Thornton Wilder (51 page)

 

“I don't want to go on!” he cried. “What good does it do to go to work if I haven't got a home to work for?” He put his hands over his face. “I don't want to live,” he said. “Everything goes wrong.”
⁵³

 

To no avail he offers to give up his job “because my home's more important to me than my business is.”
⁵⁴
Alone again, George feels a “stab of physical pain” when “on the evening walks, he glimpsed through half-drawn blinds the felicities of an American home.”
⁵⁵

In
Heaven's My Destination,
as in much of the work that lay ahead, Wilder the novelist, the dramatist, and the literary archaeologist would excavate and explore the felicities and challenges of family—of home.

23

“STRANDS AND THREADS”

Since I have been keeping this Journal I have seen the incidents of the day's life in a new light. One aspect of this consideration of events is the surprising discovery that life is more a matter of strands and threads.

—THORNTON WILDER,
journal, May 26, 1917

 

The United States and Europe (1930s)

D
uring the thirties Wilder wove into his work the “strands and threads” of his family life, his teaching life, his life on the road—and, always, his rich imaginative and intellectual life. In 1941, writing of Joyce and Cervantes, Wilder said, “The history of a writer is his search for his own subject, his myth-theme, hidden from him, but prepared for him in every hour of his life, his
Gulliver's Travels,
his
Robinson Crusoe
.”
¹
Taking Wilder at his word, it appears that “every hour of his life” had prepared him to write, in a handful of years,
Heaven's My Destination
and then
Our Town
—two landmark works infused with his predominant myth-themes: How do you live? How do you bear the unbearable? How do you handle the various dimensions of love, of faith, of the human condition? How do universal elements forge every unique, individual human life? And where does the family fit in the cosmic scheme of things?

Wilder was offered a variety of jobs in the midthirties, turning down invitations to host a radio show, lecture aboard a luxury yacht in the Greek islands, and cover a sensational murder trial. When he received a tentative offer to edit a “class woman's magazine,” Wilder was actually momentarily tempted, but the firm offer and the position never materialized. “Why should I even consider it?” he wrote to his lawyer.

 

For the same reason that I go to Hollywood: adventure, color, the exhilaration of even pretending that I have a part to play in the immense bright stream of Twentieth Century activities. These things have no relation to my midnight secret life of literary composition. I'm Jekyll and Hyde. With the side of me which is not Poet, and there's lots of it, I like to do things, meet people, restlessly experiment in untouched tracts of my Self, be involved in things, make decisions, pretend that I'm a man of action.
²

 

During the 1930s he was a man in constant motion, if not a man of action, juggling the parts he wanted to play—migrating from fiction to drama, from teaching in the university to lecturing in auditoriums and civic halls across the country, from fraternizing with literary lights and the intelligentsia to mingling with producers, screenwriters, and stars in Hollywood. Wilder's first formal movie contract was negotiated in 1934 by Rosalie Stewart and Harry Edington of the H. E. Edington–F. W. Vincent Agency, whose clients included Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and other luminaries. This agreement took Wilder to the RKO studios in Hollywood for two weeks in 1934 to discuss ideas for a possible movie about Joan of Arc, starring Katharine Hepburn, with George Cukor directing. Wilder was paid fifteen hundred dollars and engaged to write a forty-page outline, which, if accepted, would lead to the assignment to write the movie script and be present for the filming.

ENTIRE OFFICE ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT YOUR MAGNIFICENT TREATMENT OF JOAN OF ARC
, his agents telegraphed in May 1934, and Wilder waited to hear if he would be called back to work on the film for an additional fee of $13,500.
³
While there was perhaps gratuitous praise for Wilder's treatment, RKO declined to exercise his option on the grounds that they wanted to approach the film from a different angle. As it turned out, RKO abandoned the project, apparently because of lack of money, a growing concern even in Hollywood during the Depression.

It was no doubt a disadvantage to the Joan of Arc treatment that Wilder the scholar seemed to overtake Wilder the dramatist as he emphasized the authenticity of his research, occasionally burdened his characters with cumbersome dialogue, and justified the didactic intentions for certain scenes—such as those in heaven, which were important, he explained,

 

1. To please the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church.

2. To raise the closing scenes of the picture from the realm of physical suffering and torture to the realm of a triumphant moral victory.

