Thornton Wilder (97 page)

On December 6, bone weary from his journey, Wilder returned one last time to the house on Deepwood Drive. On December 7 he and Isabel looked forward to having dinner at the home of Catherine Coffin. Her son, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Yale's chaplain, would be there as well. Needing to rest before the evening's engagement, Wilder retreated to his room, donned his bathrobe, and lay down to sleep.

Sometime later in the afternoon, he died of a heart attack.

 

FOUR DAYS
before his death Thornton Niven Wilder had written to friends, “I am now old, really old, and these recent set-backs have taken a lot of energy out of me.” He had not given up, however. Far from it. He wrote, “I think I'm pulling myself together for another piece of work.”
⁸¹

EPILOGUE

There is no adventure in life equal to that of being and asserting one's self.

—THORNTON WILDER

journal entry 742, June 2, 1957

 

 

H
e was buried on December 9, 1975, in the cemetery in Mount Carmel, Connecticut, where Amos Parker Wilder had been buried in 1936, and Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder in 1946. A simple stone marks the site and bears the name of Amos Parker Wilder, followed by “His Wife Isabella Thornton Niven” and the names of three of his children: Thornton Niven Wilder (1975), Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder (1980), and Isabel Wilder (1995). Amos Niven Wilder died on May 1, 1993, and was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery on May 4, 1993. A separate headstone carries his name, and his wife's. Catharine Kerlin Wilder was buried there in 2006. Janet Wilder Dakin, who died October 7, 1994, was buried near her husband in Wildwood Cemetery in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Thornton Wilder's interment service was led by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., and attended by family and a few invited friends. The Reverend Amos Niven Wilder read scripture, and said of his brother, “He realized life while he lived it—and brought incomparable visions to all experiences and relationships, and not only in his writing.” Amos gave thanks in the benediction for his brother's work, for his “conviviality and incandescence,” and for the “rich annals of friendship, devotion, talent, and praise.”
¹

On Sunday afternoon, January 8, 1976, Thornton Wilder's friends and family gathered in Yale's Battell Chapel for a memorial service. Flowers filled the chapel—tributes from the president of the German Federal Republic, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the officials of Yale University, and the Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste—testimony to Wilder's bonds with a global audience. An organist and two violinists played Bach. As in
Our Town,
the hymn “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” was sung. After the service the music of the Yale Memorial Carillon drifted through the winter air.

A few of his multitude of longtime friends spoke at the memorial service—Ruth Gordon, Bob Hutchins, and Lefty Lewis, among others. Tappan Wilder read from his uncle's work, including these words spoken by Julius Caesar in
The Ides of March
: “Where there is an unknowable there is a promise”; and these from the archbishop in
The Eighth Day
: “Life is surrounded by mysteries beyond the comprehension of our limited minds. . . . We transmit (we hope) fairer things than we can fully grasp.”
²
These characters spoke for Wilder the writer and Wilder the man who evolved from the boy running alone in China, going his own way, then and always transcending the boundaries.

Through the voice of Chrysis, his Woman of Andros, Wilder reflected that “the most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.”
³
He traveled down those corridors all his life. He did not pretend to know the answers to the mysteries, but he knew the questions and was not afraid to ask them, over and over again, in his work and in his personal life.

Wilder's death was duly noted internationally. This quintessential American writer had lived, worked, and traveled as a citizen of the world, connecting globally with his era. He captured the spirit and the promise of his own country, and his planetary themes and questions touched a global audience as well, transcending time and place. Many of his novels and plays are vividly alive and relevant in the twenty-first century. To the end of his life he believed, as he had written in 1952, 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.”
⁴

He was a rare writer: one who worked as intensely hard on the innermost self as he did on the art. He had written to Isabel in 1937, “We're all People, before we are anything else. People, even before we're artists. The rôle of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.”
⁵
In his unfinished lecture on biography, composed in the early 1930s, Wilder wrote out a premise that described his own life: “By a strange spiritual law positive personalities so far assimilate their lives that they would not wish their very misfortunes otherwise. Their destiny is themselves.”
⁶

GUIDE TO NOTES AND SOURCES

Through the facts, as scaffolding, we hope to see the SOUL and we hope thereby to gain light on our own.

