Thornton Wilder (74 page)

In early fall Wilder reported to the 328th Fighter Group headquarters at Hamilton Field, Novato, California, near San Francisco. In addition to his training classes he performed various administrative duties, including drafting a history of the 328th, noting that the general order activating this fighter group was originally secret, and that many of the “most interesting facts about the beginning of the Group” could not be disclosed until after the war. Hamilton Field was “a post widely envied for its beauty, its handsome and comfortable original buildings and its proximity to San Francisco,” he wrote.
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Pilots of the 328th trained in P-39 Airacobras, small fighter planes that possessed sufficient speed and power at altitudes under fifteen thousand feet but were vulnerable and virtually useless above that range, and consequently were not suited for the high-altitude combat in the skies over Western Europe.

Wilder was also assigned as investigating officer in a court-martial case involving “A little 18-year old Mississippi scrub farmer's son who hitchhiked home for a month to help his father with the harvest.” Wilder helped get the desertion charge reduced to AWOL.
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His daily routine provided free time most evenings—time he had habitually used for reading and writing. He picked up his
“
several-times attempted and discarded” play,
The Alcestiad,
which had already accompanied him on so many journeys.
⁶⁰
“I write only about 10 speeches an evening,” he wrote to his mother. “If I find that it moves into the center of my interest, or keeps me awake at night, I'll have to give it up. But so far it contributes its fragments tranquilly every night. And on Sundays I can do a larger portion.—As I see it now it's very Helen Hayes.”
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But, he warned, that was a secret.

Civilian life encroached more frequently as the time grew near for the opening of
The Skin of Our Teeth
in New Haven. Then the show would go on the road for six weeks, “being licked into shape” for New York. Isabel was serving as her brother's proxy and his eyes and ears at rehearsals. Wilder shared Isabel's report with Sibyl Colefax:

 

Rehearsals have gone swimmingly as far as the text is concerned, though there have been many clashes of personalities. Tallulah has tried to show all the other actresses how to do their job and when they have not taken her advice she has flounced off to her hotel and resigned. So far she has returned almost penitently each time. She loves her rôle (Sabina) as well she might, and is very acute about the whole play when the demon is not possessing her. The text is almost established. My last week at Harrisburg I wrote them a new close to Act II and some crowning motto lines for Mr. Antrobus in Act III. Last Sunday from San Francisco I sent them a new treatment of a middle portion of Act I . . . heightening the atmosphere of impending cold and danger.
⁶²

 

His third act, Wilder said, had at its core “the conflict of Father and Son and the statement of War as the anguish of the ‘emptinesses.' ”
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Whether the battle between George Antrobus and his son, Henry, is seen as mirroring the universal father-son relationship, or the particular Amos Parker Wilder–Thornton Niven Wilder relationship, or both, it is intense, bitter, and complex. Henry returns from war sullen and angry. He has risen through the military ranks from corporal to general. He has spent seven years, he tells Sabina, “trying to find him; the others I killed were just substitutes.” He wants to burn his father's old books because “it's the ideas he gets out of those old books that . . . that makes the whole world so you can't live in it.”

Sabina intervenes to save the books, and scolds Henry for suggesting that his family doesn't care about him. “There's that old whine again,” she chides. “All you people think you're not loved enough, nobody loves you. Well, you start being lovable and we'll love you.” Outraged, Henry replies, “I don't want anybody to love me. . . . I want everybody to hate me.”

Face-to-face, father and son battle over the past and the future. “I'm not going to be a part of any peacetime of yours,” Henry swears. “I'm going a long way from here and make my own world that's fit for a man to live in. Where a man can be free, and have a chance, and do what he wants to do in his own way.”

“How can you make a world for people to live in, unless you've first put order in yourself?” George Antrobus counters. Before there is violence, Sabina intervenes: “Stop! Stop! Don't play this scene. You know what happened last night. Stop the play.”
⁶⁴
Father and son come to a kind of truce, perhaps too swiftly for credibility—but this is, after all, a play meant to seduce an audience into a willing suspension of disbelief.

Wilder would also rework the ending of the drama. As he explained to Amy Wertheimer in 1943:

 

I've always assumed a very slow curve of civilization. But I always affirm too that my “toleration” of humanity's failings is more affirmative than most “opportunists.” When I first wrote Skin of Our Teeth it lacked [the] motto-humanity-climbing-upward speeches of Mr. Antrobus at the end. I assumed that they were omnipresent in the play and didn't have to be stated. I assumed that they were self-evident,—that's how highly I believe in mankind. But more and more of the early readers found the play “defeatist.” So I wrote in the moral and crossed the t's and dotted the i's.
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The Skin of Our Teeth
was now on tour in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington after its world premiere at the Shubert Theater in New Haven on October 15. Myerberg had hired the legendary press agent Richard Maney to manage publicity for the play and, according to Maney, on opening night, after fifteen people left the theater before the play was over, Myerberg directed him to write a synopsis of the plot for a program note. Perhaps if the audience knew something about the plot ahead of time, Myerberg reasoned, they'd stay put for the entire show. Maney complied, overnight producing words Wilder later approved, and they were added to the playbill and have been part of the play's acting edition ever since.
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Even so, word got around that taxis hovered outside the Shubert Theater like getaway cars to collect unhappy patrons who gave up on the play after the first act, or the second.
Variety
reported that although ten or fifteen patrons stalked out during every performance, the play was “thriving on controversy, holding to much bigger grosses than expected.”
⁶⁷

“Wreathed in controversy,
The Skin of Our Teeth
was an immediate hit,” Maney confirmed later. He did his part in “raising a din” over the play, pleased when its “champions hailed it as a comic masterpiece,” as well as when “motion-picture actors and other dolts denounced it as gibberish.” He recalled that this “medley of cheers and jeers was music to my ears. Furtively I prodded both camps to further excesses.”
⁶⁸

