Thornton Wilder (54 page)

Wilder had taken a special interest in Robert Davis, a “grave yet turbulent” philosophy major who had just received his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago. “Don't be mad,” Wilder had written to Dwight Dana in the spring of 1935, explaining that he wanted to invest in the future of this “very brilliant student” by funding a year's study abroad, since the university's graduate school was at that time “very poor in Philosophy.” Davis was from a large family in Chicago, where his father worked for the Swift meatpacking company. Wilder had discussed with Davis's parents his offer of six hundred dollars to subsidize a year abroad for Davis to study philosophy, psychology, and German, and the funds were accepted.
⁷⁰

After Davis left the ship at Plymouth for a tour of Scotland, Wilder went on to Paris, and then he and Davis went to Bilignin to see Gertrude and Alice. He described their eight-day visit in a letter to Mabel:

 

Automobile trips in the environs; an intense preoccupation with two dogs; Alice B. Toklas's sublime housekeeping; and Gertrude Stein's difficult magnificent and occasionally too abstract and faintly disillusioned alpine wisdom about the Human Mind, identity, the sense of time and How we Know. I am devoted to both of them, but in the presence of Gertrude's gifts one must occasionally scramble pretty hard to realize one's self, collect it, encourage it, and trust it.
⁷¹

 

After some “splendid Tyrolian hiking and some great music at Salzburg,” Wilder moved on to Vienna, where he craved solitude and long walks in the woods. He would be a “surly hermit” for a while, he explained to the poet H.D.
⁷²
When he was ready he would settle down to work again. “My head is hot with three fine fiction subjects and three for non-fiction,” he wrote to Mabel. “I keep jotting down notes toward all six and finally one of them becomes more insistent than the other and that will be my task.”
⁷³

24

OUR LIVING AND OUR DYING

Well, people a thousand years from now, this is the way we were—in our growing-up, in our marrying, in our doctoring, in our living, and in our dying.

—THORNTON WILDER,

early draft of
Our Town

 

The United States, the Caribbean, and Europe (1930s)

I
n the midthirties an eclectic array of subjects filled the pages of Wilder's working notebooks—a drama about a caliph in the
Arabian Nights
; an homage to the British humorist, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter P. G. Wodehouse; a farce about an exuberant matchmaker; and a quiet play about life in a mythical New Hampshire village. Ultimately this last drama emerged from the cluster of Wilder's plays in progress to claim his energy and attention.
Our Town
was years in the making, and he wrote much of it in transit, in American and European towns. He was a perpetual traveler, habitually living “in two suitcases and a brief-case,” a mark of his transient lifestyle as well as the relative ease with which he could transplant himself from one place to another.
¹
This time he had gone abroad to rest and recover from the strenuous months of overwork in Chicago and on the lecture trail—and then to make serious progress on the unfinished manuscript drafts packed in his briefcase.

He liked railroad stations, especially in Austria, he wrote to Gertrude Stein from Salzburg in late August 1935. Wilder rose early every morning and walked to the Salzburg railway station for “a pre-breakfast,” which he especially enjoyed on Sunday mornings when the station was packed with people attending mass in the second-class waiting room, or singing folk songs in four-part harmony in the third-class restaurant, or embarking on a day trip to the mountains.
²
When he was not dining with the crowds in the railroad station, he was socializing with such luminaries as the director Max Reinhardt, whom he had revered since his boyhood in Berkeley, and the German novelist and Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann, introduced to Wilder by Reinhardt at a midnight supper he and his wife hosted at their castle after a performance of
Faust
at the Salzburg Music Festival.
³
That night Max Reinhardt offered Wilder the directorship of the theater school he hoped to establish in Los Angeles, but Wilder turned it down.
⁴

Wilder seesawed between convivial hours spent with friends new or old, and solitary hours sequestered in his work—indulging his gregarious self until he tired of company, and then retreating into his writing self until weariness or frustration or fulfillment drove him away from his desk and manuscripts to socialize once more. He saw his aunt Charlotte Niven in Innsbruck, and in Salzburg spent time with Bobsy Goodspeed, Sibyl Colefax, Katharine Cornell, and the violinist Fritz Kreisler, as well as Reinhardt, one of the cofounders of the Salzburg Festival. Wilder and Robert Davis immersed themselves in the festival—Toscanini and the Vienna Philharmonic, Reinhardt's lavish version of Goethe's
Faust
, and Bruno Walter's
Don Giovanni.
During the festival, for fun, Wilder and Bobsy Goodspeed took a class in symphony conducting from the Austrian composer and conductor Felix Weingartner.
⁵