—THORNTON WILDER,

notes for a lecture on biography, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL

 

 

Thornton Wilder left a mass of unpublished and published letters, manuscripts, journal pages, and other documents—a substantial scaffolding of facts that shape and support a narrative of his life and work. This biography has grown out of more than a decade of close study of these primary sources. In their magnitude they document and illuminate Wilder's exterior life and much of his interior life, as well as the evolution of his creative work.

The majority of Wilder's papers may be found in the Thornton Wilder Papers and the Thornton Wilder Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. These papers and resources include correspondence, manuscripts, and other documentation of the lives of the Wilder family, including Amos Parker Wilder, Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder, Amos Niven Wilder, Charlotte Elizabeth Wilder, Isabel Wilder, and Janet Wilder Dakin. Throughout the endnotes, I have referred to the Thornton Wilder Papers and the Thornton Wilder Collection as the Thornton Niven Wilder Collection, or TNW Collection, YCAL. In addition there are numerous uncataloged letters, manuscripts, and other Wilder resources in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke. When they are quoted or cited, these documents are designated as uncataloged. Papers quoted or cited from other public collections are so noted. There are significant private collections of Wilder papers, but the holders of these collections are, by request, not identified in the annotations. Other libraries and institutions containing Wilder resources include the following:

 

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library, Beverly Hills, CA

Amherst College, Amherst, MA

Amherst Public Library, Amherst, MA

Berea College, Berea, KY

Berg Collection, New York Public Library, New York, NY

Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Research Center

British Library, London

Boston University, Boston, MA

College of Wooster, Wooster, OH

Columbia University, New York, NY

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Federal Bureau of Investigation Files/Freedom of Information Act

Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY

Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, MA

Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, NJ

Library and Archives of Canada, Ottawa

Library of Congress, Washington, DC

Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA

National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC

National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh

Newberry Library, Chicago

New York University, New York

Northfield Mount Hermon School, Mount Hermon, MA

Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH

Österreichisches Theatermuseum, Vienna, Austria

Princeton University, Princeton, NJ

Private Collections

Rice University, Houston, TX

Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College/Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

School of Oriental and African Studies Library, London, repository of the archives and records of the China Inland Mission School, Chefoo (now Yantai, Shandong, China)

Smith College, Northampton, MA

Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY

Thacher School, Ojai, CA

University of California, Berkeley, CA

University of Chicago Library, Chicago

University of Houston, Houston, TX

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

University of Texas, Austin

University of Southern California, Los Angeles

University of Virginia, Charlottesville

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison

 

In lieu of a separate bibliography, titles and complete publication details are provided in the notes for all works quoted or cited. Titles, sources, and dates of Thornton Wilder's published and unpublished work are given in full in the notes. Throughout, readers are referred to the most readily available editions of Wilder's published works.

Major publications during his lifetime, with copyright information provided by the Wilder Family LLC c/o The Barbara Hogensen Agency, include the following:

 

 

Novels

1926:
The Cabala
© 1926 Wilder Family LLC

1927:
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
© 1927 Wilder Family LLC

1930:
The Woman of Andros
© 1930 Wilder Family LLC

1935:
Heaven's My Destination
© 1935 Wilder Family LLC

1948:
The Ides of March
© 1948 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College

1967:
The Eighth Day
© 1967 Wilder Family LLC

1973:
Theophilus North
© 1973 Wilder Family LLC

 

 

Plays

1928:
The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays
© 1928 Wilder Family LLC

1931:
The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act
[
The Long Christmas Dinner
;
Pullman Car Hiawatha
;
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
;
Queens of France
;
Love and How to Cure It
; and
Such Things Happen Only in Books
] © 1931 Wilder Family LLC

