Thornton Wilder (8 page)

As his letters reveal, Thornton soon discovered that at the China Inland Mission School, the boys were regularly expected to play cricket and soccer, two sports he did not play well and therefore did not enjoy. He tried, however: “The other day I played but they play a different game,” he wrote in a letter to his family. “In this one they touch it only with their feet, backs and heads. And I play the little that I know of Rugby and take it in my hands and make a foul. It is something to unlearn.”
⁵¹
He soon sought and received special permission to enjoy cross-country runs “through fields of monumental Chinese graves.” As he remembered it, Thornton “contrived too—though less ambitiously—to leave the bounds” of the school compound and, as he put it, to “go to China.”
⁵²

Most weekdays the boys were required to play cricket or soccer, but on Wednesdays they were allowed to choose their exercise, and that is why Thornton could run cross-country alone in the alluring landscape beyond the school and the city. “This privilege was open only to older boys of proven reliability,” he wrote, “but it was accorded to me, probably because of my father's position. I gave my solemn promise not to linger in the villages, not to fall into conversation with the ‘natives,' not to touch the offerings on the graves—simply to complete the three-mile course and return to the school.”
⁵³
As he relived them in memory years later, he delighted in those solitary treks, running out of the Boys' School grounds past the tennis courts and the walls enfolding the Girls' School, onto the country road that wound through lush farm fields, past farmhouses and tombs. “These were upright inscribed slabs, graceful
stelae
,” he wrote. “At the base of many of them were small altars or thrones, some of them in the shape of primitive houses surrounded by offerings in bright colored paper and festooned with streamers invoking the dead.”
⁵⁴
It was at the midway point in his run that he entered the “Grove of the Ancestors,” where ancient sycamores and gingko trees encircled a group of “noble tombs.”
⁵⁵

He loved the “solitary and ruminative” experience of the Wednesday afternoon runs. He had already decided that he was going to be a writer. “It is well known that writers require long stretches of time alone—to think,” he reflected in his manuscript decades afterward. “I thought throughout the entire course, but I thought best in the Grove.”
⁵⁶
His habit was to sit in the grove, leaning comfortably against a tree, and to think or, sometimes, to sleep before he ran down the hill back toward the school. He took advantage of any opportunity to try to talk with Chinese people he encountered on the way.

There was no escaping the strict academic regimen of the school, or the “great deal of corporal punishment, from the teachers on the students, and from the students on one another,” Thornton wrote in 1929. As he recalled it, he quickly learned from painful experience that the three students with the lowest grades on any class quiz “received three sharp blows on the hand with a ruler and could watch for hours the rising blue welts.”
⁵⁷
“I had many occasions to compare my rising welts with those of my fellow-students,” he wrote in his Chefoo manuscript.
⁵⁸
This was a practice of which his parents disapproved. His father had written to his children that “in the English schools children are punished a good deal; while boys sometimes need a little thumping, I believe that plenty of love will do much the same. At all events, we are bringing you four up on that basis—though now I am absent, the responsibility is great on you all.”
⁵⁹

The rigorous curriculum, designed in part to prepare students to take the Oxford entrance examinations and in part to produce a new generation of Protestant missionaries in China, included classes in biblical scripture, British history, world geography, English composition and literature, mathematics (including Euclid), science, Latin, music, and drawing, as well as courses in bookkeeping and shorthand. Thornton quickly realized that American boys, himself included, had certain obstacles to surmount. The English boys were far better educated. Furthermore the American boys “gave the impression of being stupid, ill-educated and uncouth,” Thornton wrote, looking back. “There was little possibility of our ever, ever growing up to be gentlemen.”
⁶⁰

He informed his father that he had been placed in a class “much higher than I ever expected and there is some doubt of how long I will stay. Im [
sic
] already tackling the six major declentions [
sic
] in a Latin grammar and the rudiments of Algebra.” He issued a warning: “My marks will be awfull [
sic
] ( just a little over half the Max, most of them) 65s and 68s.” He begged his father not to show the grades to Amos, who was a very good student. “Wait another term. I am getting into the hang of it.”
⁶¹
Even music, which Thornton loved, presented new complications. “The boys all learn by the Sol-Fa System,” Thornton reported in a letter, “and the music-books look like Hiroglyphics [
sic
].”
⁶²
He enjoyed the religion class taught by “the young and bounding Mr. Taylor,” who managed to make it fun to memorize passages from the New Testament.
⁶³

Although one of his nicknames at home was Todger, Thornton was called Towser at Chefoo—or, more formally, Wilder Minor, since there were other Wilders (unrelated) in the student population. He wrote later, “Wilder Major and Wilder Tertius were to be my best friends among my fellow students, as well as five years later at Oberlin College.”
⁶⁴
These two were sons of Dr. George Wilder, a medical missionary in Peking.