3. To cast over even the homely passages an arresting awe-inspiring sense of divine intervention and guidance,—applicable to every member of the audience.
⁴

 

Wilder wanted to satisfy what he presumed would be the audience's curiosity about what it felt like to be a saint, and what ordinary daily life was like for a “great historical character” (an idea he would revisit in his novel
The Ides of March)
. He hoped the audience would come to “the final acceptance and willing grasp of death as a meaningful, triumphant and necessary ACT.”
⁵
This lofty scenario did not suit Hollywood—but there are glimmerings of the third act of
Our Town
in Wilder's depiction of “ordinary daily life,” and in his words about death.

Wilder was intrigued with the potential of the motion picture as an art form, and beguiled by the opportunity to earn so much money so fast for so little work. In the summer of 1934, Samuel Goldwyn asked Wilder to come to Hollywood to “add words to a former silent picture of Ronald Coleman's called ‘Dark Angel' ” and then to “write a new climactic closing scene to Anna Sten's ‘We Live Again' (Tolstoi's Resurrection).” Wilder reported that he wrote three scenes that had been “shot,” and so, he concluded, “I have had my baptism in the films.”
⁶
When
We Live Again
appeared in 1934, Wilder did not expect or receive a film credit.

It was a heady existence, balancing the adventure and color of movieland with his “midnight secret life” as a serious writer. His Hollywood social life quickly grew to be even more fun than his exuberant life in Chicago—although not as emotionally satisfying because it was shallow and fleeting. While he often made fun of it, Wilder relished the glitz and glamour of Hollywood in what has been called its golden age. There were moments when his own life in Hollywood could have been a movie, starring some of the biggest names in films, with himself in a cameo guest spot. He even made the Hollywood Sidelights syndicated gossip column on September 14, 1934, hailed as a “Lion at Parties” and a “tremendous success” in the many divergent circles of Hollywood society that he had “penetrated.” The columnist Mollie Herrick admired his “genius for laughter and play” and his ability to switch in an instant from “nonsense to profundity.”
⁷

Wilder dined at Pickfair with Mary Pickford. The actress Marion Davies, supported by her lover, William Randolph Hearst, “sent out a collaborator to cook up a story for Miss Davies' use in the movies,” Wilder wrote to Mabel Luhan. “It's all about how a girl dressed as a boy and became the creator of all Shakespeare's heroines at the Globe Theatre: Willie Hewes, the dark lady of the Sonnets. Yes, Essex and Elizabeth are in it. Did you ever hear anything more foolish?”
⁸
The writer, film director, and composer Rupert Hughes (the uncle of Howard Hughes) took Wilder to a Hollywood Writers Club dinner, during which, Wilder said, he made a “short bad speech,” Will Rogers made a “long heavenly one,” and there was an earthquake.
⁹

Ruth Gordon was in town for screen tests at MGM, and “dazzled the powers over there,” Wilder wrote to the actor Charles Laughton, predicting that “something big will come of them.”
¹⁰

Wilder was spending time with Gordon, Laughton, and Helen Hayes, as well as screenwriters such as the playwrights Paul Green and Charles Lederer, the latter best known for his often edgy comedies. Lederer was “sick in bed of trying to build a movie about Mr. Wm. R. Hearst's scenario,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. “I am very fond of Charlie and to my great surprise he is very fond of me. We collaborated on a skit about censorship for the gala number of the
Hollywood Reporter
. I refused to sign my own name and used James Craven instead.”
¹¹

The family back home in Connecticut followed Hollywood gossip and happenings with keen interest, and because the frugal Wilders could now afford to indulge in the occasional telegram, Wilder sent one to his mother on September 8, 1934:
WAS OFFERED AND TURNED DOWN SOLO JOB ON NEXT GARBO PICTURE STOP ROLLER SKATED WITH WALT DISNEY
.
¹²

