Thornton Wilder (46 page)

Among other philanthropies, Wilder was financing an Oberlin College education for Tom Harris, a New Haven boy, the son of a blue-collar family. Harris had attended the Lawrenceville School, and Wilder paid his expenses all the way through Oberlin. “Your bank account is getting rather low,” Dana cautioned, “and the prospects of its being replenished in the near future are not so very bright, and I am, therefore, writing to suggest that you go as slow as you can on expenditures, certainly until the new book comes out and until we see how it goes.”
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Dana recognized, he said, that Wilder was “under such heavy personal expenses in connection with keeping your family going and in other directions,” but he warned Wilder again in October, “Your income is so irregular that it is really impossible to say whether you are living beyond your income or not, but I should be afraid that this coming year that would certainly be the case unless you can hold your expenses down to a considerably lower point than last year and also unless your income from lectures and from the book of plays is very considerable.”
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Wilder responded promptly: “I have turned over an entirely new leaf,” he wrote. “I have gone in for Voluntary Poverty. Voluntary Poverty is practically indistinguishable from Involuntary Poverty, but the hair's breadth of distinction makes a world of difference. . . . I don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't take taxis. And so on.”
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Despite his “Voluntary Poverty,” however, he wanted to contribute to various charities in New Haven and Chicago. He was also giving to a “secret Trustee's Fund” at the university to help students facing Depression-era hardship—“students who are fainting in the corridors for lack of food and doing unheard of feats to get an education.” He wrote that it “makes education wonderful to see the price these students pay, and it makes Yale look cold, conventional, constipated and unlighted.”
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WILDER THE
successful novelist was also, simultaneously and fervently, Wilder the aspiring dramatist. During the thirties his escalating renown as the novelist, the lecturer, the professor, and the linguist helped open the doors of Broadway and Hollywood to Wilder the playwright. Since his teenage years he had been learning his craft as a playwright, immersing himself in dramatic literature—seeing every possible play; analyzing the texts, the acting, the directing, the staging; writing his short plays; and then leaping into ambitious experiments with the full-length drama. Living with self-rebuke in the aftermath of the failed production of
The Trumpet Shall Sound
, he filled notebooks with names of three- and four-act plays, and ideas and scenes for some of them. Then he reverted to the discipline of the one-act play, first as the laboratory for his experiments in drama, and then simply because he appreciated the one-act form for itself. On November 5, 1931, Coward-McCann and the Yale University Press published his second volume of plays,
The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act—
six plays in all.

It was fitting that Wilder worked on the one-act plays in Germany in 1931 with the volatile, charismatic director Jed Harris as his traveling companion. Their friendship had grown since their paths had crossed briefly on that northbound train in Florida in 1927. There would be a profound intersection of their professional lives in 1937. But in May 1931, Wilder was back in Munich, one of his favorite European cities, when Harris joined him for a few days. They went to the theater and to the opera—
Don Giovanni—
where they encountered Polly and Gene Tunney. The next day Wilder gathered Harris and the Tunneys and “threw a brilliant lunch at the Bayerischer Hof (the waiters fainted in coils),” he wrote to his family. “I'm very fond of Jed,” Wilder added,

 

but if he'd stayed another week I'd have been in a Sanatorium. We had long ten-hour conversations about everything under the sun. He shopped the antiquarians for old furniture. Like Andy [Townson] (in the same hotel) he slept every day until noon, so I continued producing a new one-act play every two days. . . . Anyway I was sorry to see him go.
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Wilder—too trusting, sometimes naive and gullible—could become too enamored of a friend. Such was the case with the mercurial Harris, who habitually alienated almost everyone who knew him. In the summer of 1933 Sibyl Colefax warned Wilder from afar to be cautious about Jed Harris, whose career, like that of many directors, seesawed between success and failure, with Harris's volatile temperament vacillating accordingly.

Wilder's friendship with Jed Harris expanded to include Harris's mistress, the actress Ruth Gordon, with whom he had a son, Jones Harris, born in 1929. Wilder's friendship with Gordon would last for the rest of his life, and he would write certain dramatic roles especially for her. From the first Wilder respected her as a remarkably talented actress, thoroughly enjoyed her company, and soon began calling her the “finest girl in the world” as well as the “drollest and most original.”
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TOWARD THE
end of the 1920s, Wilder recalled in later years, he “began to lose pleasure in going to the theatre.” He “ceased to believe in the stories” he saw presented there.
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At the same time, he reflected, “the conviction was growing in me that the theatre was the greatest of all the arts. I felt that something had gone wrong with it in my time and that it was fulfilling only a small part of its potentialities.”
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After the great success of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
Wilder could now command attention for almost anything he wanted to publish, and, as already noted, in 1931 Coward-McCann brought out
The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act.
At the same time Yale University Press issued a special signed limited edition of the plays. These one-acts were widely noticed and, for the most part, positively received. Right away some of them were produced, chiefly by amateur theater groups, with Samuel French, Inc., handling the dramatic rights.
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Wilder explained his intentions years later: “I began writing one-act plays that tried to capture not verisimilitude but reality,” he wrote. “In
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
four kitchen chairs represent an automobile and a family travels seventy miles in twenty minutes. In
Pullman Car Hiawatha
some more plain chairs serve as berths and we hear the very vital statistic of the towns and fields that passengers are traversing; we even hear the planets over their heads.”
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Well ahead of
Our Town,
Wilder was experimenting with theatrical time and space—departing from linear time; minimizing settings and props; using a stage manager to narrate and interpret events.

