Thornton Wilder (65 page)

The news from Europe in September 1939 reported catastrophe after catastrophe—on the Western Front, in Poland, in the Atlantic. Looking about for even some small way to help, Wilder made arrangements to give his Swiss
Our Town
royalties to an Austrian-German exile fund. He would donate his English royalties to Paternoster Row in London after the December 29, 1940, Luftwaffe bombing of that traditional home of many publishers, including Wilder's British publisher, Longmans, Green.
⁵⁸

In late September 1939 Wilder retreated to Woollcott's island in Vermont, knowing that the private sanctuary would be full of congenial companions, including the actress Ethel Barrymore. There were “endless games of savage croquet, and crippling badminton and head-breaking pencil games,” but Wilder managed to work, “cleaning up a lot of chores,” reading some of the countless manuscripts people sent for his critique, and working on two new projects of his own. He was adapting the text of George Farquhar's 1707 Restoration comedy,
The Beaux' Stratagem
, at the request of the producer-director Cheryl Crawford.
⁵⁹
Even though Wilder was making progress with the adaptation, he began to doubt that it would be a “practical entertainment” and he eventually set it aside unfinished; it would be completed by another playwright and performed after Wilder's death.
⁶⁰

In Hamden that September, Wilder was caught up in final negotiations for the sale of the
Our Town
movie rights. The independent producer Sol Lesser wanted to buy them and produce the film, and he wanted Wilder to write the screenplay. Wilder accepted the financial deal but declined to write the script, giving approval for Frank Craven, who had written a few minor screenplays, to work on a script with Lesser. A longtime friend and colleague of Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin, Lesser was a shrewd, trustworthy businessman whose Principle Pictures and Principle Distributing Company were well-respected in the movie industry. He had made a lot of money producing B Westerns and a string of successful Tarzan movies, and
Our Town
would be a step in a new direction for him. Lesser paid $35,000 for the movie rights to the play, with 60 percent going to Wilder and 40 percent to Harris.

From the outset of the deal Wilder made it clear that he did not want a major role in planning or writing the movie because that would “inevitably lead to the general impression” that he had “completely authorized and was responsible for the final picture.”
⁶¹
He was willing to meet briefly with Lesser in New York, and he would “always extend” to Lesser and the film his “cordial best wishes.”
⁶²
Wilder conferred with Lesser as promised and refused any payment for the consultation. Astounded that a writer would actually decline an offer of money, Lesser sent Wilder a snazzy radio in appreciation.
⁶³

In early October, Lesser sent Wilder the first rough draft of the script, prepared by Craven, and Wilder could not resist responding with detailed notes.
⁶⁴
He believed that a stage play and a screenplay were essentially two different entities, two different art forms. He wrote to the ever-solicitous Sol Lesser in October:

 

I feel that now the point has come in the work, as I foresaw, when my feelings must often give way before those of people who understand motion-picture narrative better than I do. It's not a matter of fidelity to my text—since I doubt whether there has ever been a movie as faithful to its original text as this seems to be—it's just a matter of opinion, and my opinion should often give way before that of those who know moving pictures thoroughly.
⁶⁵

 

Nevertheless Wilder sent Lesser pages of notes over the next few months, and Lesser more often than not embraced Wilder's suggestions. He urged Lesser to be bold, and to avoid the “danger of dwindling to the conventional. . . . I know you'll realize,” Wilder wrote, “that I don't mean boldness or oddity for their own sakes, but merely as the almost indispensable reinforcement and refreshment of a play that was never intended to be interesting for its story alone, or even for its background.”
⁶⁶

 

WILDER WAS
restless to the point of rootlessness that fall, as writers often are when they are not deeply grounded in their work, but even for a self-anointed theater gypsy, the new plays wouldn't come. They eluded him, frustrated him, stymied him.
The Merchant of Yonkers
had left scars yet to heal, and Wilder seemed almost relieved to be distracted by Lesser and the movie. He hadn't been able to work in Mexico or Texas or Connecticut. He had not written a page during his six summer weeks in England and France—and now, thanks to Hitler and company, working in Europe was at least temporarily out of the question. His head was “full of European places all the time,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas. “I'm fretful not to be there,—there as place; I have no wish to be near it as war.” He reiterated his concern about their safety: “If the war is to be long and terrible, should you be there with it all around you—especially should you be in Paris?”
⁶⁷

He could not work in his writing room in the house on Deepwood Drive, much as he loved his family. He needed a few weeks of work “in solitary confinement,” and went to Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he followed events in Europe from the daily papers, with “hope and dread in every muscle.”
⁶⁸
For escape from current events and from writing, he lost himself in
Finnegans Wake.
He soon abandoned his solitary life in Atlantic City for New York, where he found an apartment, and tried to help arrange a U.S. lecture tour for Stein in hopes of getting her and Toklas safely out of France for the duration of the war. They refused to leave France, however, unless they were positive they could quickly and safely return.

By mid-November, Wilder was reasonably content in his new apartment at 81 Irving Place near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, enjoying the quiet and the privacy, exploring the city, and probing
Finnegans Wake
, which, he said, made “great inroads” into his time. He had “untangled some more of its knots, but there remain a million.”
⁶⁹
He loved having daily access to the theater—even Clare Boothe Luce's “dreadfully easy, emphatic and vulgar” anti-Nazi play,
Margin of Error
, and
Thunder Rock,
written by his friend and former student Robert Ardrey, directed by the young Elia Kazan for the Group Theatre, and “so immediate a failure that it is being withdrawn after a week.”
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Aleck Woollcott was starring as Sheridan Whiteside, the colorful character modeled on Woollcott himself, in
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman's new smash hit on Broadway. (The actor Monty Woolley first played the role of Sheridan Whiteside in the original 1939 stage production of
The Man Who Came to Dinner
.

