Thornton Wilder (84 page)

 

WILDER WAS
an enormous hit at Harvard, but he wore himself out in the process. On Monday, March 1, he awoke to sharp pains in his back, thigh, and left leg. He managed to hobble to his ten o'clock class, but the pain grew so intense that he was taken to the Stillman Infirmary, and from there, to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was treated for a strained or displaced sacroiliac. Wilder would be hospitalized for a month—a time of “immobile days and largely wakeful nights.” He was unable to sit up even to write in his journal. His mind, sharpened by pain and by the drugs he was given, was “very active,” so much so that in two and a half weeks he had reread
Moby-Dick,
Great Expectations,
and
War and Peace,
among other books. He longed to write in his journal about his reading, as well as about pain, and the “professional formation and deformation of nurses,” but he had to postpone writing anything at all so as not to arouse “the slumbering sciatic nerve.”
⁶⁴

He believed that his “whole illness has been obviously a retort of offended Nature against my excessive exertions.”
⁶⁵
He enumerated them in his journal when he could safely write again: the Norton lectures; his two classes; his correspondence, more than twenty items a day; his ongoing literary work; the engagements he agreed to undertake, sixteen classes and lectures in less than a month in February alone.
⁶⁶
Gertrude Stein used to warn Wilder that every individual possessed a “quotient of solitude and gregariousness” and if those conditions were not in balance, illness could result. That was exactly his plight, Wilder wrote in his journal. “My requirement for solitude is high and I was leading a flagrantly gregarious life.”
⁶⁷
He was paying a steep price for it.

During that period of recuperation and enforced rest, Wilder's desire to write in his journal soon overcame his incapacity. He refused to mark time. Unable to sit or stand to write, he stretched out facedown in his hospital bed and filled page after page for what he now thought of as his Norton book. He was released from the hospital at the end of March and moved to the Hotel Continental in Cambridge to continue his recuperation. His left leg still ached “faintly” and writing was still “very awkward” because he still could not sit comfortably. Nevertheless, he managed to write long accounts of past experiences, an extended analysis of George Bernard Shaw, a passage on Dr. Schweitzer, and new assertions about the American experience: Americans “are inventing a new kind of human being—a new relationship between one human being and another—a new relationship between the individual and the all.”
⁶⁸

He grew to love the idea of the Norton book, but, he insisted, he was not an essayist, not a critic, “not a ‘non-fiction' man.” He was an experienced lecturer and public speaker, however, and thus understood that there is a great difference in speaking to the ear and writing “for the eye.” Because he believed firmly that his lectures could not be published as they had been spoken, he set to work rewriting them with that in mind.
⁶⁹

 

FOR WILDER
the decade of the fifties was a period of unfinished business—chiefly the Norton book and
The Emporium
and other plays he wanted to write. For several years he would carry around the Norton manuscript, saddled with guilt because he had not finished it, somehow
could
not finish it. As he often did, he envisioned a project much vaster than he could accomplish, or was obligated to deliver. Rather than write down his lectures, already brilliantly presented from the podium, he conceived a book of elegantly crafted essays on American literature, coupled with profound essays on world literature. He was ultimately thwarted by his own grandiose expectations.

Even so, Wilder's most important work in the decade of the fifties was accomplished not as the playwright or as the novelist, but as the lecturer/scholar, the teacher, the public citizen. For the next five years he often turned to his journal in the ongoing effort to articulate, craft, and test his ideas about American characteristics as revealed in nineteenth-century literature and applied in twentieth-century life. He was driven in part by the obligation to ready the Norton lectures for publication, but even more, as a writer and a citizen, he wanted to understand the national experience, to interpret it, to speculate about its implications for the future.

He gave his final Norton lecture on May 16, 1951. As his Harvard year wound to its close, Wilder expressed a hope and a promise in his personal quest for the right way: “I shall yet produce a work—a work and a self—which in its relative and limited proportions will be its justification.”
⁷⁰
He thought of himself as “an observer and an onlooker,” he wrote to Howard Lowry, president of the College of Wooster in Ohio. During the Harvard year Wilder made an earnest effort, he wrote, to “
belong
, to be in and of a community. Well, by the time I left I knew every third person I passed on the street—I sure was a citizen of Cambridge—but it was the most difficult year of my life.”
⁷¹

