Thornton Wilder (81 page)

He had wanted to write a novel that was like a play, and he succeeded.
⁷⁶
His tactics in the epistolary novel led to the creation of complex characters vividly revealed through dialogue in letters and journals. Rightly or wrongly, his characters speak definitively for themselves—and Wilder's Julius Caesar is the most complex, fully developed, multidimensional character he ever created. In some ways
Ides
is also a novel of manners, as
The Cabala
had been and, later,
Theophilus North
would be—not glib, superficial commentary but astute, ironic observations on the human condition as reflected in the trappings and interactions of any society in any era.

 

THE NOVEL
appeared in January 1948 and was already a bestseller by mid-March 1948. Explaining why the Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen the book for its March selection, John P. Marquand pronounced it “more than a literary
tour de force.
It is actually literature.”
⁷⁷
While some critics found the book cold or limited in appeal, the reviews were largely favorable, with more than one reviewer joining Marquand in calling
The Ides of March
a tour de force, and praising its maturity and its lustrous prose.

Some women, however, thought the novel was unfair to women. They included Amy Wertheimer, to whom Wilder protested, “Those parts about women that make you bristle weren't me—they're Cicero! I've made a novel like a play—i.e.—
I
[Wilder underlined the word twice] am not there; just other people.”
⁷⁸
He acknowledged in a letter to Alice B. Toklas, however, that he could not resist an allusion to his mother and Isabel in
The Ides of March.
Isabel, like their mother “and like a great many women,” felt that she had “an instinct for medical matters that is superior to eight years' exclusive study of them,” he wrote. “I put that into the Ides of March, and I remember rocking with laughter in my chair while I wrote the lines.”
⁷⁹

Wilder's own view of women is more accurately expressed not by Cicero but by Caesar: “I am beyond any man I have ever met the admirer of the essential feminine; beyond any man I have ever met I am least censorious of their failings and least exasperated by their vagaries. But then!—what advantages I have had! I ask myself in amazement: What opinion must that man hold of womankind who has not had the advantage of living in the proximity of great women?”
⁸⁰

 

BY THE
time his novel was published, Wilder was in England to consult with Laurence Olivier on his upcoming production of
The Skin of Our Teeth
. He spent a night in the country with the Oliviers, as well as one in their London house; had a reunion with his friends Sibyl Colefax and Michael Redgrave; and met and had tea with T. S. Eliot. In the aftermath of the war, Wilder was heartened to see England and then France emerging “from the season of despairing confusion,” and in both countries there was “stout-hearted ‘coping' and resourcefulness,” as well as a remarkable “flowering in theatre. . . .”
⁸¹

He spent time in Paris with Sartre, who gave him a copy of the final text of his play,
Morts sans sépulture,
asking Wilder to go forward with the translation. Entitled
The Victors,
the play was directed by Mary Hunter (Wolfe), one of the first successful female directors in the United States, and produced by New Stages at the Bleecker Street Playhouse off-Broadway. It ran for a limited engagement from December 26, 1948, to January 22, 1949, with mixed reviews.

 

AFTER HE
returned from Europe in 1948, Wilder was restless:

 

But here I am this very funny fellow, glad to drop in at cocktails anywhere in New Haven, speaking at any Veterans Wives sewing circle, if it's in New Haven; going to New York “on business,” then getting a fit of shyness rather than call up friends, and eating alone at little boites in the West Forties and dropping in alone at whatever trembling pianist may be coping with a début at Town Hall.
⁸²

 

He found himself caught up in the “sideshows” of an author's work—writing “prefaces, translations, recommendations, political statements.”
⁸³
In April 1947, for instance, he had written a long letter to Lillian Gish, who sought the theater and motion picture rights to
The Woman of Andros,
explaining to her in diplomatic detail why his novel would not make a good play or movie.
⁸⁴
He had accepted an honorary doctorate at Yale in 1947, and written a series of dramatic sketches for the 1947 centennial of the Century Association, of which he was a member.
⁸⁵
In October 1947 he had contributed an article titled “Gertrude Stein Makes Sense” to
'47: The Magazine of the Year,
an essay condensed and adapted from his introduction to Stein's
Four in America.
Also in 1947, for the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Wilder had written a short play,
The Unerring Instinct,
for their “Scripts for Brotherhood” series—scripts provided without charge to dramatic clubs and high schools.
⁸⁶
He frequently read and commented on manuscripts, many of them sent to him by people he didn't know. Some of these “sideshows” were necessary, and even enjoyable—but most of them ate away his time and energy.

