of the Wilder family. As he told a friend later, it had “fallen upon” him to “sustain several members” of his family.
¹⁷
He would support his parents for the rest of their lives, and Isabel and Charlotte for the rest of his life and then, through his estate, until their deaths many years later.

In 1928 and 1929, at his father's behest, Thornton entrusted his business as well as his legal matters to experienced hands. One of the last good decisions Amos Parker Wilder urged on his son was his insistence that Thornton seek advice from the New Haven attorney J. Dwight Dana—and just in the nick of time. Dr. Wilder's health was beginning to fail, and he would soon be tactfully led to retire from his New Haven newspaper job. But by then, in large part because of his father's recommendation, Thornton's business and financial affairs, including his publishing and lecturing contracts, were safely in Dana's care.

After the publication of
The Bridge,
Wilder assumed the entire financial support of his parents and Isabel and Janet, financing Janet's college education. He contributed funds to Charlotte when she would accept them. Now thirty-one, she was teaching at Smith College, and Amos, thirty-four, was on the faculty at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. As the Depression years bashed the U.S. economy, Wilder's income from writing and lecturing vacillated and then diminished so that he had to take on other work continuously to support his family and himself.
¹⁸
First and foremost, he was determined to take good care of his mother. He treated his musical family to the luxury of their own piano, after years of renting a secondhand one, or doing without one entirely, and it was a baby grand at that, selected for him by his musician friend Bruce Simonds. Wilder paid for it with part of the advance he “made the Bonis cough up” for his new novel in progress.
¹⁹
But he wanted to give his mother more than a piano and trips to Europe. Isabella had never had a house of her own, and he wanted to give her that security for the rest of her life.

He would build his mother a house on a wooded site on a hill in Hamden, on the edge of New Haven. Wilder paid $7,500 for the lot, and on August 8, 1929, he signed an agreement with Alice F. Washburn, an architect and contractor, to construct the house on Deepwood Drive, Hamden, at a cost of $21,500. The family moved into the house in March 1930, and christened it “The House
The Bridge
Built.” There was a spacious living room downstairs, with a dining room, kitchen, and bath, and a small office. Upstairs were four bedrooms and two baths, as well as a study for Thornton. A comfortable porch overlooked New Haven, and there was a garage beneath the house. In 1929 Thornton bought himself a car, which he cheerfully shared with his mother and sisters.

A writer's income, under the best of circumstances, is an uncharted, unpredictable terrain of peaks and valleys, and Wilder the breadwinner poured new intensity into his moneymaking efforts. He still would not, however, fuse the need to earn money with his desire to write. Now that the windfall of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
had been invested in savings accounts, stocks. and real estate, and now that he was enthralled with his new novel in progress, he was determined to earn the family's bread-and-butter income from pursuits other than writing. He would lecture. He would teach. He might even go to Hollywood and try his hand at screenwriting, which differed, he thought, from his serious, creative work in fiction and drama, and there was good money to be made in the movies despite the Depression economy. But he would not allow the need for money to propel his literary efforts or determine the creative choices he made.