He found it “very gratifying” to receive an honorary doctorate at the Harvard commencement, and agreed to address the Harvard alumni reunion that day—an event, he said, that “many people throng to; they expect 8000 in Harvard Yard. . . . Damn, damn, I can never talk in general matters on America Whither, or our Age of Anxiety, or the Destiny of the New World. Damn. I've been working on it all morning.”
⁷²
He titled his address “Thoughts for Our Times,” and framed his remarks as a comparison of the “thought-worlds” of students when he himself had been one in 1917–20, and those he had known as a teacher in the thirties at the University of Chicago and at Harvard in 1950–51. Students in the fifties, he observed, were living in stormy times—the “Age of Upheaval” and the “Age of Anxiety,” as the period had been called. He was optimistic about the future because modern young people understood that “the things that separate men from one another are less important than the things that they have in common.”
⁷³
Wilder concluded:

 

All the languages in the world are but local differentiations of one planetary tongue. These concepts are very full of something frightening, but they are also full of promise. Oh, it is a lonely and alarming business to feel oneself one in the creation of billions and billions, and especially lonely if one's parents seem never to have felt that sensation at all, but it is exciting and inspiriting to be among the first to hail and accept the only fraternal community that finally can be valid—that emerging, painfully emerging, unity of those who live on the one inhabited star.
⁷⁴

 

In that Cold War era, while many writers and artists turned their attention away from the concerns of the world community, Wilder was articulating a bold global view in a cynical and suspicious time. On international stages in South America and in Europe, he had interpreted American characteristics for people from other countries and cultures. During his watershed year at Harvard, Wilder interpreted the American experience for the American audience in a nation seeking to redefine its identity in a postwar world. Masterful teacher and lecturer that he was, Wilder had learned a great deal, he said, from his “young friends in Cambridge” that year, and it gave him hope for the future. He told his audience in Harvard Yard that these young people had shown him “over and over again that to them it is as simple as breathing that all societies are but variants of one another . . . and the human adventure is much the same in all times and all places.”
⁷⁵

34

KALEIDOSCOPIC VIEWS

No view of life, then, is real to me save that it presents itself as kaleidoscopic,—which does not mean essentially incoherent. (The very children's toys of that name show us always a beautifully ordered though multi-fragmented pattern.)

—THORNTON WILDER,

“Notes Toward the Emporium,” February 15, 1954

 

The United States and Europe (1950s)

W
ilder was so exhausted by his Harvard experience that he told Isabel he would never forgive the university for the way he had aged in just that one year. “As far as Harvard is concerned,” he said, “the phrase is unjust; it is myself to blame. . . . Now it remains to be seen, not whether I can recuperate to the extent of being an adequate 54, but whether I can enter into the rights and privileges of being a good 60.”
¹
He promised himself and his lawyer that for at least a year and a half he was going to “withdraw from all that speaking-teaching-bowing-smiling racket—even if I have to dig into capital for it.”
²

He spent most of the summer of 1951 outlining and writing passages for his Norton book. He was expanding his theories of the American sense of time and place, the American transformations of the English language, and the “American Disconnectedness,” and he considered developing a section on American religion. He continued to explore the work of Poe, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Henry James with much the same fervor he had given to Joyce and Lope de Vega. He decided that Hawthorne was not truly an American writer. He found Emerson “repugnant,” writing to Malcolm Cowley: “Isn't he awful? Yet how that colossus bestrode the world for so long! His ideas basely, soothingly, flattering all that is facile and evasive in the young republic. . . . Melville's copies of [Emerson's] Essays are in the Harvard Library and it's a joy to see how Melville dug his pencil into the page in scornful attention.”
³
Wilder sketched out a “chapter” on Poe tantalizingly called “How Literature Can Be Made out of Necrophilic Sadism.”
⁴

He polished an essay titled “Toward An American Language,” which was published in the July 1952 issue of the
Atlantic Monthly,
with a photograph of Wilder on the cover. Because the journal would serialize only three of the six Norton lectures, Wilder set to work cutting and “making a sort of cuisine of passages robbed from the other chapters.” He worried that there might be a “sort of ‘incoherence in application,' ” but believed that would be smoothed out in the Norton book he was determined to write.
⁵
In August the
Atlantic Monthly
published Wilder's essay “The American Loneliness,” with a focus on Thoreau, and in November, “Emily Dickinson,” which turned out to be the last publication of any of the Norton material in Wilder's lifetime.

