Thornton Wilder (60 page)

 

“I CAN
no longer conceal from you that I'm writing the most beautiful little play you can imagine,” Wilder wrote to Stein and Toklas September 13, 1937. He had finished two acts, he told them. “It's a little play with all the big subjects in it; and it's a big play with all the little things of life lovingly impressed into it.” He described the play as “an immersion, immersion into a New Hampshire town. It's called ‘Our Town' and its third act is based on your ideas, as on great pillars, and whether you know it or not, until further notice, you're in a deep-knit collaboration already.”
⁶⁷

Some of the ideas that served as “great pillars” for act 3 of
Our Town
may have been triggered or ratified in Wilder's conversations with Stein, augmented by his reading, in 1937, of
The Making of Americans
(1925), a sweeping family saga that, as Stein proclaimed, offered a description of “everyone who is, or has been, or will be.”
⁶⁸
Wilder also knew intimately Stein's
The Geographical History of America or The Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind
(1936), for which he wrote the introduction. This short essay sheds light on what Wilder had in mind when he wrote of Stein's influences on the third act of his play. In this book she was considering the treatment of time and identity in literature and, by extension, in life, Wilder wrote. (“And what's left when memory's gone, and your identity, Mrs. Smith?” the Stage Manager asks in the third act of
Our Town.
)

Wilder also observed that Stein was exploring the metaphysics of repetition, an idea that had long preoccupied him in his own work. Since his Roman awakening Wilder had been fascinated by the repetition of universal events and themes in individual lives. He had written about it in
The Woman of Andros,
as noted: “Pamphilus thought of the thousands of homes over all Greece where sleeping or waking souls were forever turning over the dim assignment of life. ‘Lift every roof,' as Chrysis used to say, ‘and you will find seven puzzled hearts.' ”
⁶⁹
Wilder was intrigued by the view of the self repeating the universal patterns, whereas Stein was more attuned to the idea of the self repeating the self. As he worked on his play in Switzerland in 1937, Wilder was haunted by “The great ghost of Nietzche [
sic
].”
⁷⁰
Whether Stein read Nietszche—as Wilder avidly did—these ideas about repetition evoke Nietszche's concept of eternal recurrence or eternal return, “linked, not to a repetition of the same, but on the contrary, to a transmutation.”
⁷¹

The major ideas in act 3 of
Our Town
are uttered by the Stage Manager in his soliloquy on the “something way down deep that's eternal about every human being,” and by Emily, who returns to earth for one day and asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” A search for possible evidence of Stein's influence in that third act yields a passage from
The Making of Americans,
which Wilder did not read until 1937. Stein described her novel's protagonist as a man who understood the need to live every minute of life, and to fully realize every moment.
⁷²

Stein went on in this vein page after page in her novel, but Wilder had already addressed this very premise with considerably more economy, power, and beauty in
The Woman of Andros
in 1930, before he met Stein. In a scene that foreshadows the third act of
Our Town,
Chrysis tells the story of the hero who asked Zeus, as a reward for services rendered, to allow him to return to earth for one day. Lacking that power, Zeus turned to Hades, the king of the dead, who reluctantly granted the hero permission to return to earth to live over the day in “all the twenty-two thousand days of his lifetime that had been least eventful.” The hero chose a sunlit day in his fifteenth year:

 

Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment. And not an hour had gone by before the hero who was both watching life and living it called on Zeus to release him from so terrible a dream. The gods heard him, but before he left he fell upon the ground and kissed the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized.
⁷³

 

“Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” Emily says near the end of act 3. “They don't understand, do they?” she asks her mother-in-law, who replies, “No, dear. They don't understand.”

