Thornton Wilder (58 page)

He was reading Alfred North Whitehead during those months, and found Whitehead's “Christian-Platonic” philosophy provocative. “I think you'd be pained and shocked to hear my views on international affairs,” he wrote Mabel:

 

They'd seem to you an optimism too easily arrived at in the light of the daily news; but more and more (under the shadow of Whitehead's philosophy—Christian—Platonic) I see a long-time, a planetary curve and that I cling to. . . . I have decided that the human race as a whole can be given the benefit of the doubt; and the set-backs of one year and one decade and one century no longer completely obscure the sky. But I hate Hitler and the Spanish rebels.
¹⁸

 

As Wilder the citizen gave his fellow human beings the benefit of the doubt,
Our Town
was taking deeper root and seeds were being sown for a later play—the one he would call
The Skin of Our Teeth.

 

“THE FAMILY'S
fine,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas from Hamden in the spring of 1937. “Ma loves having two chillun in the house; she darns my socks; listens avidly to all radio news-reports, detective stories and serial dramas. I lie on my stomach on the floor playing solitaire and listen to the concerts.”
¹⁹
Isabel was at home on Deepwood Drive, in love with a New Haven doctor and hoping for a marriage proposal. She had just finished
Let Winter Go,
her third novel. According to Thornton, it was “a light novel that may run serially in one of the woman's glazed-paper magazines and make her an heiress.”
²⁰
As the reviews of her novel came in, Wilder proudly shared the good ones with his friends.
²¹
Amos, Catharine, and their baby daughter lived in Newton Center, Massachusetts, where Amos was still teaching at the Andover Newton Theological Seminary. Charlotte, meanwhile, was still writing her poems and her novel, supporting herself by working on the WPA Federal Writers' Project in New York. Her poems appeared, along with work by Kenneth Rexroth, Richard Wright, Claude McKay, and other struggling writers, in
American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose & Verse by Members of the Federal Writers' Project with Sixteen Prints by the Federal Art Project,
published in 1937.

Wilder left Hamden hoping to spend most of the summer of 1937 sequestered at the MacDowell Colony, hard at work on his plays (“June and July would bring real work from me, reluctant writer that I am,” he wrote to Woollcott), but he changed his plans to accept an unexpected and irresistible invitation.
²²
He was asked to attend the Paris conference of the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle of the League of Nations as the American delegate, substituting for Frederick Paul Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation. The Second General Conference of National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation would take place in Paris July 20–26, with sessions to be led by the philosopher and Symbolist poet Paul Valéry on “The Immediate Future of Letters.” Wilder wrote to Mabel, “This is the first time there has ever been an American delegate and he'll have to defend the charge that the U.S. is corrupting the world.”
²³

Because his round-trip fare would be paid, he planned to stay on in Europe after the conference. “It's about decided I shall spend eight or nine months in Zurich next year,” he had written to Stein and Toklas that spring. “I'm in no doubt about my country and countrymen being the best there are, but I got to get away from them for a while.”
²⁴

Once the conference was over, Wilder planned to go to Salzburg for the festival, and then settle in Zurich for a few months away from “the whole overinsistent hammering American scene,” and temporary “immersion in old wise tired Europe.”
²⁵
As much as anything, he needed to get away from Deepwood Drive and the family he dearly loved in order to find peace and solitude for writing.

Wilder's speeches at the 1937 Paris conference marked his first appearance as an American emissary and a spokesperson for American literature and culture.
²⁶
When he arrived he was intimidated. “It's all a little alarming for a provincial little intellectual,” he wrote to Stein. “The stenographic report of our conversations is being published by the League of Nations.”
²⁷
He had prepared “about six little speeches” on various topics—and in his typical generous way, gave Stein credit for some of the pivotal ideas he contributed to the conference discussion. “Yes, defense of the American's right to remake himself a language from the fabric of the English language, with a diagram of the difference between the American and English minds. All Gertrude.”
²⁸
At the same time he was reading the 1936 edition of H. L. Mencken's classic,
The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States.
In their catalytic hours of conversation over the years, Stein and Wilder shared numerous ideas and theories, and Wilder was careful in his attribution—sometimes verging on overstatement—if he elaborated on her thoughts.

After the Paris conference Wilder spent two weeks with Stein and Toklas in Bilignin at the house they rented in the country. “It's lovely here,” he wrote to his mother and Isabel. “Drives, calls on neighboring gentry, walks, Conversation and wonderful meals.”
²⁹
That summer Stein begged Thornton to collaborate with her on a novel, and they discussed the idea at length.
³⁰
He told Stein and others that he didn't fully understand her concept of the novel and ultimately said no, and Stein wrote several drafts of
Ida
A Novel
before it was published in 1941.

Gertrude was “a heady drink of water,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott, but he appreciated her “heroic” laughter and her “sense of enjoyment,” and her ability to talk “like an inspired being.”
³¹
Wilder loved the view from Stein's terrace—the lush valley in the lap of the hills of Ain, with Mont Blanc etched on the horizon. He prized their lively conversations. That summer he read the manuscript of Stein's
Everybody's Autobiography,
in which he himself appeared. “You will be enchanted by the description of me in the New Book!” he wrote to his mother and Isabel.
³²
He devoured the exquisite meals prepared by Alice and worked in her garden every morning, bare shoulders and chest soaking up the sun. “Mama, every morning I garden for Alice,” he wrote. “I take off shirt and undershirt and hoe obstinate weedy paths and I like it and so I'll do it for you someday.”
³³

