Thornton Wilder (77 page)

The oxen pull the plough. Do you remember, Mama, teaching me Carducci's sonnet, “O Pio Bove,”—here it is. The Lombard pine and the umbrella pine are all around us; a wonderful eleventh century church is on the hill; forceful Roman ruins to the west. Oh, there are lots of times when we all get deeply war-weary with the tragic nonsense the Germans have raised in the world, but I'm always snatching gratifications as they come to hand. The Wilders and the Nivens transmitted to me sufficient vitality to make everything I could out of what I had. I'm no moper.
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IN FEBRUARY 1945
Wilder learned that Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont and Laurence Olivier had obtained the rights to produce
The Skin of Our Teeth
in London. Olivier's military schedule would permit him to direct the play but not to act in it. Beaumont, head of the theatrical production company H. M. Tennent Ltd., would oversee this successful production of Wilder's play in March 1945, starring Vivien Leigh as Sabina. Wilder wrote to Olivier to express his pleasure at the news. “My idea is that the play could give practically the sense of improvisation,” he wrote, “a free cartoon, ‘The History of the Human race in Comic Strip.' ”
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“The play was magnificent,” Beaumont wrote afterward to Wilder's agent, Harold Freedman, and Olivier did a “first class production job.”
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Wilder was “galvanized by the tempo of progress in the Pacific Theatre and by the dismay that must be sweeping over Germany.” He was quietly arranging for royalties from his plays in Europe to be given to writers and actors in those countries who seemed to be “in distress,” or to hospitals.
⁵¹
He received the news that Assistant Secretary of State Archibald MacLeish, already planning for postwar days, had recommended him for a civilian post in the American Foreign Service as cultural relations attaché at the American embassy in Paris, to take effect once he was released from the army. Encouraged by his success in Latin America, Wilder was eager to accept the post. He was ideally suited for this multifaceted assignment, and he hoped it would begin soon, but nothing happened on schedule in the last months of the war.

“I'm tired and I'm in a decline,” Wilder had written to his brother and sister-in-law in February. “I'm not tired in body—you never saw such constant health,—nor in mind, exactly. I'm just tired in nature.”
⁵²
He had been working nonstop, seven days a week, eleven or twelve hours a day, for nearly two years, deprived, most of the time, of his habitual long contemplative walks and his customary restorative hours devoted to reading or to listening to music. He realized that the “regimen” of “long hours” and “unrelieved singlemindedness finally drains many of one's centers.” He wrote to Aunt Charlotte, “My participation in the terrible overwhelming war was microscopic but it was sufficiently related to it to have its reality, and by reason of that I can say I don't regret a moment of it, even though it may have impoverished some of these other centers.”
⁵³

By the end of March he was confined to bed in a military hospital in Italy. On March 29, 1945, Wilder wrote to Amy Wertheimer, “I'm mortified to say that I'm in a military hospital bed!!! For the first time in my life in two wars. A deep-lodged cold not improved by two trips to Jugoslav moved into one ear. However I will be discharged in a day or two. My, I'm ashamed; my record of perfect health is broken.”
⁵⁴
Since boyhood he had been prone to painful ear infections, and as he grew older, they recurred and often left him temporarily deaf in the affected ear. Apparently it was a painful abscess of the inner ear that forced him to be hospitalized. While he was in the hospital, Wilder amused himself reading Plato's
Republic,
Moby-Dick,
and various detective stories. He also mulled over the themes of three plays that, he said, were “ready and waiting to be written.” However, he reflected, “Now that I'm old they don't come so spontaneously; they're built and calculated more carefully, and weighed from all sides.” Yet he felt that “their dramatic form seems to get bolder and more adventurous all the time.”
⁵⁵