Wilder was onstage again himself in the summer of 1948, playing George Antrobus in summer stock theaters in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, and this work would at least generate some income. He performed as Mr. Antrobus in sold-out shows in Cohasset, Stockbridge, and Westport. Glenway Wescott, who had known and admired Wilder the writer for years, was also an “assiduous . . . lifelong and international” theatergoer. He was in the audience one night, and so could give a firsthand account of Wilder the actor. Wilder characterized his Antrobus “with humor,” Wescott wrote:

 

temperamentally: a familiar type of tired but sturdy, more or less indomitable man in a raincoat or trench coat. . . . As he came on stage he immediately established the reality of the scene by glancing all around it, taking possession of it, flashing his eyes; then turned and faced the audience and immediately began his portrayal of himself, gesturing strongly, as though wielding a brush, painting [a] great everyman's portrait on the canvas of air between him and the audience, up over our heads.
⁸⁷

 

Wilder told Wescott about sending a two-page letter to a sixteen-year-old boy from Long Island who had written to ask how he should enact Mr. Antrobus in his school play. The nexus of Wilder's advice to the lad: “Pick out a few places where you'll be real loud.”
⁸⁸

 

IN AUGUST 1948
Isabel was afflicted with severe arthritis, and had to be hospitalized for two weeks and “strung up by the neck in traction” in order to have “all those top vertebrae pulled out of their lethargy.”
⁸⁹
She came home from the hospital much improved, but having to wear a leather neck brace. Wilder chauffeured her to and from her treatments, took her shopping, and drove himself back and forth to the Westport Country Playhouse for his acting job. He had accepted Robert Hutchins's invitation to lecture in Germany in November 1948 under the auspices of the University of Chicago in its program at the University of Frankfurt-am-Main. There and at other German universities, he would speak on “The American Character as Mirrored in Literature.” He and Isabel traveled to Ireland in September, and then to Germany for his lectures.

Wilder was constantly ruminating about what to write next. A play? A novel? An original screenplay? His travels would help clarify the decision. He vowed, however, that although he would never write about World War II directly, he hoped that nothing he wrote would “ever fail to contain” what he had experienced there.
⁹⁰

33

SEARCHING FOR THE RIGHT WAY

The play [
The Emporium
] as it now projects itself will be all right, but it will have for me the draw-back of being all about one thing: the baffling search for the Right Way.

—THORNTON WILDER,

journal entry 412, September 25, 1948, Dublin, Ireland

 

The United States and Abroad (1948–1950s)

I
n 1948 Wilder applied for a military permit to enter Germany, the necessary official sanction to travel to Paris and then on to Frankfurt-am-Main for three weeks “to deliver lectures at the Universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg, on the recommendation of the Military Government for Hesse, Education and Cultural Relations Divisions.”
¹
His longtime friend Robert Maynard Hutchins, former president and now chancellor of the University of Chicago, had invited Wilder to lecture in the university's programs in Frankfurt. Wilder would also lecture to university students in Heidelberg, Marburg, and Berlin. But first he and Isabel would spend a month in Dublin, and then go on to Paris.

In September, when he packed for the Atlantic crossing on the RMS
Mauretania,
bound for Cobh, Ireland, Wilder deliberately left his Lope de Vega research material at home, hoping to wean himself from his addiction to it. He had told Maxwell Anderson that he planned to write a “short book, ‘The Early Plays of L. De V.' for scholars only, all footnotes, no ‘literary' appraisal.” He should have taken up this work in his twenties, Wilder said, “but I'm still living as though we were to live until a hundred and fifty.”
²
Instead of his work on Lope's plays, Wilder took his journal on the voyage, and quickly began to fill it with ideas for a new play of his own.

Whether they were lost or destroyed, or never existed at all, there is a gap in Wilder's journals from 1942 until a one-paragraph entry on June 6, 1948. It was not until his ship approached the Irish coast on September 21, 1948, that he took up his journal again in earnest. Although his topic was his new play, his subject was himself at age fifty-one—his doubts and indecision about what to write, and how; about where to spend his energy; about, from this time onward, how to live his life. In the confines of this postwar journal in the 1950s, Wilder created as compelling and revealing a self-portrait as he had ever written.

In 1950 he would clarify the purpose of his journal: It was not to be a receptacle for descriptions of events, or conversations, or parties, or books he was reading, or plays he was seeing. Instead it was to be a vehicle for reflection, a “repository only for ideas which are
moving
and
gathering
, which promise to reward me with greater extent and definition if I note them here, which are
snowballing.”
In essence his journal would concentrate on two questions: “Why One Writes and What One Writes.”
³
He might have added a third, for the journal also reveals his own struggles with the question of how one lives.