 

IN MID-SEPTEMBER,
Wilder wrote to his family that he had finished the second act of
Our Town,
which he pronounced “just lovely, as is the opening of Act III. I'm just a dandy dramatist, looks like.”
⁷⁴
For all of Wilder's deference to Stein and Woollcott about their inspiration, it was to Sibyl Colefax that he entrusted his play in progress, reading sections aloud to her, and copying into his letters to her entire sections of the play as they evolved. “You never saw such a play!” he exclaimed in a letter to Sibyl September 25. He wrote at length about the first act, including a two-page transcription of lines and stage directions. He had finished a draft of act 3, he told her, although it had to “be cleared and enriched.” Still it had “some awful strokes in it,” transcribing passages to demonstrate, and adding that he had woven “hymn-singing” into every act of his play, just as spirituals “bathed and supported” Marc Connelly's 1936 play
Green Pastures.
⁷⁵

Wilder worked on the third act of
Our Town
in a hotel five miles outside Zurich, where for a time he was the only guest. His room's small balcony overlooked the slope of a mountain and the lake below. In October he described his daily schedule to Woollcott: “Late every afternoon I walk into town, call for my mail, get a cocktail, dine on a kilogram of Hungarian or Italian grapes and return home on a little suburban train. I'm very happy, but the happiness does not prevent little accesses of home-sickness for the greatest country of the world.”
⁷⁶

26

“CHALK . . . OR FIRE”

There are the stars—doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk . . . or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself.

—STAGE MANAGER,

Our Town,
Act 3

 

Princeton, Boston, New York, Tucson, Hollywood, Taos, and Other Destinations (Late 1930s)

J
ed telephoned from London for 20 minutes the other night,” Wilder wrote to his mother and Isabel on October 28 from Zurich. “He wants to know if ‘Our Town' would be a good play for the Xmas season in New York. Would it?!! And guess who might act the lanky tooth picking Stage-manager? Sinclair Lewis! He's been plaguing Jed to let him act for a long time.”
¹
Harris, who badly needed another Broadway hit, had in turn been “plaguing” Wilder for a play. He had promised Harris years earlier to let him have the first look at his first full-length play, and Wilder was a man of his word.

Wilder had already had a hand in one Broadway hit that year, for he had adapted Ibsen's
A Doll's House
from existing English and German scripts for production by Harris, starring Ruth Gordon. The play had opened in the Central City, Colorado, Opera House on July 17, touring to enthusiastic audiences for thirteen weeks before heading to New York for its opening on December 27. The play's successful run on Broadway would continue until May 1938—144 performances in all. When Harris and Ruth Gordon did the play for Ned Sheldon in his penthouse, Sheldon called it “the best performance” of Ibsen ever, lauding Wilder's adaptation as “positively magnificent.”
²

By this time Gordon and Harris were working together even though their turbulent love affair had ended. Gordon could no longer tolerate Harris's serial affairs with other women—although she herself had been one of the other women during Harris's first marriage. Harris was now romantically involved with movie and stage actress and socialite Rosamond Pinchot, who had been separated for several years from her husband, William “Big Bill” Gaston. Quite a beauty—called by some the loveliest woman in America—Rosamond had been discovered by Max Reinhardt, who cast her in movies as well as plays.
³
She was befriended by Aleck Woollcott, and pursued by Sinclair Lewis, George Cukor, and David O. Selznick, among others.

Wilder arranged to meet Jed Harris in Paris on October 31, 1937, and read him
Our Town
as well as
The Merchant of Yonkers.
Wilder made it clear to Harris that he had promised Max Reinhardt first refusal on
Merchant
, but even so consulted with Harris about some problems in the third act. Harris pronounced the second act of
Merchant
a “perfect piece of farce-comedy writing,” and gladly set in motion the production plans for
Our Town,
aiming to rush it into rehearsal in New York by mid-December.
⁴
First, however, Wilder had to finish writing the play. In a letter from Paris November 24, he described it to Amy Wertheimer as “a New Hampshire village explored by the techniques of Chinese Drama and of
Pullman Car Hiawatha.
”
⁵

By December 9 Wilder was back in the United States, where Harris had “installed, or rather imprisoned” him in a cottage in the “swankiest section” of Long Island, with a butler and a cook—and orders to finish
Our Town
.
⁶
Wilder soon discovered that his “prison” was chosen for its proximity to Ballybrook, the estate near Old Brookville, Long Island, that Pinchot was renting. Some of Wilder's closest friends cautioned him to watch his back with Jed Harris, whose reputation for a volatile temper and questionable integrity and trustworthiness expanded as the years passed. Sibyl Colefax in particular warned Wilder never to trust Harris in business dealings, and Ruth Gordon sent the most serious warning: “There is a stage in the creative act where one rises up to destroy the work in creation,” she wrote to Wilder. “The same mind that is intelligent enough to create something is also at every moment intelligent enough to see every fault in the work and to turn and destroy it. That impulse must remain in the subconscious as corrective power.” She told Wilder that already, with
A Doll's House,
Jed had “opened the trapdoor to the destructive impulse and was tearing his work to pieces.”
⁷
Fortunately that production survived and went on to its Broadway success.

