Thornton Wilder (66 page)

Charlotte's second book of poetry,
Mortal Sequence
, dedicated to her mother, came out in 1939, to small sales and mixed reviews, unlike her first book,
Phases of the Moon,
winner of the Shelley Memorial Award, given annually by the Poetry Society of America to honor a living American poet on the basis of merit and need. Charlotte had shared the 1936 prize with the poet Ben Belitt, and the honor had opened doors to ongoing friendships with other writers, including the Irish poet and novelist Padraic Colum.
⁸³
This award, over time, was remarkably prophetic of distinguished careers in poetry: Previous winners included Conrad Aiken, Archibald MacLeish, and Lola Ridge, and among those in the 1940s would be Marianne Moore, e. e. cummings, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Penn Warren, and John Berryman. Charlotte's career, unfortunately, would be short-lived.
⁸⁴

Like her versatile siblings, Charlotte was writing in more than one genre. “Charlotte will have after many years a volume of prose ready this spring—Proust-like evocations of her childhood in Berkeley and China,” Wilder told Stein and Toklas, unaware, like the rest of the family, of how hard his gifted sister was struggling to finish her book.
⁸⁵

Meanwhile Wilder had embarked on a writing project of his own in February 1939, beginning a new journal “in order to discipline my thinking, in order to have thoughts, and in order to improve my thinking.”
⁸⁶
This 1939–41 journal turned out to be the most profound instrument of self-revelation and analysis that Wilder had yet created. In 1940, when he was filling pages and pages with single-spaced text, the journal also absorbed much of his creative energy and, as intense journal writing can do, satisfied the urge to write to the point of subverting his literary work. He had kept journals before, filling them with ideas for novels or plays, passages from works in progress, copies of letters written or received, notes on his reading, random accounts of his nocturnal dreams, and sporadic reflections on his daydreams and doubts. For the most part those journals were repositories for the strivings and experiments of a working writer.

The journal he wrote in 1939–41 was a different endeavor, however. It would focus on the inward life of Wilder the man more than that of Wilder the writer. In it he wrestled with what he called his chronic “easy fatigue, flagging concentration, and bad habits.” While he analyzed in depth his failings as a writer, he was far more profoundly concerned with his failures as a thinker. “I had long noticed,” he confessed, “that my thoughts on some given subject . . . ran into confusion or ran off the track or fell into a meretricious elaboration which was able to bedazzle (yet untrouble) the unthinking but which left me with despair and self-contempt.”
⁸⁷

He could edit and berate himself ruthlessly after a speech or even a conversation. The Wilder who could “bedazzle” an audience with his eloquence and wit was privately beset with doubts and “stage-fright”—“so much,” he wrote, “that I turned with hope and yet with alarmed self-distrust and
watched myself
try to jump the gate.” His intense search for modes of thought and speech carried over to his search for literary form. He sought to make all his expression, whether written or spoken, substantial, profound, original, unique. His expression had to be organic to the subject. It had to be masterly. “I soon came to see that the practice of reflection alone—even on the long walks which have provided me for twenty years with all that is my best in that very different activity, imaginative composition—would for me, be fruitless,” he wrote.

Instead of doing some of his best thinking on those habitual walks, he decided, he would now “require a more exacting method” of thought. He believed he could best achieve that by writing in his journal with disciplined precision “to prevent mere word mosaic and self-deception.” He aimed “to create a habit and a relation between thinking and writing,” and to record in the journal “a reservoir of more codified ideas on which to base the judgments I am so often called upon for in conversation.” He hoped that from these practices he could “proceed to the ability to reflect without writing and build up the power of ‘unflurried' thinking in the thousand occasions in daily life.”
⁸⁸
As the journal unfolded, this “unflurried” thought would encompass his explorations of
Finnegans Wake
; his theory of the novel as a literary form; his search for the subject of his next play; his work on the novel about Julius Caesar that he was now calling
The Top of the World
, a novel that would not be published until 1948, when it was titled
The Ides of March
; and his thoughts on moralizing, on happiness and unhappiness in fiction, on motion pictures, on tone in tragedy and comedy, on actors, on sentimentality and obscenity, on religion and psychoanalysis—and on the war.