In June 1911 Thornton was elated to learn that his sister Charlotte would soon be coming to Chefoo. His father wrote to a friend on June 10, 1911: “Let me add confidentially, that Mrs. Wilder may go to Europe soon, leaving Charlotte at Thornton's school in the hope that with the minimum cares she [Isabella] may pick up her strength and fire.”
⁶⁵
Isabella's doctor recommended the change of scenery, and once again plans were under way to split the family. She was “run-down and depleted,” her husband knew, and she needed “
change—change, newness
” as well as “freedom
from care
.”
⁶⁶
Dr. Wilder, of course, had to remain in Shanghai. Young Amos would stay at the Thacher School in the United States. Isabella would travel to Europe, as she had longed to do for years, first to Switzerland, and then to join her sister, Charlotte Niven, and her now-widowed mother in Florence, Italy, where Charlotte worked as one of the national secretaries of the YWCA in Europe. Isabella would take the two little girls with her—Isabel, now ten; and Janet, just a year old. And that left Amos in California, and Thornton at his boarding school in Chefoo.

But what to do with Charlotte? It was decided that she would join Thornton in Chefoo. The school was good for him, his parents believed, and they hoped it would be so for Charlotte. “She's a girl full of power,” her father wrote to Amos, “if she can get it under control.”
⁶⁷
He had other concerns about Thornton, which he shared in July in a letter to Amos: “Thornton will go through life radiating good nature, I hope, but unless he gets more ‘practical' I guess you have to support him!—tho these dreamers sometimes surprise one.”
⁶⁸

Over their protest, and to their dismay, the decision was made for Thornton and Charlotte to be left to live at the China Inland Mission School. At least they would be together. Thornton waited eagerly for his sister's arrival, and finally, on a July morning, was summoned to the school gate to meet her. He was happy to have her nearby in the Girls' School, even though they were allowed only an hour and a half of “Brothers and Sisters” time each Saturday.
⁶⁹
Just a year apart in age, they walked together, their dark heads bent toward each other, as Charlotte confided her worries and troubles to her older brother. “She is being made to take french [
sic
] instead of German,” he reported in a letter to their father. “All communications about her should be addressed to Mrs. Hayward, Girls C. I. M. School, Chefoo.”
⁷⁰
Soon he wrote with pride that Charlotte was “doing sensational things up at the girls school.”
⁷¹
A smart, shy, sometimes moody child, Charlotte nevertheless seemed to adjust to the school routine quickly.

Thornton and Charlotte stayed in Chefoo during the school's summer vacation, while their mother finished preparations for her journey to Europe and their father carried on his work at the American consulate in Shanghai. Chefoo's fresh sea breezes and mild, sun-filled days attracted hundreds of visitors during July and August, and students from the China Inland Mission School had their own private beach for swimming and diving. Sometimes, Thornton reported, they were allowed to go swimming twice a day, and he was learning to dive off the pier a half mile from the school.
⁷²
On her thirteenth birthday, August 28, 1911, Charlotte wrote proudly to her brother Amos that she could swim two hundred strokes, and that she was “getting on pretty well” in Latin, English, French, and geometry. “Can you come up to my height?” she asked her studious older brother. “Latin, French, German, Chinese, English, Eng. Money problems, etc., algebra, geometry at 13 years of age. I'll be a phenomenem [
sic
] before I finish!”
⁷³

Charlotte was disappointed that the school offered no courses in Chinese and that only upper-form students were allowed to study German. She asked her father to write to the head of the Girls' School to see if something could be done about that in her case. Many Chefoo students spoke Chinese fluently, having grown up surrounded by Chinese servants and raised by amahs. While it would seem sensible to teach Chinese language, history, and culture, especially to children who might grow up to be missionaries or diplomats like their parents, the teaching of anything Chinese at Chefoo was forbidden until sometime in the 1930s because school officials did not want students to be able to communicate in Chinese with servants or other townspeople.
⁷⁴