Wilder spent time with Charlotte, taking her to restaurants and theater performances. She was working on her mysterious new book, all the while patching together a meager living from her ongoing work for the WPA, and doing freelance editing and typing manuscripts—still refusing offers of financial help from her mother and her brothers. Thornton and Charlotte had seen “considerably more of each other, while he was in town in this more leisurely way,” Charlotte wrote to Amos. “He seemed to enjoy walking across town to take in my neighborhood,” she said, and her landlady, “although she manages to conceal it behind a worn discouraged harridan's aspect, is a-flutter. I get the benefit of the prestige.”
⁷¹

Mabel Dodge Luhan, also in New York, arranged for Wilder to read and interpret eight pages from
Finnegans Wake
at one of her salons. For that gathering Wilder passed out mimeographed sheets “reprinting the first three paragraphs” of Joyce's novel, along with “the Nocturnes on p. 244 and the close from 626,” he wrote to Edmund Wilson afterward. It turned out to be a boisterous evening at Luhan's apartment, overcrowded with people coming out of curiosity about Joyce's novel, or about Wilder or Mabel herself, and latecomers being turned away and “pounding on the door.”
⁷²

Wilder was addicted to the novel, he told Stein and Toklas, obsessed with decoding that unbroken chain of complicated, erudite puzzles: “I've only skimmed the surface, but I know more about it than any article on it yet published. Finally I stopped, and put it away from me as one would liquor or gambling.”
⁷³
He soon relapsed, however, reopening
Finnegans Wake
and spending “hundreds of hours” on it, and planning a visit with Edmund Wilson so that they could discuss the novel at length.
⁷⁴

Looking back on the past few months, however, Wilder was exasperated with himself for his inertia and his “shocking busyness over trifles.”
⁷⁵
Despite his adamant disclaimer that he could not help with the
Our Town
film script, he had spent hours during those months in New York poring over letters and screenplay drafts from Sol Lesser, attentive down to the smallest detail of script and camera angles. Lesser not only solicited and encouraged him, but at least as far as their letters reveal, genuinely welcomed and incorporated most of Wilder's ideas, respecting his wishes to restore certain cuts to the original script, and to abandon certain changes. Lesser proposed, for instance, that the film set up some conflicts in Emily and George's marriage—conflicts that were Emily's fault and that she would understand and regret only after her death. Wilder replied that for several explicit reasons, he felt “pretty concrete about trying to dissuade you against showing Emily returning to her fifth wedding anniversary and regretting that she had been an unwise wife.”
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The most significant change Lesser made had to do with Emily's death. “The first serious thing to decide is whether we should let Emily live or die,” Lesser wrote to Wilder, offering the reasons for and against such a major departure from the stage play.
⁷⁷
The ultimate decision was to let Emily live. “In the first place, I think Emily should live,” Wilder responded:

 

I've always thought so. In a movie you see the people so
close to
that a different relation is established. In the theatre they are halfway abstractions in an allegory; in the movie they are very concrete. So insofar as the play is a Generalized Allegory, she dies—we die—they die; insofar as it's a Concrete Happening it's not important that she die; it's even disproportionately cruel that she die. Let her live—the idea will have been imparted anyway.
⁷⁸

 

In late November, Lesser considered and then decided against calling in Lillian Hellman to help Frank Craven with the screenplay. The on-screen credit went to Wilder, Craven, and screenwriter Harry Chandlee. Lesser hired Sam Wood, the director of
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
, to direct the film. By early December 1939 the script was in such good shape, and Wilder had done so much—without pay—to make that possible that Sol Lesser looked about for a tangible way to express his appreciation. On December 4 he telegraphed Isabel Wilder:
WHAT MAKE OF CAR WOULD THORNTON LIKE FOR CHRISTMAS
.

Isabel telegraphed Lesser in Hollywood the next day:
THORNTON DOESN'T DRIVE ANY MORE BUT HAS ALWAYS SAID IF HE HAD CAR WANTED A CHRYSLER CONVERTIBLE WITH RUMBLE SEAT
.
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A surprised and delighted Wilder wrote to Lesser the day after Christmas to tell him he now owned “the most beautiful car in town.” Everyone home for Christmas was “squealing” with pleasure. “Everybody had to be taught all the gadgets,” Wilder wrote:

 

When they found there were little red lights that went on when your oil and gas were low—that slew 'em; and the two speeds on the windshield—oh, and the defroster; and a top that goes up and down without anybody losing their temper. Well, well—first I was so astonished I didn't know what to do, but ever since I've been getting more proud and pleased every hour. A thousand thanks, Sol! I wish you were here to see what a big success it is.
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Wilder decided that when he left New York he would take his new car “and drive far away.”
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He wrote to Gertrude and Alice, “That movie producer gave me a beautiful car for Xmas and soon I shall be out on the road—sleeping in tourist-camps and drawing near to the first tumble-weeds and the desert.” After his city life he was ready for “air and light and sky.”
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AS THEY
moved forward in the new decade, all the Wilders were fine, according to the roundup of family news Thornton sent to Stein and Toklas. Isabella was in good health and enjoying her life in Hamden, content to stay at home for a while after her recent journey to Scotland, especially with the growing tumult in Europe. Isabel “at last” had a job—as assistant to the supervisor of the Connecticut branch of the Federal Writers' Project. Janet was teaching at Mount Holyoke after finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. Amos's new book,
The Spiritual Aspects of the New Poetry,
would be published by Harper & Brothers in 1940, and he and Catharine were expecting a baby. Their son, Amos Tappan Wilder, was born in Boston on February 6, 1940.