He longed to see Stein and Toklas and to hear their close-up perspectives on the war. “I don't like my own and I don't like anybody else's,” he wrote to them.

On many nights during his sojourn in New York he had walked down to the Battery to listen to “the waves slapping the sea-wall” and to think of his friends “across the million waves.”
⁸⁹

 

IN THE
spring, back in Hamden, Wilder took driving lessons so he could prove to his family that he wasn't incompetent, and so he could take his “beautiful car” out on the road.
⁹⁰
He wanted to travel “in and out of hundreds of American villages.”
⁹¹
He passed his driver's license examination in late March, he reported to Woollcott. This was a significant feat, for in earlier years, to the dismay of his family, Wilder had declined to get a license. When he was learning to drive in Peterborough, New Hampshire, years earlier, he had obtained his first license only after being “tactfully” warned by the local sheriff that one was required. Later, after Wilder skidded and broke the back axle and a wheel of his first car, he stopped driving for a long time. He preferred for someone to drive him “hither and yon,” Isabel confided to Dwight Dana in 1931. But sometimes, she said,“in the enthusiasm of the moment,” he would set out alone in his car, “zig-zagging down the road,” leaving his anxious family behind. Wilder did many things well, but driving was never one of them.
⁹²
“At present,” he wrote, “it seems to me that I hate driving and automobiles. Like I hate typewriters.”
⁹³
He preferred walking to riding in cars, traveling by ship to flying, and writing with pencil or ink on paper to typing. Sometimes, however, certain modern conveniences were unavoidable, even if they were basically just a “lot of metal.”
⁹⁴

Wilder set out in the Chrysler convertible on April 1 for a long, leisurely trip south, paying a brief visit to his aunt Charlotte in Winter Park, Florida, and going on for a solitary stay in Saint Augustine. As he traversed the East Coast in his new convertible, he paid far too little attention to his driving, as he noted in his journal May 2, 1940: “Having resumed automobile-driving after eleven years I notice more clearly that my real danger as a driver is that my ‘thinking' employs such concrete imaginative forms that it steals my attention from the process of driving.” He found that even his “banal” thoughts about passing scenery, or people he saw along the roadside (especially the convicts working along Florida's highways), or memories of past events or anticipation of future ones, were “dramatized to such an extent that I am, as it were, wrapt up into them.”
⁹⁵

Fortunately he managed to drive himself safely to Florida and home again, staying in tourist camps along the way “On this trip I've lived in Tourist Camps,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas, “elbow-close to my fellow-census numbers among the 130 millions.”
⁹⁶
Forerunners of the American motels, tourist camps evolved as alternatives to hotels, which were not the most convenient accommodations for dusty, road-weary travelers or for their automobiles, which had to be housed somewhere, often in livery stables. When automobile travelers took matters into their own hands and camped out overnight along the roadside, in parks, or even on private property, many towns and cities began building free municipal tourist camps equipped with cabins, picnic tables, fireplaces, showers, and toilets. When the camps began to be overrun by riffraff—criminals, prostitutes, and noisy college students—owners imposed rental fees, and the modern motel was born.

Wilder was back in Connecticut in mid-May. On June 18 he was scheduled to be the guest of honor at a reception and dinner at the Hotel Taft in New Haven when
Our Town
opened in the movie theater in that city, just in time for the twentieth reunion of his Yale class. But first he would escort Isabel to the gala premiere of Sol Lesser's film in Boston on May 22. The governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire joined Boston's mayor at the premiere—an event so dazzling that Wilder feared it was enormously inappropriate during a time of war. The news from Europe was grim: The Nazis had taken Antwerp, Belgium, on May 18. There were reports that the French 9th Army had been destroyed. The Allies were gearing up for Operation Dynamo, a mammoth effort to save Allied troops at Dunkirk. The Germans were within days of subduing Calais, and Luftwaffe bombers were pummeling targets in France. Against that global backdrop, Wilder had little heart for the Hollywood-style celebrations of
Our Town
.