By the time Wilder arrived in New York, Harris was thinking of casting the actor Frank Craven to play
Our Town
's Stage Manager, and was putting other production details in place, although he and Wilder had no written contract. Wilder was still finishing act 3, and rehearsals were about to begin in New York. He found himself in “such a mess of friendship-collaboration sentiment with Jed, and with the sense of guilt about the unfinished condition of the play” that he couldn't bring himself to insist on a contract immediately.
⁸

Soon the play was cast, and the script was finished, with some revisions by Harris—“admirable alterations in the order of the scenes, and some deletions that I would have arrived at anyway,” Wilder wrote to Sibyl, plus “a number of tasteless little jokes” that “don't do much harm,” although they gave Harris “that sensation of having written the play which is so important to him.”
⁹
At the first rehearsal, Wilder said, when the actors sat around a table reading the third act, they all wept, “so that pauses had to be made so they could collect themselves.”
¹⁰
He wrote to Dwight Dana, “There's a possibility that the play will be a smashing success—an old theatre-hand like Frank Craven seems to be thinking so.” Then he added cautiously, “Maybe not.”
¹¹

 

“ON THE WHOLE
everything has been pleasant, exciting and friendly,” Wilder wrote to Sibyl Colefax on January 2, 1938, soon after the play went into rehearsal. Harris planned to try out the play in Princeton, New Jersey, with “perhaps an advance performance in New Haven, too,” Wilder wrote. Then they hoped to head for Broadway. For the duration of rehearsals, Wilder was staying in New York, revising the play and sitting in on readings, meetings, and practices as needed. Behind the scenes, however, despite and even because of their long friendship, the “pleasant” and “friendly” atmosphere of the high-stakes Wilder-Harris association was quickly deteriorating. Harris, desperate for another hit on Broadway after a drought of a few years, and Wilder, staunchly possessive of his text and vision for
Our Town,
began to clash over the script, the lighting, the acting, and even Harris's choice of a theater in New York. It would probably be the Henry Miller's, Wilder wrote to Sibyl, but that would be “all wrong; that's a drawing-room theatre; my play should be in a high old-fashioned echoing barn of a place with an enormous yawning stage on which is built the diaphanous ‘Town.' ”
¹²

Wilder had been repeatedly warned by Ruth Gordon, Gertrude Stein, the Lunts, Sibyl Colefax, Woollcott, and others about Harris's temperament and tactics, and he finally confessed his growing concerns to Colefax and Woollcott. One night, “under an angry insomnia,” he had even considered withdrawing his play, he wrote, “but the thoughts of 3:00 a. m. are very unreasonable things and in the morning I knew it had been nonsense.”
¹³
He worried that Harris was trying to “make the play ‘smoother' and more civilized, and the edge of boldness is being worn down,” but rationalized that the play remained “bold enough still.”
¹⁴
He was afraid that the second act was the “least solid of the three,” and copied a page of the Stage Manager's opening lines into his letter to Sibyl—lines that deviated slightly in word choice and cadences from the published script.
¹⁵
Harris was constantly changing and interpolating lines in the play, often without Wilder's knowledge. Wilder wrote to Gertrude Stein on January 12:

 

As you predicted Jed got the notion that he had written the play and was still writing it.

As long as his suggestions for alterations are on the structure they are often very good; but once they apply to the words they are always bad and sometimes atrocious.

