Thornton Wilder (53 page)

Meanwhile
Heaven's My Destination
was doing very well. It was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in the United States and the English Book Society in the United Kingdom, and would rank seventh among the top ten bestselling novels of 1935. The novel yielded $27,000 in royalties that first year (worth about $425,000 in 2010 buying power), and was “selling like pancakes,” Wilder exulted, even though “almost everybody” misunderstood it. Once more he clarified his intention: “It's no satire. The hero's not a boob or a sap. George Brush at his best is everybody.”
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Amos Wilder was one of the most appreciative readers of his brother's book, and wrote a perceptive assessment of it in 1943:

 

The discerning saw in the hero, George Brush, an attempt on the part of the author to Americanize Don Quixote, and to give him the run of Main Street in the nineteen thirties. . . . George Brush is a Puritan who is under a misapprehension; he is a reformer wandering about in worlds not realized. It is his fate, out of zeal, always to overshoot the mark. In the field of ethics he is always doing the wrong thing for the right reason, and the right thing for the wrong reason. He has an undigested assortment of ideas and revelations from Marx, Tolstoi, Henry George and Gandhi and an outsider's over-simplifications about the common life. . . . He is not satisfied to hitch his wagon to a star but he must select the most remote and cloudy of all stars, perhaps the nebula in Andromeda or some galaxy entirely invisible to the naked eye.
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WHETHER HE
was working in Hollywood or Chicago or New Haven, or traveling, lecturing, and writing throughout the United States and Europe, Wilder sustained an astonishing number and variety of friendships—steady ones, carried on largely through letters, with Alexander Woollcott, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Sibyl Colefax, Les Glenn, Jed Harris and Ruth Gordon, and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and more sporadic ones with people he met along the way. In Chicago in 1933, for instance, he had enjoyed a “galvanizing” talk with a discouraged young actor who had left the stage to become a writer, and Wilder gave the young man letters of introduction to friends in New York. He was a “rather pudgy-faced youngster with a wing of brown hair falling into his eyes and a vague Oxford epigrammatic manner,” Wilder had written to Woollcott from Chicago in 1933. “The pose is from his misery and soon drops under a responsible pair of eyes like mine. The name is Orson Welles and it's going far.”
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Wilder was connected to a powerful network of theater friends by this time, and he used it to benefit the eighteen-year-old Welles, who often gave Wilder credit for discovering him. Wilder gave Welles a letter of introduction to the illustrious, influential Woollcott, who took Welles under his wing and immediately gave him a new wardrobe as well as introductions to Katharine Cornell and her husband, Guthrie McClintic, who quickly cast Welles in three of their productions—
Candida, The Barretts of Wimpole Street,
and
Romeo and Juliet.
Wilder and Welles were later connected by other strands and threads: In 1940, as Welles worked on the script for his landmark film,
Citizen Kane,
he openly borrowed a pivotal idea from Wilder's
The Long Christmas Dinner,
telescoping time when he wrote the breakfast scene between Kane and Emily in which they traverse the history of their entire marriage as they sit at the breakfast table.
⁴⁶

In March 1935 Wilder, nearly thirty-eight, formed one of the pivotal literary friendships of his life when Gertrude Stein, just turned sixty-one, and Alice B. Toklas, fifty-eight, her companion-lover-amanuensis, arrived to stay in his apartment in Chicago. After Bobsy Goodspeed had introduced him to Stein and Toklas in November 1934, Wilder had written to Mabel: “Gertrude Stein has been in town giving some beautiful lectures. I have met her over and over again, but usually with a throng about her. I told her and Miss Toklas what I felt about Taos, my affection for you and the beauty of the place.”
⁴⁷