The movie was welcomed with “glittering fanfare” in Boston instead of the “indifference” that greeted the opening of the play in that city in 1938.
⁹⁷
According to the
New York Times
critic Bosley Crowther, “There is reason to hope this morning, to find renewed faith and confidence in mankind—and, incidentally, in the artistry of the screen.” He found in the film a “tonic and reassuring avowal of the nobility that resides in just plain folks.”
⁹⁸
The film garnered good reviews and good box office, and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture (although the prize would go to
Rebecca,
the first American-made film directed by Alfred Hitchcock). More important, just as
Our Town
spoke to theater audiences during the Depression, the movie resonated with the American audience in what Wilder described to friends as that time of “vast and terrible events,” when each day seemed “more in crisis than the last.”
⁹⁹

28

“SEEING, KNOWING AND TELLING”

In fact, it's not so much a matter of emotion at all, as it is of seeing, knowing and telling.

—THORNTON WILDER,

journal entry 34, November 1, 1940

 

The United States and Canada (1940s)

I
n the summer of 1940 Wilder planned to settle down to hard work at the MacDowell Colony, occasionally indulging in the distraction of
Finnegans Wake.
He had picked it up again “after a long recess,” he wrote to Edmund Wilson, one of the few people he knew who shared his avid interest in the novel. He told Wilson, “I think I'm stuck,” for he was alternately obsessed and exasperated with Joyce's “damned tricks.”
¹
On June 3 he told Wilson:

 

I discovered the key to Finnegans Wake, “the figure in the carpet,” and the meaning of 1132.

The subject matter of this letter is plain nasty, but it'll be over soon.

F———gans W———treats anal eroticism plus coprophilia plus stercophagia and that's all it's about and it isn't about anything else. It's buried in every five words of it. Even that beautiful last eight pages is deep in it.

Millions of those words are to be read backwards, sometimes slightly anagramatized, sometimes as a whole word, and sometimes syllable by syllable.
²

 

At first, Wilder wrote, “I thought I was imagining it and that I'd fallen into a prurient miasma.” But he went on to give Wilson vivid details to support his thesis. All in all, Wilder contended, the novel read this way revealed a “triumph of Neurosis,” along with some “secondary thoughts,” including: “How overwhelmingly the book illustrates Freud's definition of the type anal-erotic: order, neatness, single-minded economy of means. The neurotic's frenzy to tell and not tell. . . . Joyce's beady-eyed delight as the critics grope for the cosmological message. . . . The unsettling thought of the figure in the carpet of many works in literature.”
³

“I was very much interested in your letters,” Wilson quickly replied, “but I think you're exaggerating the importance of the anal element—which has always been present in Joyce. . . . Don't you think, after all, that he means to present it as merely mixed up with all the other elements of the human situation?” Wilson agreed, however, with Wilder's earlier idea that the family was the “fundamental symbol” in the novel.
⁴

There was “a lot more evidence there that I didn't feel like committing to the Postal Service,” Wilder retorted, but he joked that he “tore up” his notes “in wild indignation,” and hoped later in the summer to visit Wilson and discuss the issue further.
⁵
In his letter rejecting Wilder's latest theory about
Finnegans Wake,
Wilson sent along another compliment for
Our Town,
which he had greatly admired on the stage, and had just read in a paperback edition he bought at a newsstand. He still found it “certainly one of the few really first-rate American plays.”
⁶

In June, Wilder was once again sequestered in the “deep green shade and solitude” at the MacDowell Colony, and—“at last”—he found the subject for his new play. He recorded it in his journal on July 6, 1940: He had begun the play on Monday, June 24, in the Veltin Studio at MacDowell, and quickly finished the first act. During those years of global upheaval Wilder had despaired over the “difficulty of finding a subject.” He wrote in his journal that summer, “During the last year subject after subject has presented itself and crumbled away in my hand. Can this one hold out?”
⁷
He fervently hoped so. He was calling the new play
The Ends of the Worlds.
As the first draft of the first act began to take shape on the page, Wilder wrote, “I've at last found a subject that ‘permits' perseverance.”
⁸

