Thornton Wilder (62 page)

Wilder expressed his strongest, most critical assessment of Harris to Ernest Hemingway, who was in discussions with Harris about producing Hemingway's play,
The Fifth Column.
Harris did not like the play but had been persuaded by Hemingway's agent to fly to Key West and discuss the project anyway. Wilder wrote an adamant warning to Hemingway on March 1:

 

You've seen him now, and know that extraordinary bundle of lightning flash intuitions into the organization of a play; vivid psychological realism; and intelligence, devious intelligence.

But maybe you don't know the rest: tormented, jealous egotism; latent hatred of all engaged in creative work; and so on.

Use him for his great gifts—one play at a time only. But don't presuppose a long happy collaboration.

My distrust of him is bad enough, but others go far farther than I do and insist on a malignant daemonic force to destruction in him. Anyway, his professional career is one long series of repeated patterns: trampling on the friendship, gifts and love of anybody who's been associated with him.

I feel something like a piker to write such a letter as this. Because he has done, in many places, a fine job on my work. But the friendship's over all right. He's the best in N. Y., Ernest, but after this I'm ready to work with duller managers, if only I can get reliability, truthfulness, old-fashioned character, and coöperation at the same time.
⁵⁴

 

As Wilder was trying to come to closure on his unhappy relationship with Harris, he was just beginning the association with the great director Max Reinhardt that had been his dream since boyhood. He had sent Reinhardt the script of
The Merchant of Yonkers
, and had just about given up on hearing from him when a “thunderbolt” of good news came in a telegram from Hollywood. Reinhardt was “truly delighted” with what he had read, awaited the rest of the script with “the greatest suspense,” and “eagerly” wished to “put it on the stage.” Reinhardt, of course, knew the Nestroy play that had given rise to Wilder's farce, and so he recognized that Dolly Levi was Wilder's creation. Reinhardt found her to be a “precious addition to the play.”
⁵⁵

 

Our Town
settled in at the Morosco, receiving mixed but mostly favorable notices, and drawing largely enthusiastic crowds. All the Wilders celebrated, and Thornton probably never saw one of the most affirming “reviews” of his play—the letter about
Our Town
written to Amos by their sister Charlotte. “The Play is the Thing,” she commented.

 

It is doubtless selling like wildfire—sometimes I walk by just to see, and there are always people getting tickets; it stays in my imagination as magically graphic, touching, original, and powerful, in its few mordant spots—the umbrellas of the funeral; the young husband flung on the ground; and the fascination of that exquisite expressive keenness, in humor, and nostalgic reference. Thornton's genius, as I see it, besides the wealth of his imaginative evocation, his verbal virtuosity, is for perfect taste in relation to form.
⁵⁶

 

Thornton's income from
Our Town
would set him free to write more plays, even though royalty payments lagged behind the reviews and the box-office receipts. Amos and Janet were not dependent on Thornton for financial support, and Charlotte, struggling to stay afloat on her paltry earnings in New York, was too proud and stubborn to accept her brother's offers of help. But Thornton's income from
Our Town
would provide additional security for his mother and Isabel—and Charlotte, if she would allow it. Frugal Isabella celebrated by indulging in a new hat and a “black cotton lace dress with bolero” that fitted perfectly, and she could have bought more: Wilder's income jumped from a net of $4,854.23 in 1937 to a net of $29,768.16 in 1938, and $37,154.80 in 1939 (the estimated equivalent of more than $720,000 in 2010 purchasing power). Slightly more than two-thirds of the 1939 income came from the publication of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
as one of the first ten books in the new Pocket Books series
.
⁵⁷

Worried about Isabel, who was still grieving over her broken romance, Wilder used some of his income to try to hasten her “convalescence” by providing “a complete change of place and tempo.” He invited her to travel with him to help him with various matters surrounding the production of the play.
⁵⁸
He also funded a trip for her to spend April in London, believing that she needed “a rest and change very much; that ‘heart' trouble slow a-healing.”
⁵⁹