When he was well enough to leave the hospital, Wilder spent the rest of April awaiting his discharge from the army and his final instructions from the State Department about the Paris assignment. He took a few days' leave at an air force rest camp on Capri, wrapped up his duties at Caserta, and began to say good-bye to friends and colleagues. He was still in Caserta when the news came of President Roosevelt's death on April 12, 1945. The president had looked gaunt and haggard when he posed for photographs during the Yalta Conference in the Crimea February 4–11, 1945, and was too ill by late March to carry the burden of wartime responsibilities. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945. “We're having a memorial service for the President this morning,” Wilder wrote to his family from Caserta April 14. “His death had a tremendous effect in this headquarters.”
⁵⁶

Wilder was still there when the Germans signed a surrender agreement on April 29 at Caserta. By V-E Day, May 8, 1945, he was back in the United States, awaiting discharge orders in Miami. The paperwork was delayed by one bureaucratic snafu after another. “I'm in such a mess of red tape as has never been seen,” he wrote to Harry J. Traugott, his clerk in North Africa and Italy, describing the convoluted reassignment process.
⁵⁷

Wilder had served in the war with distinction, confirmed by the award of the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur. He received an honorary membership in “The Military Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” for his “ability, enthusiasm and indefatigable energy together with painstaking accuracy,” and the official citation noted that his work had “contributed materially to the efficiency and success of air operations.”
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(“Hah! Everybody laughed when little Thornton entered the Army,” he wrote.)
⁵⁹

He received the news of the MBE in 1945, although the final paperwork was issued in stages by the British War Office and the U.S. War Department in 1946 and 1947, and his receipt of the actual Bronze Oak Leaf emblem that accompanied the MBE was delayed for more than two years because of the postwar “scarcity of supplies and material necessary to manufacture the British insignia.”
⁶⁰
But that summer of 1945, awaiting his discharge orders, Wilder wanted Sibyl Colefax to be “among the first to know” about the Military Order of the British Empire. “That with my Legion of Merit brings my three years of the war to a happy close,” he wrote to her. “There are few satisfactions greater than knowing you have the approval of your superiors in a job which involved their responsibility as well as your own. When I heard of this, I thought of my favorite Britisher in the world: ‘Sibyl will be pleased,' I said.”
⁶¹

He did not regret a moment of his service, but he was eager for the war to be over. “Some of my colleagues are cynical when I talk of how wonderful the day of peace will be,” Wilder reflected. “I'm not; it's wonderful enough to know that conscious death dealing has come to an end; the difficulties beyond may be formidable, but I am grateful enough for
that
cessation.”
⁶²

 

WILDER SPENT
more than four months in limbo, in Miami, New Haven, Hamden, and Washington, waiting in vain for his military discharge to come through. As for the assignment in Paris, he was simply physically unable to fulfill it, and had to notify Archie MacLeish that his doctors would not allow him to take it on. “It's all off,” Wilder wrote Stein and Toklas in July. “The doctors say I must take 6 months' to a year's rest. . . . What's my sickness? I don't know. Everything and nothing. . . . There's nothing organic the matter. There's nothing that a revolver won't cure. So as soon as I get out of the Army I'm going to Colorado to write plays.”
⁶³

He was, in fact, badly run down, and his “long torpor” and “paralysis of the will” dragged on.
⁶⁴
In those post–World War II days, long before post-traumatic stress disorder was given its clinical name in 1980, “gross stress reaction” was the formal diagnostic term applied to problems such as those Wilder and other World War II veterans experienced. The profound aftereffects of war had been called combat fatigue or shell shock after World War I, and “soldier's heart” after the Civil War. For Wilder there seemed then to be no cure but rest and time. His family alternately rejoiced in his return and worried about his health, and Isabel alerted friends to the seriousness of Wilder's problems: He had come home “an exhausted, grey-green, limp image of his own former self,” she wrote to Sol Lesser.
⁶⁵
After eight weeks in the United States, he was “just beginning to show signs of being himself,” she wrote. Physically he was plagued by lingering ear trouble, occasional deafness, and “a fatigue so great that he will be many more months overcoming that and being in good enough shape to overcome the deafness and head congestion. He is weary to some inner core of being; ill to a point that it is a physical, nervous and with him, spiritual, illness too.”
⁶⁶