 

THE WAR
was very much on his mind, as his journal reveals. “What are some of the primary reflections that keep returning to the mind in the face of so vast an irruption of evil?” he had written in his journal in late May. He was increasingly cut off from communication with friends in England and France, and, with daily dread, he depended on radio and newspaper accounts to track the proliferating war. He speculated about what it all meant and where it would lead. “Democracy is the government-form toward which the world moves, but one which requires as long an education of the people to maintain it as it requires a painful struggle to acquire,” he reflected.
⁹
He wrote in his journal about the role of the artist in the modern world: “This irruption of evil should show all the more clearly that [the artist's] work is to write Pure poetry, pure novel, and pure drama.”
¹⁰

As his thoughts on the war crystallized his theory of the artist's role in society, Wilder resolved to write “pure drama.” Soon afterward he began writing
The Ends of the Worlds,
which he eventually renamed
The Skin of Our Teeth—
a title evoking Job 19:20: “My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” Wilder decided that his new play about the “ordeals that man has had to pass through, including the Ice Age” would be a comedy—at first glance a strange choice for a drama about war, catastrophe, and the universal human family. He wrote to Austrian dramatist and poet Richard Beer-Hofmann, “In this one it seems I call upon still free-er uses of the stage, as to scenery, time, abstraction and audience collaboration.” He recognized that it would be “Difficult, difficult,” he said, “but I hope I can ‘get it right.' ” The method would be “buffoonery and
lazzi
[jokes].” The play, Wilder wrote, “has all colors in it—violence, anguish, detailed realism of the contemporary American scene, and low comedy.”
¹¹

Wilder had spent two years in a fruitless search for subject and form, and now his play emerged full force from the firestorm of war. The world war compelled him to confront the universal sweep of human experience. He was writing a play “in which the protagonist is [a] twenty-thousand-year-old man and whose heroine is [a] twenty-thousand-year old woman and eight thousand years a wife.”
¹²
He tried to describe it to Max Reinhardt: “All I can say of the play is that it is about the sufferings of the human race—including the Ice Age, and the Flood—told in riotous low comedy, with a pathos that never comes to the surface.”
¹³

Why comedy, for such a tragic subject? Like Joyce, Wilder would have to invent a style that would do justice to the subject. “Happier ages than our own could do it—or some aspects of it—in the purity of the lyric, the morality play, or in the relative simplicity of the
Prometheus Bound
and the
Oedipus
,” he wrote in his journal, “but in this century and above all, in these times, there has been added to the difficulty that of avoiding the pathetic, the declamatory, and the grand style. The only remaining possibility is the comic, the grotesque, and the myth as mock-heroic.”
¹⁴

This play was in many ways the most difficult creative work he had ever undertaken—but in the process he was discovering essential lessons about his craft. Heretofore he had often begun writing a novel or play only to abandon it when it didn't go well. Then he had come to recognize that the half-born or stillborn projects in his notebooks had, for the most part, not wasted his creative energy but redirected it. Now he was so committed to this new idea for a play that he felt he could not give up on it even if he was “writing it all wrong.” He wrote in his journal, “It presents problems so vast and a need of inspiration so constant that all I can do is to continue daily to write it
anyhow
in order to keep unobstructed the channels from the subconscious and to maintain that subconscious in a state of ferment, of brewing it.”
¹⁵

Throughout his writing life he had “been convinced of the fact that the subconscious writes our work for us, digests during the night or in its night the demands we make upon it, ceaselessly groping about for the subject's outlets, tapping at all the possibilities, finding relationship between all the parts to the whole and to one another.”
¹⁶
He was even more sure of this one night when he was “turning over the play in feverish insomnia,” and suddenly saw the resolution of his dilemma about a particular scene. “A few more such revelations,” he wrote, “and I shall be building a mysticism of the writing process, like Flaubert's: that the work is not a thing that we make, but an already-made thing which we discover.”
¹⁷