There have been some white-hot flaring fights. At present we are in a lull of reconcilement
.
¹⁶

 

To his own detriment, despite warnings from people close to him. Wilder put his friendship with Harris ahead of his obligations to himself, his work, his lawyer, and his dramatic agent, Harold Freedman. Inevitably, as in many of Harris's productions, there was a morass of trouble. Over the years Harris had alienated a string of theater luminaries—the director George Abbott, the actor Henry Fonda, the playwright George S. Kaufman. Wilder was still working without a contract with Harris—a foolhardy approach under the best circumstances, but especially treacherous with someone who often did business the way Harris could do business—selfishly, single-mindedly, sometimes unscrupulously, and often heedless of the rights of other people. Wilder greatly admired Harris's proven skills as a director, but now he also trusted himself as a playwright. His self-confidence had been fortified by Ned Sheldon and Aleck Woollcott—the dramatist and the critic. “How proud I was to be told by Ned that I had the resources of a playwright well in hand,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott in January 1938. “And I learn. I am an
apprenti sorcier
. That's all [that] matters.”
¹⁷
Of all the people with whom Wilder shared his work in progress, Ned Sheldon was the one, Wilder said, who had never lost one of his manuscripts, never tried to compete for his audience, just generously “
shared
a thing in a state of growth.”
¹⁸

Early in 1937, with one of the first rough drafts of
Our Town
in hand, Wilder had called on Sheldon at his penthouse on the fourteenth floor of an apartment building at Eighty-fourth and Madison. Countless friends (including Woollcott, Ruth Gordon, Edith Wharton, the actress Ruth Draper, the composer Deems Taylor, the violinist Jascha Heifetz, and Helen Hayes and Charles MacArthur, the brother of Alfred MacArthur, who was married to Sheldon's sister, Mary) found in Sheldon's company a “haven of repose in the hectic life of Broadway.”
¹⁹
Wilder sat beside Sheldon's bed to read his play aloud, knowing his friend would not interrupt until he had finished. Wilder read all the parts, beginning with the Stage Manager, who would guide the audience through
Our Town
, just as a Stage Manager had functioned early in the decade in his one-act plays
Pullman Car Hiawatha
and
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.
Wilder played with time in
Our Town
, as he had in the one-acts and even in some of his early playlets, liberating his characters from the strictures of conventional linear time into a malleable, dynamic stream of time and being. And in the apparent simplicity of their lives in the mythical village he created as their habitat, Wilder surrounded his characters with the primal questions he had been exploring for years: How do we live? How do we survive? What is love—and is love sufficient “to reconcile one to the difficulty of living (i.e. the difficulty of being good. . . .)?”
²⁰

“You broke every rule,” Sheldon wrote to Wilder after the reading:

 

There is no suspense, no relationship between the acts, no progress; but every seven minutes—no, every five minutes—you've supplied a new thing—some novelty—in the proceedings, which is at once a pleasure in the experience, and, at the same time, a contribution to the content of the play. Most plays progress in time, but here is a progression in depth. Let us know this town more and more!
²¹

 

Wilder had followed Sheldon's advice, reporting to him from Zurich that summer of 1937 that before Emily Gibbs appeared in act 3 “in the Elysian Fields on the hill above Grover's Corners, New Hampshire,” the whole second act of the play was devoted to her wedding and the events leading up to it.
²²
Furthermore, Wilder said, he thought the audience would love Emily.
²³

Wilder quickly learned that in Jed Harris he had to confront a nearly invincible adversary. Constitutionally averse to conflict, Wilder fought for the integrity of his script but internalized much of his anger and frustration. By mid-January he told Harris he had a “whole set of Nature's Warnings = twitches, and stutterings and head aches.” He was going to have to “retire” from the production for a while, to sleep and rest and regain his “fresh eye” for the play. His perspective, he said, had “become so jaundiced that I can no longer catch what's good or bad.”
²⁴

At noon on January 22, 1938—before the opening of the Princeton tryout that evening—a deeply worried Wilder recorded his concerns about Harris's production and sealed them in an envelope that was not opened until 1944, when Isabel Wilder took out her brother's notes and read them at the time of
Our Town
's first revival in New York. That snowy day in Princeton in 1938 Wilder wrote that he was very much afraid certain of Harris's production elements would “harm and perhaps shipwreck” the play's effectiveness. He feared that the play was “in danger of falling into trivial episodes,” that Harris had not “vigorously directed” some of his actors, that he had an “astonishingly weak sense of visual reconstruction,” that his interpolations in the text robbed it of “its nervous compression.”
²⁵