This message would not have entirely pleased either Stein or Luhan, for the two were rivals as well as friends. They had known each other since the spring of 1911 in Paris, and, by some accounts, had been so attracted to each other that there was infatuation and flirtation during a time when Gertrude, then thirty-seven, was already in her relationship with Alice, and Mabel, then thirty-three and widowed by the first of her four husbands, was in the midst of one of her many love affairs, this time with her son's twenty-two-year-old tutor.
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On February 24, 1935, Gertrude and Alice settled into Wilder's comfortable apartment at 6020 Drexel Avenue for two frenetic weeks at the University of Chicago. While his guests took over his apartment, Wilder occupied the Visiting Preacher's Suite in Hitchcock Hall at the University of Chicago, where he had stayed before and felt “perfectly at home.”
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Gertrude was to deliver four public lectures to audiences limited to five hundred, and, in a special course, Narration, lead a series of two-hour “conferences,” as Wilder described them, in which she “amplified the ideas contained in these lectures by means of general discussion with some thirty selected students.”
⁵⁰
The university students were handpicked by Wilder, and according to him, there were ten conferences in all. In
Everybody's Autobiography
Gertrude acknowledged that Thornton made all the arrangements, including choosing the participating students.
⁵¹
Wilder wrote to Les Glenn, “At present I am the secretary, errand boy-companion of Gertrude Stein who is teaching here for two weeks—a great, sensible, gallant gal and a great treat.”
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Delighted by the American custom of “drive-yourself” cars, Stein rented a Ford and drove all over the city. (“Gertrude with the wheel of a car in her grasp was like Jehu with the steering reins of a racing chariot,” said her friend Fanny Butcher. One evening in Chicago Gertrude was arrested for driving erratically—and without a license—but managed to prove that she had a license at home in France and to intimidate the police into believing that she was in Chicago as a guest of the government and therefore had diplomatic immunity.)
⁵³
Looking back on her sojourn in Chicago, Gertrude wrote that piloting the “drive-yourself” car around the city was the most exciting aspect of the experience.
⁵⁴

In addition to keeping up with Gertrude and Alice and his teaching schedule, Wilder welcomed two other special guests to Chicago, and the flurry of social events intensified. March 4 marked the arrival of Alexander Woollcott, whom Gertrude had met in New York, and on March 9, Isabel Wilder came to town to promote
Heart Be Still,
her second novel. The Wilders, Fanny Butcher, and her husband, Dick Bokum, joined Stein and Toklas for a festive lunch in Wilder's apartment, no doubt prepared by Alice, a notable chef. (Alice would leave Wilder's refrigerator full of gourmet treats when she and Gertrude vacated the apartment.)

It was not surprising, all things considered, that Wilder found himself “a little shaken in health” during that hectic time or that he had
AN ODD LITTLE UNIMPORTANT NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
, as he described it in a telegram to Stein on April 2.
⁵⁵
Actually, he was totally exhausted and very worried about his health. Encouraged by the book royalties coming in, Wilder requested a year's leave of absence from the University of Chicago in 1935. He was still “very proud of the university and the
wunderkind
president.”
⁵⁶
He wrote to Les Glenn:

 

The University has now given me one year off—April to April. Maybe with plays on Broadway or something other I shall not return. But I don't know any reason now why I shouldn't, except that I teach worse and worse in the classroom itself—tho' if I do say it, I get better and better as a “campus character” in general circulation, accessible to all comers. Some mornings I rise up and swear that I shall never teach again, that I must go away and become a writer etc. Other days I rise up and love it . . . the classes, the tumult on the stairs of Cobb Hall.

What a silly pathless creature I am.
⁵⁷

 

He was also mentally and physically exhausted, as he confided to Amy Wertheimer. “I was in a strange state ever since Christmas,” he wrote to her from Hamden.