After years of helping to make life-or-death decisions in the war, Wilder couldn't seem to make the simplest decisions at home. He was restless and distracted, as if civilian life were too much for him. After a few days of driving the Green Hornet, he stripped the gears, but fortunately, spare parts for the expensive repairs were available in a nearby town. He had come home from the war “hungry and thirsty for music,” Isabel said, and he spent a great deal of time at the piano with an “unconscious sweetness of touch” although he didn't always hit all the right notes. He seemed to take “infinite pleasure and comfort” from the portable Victrola they bought to replace the ones Isabel and her mother had given away to the prisoner-of-war drive.
⁶⁷

As the summer wore on, Wilder would occasionally travel in to New York to see his theater agent, Harold Freedman, and his wife, or the director and producer Arthur Hopkins. When Thornton was up to company, Isabella and Isabel invited a few friends at a time to quiet luncheons or dinners at Deepwood Drive—Elia and Mollie Kazan, and Montgomery Clift, who was sometimes invited to spend a couple of days with the Wilders. Thornton had “discovered a most rewarding and happy friendship in Monty Clift, surely our rising great actor, only 24 now,” Isabel wrote.
⁶⁸
The bond between the two men grew stronger when Wilder learned that Clift was also a twin, and they talked at length about the significance of twinship.
⁶⁹
“I have a new friend—one T. N. Wilder—novelist—playwright,” Clift wrote in July 1945.
⁷⁰
He claimed Wilder as his uncle and his mentor.

Wilder and his mother and sister hoped that writing might help to restore his health, and he began working again on
The Alcestiad.
⁷¹
Later in the summer Jed Harris traveled to Hamden for lunch and an afternoon of intense conversation that stimulated and even agitated Wilder. After Harris departed, Isabel wrote, Wilder “paced up and down the terrace” and not only delivered long scenes of
The Alcestiad
“in full dialogue, but acted out the parts, described the setting, even the props, the costumes.” He had shared parts of the play before, but as he walked and talked that sultry summer night, the whole play seemed to come clear to him. Isabel marked his return to writing as a turning point in her brother's homecoming.
⁷²
Now Wilder went into his study each morning and came out energized and excited.

More than thirty years later Isabel remembered that while her brother was “in a camp near Boston” waiting to be separated from the Army Air Forces, “his papers were lost” and that the commanding officer granted him a three-day pass to go to the Boston Public Library, “where he drowned himself once more in the Golden Age of Greece.”
⁷³
Wilder was at Camp Devens in Massachusetts in September 1945. On July 23, however, Isabel wrote to Sibyl Colefax that Thornton had lost the manuscript of the “almost completed first act,” but “doggedly and courageously he began again, from memory and also from beginning again.” The exact circumstances are unclear, but the fact remains that at some point Wilder lost his only copy of the working draft of his play, and reconstructed parts of it from memory, at the same time creating new versions of certain scenes. His own note about the loss does not record exactly when it happened, but the title page of the 1945 draft among his papers reads “THE ALCESTIAD/A PLAY OF QUESTIONS.” On the back of the page are Wilder's brief annotations:

 

Sketches up to and including the Tiresias scene of Act One had been made before the War and lost. Draft One of the first act, May and July 1945. Draft Two, begun July 8, 1945. This Draft Three begun (after the Completion of the First Drafts of Act II and half of Act III) on Dec [
sic
].
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At last Thornton was again finding joy in writing.
⁷⁵
It seemed to his family that word by word, page by page, day by day, the act of writing was “restoring him.”
⁷⁶
There were flashes of his sense of humor in the few letters he wrote that summer of 1945. “In a word I have psycho-physico-somatic-hypsobybalic symptoms, and am enjoying them very much,” he said.
⁷⁷
Two activities were helping him: He was reading Kafka, and he was reading Kierkegaard. He wrote facetiously in a letter, “Just read twice Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and know that I haven't got religious faith, that nobody ever has had it, and that it need not concern us.”
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