 

BY MARCH 8, 1938
, free of teaching, lecturing, and Broadway duties, Wilder was at the Arizona Inn in Tucson, and by March 16 he was comfortably settled in a “tiny apartment” at 732 North Sixth Avenue, surrounded by desert air, Arizona sunlight, and at night, the “wild magic” of the moon. He found himself to be the lone walker in the town. “Everybody else drives dusty cars, or stands leaning against store-fronts with half-closed eyes,” he said. “But I still walk right smartly.”
⁶⁰
“The desert's wonderful,” he exulted in a letter to Stein and Toklas. “I just returned from spending the day at a ranch sixty miles away,—between 20 and 30 thousand acres, the cows browsing among the cacti and rattlesnakes. I climbed the nearest hill and looked out over a tremendous prospect of mountains, plain, clouds and mesquite.”
⁶¹
After the prolonged stress in New York, the desert retreat was just what he needed for rest, rejuvenation and work. He was thriving in his new daily regimen of “baking sunlight, long walks and hard work.”
⁶²
He fixed simple, “primitive, but good” meals for himself, and took time to enjoy “Wonderful piercing hot days” and the flowering of the cactus.
⁶³
He was living a monastic life, he wrote his family. “Haven't spoken to a soul; walked and saw sunset from Sentinel Mountain! And spent the mornings on the play.”
The Merchant of Yonkers
had its ups and downs, he said. “Some mornings fancies run down my forearm like ants, and other days I just copy the
status quo.
Writing's a damnable profession. But rain or shine, I write.”
⁶⁴

The new play was growing, so much so that one evening he read portions of it aloud to friends at a nearby ranch. “Some of it's very funny—sly deep deep records of ‘human nature' getting itself into frightful predicaments. Max Reinhardt wrote that he was very pleased with the first two acts I sent him and as soon as I can I'll be in Hollywood showing him the rest.”
⁶⁵
By March 21 he had finished the fourth act, but the third was giving him trouble. “The Fourth Act's developed fine,” he reported to his mother and Isabel.

 

I who never could finish a novel correctly seem to have the knack of Last Acts.

But the Third Act has been terrifying me.

Ever since I got here I've been in a cold sweat about it. It wouldn't come right.

I had thoughts of laying the play aside and telling Reinhardt that maybe I'd be a year or two at it.

And then last night I got the Key. The direction.

All my plots—count 'em—and idea-themes all come to a head at the right moment, with Mrs. Levi ruling the Roost.

Rejoice with me. Now it'll go very fast.
⁶⁶

 

Physically and mentally restored in the “wonderful desert air and penetrating sun light,” Wilder could turn his attention to the mountain of mail generated by
Our Town.
⁶⁷

After his Oberlin professor Charles Wager read the Coward-McCann 1938 readers' edition of the play, the first publication of
Our Town
, he pronounced it the finest work Wilder had ever done. Wilder was still perplexed, however, to discover the contradictory conclusions the play provoked: Some people found it sentimental, while others saw in the play an “embittered pessimism” about human nature and its “being in the dark.”
⁶⁸
He recognized that “for every person that thinks the last act is easy, sentimental and soft, there's always another person who thinks it hard, embittered and cruel.”
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Another letter caught Wilder's attention, and elicited a detailed response about the sources for the play. It came from Christina Hopkinson Baker, the widow of George Pierce Baker, one of the founders of the drama program at Yale, and the mentor and teacher of numerous playwrights. In answer to her question about the influences in the third act, Wilder responded at length. “Lordy. I'd built my house with those ideas so long they seemed to have the character of simple self evidence,” he wrote:

 

I suppose that I got it from Dante. I had to teach the Inferno And the first half of the Purgatorio at Chicago. I had in mind especially the Valley of the repentant Kings in about the 8th Canto of the Purgatorio. Same patience, waiting; same muted pain; same oblique side-glances back to earth. Dante has an angel descend nightly and after slaying a serpent who tries to enter the Valley every evening, stands guard the rest of the night. Most commentators agree that the allegory means: from now on the Dead must be guarded from memories of their earthly existence and from irruptions of the old human nature associations . . .