 

I was working like mad: eight classroom lectures a week; lectures outside; the long rehearsals of Xerxes; the gregarious social life; endless conferences over MSS with novelists, dramatists, etc., many of whom were not even connected with the University; and finally Gertrude Stein's [two-week] visit for which I was guide, manager and secretary. Naturally nature could not stand this any longer and I was suddenly brushed by light warnings of a nervous breakdown. I began fainting for apparently no reason in public and found that after any conversation an hour long my hands began to tremble and I was filled by an irresistible desire to run away. I saw the warning and immediately changed my life; day before yesterday I came home here and my family is putting the last touches to my convalescence.
⁵⁸

 

Free of his university commitment, and with money in the bank (and, like his hero George Brush, with a history of attributing other people's illnesses and “nervous breakdowns” to psychogenic roots), Wilder decided that the only path to his own renewed good health and vigor and the essential time to write led to one destination: Europe. He had not been there for three years, and he was determined to embark on that journey in early July 1935. However, he was caught in the web of family concerns about his father's rapidly declining health. Dr. Wilder had been a virtual invalid for several years, and although Thornton believed that his father's illness was almost entirely psychogenic, he suffered from seizures and strokes and intermittent paralysis.
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Thornton dutifully paid the mounting medical bills, along with the other family expenses. He had been the family's dependable financial father since 1930, and, with Dwight Dana's guidance, planned to continue that support indefinitely. While Wilder was in Europe, Dana would oversee financial matters and serve as liaison between Wilder's literary interests and his publishers, past and present. His Hollywood agent, Rosalie Stewart, was working on “the possible sale of the movie rights” to
Heaven's My Destination.
Playwright Marc Connelly had entered negotiations for the rights, and then withdrawn, but Stewart had hopes—eventually dashed—of making a sale.
⁶⁰

“I feel like a cad to be going abroad,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas, who hoped to entertain him at their country home at Bilignin in the south of France. His “women-folk” were “standing by,” he said, “attending the protracted exasperating unlovable death of my father. I pass through the house having come—in their eyes—from a brightly lighted gay life in Chicago en route to a life of pleasure and glamor in Europe.”
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One roadblock to his journey was averted when Amos and his bride-to-be, Catharine Kerlin, offered to move their planned September 1 wedding to late June so that Thornton could be there “and usher in striped trousers and a camellia.”
⁶²
He reluctantly agreed—how could he not? But he was “really not well,” he mused. “I have funny moods. I have to withdraw when there are large groups of people, etc. . . . What fetishes there are about us. This notion that one must be present at weddings and funerals.”
⁶³

 

“THERE ARE
some new notes to report to you on the Wilder saga,” Wilder wrote to Mabel in the summer of 1935 after the landmark family event. “Wednesday we got Amos married on a sunny lawn.”
⁶⁴
Catharine and Amos were wed on June 26, 1935, in the garden of the Kerlin home in Moorestown, New Jersey, with Thornton as the best man and Isabel as a bridesmaid. It was on his brother's wedding day that Thornton discovered the custom that the groom was not allowed to see his bride until the ceremony—a detail that would later show up in
Our Town.
Amos was “marrying a fine girl,” Thornton reported to Mabel, “and we're delighted for him.”
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Wilder had very little uninterrupted time for writing in 1935, but by July 2, soon after his brother's wedding, he started a draft of a play he titled
M Marries N
, clearly a forerunner of the first two acts of
Our Town.
A stage manager takes on the role of a minister and tells the audience that “M. . . . marries N. . . . millions of them.”
⁶⁶
The stage manager oversees “an American village,” in which two young people are in love. The intertwining threads of courtship, love, and marriage lingered in Wilder's mind that year: When his friend Fanny Butcher married Dick Bokum in February 1935, Wilder had discussed the “awe-full character of the Marriage Service” with Gertrude Stein. It was “one of the best written scenes in all drama,” Wilder said. “I wish I'd thought of it first.”
⁶⁷

 

“EAGER TO
get abroad; the correspondence over that blame book swamps me,” Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer.
⁶⁸
By June 28 he was bound for Europe aboard the RMS
Ascania,
with George Brush tagging along. Wilder took with him letters from his readers—pages full of questions and complaints about
Heaven's My Destination,
and occasional praise. Wilder's actual traveling companion on the crossing was Robert Frederick Davis, one of his University of Chicago “children” as he called the group of talented scholars and writers he had taken under his wing, including the playwright Robert Ardrey and the artist John Pratt.
⁶⁹