One American characteristic that Wilder especially prized was mobility, which, thanks to his car, meant independence. He was traveling now in a gray Mercury Dynaflow convertible with red leather seats. He loved the freedom of the American road, where he could drive himself to New Hampshire or Rhode Island or Florida, or to Atlantic City or Tucson, or to the Massachusetts coast, where he and Isabel took refuge in the summer, or to Maine, where Amos and Catharine had built a summer cabin at Blue Hill. There was also the freedom of the sea, his escape route to Europe. By mid-September Wilder was on the way to Europe again, hoping to continue his Norton work in Italy and France. He was convinced he could get some rest on the voyage; he told his lawyer, as he told many others, “Baby's best on a boat.”
⁶
He was back home in Hamden in November but soon headed off again, this time to Florida. More peripatetic than ever, he planned to go to Key West and maybe to Havana, or maybe to Tucson, and then—who knew where?
⁷

Wilder was in New York on May 28, 1952, to accept the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He had been elected to membership in the academy in 1939.
⁸
Pearl Buck presented him with the “highest honor for fiction” bestowed by the National Institute of Arts and Letters (the “inner body” of the Academy), observing that it was rare to “find a writer gifted and successful in such different fields as the play and the novel.”
⁹
In his acceptance Wilder identified two “essential requirements” of the novelist: “He must be more interested in human beings than in forming generalized ideas about human beings; and he must believe profoundly in the principle of freedom in the life of the human mind.”
¹⁰

The accolades kept coming: On June 9 Wilder was at Oberlin College, where he and his brother would receive honorary degrees. The college conferred an honorary doctorate of divinity on Amos, now Professor of New Testament Interpretation at the Chicago Theological Seminary at the University of Chicago. Thornton received an honorary doctor of letters degree and gave the commencement address. He was “triply happy” that he and his brother would receive honorary degrees at the same time.
¹¹
His commencement address, “Wrestling with Thoreau,” was one of his Norton lectures, tailored for the occasion.

 

THE WILDERS
were keeping careful watch over Charlotte, who was now living on her own in Greenwich Village. “So I had lunch with Sharlie,” Wilder had written to Isabel in the fall of 1951. He was happy to see that his sister was “most definitely better in every way. Hat and dress downright smart. She's now forbidden liquor and smokes only some expensive de-nicotined cigarettes.” He noted the irony, however, that although Charlotte seemed “almost completely well,” her conversations were less interesting.
¹²
Had he been privy to some of the prose she was writing at the time, he would have changed his mind on both counts. “My life is a smashed crystal—I don't know any other way to describe it,” she wrote.

 

It is like the lens of a huge telescope that an explosive bullet has struck; the glass has not fallen out, but the entire surface—even the inside—shows an infinite cross-pattern of a mosaic of cracks without a centre. This situation, of course, started, as it happens[,] virtually with birth; but the inciting cause of the present situation began in what my notes tell me was 1940—about eleven years ago, or a trifle more. . . . The gist of the centre of it, itself, I think, is the complex of ten years in hospitals and psychiatric institutions, for a
double
reason—one of which, the one that kept me there the full ten years, was “a severe nervous breakdown,” which only I, of all the world, evidently, know that I did not have. . . .
¹³

 

The sister and brother summarized their lives with metaphors that were uncannily similar images, yet with enormously different implications: Charlotte's life was a smashed crystal, a mosaic of cracks without a center. Thornton's life was kaleidoscopic—a “beautifully ordered though multi-fragmented pattern.”

However, Charlotte had shown so much improvement nearly three years after her lobotomy that her doctors had decided she could try to live independently. With Thornton's financial support, she rented an apartment at 220 Sullivan Street, off Washington Square, and was soon “on a high grade octane work program,” she wrote to Isabel. “Writing like dear life.” She wanted to resume her writing career, planning, she said, to “write out of the experience of the last ten years. (That will be an exposition of my character that will certainly put me on a guillotine in the public gaze!)”
¹⁴
But most of the time she didn't know what to write, and still insisted that she had never had a “nervous breakdown or any other mental or physical trouble.”
¹⁵

In the winter of 1951–52, Charlotte stopped taking care of herself, failed to eat properly, filled her apartment to overflowing with newspapers. “Honey, why will you collect old papers?” Thornton wrote to her. “I'm the quickest tearer-upper in the world. Isabel's always afraid that I'm about to throw away some ‘treasure.' ” He liked rooms “as near to monastic cells as possible,” he told Charlotte, and expressed his concern that old papers lying about would “collect dust: asthmatic, choking, wearying, unclean, disorderly dust.”
¹⁶

