Thornton Wilder (82 page)

 

ON FEBRUARY 19, 1949
, the Wilders were homeward bound on the
Queen Mary
; they arrived in New York on February 25. Wilder did not pick up his journal again until May 7, when he took refuge at the Claridge Hotel in Atlantic City, his first opportunity for “true solitude” in months. He was going to try again, he wrote, to collect his thoughts “toward the Emporium and toward the two tasks that await me this summer: the short address of opening at the Goethe Festival and my own forty-minute discourse there.”
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He berated himself because the five-month lapse in his journal was proof of his “continued inability to organize” his life so he could work. It was also evidence of his “lifelong” habit of “barefaced substitution of occupying diversions.”
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Overwhelmed with doubts, he wrestled with the play. “I hate allegory and here I am deep in allegory,” he wrote. He revisited Goethe's work hoping to reinvigorate his own play in progress, as well as to glean ideas for the lecture he had been invited to deliver at the Bicentennial Goethe Convocation in Aspen, Colorado, in July 1949—another invitation extended by Bob Hutchins. Wilder was indebted to Hutchins for some of the most significant experiences in his career—the opportunity to teach at the University of Chicago, and to enjoy there some of the happiest years of his life; the chance to meet Gertrude Stein and launch a pivotal literary and personal friendship; the journey to lecture in postwar Germany; and now the invitation to go to Aspen to experience what would be a galvanizing summer.

Hutchins and two of his friends, wealthy businessman and University of Chicago trustee Walter Paepcke, and university vice president Wilbur C. Munnecke, had established the Goethe Bicentennial Foundation in order to orchestrate a celebration of Goethe's bicentennial in 1949. The event would take place in Aspen, where Paepcke's Aspen Company was rescuing the old silver-mining town in the high Rockies and transforming it into a mountain resort that would also be a sort of Chautauqua of the West. The Goethe festival would lead to the creation of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies. Although the Modern Language Association first conceived the notion of honoring Goethe's legacy, the idea was brought to fruition by Hutchins and the Italian classical scholar Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who saw the bicentennial celebration as an opportunity to “honor Goethe the cosmopolitan humanist and universal man—poet, philosopher, scientist, administrator, and exponent of the cultural unity of mankind—and thereby to help heal the wounds of war and to promote world government.”
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Hutchins was largely responsible for securing the speakers and raising funds for the event in an era when Germans and Germany were still viewed as suspect by many in the United States. He succeeded in recruiting two world figures as speakers—the Spanish philosopher and author José Ortega y Gasset and Dr. Albert Schweitzer, musician, biographer, teacher, theologian, and, for thirty-six years, physician ministering to the people of Gabon in French Equatorial Africa. This would be Schweitzer's first and only visit to the United States. Naturally Hutchins relied on his old friend Thornton Wilder as an adviser, and invited him as well to speak at Aspen, where more than two thousand people gathered during the three-week run of the celebration.

On July 7, 1949, in a letter from Aspen, Thornton described the event to Amos, who in 1922 had worked briefly with Schweitzer at Oxford, and assisted him with French-to-English translations. Wilder wrote, “Batteries of concerts and lectures assault you—often three a day,” adding, “I've become the pack mule of the convocation.” Dr. Schweitzer lectured in French at Aspen, but when a translation into English proved to be “terrible,” Wilder was asked to “touch up the English text for its German presentation,” and to read the English text antiphonally as Dr. Schweitzer delivered his lecture in German. “Ditto Don José Ortega y Gasset,” Wilder wrote to his brother. “Only for him I am to be first and sole translator of his Second Lecture and I am to read it with him from the Podium.”
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Not only did Wilder translate German to English for Dr. Schweitzer and Spanish to English for Ortega, but at Hutchins's “command,” he delivered his own lecture twice as new guests and subscribers arrived at different times.

Wilder spoke at the festival not as a novelist or playwright, but as a student of Goethe's work, and an advocate of certain of Goethe's principles, which he had long ago incorporated into his own work: Goethe's concept of the unity of mankind and the potential unity of human minds; his prediction, in 1827, that the era of world literature was at hand; his belief that “from the heart of the universe . . . there pours out a stream of energy ceaselessly operative,” and that this energy's “action is to mold chaos into significant form.”
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Wilder loved the convocation, he loved the mountains, and, he wrote to Amos, “I love the schoolteachers who stop me on the street, and the students who've hitchhiked across the country to sample this. But most of all I love Goethe. Nobody ever loved anybody like I love Goethe.”
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He thought he'd stay on in Aspen after the festival and finish his play. “I realize this letter sounds like
euphoria
,” Wilder wrote to his brother, “and you are putting it down to the altitude or to drink,—no, no, mostly it is Goethe. Perhaps too it is the elation of plain brute fatigue. Pack-mule fatigue.”
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Now in Aspen—and again, thanks to Hutchins—Wilder was launching his work as an advocate for the global community, the champion of the planetary mind—a worldview that transcended national borders. His Goethe lecture not only articulated one writer's debt to another but crystallized fundamental tenets in the literary work Wilder himself had already done—and, if he would only pay attention, it could guide him toward the work ahead. As Wilder's lecture on Goethe reveals, Goethe, like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Joyce, and Stein, was a catalyst for the expression of some of Wilder's quintessential themes: There is the theme Wilder first recognized in the archaeological ruins in Rome, “that billions—not merely millions—have lived and died and that no description of mankind is adequate which does not find its proportionate place within a realization of all the diversity of life on the entire planet over a vast extent of time.”
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There is a second theme—a corollary of the first—the principle of the particular in the universal, and the universal in the particular. There is the vision of a planetary consciousness, and an understanding of the unique identity of each soul among the multitude of souls.
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As he composed his lecture Wilder seemed to resolve the quandary about the role of chance, fate, and destiny in human life, a recurring question in his own work, hovering throughout
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Woman of Andros, Heaven's My Destination,
and
The Ides of March.
In his allusions to Goethe's ideas, Wilder was offering a possible answer to himself as well as to the two thousand people who gathered in Aspen that July. “What do we do while we await” being “carried on to our goal?” “We work,” Wilder said. “What do we work at? There the life of Goethe helps us as much as the writings—through
Faust
rings wide the conviction that
Wirken
—effective action—alone reconciles us to life and leads us into the sense of the oneness of all existing.”
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And after life on this planet, what? In Wilder's novels and plays, various characters ponder this question, among them Brother Juniper, Chrysis, George Brush, Emily, Caesar. Again, Wilder found an answer in Goethe's ideas—one answer, if not
the
answer—continuous practice of one's art, and continuous evolution as an artist and a person. According to Wilder, Goethe said when he was “very, very old”:

 

If I remain ceaselessly active to the end of my days nature is under an obligation to allot me another form of existence, when the present one is no longer capable of containing my spirit. . . . I do not doubt the continuance of our existence. May it then be that He who is eternally Living will not refuse us new forms of activity, analogous to those in which we have been tested.
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Wilder concluded that Goethe could envision a planetary literature and not be frightened by the prospect because “he had found his place among two hundred thousand billion and had accepted his moment in uncountable light-years.”
³⁵

 

IN HIS
private hours in Aspen, as Wilder thought over his conversations with the Goethe specialists at the convocation, some of them related to questions about Goethe's sexuality. “It seems to be agreed that Goethe was psychically impotent until the Italian Journey,” Wilder wrote in his journal, adding, with reference to Goldsmith's play, that some scholars had concluded that Goethe had “the She-Stoops-to-Conquer” situation—he could connect only with a woman of inferior social class. “This would indeed give rise to fantasies.”
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Wilder concluded that “Goethe's genius is all sublimation,” observing that sublimation involves both a “normal” animality and “the Twisted—the price which must be paid for that very offense against nature which is sublimation.”
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It was not so much sublimation resulting in “the Twisted” that Wilder had in mind, but, as he later defined it, sublimation as “a
higher
transference of the sexual drive,” for instance, into art or science or religion or some other worthy endeavor.
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As Wilder reflected on Goethe's sexuality in his journal, he may have revealed part of the rationale for the choice he was making for himself—the sublimation of his own sexual energy in his creative work.

 

WILDER STAYED
on for a time in Aspen after the convocation concluded, socializing and working sporadically on
The Emporium.
He wrote a new prologue for the play, restructured certain elements, and felt that, at last, he had regained his momentum even though it was “still far from written or even foreseen.”
³⁹

He answered a pile of mail in Aspen, and wrote a long letter in response to a telephone call from the actor Cary Grant, who, with the producer Howard Hawks, wanted Wilder to write a film script based on the first two books of
Gulliver's Travels.
Wilder replied that there was “no possibility” that he would undertake the Gulliver project. Still he thought it was a “fine idea” and if “certain difficulties” could be mastered, it would make a film that “would delight millions.” Wilder suggested what should and should not be done with such an adaptation—including a whimsical reflection on the “real difficulty” in such a script: “
Do you need to add some plot?
Love-interest (given the difference of size!) is out of the question; but what is lacking is any person-to-person relation between
anybody
and
anybody
. . . . Can you hold the interest of audiences for two hours on the situation GIANT-PYGMY?”

Perhaps Grant could take some liberties, Wilder said, and let Gulliver “really have an absurd but touching
tendresse
(and farewell) with the Queen of Brobdingnag.” He would be in Aspen until September 3, Wilder wrote, in the event that Grant and Hawks would like to travel to Colorado to see the majestic scenery and “talk over this very exciting project.”
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Grant and Hawks didn't make the trip or the movie, and in early September Wilder was aboard the Zephyr, traveling back to Connecticut.

In late September he went on from Hamden to Newport, one of his favorite writing retreats, but despite his solitude and long walks on the familiar shore, he remained discouraged about his play. He wrote in his journal, “Never have I had a work at once so far advanced and so far from completion.”
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WILDER'S LIFE
in the decade of the 1950s was a dichotomy: There was his public face, famous on both sides of the Atlantic, increasingly visible in lectures and public appearances. There was his private face, revealed only in his journal and certain intimate letters. As his artistic and intellectual interests continued to evolve, it was a decade of doubt and indecision about what to write, and how, and why—and where to live, and how, and why. Wilder migrated from public appearances and accolades to private angst, from Europe to the United States, and back again, restless, searching. He was, he wrote in his journal, “a canoe in mid-ocean.”
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He was bound this time for Holland, England, France, and Spain. He would see Alice B. Toklas, lonely in Paris. He was forced to cancel plans to drive through Tuscany with Sibyl Colefax, for she was too ill to make the trip. Other than seeing very close friends, he hoped against hope for a “solitary Trappist work-siege.”
⁴³
Wherever he traveled these days, there were distractions—people he wanted to see, people who wanted to see him, reporters who wanted interviews, some of them annoying. Gone were the days when he could travel anonymously, at his leisure, on his own terms. In a letter written in Paris, he recalled fondly, “the happiest occasions in my life were those days when as dreamy student-vagabond—boundlessly un-noticed—I visited foreign countries; to recover that is all my aim.”
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