The journal would absorb and consume much of his creative energy in the 1950s—and, at first glance, even seems on the surface to deflect it. In reality Wilder's journals through the decade contain some of his most important creative work, as well as unprecedented revelations of his inner life. There are 539 pages of entries from 1948 through 1961, with two short entries in 1969. For the most part all these entries are handwritten, single-spaced, on lined paper. Each of these handwritten pages contained an average of 500 words. By this measure Wilder wrote an estimated 269,500 words in his journals alone from 1948 to 1961. In addition, more than a thousand manuscript pages of Wilder's notes on Lope de Vega survive, as well as more than 600 manuscript pages of notes on Joyce's
Finnegans Wake,
along with the “hundreds of annotations” in his copy of the novel.
⁴
That is 2,139 pages plus an estimated 400 pages of earlier journal entries—or more than 2,500 pages Wilder thought about, composed, and wrote out by hand, as was his habit when writing his novels and plays. The pages in his surviving journals, added to his surviving Joyce and Lope de Vega notes, yield an estimated total of at least 1,250,000 words—words he put on paper beyond all the words in his novels and his plays, unfinished as well as finished, and in the thousands of letters he wrote. This total far exceeded the word count in his first five novels, combined.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
contains an estimated 34,000 words, for instance; with the words Wilder put to the page in his journals and scholarly investigations, he could have written thirty-six novels the length of
The Bridge
and still have had words left over.

He was often criticized as a writer of slight output—by 1950, five novels; four full-length plays, if
The Trumpet Shall Sound
is counted; a number of playlets; and a collection of six one-act plays. But if the text in his journals and his scholarly investigations is counted, Wilder was actually prolific, and he had compelling reasons for investing his creative energy as he did. He expanded his experiments in his own literary work and his inquisition into the works of Joyce and Lope to search for the “right way” to interpret the American experience and the American character as revealed in nineteenth-century American literature; to define what it meant to be an American in the twentieth century; and to examine the role of America and Americans in the global community.

 

IN A
lecture Wilder gave at Harvard in 1950, he speculated that after Herman Melville finished writing
Moby-Dick,
“something broke” in him. Melville “lost his concentration,” Wilder said.
⁵
He recognized in Melville what he knew to be true of himself after he had finished writing
The Ides of March
. Throughout the months after his novel was published, Wilder wrote in his journal, “I groped about for the theme of my next piece of work,—a play, a novel, or an original motion-picture. I turned over some of the old themes, the Alcestiad. The Christmas pageant [a proposed play he called ‘The Sandusky, Ohio Mystery Play']. The pure detective story. The Horatio Alger form, rejecting them all without much exploration.”
⁶
A chance remark from a friend led him to consider writing a play juxtaposing his unfinished “Empress of Newfoundland” story with a Horatio Alger theme, told in the atmosphere Kafka created in
The Castle.
After two shipboard nights of “almost total insomnia” Wilder believed this new play was “in a fair way to determine itself as the next work I shall offer.”
⁷
He called it
The Emporium
, and began filling page after page of his journal with notes on character and plots, and fragments of possible dialogue.

His work on the dating of Lope's plays encroached again, however, despite his good intentions. He had been working on that project for nearly three years, and reckoned that if he concentrated on it for ten years he could date most of the plays “within a three-year margin of error” and, in the process, make significant discoveries about Lope as a playwright and a “builder and destroyer” of drama companies.
⁸
But he had to face the reality: What difference would it make? Would the book he envisioned “be worth that time”? He postponed the answers, deciding that when he returned to the United States in February, he would “devote solid months to Lope,” and assess where he stood. Then he would have to decide whether to continue, or whether the “whole pursuit in reality” was a “dangerous flight from the difficulty of thinking and writing.”
⁹

In Dublin, when he was not drinking shandy and exploring sites depicted in
Finnegans Wake,
Wilder was engrossed in his new play, pulling together events, characters, and ideas from his earlier, unfinished work. It would take place in an emporium, a symbolic department store, where metaphorical material goods and life itself were bargained, bought, and sold. Once again he made a firm decision to challenge the audience's imagination with “bone-bare staging” and the “incoherence and the absorbing intensity of dream-experience,” with the whole play “touched with the unexpected and the disconcerting.”
¹⁰
By September 23 he was “well along in Part Two,” and had changed the name of the play to
“
Pluck and Luck,” in deference to the Horatio Alger theme and Alger's series of novels by that name. The play was “straining to be born,” he believed, because it was still giving him insomnia.
¹¹
He could feel “the central idea of the play tearing around” in his head.
¹²
He was writing at white heat, but he had no idea how the play would end: “Of course, I should be frightened that I do not see my conclusion, but all writing is a Leap.”
¹³