He went on to Salzburg, where he met Sibyl Colefax for the music and a whirlwind of social events they often attended together—the famous writer, fit and dapper at forty, and the patrician widow, still glamorous at sixty-three. They were “such a success” at one party, Wilder reported to Woollcott, “that we were promptly invited for the next night, too . . . musicale and supper, probably the Crown Princess of Italy.”
³⁴
But most of all he enjoyed taking walks with Sibyl, and reading parts of his plays in progress to her, welcoming her thoughtful opinions. Their “big social whirl” in Salzburg and their “tranquil country walks” cemented their friendship, and “I love her very much,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott. He especially appreciated her “long generous letters packed with information”:

 

Golly, her knowledge of places and pictures and people and her memory. And under it all, the constant pain of her widowhood. And the grueling distasteful hard work of her shop. . . . She's a trump and I intend to know her and love her all my life.
³⁵

 

Before her husband died, Sibyl had worked occasionally as an interior decorator to augment their income, but this became a serious business of necessity when she was widowed. In 1938, with young decorator and designer John Fowler, Sibyl founded Colefax & Fowler, an interior decorating company that came to be lauded as the foremost decorating firm in England in the twentieth century.

 

IN LATE
August, Wilder the writer and social gadfly was superseded by Wilder the older brother when a letter from Isabel reached him in Salzburg. She was heartbroken over her breakup with the man she had hoped to marry. Wilder immediately cabled his sister and mother to come to Europe. Then he wrote a long letter full of brotherly advice: Isabel and their mother should come to Europe, he reiterated. “Would even help my work,” he contended, as if that might persuade Isabel to make the journey.
³⁶

Isabel had felt “pretty sure” she wanted to marry this workaholic surgeon, she said, although she recognized that it would “not be the marriage one plans and dreams of as a girl. It would not be the kind of companionship one would want.” He was “a restrained, even eccentric man,” a “seasoned bachelor” who didn't send notes or flowers, although now and then he surprised her with a gift. Yet she had believed he loved her “deeply” and needed her, and would marry her as soon as he was less “harassed and worried.”
³⁷
Isabel was thirty-seven, eager to be a wife and a mother—and she had been so confident that this would soon happen that she was cleaning the Deepwood Drive house from top to bottom “so that if I step out, everything will be in order here.” She was also excited that her mother had bought herself a car as “part of her plan for getting used to being without me.”
³⁸
But by August the relationship was over, and Isabel was bereft.

Thornton answered her despairing letter by tackling her worries one by one. She was not “old plain and poor,” as she had described herself in her letter. “Don't overdo that notion that a woman has nothing to say or be or give unless she's wife-mother-and-home-decorator,” he wrote. “We're all People, before we're anything else,” he told her. “People, even before we're artists. The rôle of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.” There was “lots of” pathology in the whole business, Wilder wrote. The man who broke Isabel's heart had a “psychic fear of going thru a thing. He's ill.” But Isabel had her own problems, her brother told her: “From some deep infantile Father-love-and-hate you brought up a lack-of-confidence in that realm that colored the air without your knowing it. . . . Out of these infantile conditionings we make our strengths as well as our weaknesses.” His prescription for her convalescence? “Better take a trip to Europe. There's plenty of money.”
³⁹

Isabel and Isabella decided to stay in Hamden, however, and Thornton was soon caught up in the Salzburg Festival, living “entirely for pleasure” before settling down to work in Zurich. From Salzburg he wrote to Stein and Toklas about a night of drinking, first at the Mirabell Bar and then, after the bar closed, in the third-class waiting room at the railway station with the novelist Erich Maria Remarque; the German playwright Carl Zuckmayer; a “wonderful German Archbishop” incognito in civilian clothes; Lucy Tal, the wife of Wilder's German publisher; and “a Swedish street-walker.”
⁴⁰
But soon he was sober and hard at work in Zurich. He planned to spend some time in the mountains at Sils-Maria, he told Gertrude and Alice. “I must face the fact that I shall be very lonely,” he wrote to them, “but there at the least, in terrifying loneliness, Nietzsche sent out his Zarathustra into the world, the time-bomb that took fifty years to explode and then what havoc.”
⁴¹
Yet he was “very happy” in Zurich, despite the fact that he had “scarcely spoken a word to a human being in over a week.”
⁴²

Gertrude wrote in early September to tell Wilder he had left a vest in Bilignin, and sent him a postcard shortly thereafter to say she was sending it to him via a young writer and college professor who would be passing through Zurich. He was Samuel Steward, twenty-eight, a native of Ohio and the author of a controversial novel entitled
Angels on the Bough
(1936). Gertrude liked him and hoped Wilder would have time to see him. Because Wilder knew “scarcely anyone in town,” he was eager for company. He left a note at the American Express office in Zurich inviting Steward to visit him at the Carleton-Elite Hotel.
⁴³
According to Steward, this “began the casual acquaintance with Thornton Wilder that lasted through the war years and beyond, ending sometime in 1948.”
⁴⁴
Also according to Steward, he and Wilder had sex in Zurich.

Opinions diverge as to whether a writer's sex life is a legitimate field for public examination unless it serves as subject matter and/or thematic matter for the artistic work, or unless it has, with the writer's complicity, emerged into public view as a defining force in the life and work. A very private man who often saw his fame as an intrusion into his personal life, Thornton Wilder seems to have studiously kept to himself the details of his sexual experiences, whether homosexual or heterosexual or both.

Five years after Wilder's death, and forty-three years after they met, Sam Steward published his first account of a sexual experience with Wilder, and then included the account in a memoir in 1981.
⁴⁵
Several years later Steward talked about Wilder in interviews that linger in the public record. The surviving documentary evidence seems to give only a partial record of exactly what transpired between the two men, and when, and where, especially since some of Steward's later recollections do not always coincide with his letters written at the time.