But Hollywood life was not all glamour, he wrote his friend Grace Foresman. “It's a mixture of very hard work and the industrious contrivance of untruths.”
¹³
It was a dazzling, illusory, addictive, and often exhausting life with intense, deadline-driven work, and the drinking he was now doing at night with his new cohorts. It was enough to drive a man back to teaching. “Now I'm dying to withdraw from the whole business, refuse any money, and return to my university work, my correspondence, my reading and my thoughts,” he said. “I haven't the strength to break off. Really.”
¹⁴

For Wilder, as for other novelists and playwrights who hired out in Hollywood during the Depression, there could be big payoffs, and Wilder had the chance to work on some serious projects in addition to the proposed Joan of Arc film. He collaborated with Paul Green to rewrite the final scene of Sam Goldwyn's
We Live Again,
based on Tolstoy's
Resurrection.
Goldwyn pronounced their work beautiful, but Wilder, Green, and three other writers did not receive on-screen credit for the finished product; the credit went, of course, to the principal screenwriters, Maxwell Anderson, Preston Sturges, and Leonard Praskins.
¹⁵

All in all during that first year of movie assignments, Wilder worked more than two weeks for RKO, six weeks for Samuel Goldwyn, and two weeks for William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Productions—and the work was lucrative: Wilder earned $11,500 for ten weeks of work in Hollywood in 1934, more than double his half-time teaching salary, and five times the fees he earned out on the lecture circuit.
¹⁶
He needed the money as the Depression economy gnawed away at lecture fees, lowering them dramatically. Keedick found extra dates for him whenever possible, usually at reduced fees. “So many states have declared a bank moratorium that lecture committees everywhere have become frightened,” Keedick informed him, explaining why some lecture dates had fallen through. “This country is in a deplorable state due to our wretched banking laws which were passed years ago when, I imagine, bankers controlled the government even more completely than now.”
¹⁷
As if to fit the emotional atmosphere of the time, Wilder notified Keedick that lectures would “be a shade more serious from now on: I offer the Titles: ‘Novel, Allegory and Myth' or ‘The Novel versus The Drama.'”
¹⁸

Wilder wrote to an old friend on October 13, 1934, “I work in Hollywood a few months every year. I am very interested in the movies as a form; I am working very hard at its peculiar technique and after a few years of apprenticeship I hope to be allowed a chance to write one that is all myself and all deeply felt. Besides it has fallen upon me to sustain several members of my family and the earnings out there are a great help.”
¹⁹

In a demonstration of his serious interest in movies as an art form, Wilder later sent Lee Keedick a synopsis of a lecture he planned to give. “Motion Pictures and Literature,” he called it, and it concluded with the prediction that the motion picture could become an independent art form and take its place as a form of literature.
²⁰

Wilder's love affair with Hollywood lasted for several years. He wrote to Dwight Dana from Hollywood in August 1938: “You will be interested to know that Columbia offered me $5000 a week to finish off the script of ‘Golden Boy' and De Mille today wanted me to do some work on ‘Union Pacific.' ”
²¹
He found a certain security in knowing that earning money in Hollywood was an option. He could pay the medical bills for his father's “protracted invalidism.”
²²
He could provide certain luxuries for his family—sending his mother and Janet to Scotland, for instance—and certain necessities such as a new suit for himself, since his clothes were “falling to pieces.” However, he assured Dwight Dana, overseer of his budget, except for an occasional dinner in a “dazzling” Hollywood restaurant, not a dollar he spent was wasteful.
²³

 

PART OF
Wilder's discipline as a writer grew out of his pervasive sense of the artist's responsibility to his art, to his subjects, to his world, to himself. Bound up with that was his often-frustrating inability to create works of fiction or drama that lived up to his visions for them. He wrote to Aleck Woollcott in 1938, “Success is accorded to a work of art when the central intention is felt in every part of it, and intention and execution are good.” As he endeavored to articulate his artistic intentions to readers—friends and strangers alike—who challenged him with questions, he was continually refining his ideas about the purpose of literature and art generally and his own creative endeavors specifically.
²⁴
In particular Wilder found himself devoting a significant amount of time and energy in the thirties and afterward to clarifying for himself and his readers his intentions for
Heaven's My Destination
, as well as explaining the literary techniques he employed in the book.