At all events I do not mind from critics the charge of immaturity, confusion and even pretentiousness. It's a first play; it's a first sally into deep waters. I hope to do many more—and better—and even more pretentious. I write as I choose; and I learn as I go; and I'm very happy when the public pays the bills.
⁷⁰

 

“THE PULITZER
announcement is to be Monday,” Wilder's proud mother wrote on April 29, 1938. “How can I wait?”
⁷¹
She had just entertained twenty-five friends at tea, and found it difficult to keep the secret that Thornton was about to receive the Pulitzer Prize for
Our Town
, becoming the first writer to win the award for both fiction and drama.

Isabella Niven Wilder had lived many years of her own life through her children—her literary ambitions materializing in their achievements, her disappointing marriage more than offset by the devotion and affection lavished on her by her sons and daughters. Those were especially gratifying years—the last years of the thirties—when her children were flourishing and, except for Isabel's disappointment in love, happy, as far as a mother's eye and instinct could tell. Isabella was proud of all her children, hovering over them in person or through long, chatty letters; avidly following their projects; bolstering their spirits during hard times; and, as she had done all their lives, cheering their aspirations and achievements.

Although Isabel was on the brink of giving up her career as a novelist, Charlotte was working relentlessly hard as a poet. Coward-McCann had just accepted Charlotte's new book of poetry,
Mortal Sequence,
to be published in 1939. “I never had a moment's doubt that Mr. Coward would accept the book,” Isabella wrote to her daughter:

 

Your “Moon” [
Phases of the Moon,
published in 1936] was a “distinguished book of verse,” as Thornton phrased it and you know he is a very good and a very exacting critic—none better—and this book has the further joy & distinction of lyric qualities external as well as internal.

 

Isabella predicted that Charlotte would “wake up some day to being judged in your own field as a dominant figure—unique and distinguished and justified in all the decisions you have made.”
⁷²

Like Thornton, Isabella kept up with New York theater and Hollywood movies. “Hollywood is in a big depression,” she wrote in 1938 as Thornton and Max Reinhardt began serious talks about the production of
The Merchant of Yonkers.
She predicted that the Pulitzer Prize would help attract backers to her son's new play.
⁷³
The Pulitzer award no doubt boosted ticket sales for
Our Town
, and the play would run until November 19, 1938, when Harris closed the show and inaugurated the national tour. Almost immediately there was extraordinary national demand from amateur and stock companies for rights to perform the play. Coward-McCann had published a hardcover reading edition of the play in March 1938, and collaborated with Samuel French on the production of the first acting edition, published in 1939. The first amateur production rights for
Our Town
were granted on April 5, 1939, to a theater group in Salt Lake City, and next came Tucson on April 8, 1939. Over the next twenty months
Our Town
was produced in at least 658 communities across the United States and in Hawaii and Canada.

With the success of the plays, Wilder's whole view of life had changed, he said. “Now I make no plans—I'm a theatre-gypsy,” he wrote to Sam Steward. “Come and go, without home, address, or citizenship.”
⁷⁴
His life in Tucson was a daily calibration of “desert, sun, walks, and work. Some days work goes fine; other days nil; writing's an awful business, punctuated by ecstasies.”
⁷⁵
For now, he focused all his attention on
The Merchant of Yonkers
, which he described to another friend as a “broad low comedy, based upon a Viennese classic of 1845, into which is inserted that wonderful scene in Molière's L'Avare where Louise, the marriage-broker, tries to interest Harpagon in a young girl. This time I'm out for trenchant, not to say, cutting laughter.”
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