Charlotte began to experience occasional paranoid episodes, usually directing her angry outbursts at Isabel and Thornton, but sometimes at Amos and Janet as well. She developed bleeding ulcers and eventually had to be hospitalized for a hemorrhaging gastric ulcer. Afterward she recuperated at the Amityville home, but then was allowed to return to Sullivan Street. Ten months later, in a second hospitalization, most of her stomach and part of her colon had to be removed. In June 1953 she returned to the Long Island Home in Amityville for her recuperation from surgery. “Remember: you don't
only
eat to support your body,” Wilder wrote to his sister. “You eat to support your soul. . . . Do not read while you eat—do as the Mohammedans do: eat in silent admiration: eating is thanking,—thanking for being.”
¹⁷

By now it was clear that physically and emotionally, Charlotte was incapable of living alone. She was officially readmitted to residency at the Long Island Home July 18, 1953, to stay there indefinitely. “Yes, I went to see Charlotte,” Thornton wrote from the MacDowell Colony in September 1953. “Amazing. Best she's been since her first illness. Climbs up and downstairs like you or I.” He reported that one of the Long Island Home doctors had told him that there had been a “radical change” in her attitude, and that she had finally acknowledged that she did have a nervous breakdown and that her family “was acting for her own good and not merely maliciously restraining her liberty.”
¹⁸

It is not clear whether Wilder knew at the time of Charlotte's surgery that another American playwright had a schizophrenic sister who had been lobotomized. In 1943, after six years of futile treatment for her schizophrenia, Tennessee Williams's older sister, Rose, was subjected to the surgery. For Williams, his sister and her tragic illness were subject matter for
Suddenly Last Summer
and
The Glass Menagerie.
(In 1959 Wilder's young friends Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor played in the movie version of
Suddenly Last Summer
, with its graphic depiction of a lobotomy and of conditions in some psychiatric institutions.) What was public, center-stage subject matter for Williams the dramatist was private business for the Wilders, although Thornton Wilder the novelist would later portray in his fiction two young women who suffer mental or physical breakdowns—Sophia in
The Eighth Day
and Elspeth in
Theophilus North.
As shall be seen, these characters evoke images of Charlotte Wilder and the lessons her family learned from her illness. Like Wilder, Williams was devoted to his sister, financed her lifetime of medical care, and set up a trust to protect her as long as she lived.

 

FOR MOST
of the fifties Wilder was, as usual, overwhelmed with work and by “unredeemed pledges of work”—projects ranging from writing a screenplay to leading a diplomatic cultural mission.
¹⁹
In 1952 he accepted a five-thousand-dollar payment from the celebrated producer-director Vittorio De Sica to write “story ideas, plot ideas and dialogue” for a screenplay set in Chicago and based on what Wilder soon called a “worthless story” by Ben Hecht, drawn from Hecht's 1943 novel,
Miracle in the Rain.
²⁰
To be produced by Warner Bros., the film was De Sica's first movie project in the United States. After numerous sessions with De Sica in New York, Wilder withdrew from the project out of concern that “the whole constructions” might “suddenly topple down about our ears as forced, contrived.”
²¹
He also worried that De Sica and his colleagues were bent on depicting Chicago as “a love-less jungle of concrete,” and that they were working with “plot and dialogue, of abysmal conventionality,” perhaps out of the “problem of picture-making in a new country,” where they feared rejection by American studio heads—which, Wilder recalled, had been the fate of Max Reinhardt and other European filmmakers.
²²

Wilder's attention swiftly turned from a film about Chicago to an international gathering in Italy. He was asked to lead the American delegation to the UNESCO International Conference on the Artist in Contemporary Society, to be held in Venice in September 1952, and to prepare the official report. He refused the invitation twice but finally agreed to go, in large part because this was the first time a “truly international company of artists has met together.” There were visual artists, writers in various genres, and musicians. Distinguished artists were chosen to report on their individual disciplines: Henry Moore on sculpture; Georges Rouault on painting; Arthur Honegger on music; Marc Connelly on theater—and Thornton Wilder, the Reporter General, speaking on behalf of them all. The artists who gathered in Venice wished to “re-affirm two principles which the world is in constant danger of forgetting,” Wilder wrote in his official summary:

 

That the artist through his creation, has been in all times a force that draws men together and reminds them that things which men have in common are greater than the things that separate them; and that the work of the artist is the clearest example of the operation of freedom in the human spirit.
²³