1933:
Lucrece
© 1933 Wilder Family LLC

1938:
Our Town
© 1938 Wilder Family LLC

1939:
The Merchant of Yonkers
© 1939 Wilder Family LLC

1942:
The Skin of Our Teeth
© 1942 Wilder Family LLC

1955:
The Matchmaker
© 1955 Wilder Family LLC

1955:
The Alcestiad, with a Satyr Play, The Drunken Sisters
© 1977 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College

1959:
The Wreck on the 5:25
© 1959 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College

1960:
Infancy
[
Childhood
] © 1960 Yale University, Fisk University, and Oberlin College

 

Wilder's selected nonfiction was published posthumously in Donald A. Gallup, ed.,
American Characteristics and Other Essays
(New York: Harper & Row, 1979). © 1979 Wilder Family LLC.

Selected entries from Wilder's journals are published in Donald A. Gallup, ed.,
The Journals of Thornton Wilder 1939–1961
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). © 1985 Wilder Family LLC.

TNW's surviving early journals (from 1912, 1916–17, and 1922–33) are unpublished, and while the entries in these journals are usually dated, they are not numbered until October 11, 1926. There are a few 1969 journal entries, also unpublished. Quoted or cited journal entries in the later years follow Gallup's designations: “The 1939–1941 Journal” and “The 1948–1961 Journal,” but many of these entries are not included in the published volume.

Wilder's selected letters appear in the following editions:

 

Edward M. Burns with Joshua A. Gaylord, eds.,
A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen (
Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001).

Ulla Dydo and Edward M. Burns, with William Rice, eds.,
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds.,
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
(New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Copyright © 2008 Wilder Family LLC. (Compilation of the letters and added text copyright © Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds.)

 

Previous full-length biographies of Wilder include:

 

Richard H. Goldstone,
Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).

Gilbert Harrison,
The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder
(Boston: Ticknor & Fields, 1983).

Linda Simon,
Thornton Wilder: His World
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).

 

Book-length Wilder bibliographies include:

 

Richard H. Goldstone and Gary Anderson,
Thornton Wilder: An Annotated Bibliography of Works by and About Thornton Wilder
(New York: AMS Press, 1982).

Claudette Walsh,
Thornton Wilder: A Reference Guide, 1926–1990
(New York: G.K. Hall, 1993).

 

Many of the papers of Amos Niven Wilder, Charlotte Wilder, Isabel Wilder, and Janet Wilder Dakin are deposited with the Thornton Niven Wilder Collection at Yale. As of this writing, however, mystery surrounds the fate of some of Charlotte's papers. In the year after Thornton's death, it fell to Isabel to deal with twenty years' accrual of Charlotte's papers in the “dust-covered, untidy, hastily packed cartons” stored in the attic of the house on Deepwood Drive. As Isabel wrestled with the boxes in the attic, pages fell out. Notebooks opened. In glancing at the pages, Isabel wrote, she came across “startling words,” painful words. There were, she estimated, hundreds if not thousands of pages of prose—fiction and nonfiction—most likely Charlotte's unfinished memoir and her autobiographical novel. Letters over the next few years trace the movement of Charlotte's manuscripts from Isabel to Amos to Janet and back again. The manuscripts themselves have not been found. No records have been uncovered to document their ultimate disposition, nor can family memories shed light, and the search continues. Among Charlotte's surviving papers, however, are many pages with poems typed on one side and fragments of prose on the reverse, as sadly incomplete and incoherent as Charlotte's life itself.

 

THE THREE
earlier biographies listed above were written without access to all of the resources now housed at the Beinecke Library or in other collections, public and private. Now that Thornton Wilder's papers are more fully available, rich opportunities for research await students and scholars who are interested in American literary, theater, cultural, and social history in general, or in Wilder's plays, novels, lectures, essays, translations, adaptations, and/or journals in particular.

For further exploration of Wilder resources, readers are invited to consult the following Wilder-related Web sites:

 

www.library.yale.edu/beinecke

www.PenelopeNiven.com

www.ThorntonWilder.com

www.ThorntonWilderSociety.org

 

 

Key to Abbreviations Used in the Notes