Harried as he was in Shanghai, Amos Parker Wilder always found time to write letters to his children, especially about their spiritual lives, regularly directing them to read the Bible. Charlotte reciprocated in a letter to her father in July 1911: “You look up I Timothy 2nd chapter 11 and 12 verse and you will find something about women's sufferage [
sic
],” she wrote. “You may wonder how I penetrated so deep into the Bible. Every morning and evening we have prayers and have quarter of an hour, called, ‘silent time,' which we spend reading the Bible. I am beginning with Genesis and going right through.”
⁷⁵

“My sister Charlotte and I were sent to the China Inland Mission Boys' and Girls' Schools at Chefoo in Shantung Province, on the coast some 450 miles north of Shanghai,” Thornton wrote years later in one passage of his Chefoo manuscript. “I suspect my father selected Charlotte and myself as the two of his children most in need of the edifying influences we would find there.”
⁷⁶

 

BY LATE
August 1911 the Wilder family was once again separated by oceans and continents, and Thornton thought this was the worst of all the separations he had so far endured. His mother and two sisters, accompanied by Nurse Donoghue, would live in Europe with his aunt and grandmother.
⁷⁷
His brother, now fifteen, would live in the United States. His father would live in Shanghai. And he and Charlotte would live in Chefoo, 450 miles away from Papa and thousands of miles away from Amos and their mother and the two little sisters who, he despaired, would probably forget him before he saw them again.

Because Thornton and Charlotte dreaded the separation from their mother, Dr. Wilder traveled to Chefoo in late August to visit them to ease the departure. Heedless of the pressures of his father's official duties, his mother's health and desires, and the family's finances, Thornton came to believe that his father, “like a chess-player,” moved “his wife and five children about the world, sending some to Europe, some to America, and some to north China—always in the interest of the young people's education.”
⁷⁸

4

FOREIGN DEVILS

All those hundreds of thousands of eyes rest on you for a moment, really see you (you are the “foreign devil”) and in those glances is neither antagonism nor admiration nor even indifference,—there is a touch of curiosity and some amusement.

—THORNTON WILDER,

“Chefoo, China”

 

Chefoo, China (1911–1912)

O
n August 24, 1911, militant Chinese university students from Szechuan (now Sichaun) in southwest China swarmed the streets of Shanghai in angry protest against the nationalization of the railway. U.S. Consul General Amos Parker Wilder took solace in the fact that his family was out of harm's way. His wife and two youngest children were safely in Europe, his eldest son was with family friends in the United States awaiting the new academic year at the Thacher School, and Thornton and Charlotte were tucked away in the China Inland Mission School compound in Chefoo, surrounded by teachers and staff who were experienced in protecting their charges from pestilence, battle, and other dangers.

Dr. Wilder poured his energy into the consular mission of protecting American citizens and American interests from revolutionary forces in and around Shanghai. “Safe-guarding the Americans in China” ran the heading of a story with a Madison, Wisconsin, dateline in the
Waterloo
(Iowa) Times-Tribune
on November 23, 1911, complete with a picture of the consul general, lauding Dr. Wilder for protecting American lives and property in the “midst of the present epochal upheaval in the Chinese empire.”
¹

In his private hours Dr. Wilder longed for his family. As if courting his wife, he wrote to Isabella, who was in Lausanne, Switzerland: “My sweet Isabel—I shall forever call you this in honor of dear days. . . . A fellow in absence must have some beautiful thing to cling to. Tell me if your heart warms a bit.”
²
He wanted her to be well and serene again. He passed along the news that at last a buyer had been found for his newspaper. He regretted that he had been so “hampered” with financial worries for so long. He would do better, he promised. “If you have any new resolves in your sweet breast and are willing to be hugged and kissed,” he wrote, “come back to me after you have had a winter of rejuvenation, and we will do the Shanghai life normally, as other people do and then go ‘on leave.' But if you do not feel any conversion and know no sense of cooperation and dislike Shanghai, I will come and see you all later.”
³

Isabella wrote to assure her husband that she and the children were well and comfortable in Switzerland, although missing Nurse Donoghue, who had accompanied them to Lausanne, helped them get settled, and then returned to the United States. “If only you will get your nerves and serenity & wholesome view of life again,” he answered, “
I care not where you go to find it
.”
⁴