 

AT HAMILTON FIELD,
Wilder found that it was simpler to coordinate pilots and fighter squadrons than it was to persuade feuding producers and actors to work together congenially. As the pre-Broadway tour progressed, there was near-mutiny from the cast. Hearing from Tallulah Bankhead and Florence Reed that Michael Myerberg had dismissed three actors and was undermining the play, Wilder tried to untangle events from his vantage point on a California military base. Isabel confirmed that Myerberg, prone to an arrogant disregard for others, and Bankhead, prone to an excessive confidence in her own talent and power, often clashed. Bankhead did not get along with other members of the cast, especially Florence Eldridge. Wilder was bombarded with letters of complaint about Myerberg. He urged Myerberg by mail to “do everything to establish so fine a company into the harmonious working unit they have a right to be.”
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He pointed out that the stars of the play had “almost a right to such agitations—being artists going through the throes of bringing to birth.”
⁷⁰

Wilder was eager, as always, for Woollcott's opinion of the production of his play. Before he had seen the play himself, Woollcott reported to Sibyl Colefax that Edward Sheldon had called
The Skin of Our Teeth
“a work of indisputable genius and Helen Hayes thinks of it as the finest script she ever read.”
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After he saw the play in previews in early November, Woollcott wrote Wilder his frank opinion:

 

Having seen “By the Skin of Our Teeth” [
sic
] and thought about it and read it, I know what I think about it. I think no American play has ever come anywhere near it. I think it might have been written by Plato and Lewis Carroll in collaboration, or better still by any noble pedagogue with a little poltergeist blood in him. I had not foreseen that you could write a play that would be both topical and timeless, though I might have remembered from “The Trojan Women” [by Euripides] that it could be done.
⁷²

 

However, Woollcott wrote, “Tallulah does not know how to play Sabina and cannot be taught to. She has some assets as an actress, but she is without comic gift. . . . . Tallulah is not a comedienne and thinks she's a wonderful one.” Woollcott told Wilder that Sabina's every scene and every line “aches for Ruth Gordon.”
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Backstage feuds continued long after the play opened on Broadway at the Plymouth Theatre on November 18, but reviews were strongly positive, and Talullah Bankhead and Fredric March had the marquee appeal to draw crowds. The play was a critical as well as a box-office hit, playing to nearly full houses night after night, with a box-office take approaching twenty thousand dollars a week.
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Wilder saw his play onstage for the first time in November, just before its New York opening. With the play's successful debut, he hoped he could be free of civilian distractions and concentrate on his military duties, which had grown more and more demanding. That fall Wilder was assigned sixty days of “Detached Service” to travel the country visiting airfields as part of a committee preparing an Air Force document. From Spokane, Washington, on November 24, he mailed notes on
The Skin of Our Teeth
to Harold Freedman, his dramatic agent, asking him to pass them along to his producer and director, as well as to Isabel. He was “overwhelmingly grateful” for the “fine things about the performance,” Wilder wrote. The only flaw he perceived in the performance was the “hurry-hurry-hurry”—the “lack of variation in pace” in act 1.
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By December 1942 Captain Wilder, part-time playwright, had been assigned to the Pentagon in Washington and, to his astonishment, found himself under siege from the
Saturday Review of Literature.
The December 19 issue of the magazine carried “The Skin of Whose Teeth?—The Strange Case of Mr. Wilder's New Play and
Finnegans Wake,”
the first half of a two-part article by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson challenging the originality of
The Skin of Our Teeth,
and charging that Wilder's play was “an Americanized re-creation, thinly disguised, of James Joyce's ‘Finnegans Wake' ”
⁷⁶
The second installment, “The Skin of Whose Teeth? Part II: The Intention Behind the Deed,” appeared in the February 13, 1943, issue. Campbell, a thirty-eight-year-old teacher of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, was at that time working with Swami Nikhilananda on a new translation of
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
, published in 1942, and
A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake
with Henry Morton Robinson, which would be published in 1944. Robinson, forty-four, had taught English at Columbia University, was a senior editor at
Reader's Digest,
and would make his fortune as the author of a popular novel,
The Cardinal,
a bestseller in 1950 and 1951, made into a movie by Otto Preminger in 1963. Campbell would become an award-winning teacher, editor, and popularizer of mythology and folklore.

At the time of their attack on Wilder and his play, however, Campbell and Robinson did not have a publisher for their proposed key to
Finnegans Wake
, having been turned down by Benjamin W. Huebsch, who had published the first American edition of Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
in 1916. Huebsch was a pioneer in publishing the work of modernists in the United States, working as an independent publisher before joining Viking Press in 1925. In June 1940 Wilder had written to Huebsch that he and Edmund Wilson were conferring on the “knottier problems of
Finnegans Wake,”
and that some of them were “mighty dirty.”
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In his reply to Wilder, Huebsch mentioned that Campbell and Robinson had submitted some “good” preliminary material for a proposed key to Joyce's novel, but that it had been turned down. If Wilder—or Wilder and Wilson—should decide to write about some of their discoveries in
Finnegans Wake
, (“including the ‘mighty dirty' ones”), Huebesch said he would be interested.
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In 1942, working on their proposed key to Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
, Campbell and Robinson attacked Wilder's play. Without using the term “plagiarism
,
” they insinuated that Wilder was guilty of it, and that he had appropriated his play from Joyce's novel. It was no secret that Wilder was studying
Finnegans Wake.
His tribute on the occasion of Joyce's death in 1941 had been published in
Poetry
that March, and his commentary on Joyce and myth-theme in literature would surely have caught Campbell's attention.