Throughout, Wilder was serving as patron or mentor to a variety of friends and acquaintances. As his friendship with Sibyl Colefax flourished, they exchanged long letters, and he began to confide in her about his writing projects. In person or in correspondence, he was a confidant and literary adviser for Mabel Luhan in New Mexico and Gertrude Stein in France, sometimes even acting as Stein's publishing agent. He was both patron and mentor to Robert Davis, paying his way to Europe, funding his year of study there, seeing to it that he had German-language lessons, and introducing him to people who might be helpful to him. An inveterate walker and hiker, Wilder insisted that Davis accompany him on hikes through the wild splendor of the Dolomites. They bought “leder-hosen and complete rig,” and posed for a photograph that Wilder sent to Stein and Toklas.
⁶

Before long, however, Wilder was “cranky from travelling, from not being in one place more than two days at a time” and “from having to speak and think in French, German, and Italian and English (every now and then I have amnesia and can't remember one word in any).”
⁷
He was eager to focus on writing, and he needed “silence and solitude” and long walks. He found them in nearby Kobenzl, at the Schlosshotel, where he began a “new life”:

 

On a hilltop—nobody near. Long walks through woods stretching on every side of the hotel, with great prospects of the city in the distance with St. Stephen's tower, the Danube winding about the plains that stretch toward Hungary.

And the hours falling like leaves.

At last I shall hear myself and when the inner monologue gets too loud I can go into town.
⁸

 

At the same time Wilder was reading, traveling with a book in hand. He gave up on eighteenth-century dramatist Carlo Goldoni's realistic comedies because the Venetian dialect was too difficult, but he devoured
Der Zerrissene
and other farcical comedies by Johann Nestroy, Austria's popular nineteenth-century playwright. He read Voltaire's
Zadig
and Goethe's
Faust
twice
,
the plays of the great nineteenth-century Austrian dramatist Franz Grillparzer, and the fiction of the nineteenth-century Austrian novelist Adalbert Stifter.
⁹
Wilder's German was improving so steadily that he could “tear up and down Goethe and Thomas Mann and Freud like they was English,” he wrote to his brother and sister-in-law.
¹⁰
He reported that his farce-comedy was “shaping up” in his mind; this was an early stab at
The Merchant of Yonkers,
influenced by Nestroy's work, which Wilder had been reading for several years.
¹¹
He would base his
Merchant
on Nestroy's
Einen Jux will er sich machen
(
On the Razzle,
or “He Just Wants to Have Fun”) with a little help from a scene from Molière's
The Miser.

The more time he spent in Europe in 1935, the more he began to worry about the world scene: “I guess there's going to be a War soon,” Wilder wrote to Amos and Catharine from Vienna in September. “Italy had 500,000 men in manoevres [
sic
] in their northernmost mountains when I was there and now your Geneva is on pins and needles. . . . Amputated, strangled Austria hasn't money enough to buy a cannon even, so the Austrians sit in cafés all day over one
mokka
and wax witty about dictators and empires.”
¹²

But he had to force his eyes away from world issues to read the page proofs of Gertrude Stein's latest book,
Narration,
the University of Chicago Press edition of the lectures she had given at the university—and a book whose publication in 1935 in large part hinged on Wilder's agreement to write an introduction. He could be diplomatically forthright with Stein about her lectures and writings, and sometimes he simply told her candidly that he had no idea what she was talking about. Stein also asked Wilder to read the manuscript of her unpublished
Four in America,
which she had begun writing in 1932 and finished in 1933
.
In this treatise on creativity, Stein wrote hypothetical biographical portraits speculating on what Ulysses S. Grant, the Wright brothers, Henry James, and George Washington might have accomplished if they had devoted their lives and creative energies to different professions. Wilder wrote to Stein from Berchtesgaden, Germany, “I am all happy and grateful about Grant; scarcely understand a word of Wilbur Wright; and still have the other two to read—read slowly and aloud.”
¹³
Having read further, he wrote from Vienna, “I cast myself out into the open sea of friendship and hope to be supported and understood. SO: there are long long stretches of the
Four in America
where I don't understand a word.”
¹⁴
Stein thanked him for his observations and hoped that they could talk them over. That manuscript would not be published until 1947, the year after Stein's death, and Wilder contributed a long introduction that was part literary criticism, part affirmation, and part eulogy for his friend.