His play as it unfolded presented him with “the drawback of being all about one thing: the baffling search for ‘the right way.' ” He did not want to write a play that turned “endlessly on one subject”—an objection he had always felt to Shakespeare's
Othello.
¹⁴
He looked at his play from “every angle,” seeking to “establish the angst”—in part 1, the angst of an orphan boy who felt “the wild homelessness that longs to ‘belong.' ” He would write about the angst of longing for recognition from “those Higher Up”; about the angst of “self-seeking”; about “love under the conditions of angst”; and, finally, about “the liberty found in the
angst
, the self-reliance that is the only answer to the bafflement, and then the slightest intimations that the Emporium approves the exploitation of one's liberty however erratic.” It was painful, he acknowledged in his journal, to tease his subject from every angle, and to “color” the “inner state” of his characters with “the dragging search for the right way.”
¹⁵
Wilder turned back to Kierkegaard's ruminations on sin, guilt, and freedom of choice in
The Theory of Dread
as he thought through his plans for the play “at its most profound level.”
¹⁶

He had promised his next play to director and producer Arthur Hopkins, whom he had long admired. In fact, he allowed his concern for Hopkins's expectations to influence some of the creative choices he made in
The Emporium
.
¹⁷
By early October, Wilder was beset by doubts about the emerging drama, especially the device of using the audience as if they were characters in the play—a device he employed out of consideration for Hopkins's need for a small cast. Was this going to be “valid theatre”? Would the audience tire of the word “emporium”? What were the perils of using “the Store as a figure of the Absolute” and of employing a “sustained metaphor”? (A sustained metaphor was bad enough in a sonnet, Wilder wrote, and even worse in a full-length play.) “But my real basic fears—when I allow myself to admit of a fear—are that the whole thing may be a wild preposterous lapse of judgment on my part (and oh, how badly I can write); and that I may not digest and compass a true ending.”
¹⁸

During the month Wilder and Isabel spent in Dublin he split his time between writing—and fretting over—the new play, and preparing for the lectures he had promised Bob Hutchins he would give in Germany in November and December. He would address two topics. The first was “Some Reflections on the Theatre,” an updated version of a lecture that had been a staple on his speaking tours in the 1930s, and the subject of a major essay he entitled “Some Thoughts on Playwriting.”
¹⁹
The other topic was “American Characteristics as Reflected in American Literature,” a lecture he had been developing for years, especially during and after his South American tour in 1941. He expanded the lecture as time and world events dictated, and it would serve as the foundation for lectures he would deliver in the future.

In these upcoming lectures in Germany, Wilder would speak not “of man in his social and political relationships but of the Human Condition in general,” he wrote in his journal.
²⁰
He would speak about art as one principal resource mankind could summon in the face of “potential catastrophe,” along with religion, technology, and “Frivolity—distraction.” In “Some Reflections on the Theatre,” he would focus on the art of the theater, which, he wrote, “hangs balanced in suspension between two resources: it both offers a flight and relief from dread by being as completely occupying as frivolity is, and it also, like religion, provides an escape from the insecurity of the human condition by offering a promise that there is order and relatedness in the world.”
²¹
The lectures were well received, and he appreciated his encounters with German university students, especially in Berlin, which was then blockaded by the Soviets and dependent on British and American airlifts to fly in food and fuel—more than three hundred thousand tons by November, when Wilder visited the city.

By December 27 the Wilders were in St. Moritz, after a short stay in England. He could finally pick up the pages of
The Emporium
again, but now Wilder realized that his momentum, his energy, and even his original vision for the play had disappeared. “During the last few weeks I almost lost my play several times,” he wrote in his journal. “Totally lost it. Even now it may be lost.”
²²
He thought he might have to destroy everything he had written. “I see that I don't yet know how I can write this play,” he worried in his journal. “I haven't thought deep enough. If this is all I've got I'd better throw it away now.” He diagnosed his problem astutely: He was not feeling his themes “validly in my self . . . I have found them in books (in Kierkegaard), but if they are not in me (or . . . with passion potentially in me) they have no business messing up my play.”
²³