Dr. Wilder urged his wife to enroll Isabel in a good school and find an evangelical church to attend. He assured her that Charlotte, Thornton, and Amos were “doing nicely” in their respective schools, and seemed to be “very content and
doing good work.
”
⁵
He could report that Thornton's letters revealed him to be “happy & progressing:
playing tennis
now.” He was satisfied that it had been “a great idea” to send Thornton and Charlotte to school in Chefoo, believing that the experience would give them “strong bodies, good English sense & directness, and, I hope, earnest character.”
⁶
He missed Isabella and the children keenly, but, he said, “I am getting on all right; feel well & seem to be doing good work–tho' one never can tell the Washington end.” He asked her to send him “a word of
affection
.”
⁷
He hoped she would come home to him with renewed “bodily health & soul calmness.”
⁸
He reassured her that while the revolution in China was a serious matter, he was not in danger, for the “rebels make foreign friends by scrupulously keeping hands off foreign interests.”
⁹

 

DURING THE
revolution life went on as usual in Chefoo, removed as it was from the Chinese cities where normal life was riven by bomb explosions, terrorism, bloody massacres, and fierce fighting by revolutionary societies opposed to the existing imperial government, the power of the military, the threatened nationalization of the railroads, and the long-standing “encroachments” of “foreign devils.” That brutal autumn of 1911 led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the emergence of the fledgling Republic of China, and the ascent to power of Sun Yat-sen.
¹⁰

Safe within the comfortable confines of the China Inland Mission School, Charlotte excelled in her studies, and Thornton began to improve in his, although he remained afraid that he could not achieve enough academically or athletically to please his father. This time, however, Dr. Wilder tried to cheer him up, and wrote to Amos, who was excelling in all ways at the Thacher School, that he didn't care about Thornton's shortcomings “so long as he has the kind and pure heart. He is an unconventional lad and I do not marvel that he does not do as others do.” Dr. Wilder was pleased that Thornton had “lots of
sense
in him—for poet natures are sometimes abnormal.”
¹¹
He worried about Charlotte, however. Her letters were marked by “an extravagant, uncontrolled swing like her impatient conversations,” even when they were full of joy. He wrote to Isabella, “I am troubled of all the children lest she prove unmanageable later—So strong, able and full of fire.”
¹²

As Thornton felt more at home at Chefoo, his performance on the athletic field also seemed to improve. He hoped to impress his father with reports of his athletic prowess. Most of all he enjoyed his solitary hours running and the hours swimming in the bay.
¹³
While he was “not a good enough rower to get in the boat-club,” Thornton wrote, he did make the tennis club, and he made three runs on one cricket day. He was also learning to drill with Indian clubs, another required activity—although he found that sport perilous: Once, in his daily gym class, a fellow student lost control of a club and it flew across the room “at tremendous velocity,” whacking Thornton in the forehead. He was “carried to the infirmary more dead than alive,” he recalled years later (with some deliberate exaggeration), and the medical staff looked on in alarm as “the swelling rose to the size of an Easter egg.”

Should they telegraph Consul General Wilder in Shanghai about his son's injury? A very concerned nurse reported to Dr. McCarthy, the school's headmaster, that Thornton was “talking very strangely. Very strangely indeed.” She was afraid that they must “fear the worst.”

“And from that moment,” Thornton remembered, Dr. McCarthy knew “that all was well.” He said to Thornton later, “If you had begun talking sense, I would have been obliged to telegraph your father.”
¹⁴

According to one Chefoo legend, while Thornton played cricket reluctantly, he gave it his best, even managing to make the school team. “He used to play as goalkeeper,” schoolmates remembered, “and when the ball was safely at the farther end of the field, he would pull out a copy of Horace's Odes and read that—an admirable act and prophetic of his future greatness.”
¹⁵
Thornton studied violin for two and a half hours weekly, sang in the glee club, and played the violin in two trios.
¹⁶
He respected his violin teacher, the Scotsman Ebenezer Murray, who was noted for “strict discipline” and his “passion for good music and all forms of beauty.”
¹⁷
Decades later, when he heard that Murray was living in Canada in straitened circumstances, Wilder notified his former classmate, Henry Luce, and they joined other former schoolmates in a fund-raising effort to help their teacher.