Looking back on these plays in 1974, he told an interviewer, “My earlier one-act plays, before
Our Town,
were free of scenery too and things went back and forth in time. . . . In my plays I attempted to raise ordinary daily conversation between ordinary people to the level of the universal human experience.”
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ONCE
The Woman of Andros
and his one-act plays were launched, Wilder forged ahead with his fourth novel. In 1930 he had made a list of writing projects that were already under way on paper or in his imagination, some of them dating from 1929 or even earlier. Near the top of the list were two ideas for picaresque novels, for he had been reading Casanova, teaching
Don Quixote,
and ruminating on the picaresque form. Item three on the list in his journal on June 27, 1930, was “Picaresque: Baptist ‘Don Quixote.' Selling education textbooks through Texas, Oklahoma, etc.”
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That would be his next creative project. Edmund Wilson and others speculated that Wilder's decision to set some of his new one-act plays and his fourth novel in the United States came in response to Michael Gold's attack. Isabel Wilder perpetuated that idea many years later when she wrote that
Heaven's My Destination
was her brother's “riposte to the accusation from some quarters that he was refusing to deal with native American subjects,” and that “Crossing the United States on several lecture tours had given him the material that he needed in order to write it.”
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But such motivation alone did not govern Wilder's creative choices. First, he had always chosen his subjects out of his deep-rooted artistic interests—characters who fascinated him; questions and themes he wanted to probe; literary challenges, including forms he wanted to tackle; stories he could not resist telling. He did not write for the marketplace or for money or for a particular audience—especially not for critics. Furthermore, like many American writers in the postwar twenties, Wilder had been thinking for some time about what he called the “flowering of America,” especially American literature and culture.

He was soon absorbed in the picaresque form, and in his picaresque hero—his Baptist Don Quixote. This novel would be wildly different from its three predecessors in form, setting, and characterization, but it would be all of a piece with the major questions and themes that always engaged him; How do we live? How do we love? How do we cope? How do we bear the unbearable? Where do we turn for solace and survival? In
The Cabala
he gave us a decaying society and a declining religion
—
and in our last glimpse of the protagonist, we see him bound “eagerly toward the new world and the last and greatest of all cities.”
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The Bridge of San Luis Rey
takes readers back two centuries before
The Cabala,
but despite the stark differences in place and time between the two novels,
The Bridge
treats many of the same themes and questions—and the characters who question orthodox religion in
The Bridge
are not treated kindly by the church or the society they inhabit.
The Woman of Andros
moves still farther back in time, long before the birth of the religion that has become stagnant and repressive in Wilder's first two novels. In
Andros
he searches the pagan soul for answers to his enduring questions. In the novel he decided to call
Heaven's My Destination
readers are catapulted to the American heartland in the 1930s to accompany George Brush, a tragicomic everyman, on his dogged journey to practice what his religion preaches, no matter the consequences.

From Lake Sunapee in the summer of 1932, Wilder wrote to Bill Nichols that he was “20,000 words advanced in [a] stunning new novel—Don Quixote—travelling salesman idealist; picaresque; Arkansas and Texas. Funny; vulgar; hotbreaking [
sic
]. From Baptist fundamentalist to sad tolerant wisdom in three years.”
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Hemmed in as he was with teaching and lecturing, Wilder had to work sporadically on
Heaven's My Destination
—but the story grew like yeast-rising bread even when he wasn't putting words on paper. Of necessity during the decade of the Great Depression, Wilder traveled the American landscape as a professional lecturer, hawking his ideas and his books—but in the process he was exploring the American vernacular and the American mind and spirit. Through his teaching and his travels, especially in the American heartland, he was seeing Depression hardships close-up, and witnessing countless variations of American despair, grit, and ingenuity. One by-product of the experience was the promise of gleaning rich material with every mile he traveled on the lecture tour, every person he met along the way, every conversation he shared or overheard in diners and bars and hotels and railroad cars.

Riding the tide of his celebrity as a Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling novelist, Thornton Wilder the man began to outgrow the shy awkward boy who, during his earlier years, had stood on the outside of society, looking in. He still worried, he said, that he grew “more like Uncle Pio every day, all onlooker, all uncommitted participant,” yet more and more often he was less the observer and more the active participant who actually belonged in the social group.
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Now he was more often viewed as the handsome, dapper bachelor with impeccable manners, an engaging wit, and an infectious ebullience for all his erudition—and he had become one of the most famous American writers in the world.

His name even seeped into Chicago gossip columns: “The columnists in town are linking my name with a certain xxxxxx xxxx [
sic
]; think nothing of it,” he wrote jauntily to Isabel in May 1933. He was also openly enjoying the company of new friends such as the flamboyant actress and speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan, then in her late forties. Wilder told Isabel, “I had a fine evening with Texas Guinan; we rejoice in one another.”
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Guinan's colorful career included rodeos, more than two hundred silent movies, two talkies, several Broadway musicals, and a series of gigs as a popular speakeasy hostess, beginning at bootlegger and racketeer Larry Fay's El Fay Club in New York. In and out of trouble with the law, the glamorous Guinan starred in her own revue in the early 1930s. When she was forbidden to stage it in France because it was too risqué, she named the show
Too Hot for Paris
and took it on the road in the United States and Canada, where it enjoyed a roaring if scandalous success.

“My life has variety,” Wilder wrote in a letter that must have at least momentarily alarmed its recipient, staid Dwight Dana back in New Haven. “The other night I had supper (4 am) as the guest of Jack McGurn (Capone's chief representative and lieutenant) and Sam [Hunt] the golf bag killer. Tonight I dine at Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick's off the gold plate that Napoleon gave Josephine. Variety, variety.”
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