When Wilder wrote introductions to Stein's
Narration
(1935) and
The Geographical History of America
(1936) he not only lent his highly visible name and literary reputation to Stein's ongoing effort to establish herself firmly with the American audience, but also served as her emissary and intermediary with American publishers, especially Bennett Cerf at Random House. In Wilder's elucidations of Stein's work he functioned as her virtual translator, distilling the essence of her often dense and convoluted prose. In the introduction Wilder highlighted some of the ideas he and Stein had explored in their conversations, especially those that had stimulated or coincided with his own thought: The question of how creativity operates. The concept that repetition is a dynamic in all of nature as well as in human life, and, as Wilder put it, foreshadowing
Our Town,
“Repeating is emphasis. Every time a thing is repeated it is slightly different.” And Stein's belief, first stressed to him by his parents, that, as Wilder summarized it, “the richest rewards for the reader have come from those works in which the authors admitted no consideration of an audience into their creating mind.”
¹⁵

He had to lobby aggressively with Cerf for the publication of Stein's
Geographical History of America
. “G. Stein has written a very good book,” Wilder wrote to Aleck Woollcott, who by 1935 was one of the most formidable literary and theater critics in the United States. For years he had written reviews and commentary for the
New York Times
and the
New York World
and then, from 1929 to 1934, for the
New Yorker
in his column, “Shouts And Murmurs.” From 1929 to 1933 he reviewed books on CBS radio, and beginning in 1933 he had his own popular CBS radio show,
The Town Crier.
It was said that if Woollcott merely mentioned a book it could sell a thousand copies, and he could make or break plays and actors.
¹⁶
He had promoted the careers of Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, Orson Welles, Paul Robeson, and Helen Hayes, among others. But it was mutual friendship rather than promotion that prompted Wilder's letter about Stein's book:

 

I don't know yet whether it's a very great book. She does. Bennett Cerf says the rewards of her previous ones were so slender that he doesn't dare publish this one (“The Geographical History of America, or the Relations between Human Nature and the Human Mind”) . . . Gertrude . . . and P. Picasso (and Bennett Cerf) want it to be published with the text on one side and my explanatory marginalia on the other, reproduced in my own handwriting. I don't want to do that. It's true that I can clarify many an apparently willful inanity and (with the help of those wonderful conversations show it to be brilliant phrasing and thinking), but there are long stretches I cannot; and it's those stretches where the pretentious explicator ought to be strong.
¹⁷

 

Many readers have observed that Wilder was influenced by Stein, and he himself acknowledged her influence—but few have noted Wilder's influence on Stein, as documented in her published work. In
The Geographical History of America,
which she wrote in the early years of her friendship with Wilder, and which is often called her culminating work, Wilder is a presence, called by name, and a strong voice who sometimes affirmed, sometimes challenged, and occasionally crystallized her own ideas. In one of their conversations Stein talked about inspiration, and Wilder later recalled that she told him, “What we know is formed in our head by thousands of small occasions in the daily life,” emphasizing the importance of all the “thousands of occasions in the daily life that go into our head to form our ideas.” She did not like the word “inspiration,” he remembered, “because it suggests that someone else is blowing that knowledge into you. It is not being blown into you; it is very much your own and was acquired by you in thousands of tiny occasions in your life”—an idea akin to Wilder's later reflection in his essay on Joyce that a writer's subject or “myth-theme” is “prepared for him in every hour of his life.”
¹⁸

Wilder devoted hours to reading Stein's manuscripts and commenting on them, and then performing some of the tasks a literary agent would normally do in getting the work to potential publishers. Stein was not alone in seeking Wilder's advice and support. He read and praised Mabel Dodge Luhan's
Winter in Taos,
published to critical acclaim in 1935, one of her seven books published in her lifetime. Later, at Mabel's request, he responded in detail to the manuscript draft of a novel she was working on in 1936. In that exchange he was the willing teacher in the equivalent of a private tutorial in advanced creative writing. He reminded her, “The greatest idea-men in the world when they really wanted to convey always found themselves moving into a story: think of Plato and his Cave and his Charioteers; think of Christ and his ‘there was once a man who . . .'”
¹⁹
Mabel apparently gave up on the novel and returned to writing nonfiction.