In addition to his academic courses, Thornton was taking the required religion courses, including one in Old Testament texts, where he was “studying up Isaiah” and needing the “big Bible” his father had promised to send up from Shanghai.
¹⁸
One result of attending the required Sunday church services was that “we were all falling in and out of religious conversions a good deal of the time,” Thornton recalled.
¹⁹
There was no doubt that this was a school with emphasis on religion, but Thornton had not yet encountered the “ ‘hell-fire' ” evangelism that he would occasionally witness during his college years at Oberlin and Yale.
²⁰
He believed that the majority of American missionaries in China preached a religion that “turned largely on
SIN.
” In fact, he wrote years later, “The early translators of the Bible into Chinese found difficulty in translating that word. The Chinese knew all about wickedness and injustice, but when these ‘foreign devils' harangued them from street corners, beseeching them to confess their sins to God and be saved, they could only listen with blank wonder. . . . Only an occasional missionary was able to render Christianity
attractive
to his native listeners, to himself, or to his family.”
²¹

Fascinated as he was by the Chinese people in every corner of the city, Thornton was aware that they in turn were intrigued by the presence of “foreign devils.” He reflected six decades later,

 

All those hundreds of thousands of eyes rest on you for a moment, really see you . . . and in those glances is neither antagonism nor admiration nor even indifference,—there is a touch of curiosity and some amusement. There is something that is more chilling for an occidental. The Chinese have lived in this density of population for tens of centuries (even the villages convey a shoulder-to-shoulder density); their customs are fashioned by it; their religion has been moulded by it. Those glances reflect also the reason for the omnipresent untended misery: they devaluate the importance of
any one individual life.
²²

 

Here were the seeds of one of Thornton Wilder's recurring fundamental themes—the unique value of each individual life among the multiplicity and diversity of souls. As he reflected in later years, “Even small boys are affected by these confrontations.”
²³

 

POLITICS RATHER
than plague threatened to disrupt the 1911–12 school year at the China Inland Mission School, and many of the missionary parents stationed closer to the violence of the revolution fled to Chefoo for safety. Consequently, Thornton and Charlotte were surrounded by a large crowd of youngsters and adults during the Christmas holidays of 1911 at Chefoo, and they also enjoyed a visit to their father in Shanghai. “There was a great pillow fighting,” their father wrote to Amos, and they hung the traditional Christmas stockings.
²⁴
The family exchanged transoceanic gifts and letters as Papa, Thornton, and Charlotte celebrated Christmas in Shanghai; Amos in California; and Mama, Isabel, and Janet in Florence with Isabella's sister and mother.

To inaugurate the New Year, Dr. Wilder led Thornton, nearly fifteen, and Charlotte, thirteen, in a ritual that was dear to his heart—the signing of a temperance pledge. He wrote out the intimidating text by hand, and witnessed the two signatures: Thornton Wilder's first, followed by Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder's, inscribed January 7, 1912, at Shanghai. “My father has instructed me from my earliest years as to the evils of drink,” the pledge began,

 

and he has shown me that until drinking as a social custom abates, the terrible harvest of violence, misery, insanity, cruelty to children and death will continue, for habit will thus be engendered in the new generation forever coming on. As a Christian, knowing these things, I should count it a duty to refrain from doing anything that shall continue this dreadful waste & loss of human lives and souls; and with heartiness I should join in the efforts of earnest men and women of every race and every religion to bring in the glad day when there shall no longer be a drunkard. . . . I therefore promise solemnly, God keeping me, to abstain from all distilled, fermented and malt liquors as a beverage. . . .
²⁵

 

During this time the parents were debating their future plans by mail. Should Isabella and the children return to Berkeley, and if so, when, and should Amos Parker join them there? If so, how would he support them? “We will all be house-keeping in America soon enough—I fear,” Dr. Wilder wrote,

 

for I would like to stay here indefinitely to get the income & keep [the] children at Chefoo & Amos at Thacher School for a couple of years. I may be able to do it—I will try; but with the Rebellion & Consular intensity, I know not. I think I shall take a room in this Consulate Jan. 1 for economy until the early summer when I will ask for leave—if my ship floats so long.
²⁶

 

He assured Isabella that her part, for the time being, was “to live quietly & to get strong and serene.”
²⁷

 

AGAINST A
backdrop of profound political change in China, Dr. Wilder tried to cope with his expanding duties in Shanghai. Now he was in charge not only of oversight of the robust trade enterprises centered in Shanghai, but of preparing a yearly commercial review of the entire Chinese empire, based on annual reports forwarded from all the American consulates in China. He had to monitor international business trends affecting China, Japan, the United States, and the Philippines. He oversaw the consular court and endless customs, immigration, and shipping matters. Quite simply, he found himself in charge of one of the busiest, most important consular posts in the world—and he was overwhelmed. He was also exhausted, with lackluster energy, but all the while he did his best to care for his far-flung family, wishing they were still at home together in Madison or even Berkeley.