He wanted to infuse his play with pure, genuine emotion—no “false pumped-up emotion—or an anemic emotion which ekes out itself in whimsical fancies. In fact, it's not so much a matter of emotion at all,” he concluded, “as it is of seeing, knowing and telling.” He applied that formula to his play in progress: “In so far as I see, know, and tell that the human race has gone through a long struggle (Act One) it is legitimate that I cast the consideration in the form of modern man and his home; and precisely to avoid false heroics—in this time, of all others—that I cast it in comic vein.” He hoped, he said, that “at least, I bring to it my sense of making the whole stage move and talk, and my characteristic style, which weaves back and forth between the general and the particular.”
¹⁸

By mid-July, when Wilder packed up his journal and manuscript and left the MacDowell Colony to return to New Haven, he had finished the first act of
The Skin of Our Teeth.
¹⁹

 

“EARLY FALL,
I was busy talking and broadcasting and signing manifestos for the British, etc., and for Roosevelt,” Wilder wrote to a friend. “Then I retired from the whole whirlpool and went to Quebec for two months—work, long walks and reading the papers.”
²⁰

“I love it here, but it's not reciprocated,” Wilder wrote to Woollcott from Quebec in October 1940.
²¹
He had driven his Chrysler to Canada in pursuit of solitude and a “working hermitage” where he could immerse himself in the new play.
²²
He could see the steep streets of Old Quebec and the glistening St. Lawrence River from the window of his comfortable room in the Château Frontenac—a far cry from the tourist camps where he stopped overnight en route to Canada. He had barely gotten settled, however, when he was summoned to the local post office. “My family carelessly forwarded to me a magazine edited in Zurich,” Wilder explained to Woollcott:

 

I was called into the Post Office and the words “printed in Germany” were pointed out to me on the third page. It is being carried up to higher and higher authorities who are looking for cryptograms in the pages of Corona whose only fault is that it's overprecious. I suspect my rooms of being sifted while I'm out. . . . While I take these endless walks—I presume some poor Intelligence Officer is darting behind trees and burning up shoe leather at my heels.
²³

 

Unknown to Wilder as he joked about being under surveillance in Quebec, the FBI was actually investigating him in earnest in the United States. During the summer of 1940, Wilder had crisscrossed New England, driving his Chrysler from New Haven and Hamden to Woollcott's Neshobe Island on Lake Bomoseen, Vermont, to the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, back to Hamden, and then back to Neshobe. He also drove to Gloucester, Massachusetts, for a stint as the Stage Manager in
Our Town,
a role he had played more than sixty times by early December 1940.
²⁴
“I'm acting in my play again,” he wrote to Stein and Toklas. “The world's weather has done something to the reception of the play—the last act always was sad—now it's convulsive—Lordy, I never meant that!”
²⁵

On or about July 19, 1940, as Wilder drove from Hamden to Neshobe Island in Vermont, he apparently stopped to visit friends in Keene, New Hampshire, for his car was spotted at an alleged Austrian “Refugee Camp” located on an estate near Keene—“under suspicion as a possible center of operations for a group of German spies.” An FBI agent investigating the rumor of espionage based his information largely on an interview with “a girl who is employed at the Eskimo stand,” an ice-cream shop and dance pavilion near the estate. The proprietor of this enterprise told the FBI agent a hair-raising tale about the supposed goings-on at the alleged spy camp: The Austrian refugees appeared to the Eskimo-stand staff to be engaged in secret activities led by a man they called the “Captain,” who had supposedly commanded a “U-Boat or a destroyer in the World War” and was now “dominating” the “elderly lady” who owned the estate. Some people who sounded as if they were Germans came and went in cars, but the FBI investigator had obtained only one license number for an automobile observed at the camp—Connecticut 1940 License WW-69. The FBI set out to “ascertain all available registration data” on the car, and to “conduct a preliminary investigation to determine the apparent activities and occupation of the person to whom this car is registered.”
²⁶