Penelope Niven Read online

  THORNTON WILDER

  A Life

  PENELOPE NIVEN

  WITH A FOREWORD BY EDWARD ALBEE

  DEDICATION

  To Jennifer, my daughter,

  who shares the journey and lights the way

  EPIGRAPHS

  Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  “On Reading the Great Letter Writers”

  “How does one live?” he asked the bright sky. “What does one do first?”

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  The Woman of Andros

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Foreword

  Preface: “The History of a Writer”

  1. “Godly Folk”

  2. “A Foretaste of Heaven”

  3. “Being Left”

  4. Foreign Devils

  5. “Parental Expectation”

  6. “All Aspiration”

  7. “Literary Development”

  8. “The Art of Writing”

  9. Distant Sons

  10. “Flowering into Literature”

  11. “Heroes”

  12. “His Own Tune”

  13. “Choice Souls”

  14. “All My Faults and Virtues”

  15. “Millstones”

  16. “The ‘Way Within’”

  17. “My Real Vocation”

  18. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  19. “The Finest Bridge in All Peru”

  20. Preparation and Circumstance

  21. “Variety, Variety”

  22. “Home”

  23. “Strands and Threads”

  24. Our Living and Our Dying

  25. The Village and the Stars

  26. “Chalk . . . or Fire”

  27. “Perseverance”

  28. “Seeing, Knowing and Telling”

  29. “The Eternal Family”

  30. “The Closing of the Door”

  31. “Wartime”

  32. “Post-war Adjustment Exercise”

  33. Searching for the Right Way

  34. Kaleidoscopic Views

  35. “The Human Adventure”

  36. “Tapestry”

  37. “Life and Death”

  Epilogue

  Guide to Notes and Sources

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Permissions

  Index

  Photographs

  About the Author

  Also by Penelope Niven

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  FOREWORD

  Whenever I’m in a theater group and the discussion turns to the essential American playwrights—the ones whose accomplishments define our culture—I’m always startled and confused that Thornton Wilder’s name comes to the fore so infrequently.

  Eugene O’Neill is there, of course, in spite of his frequent tin ear. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a great play, perhaps the only one of his in which everything comes together fully—the mind and the ear—in a way the other best ones only occasionally approach.

  Tennessee Williams is there, naturally, for the poetry of his language, the intensity of his dramatic structure, and the three-dimensionality of his characterizations.

  Arthur Miller is included as well, as much as anything for the sociological and political importance of his dramatic concerns.

  But why is Thornton Wilder so infrequently placed up there where he belongs?

  If I were asked to name what I consider to be the finest serious American play, I would immediately say Our Town—not for its giant Americanness but because it is a superbly written, gloriously observed, tough, and breathtaking statement of what it is to be alive, the wonder and hopeless loss of the space between birth and the grave.

  While I prefer The Skin of Our Teeth—another first-rate play—to most of Wilder’s novels, he was no slouch there either.

  This new biography of Wilder, comprehensive and wisely fashioned, gives us sufficient view of his methods, his public and private life, and the reaches of his mind to begin to understand with what intellectual and creative sourcings he was able to write so persuasively about things that greatly matter.

  This book is a splendid and long-needed work.

  A side note: I was a twenty-two-year-old very mediocre poet when I met Thornton Wilder at the MacDowell Colony. I forced my poetry on him. He read it and took me to a small lake where he plied me with bourbon and told me to stop writing poetry, that it was no good. He suggested perhaps I start writing plays instead.

  I wonder if he knew that one day I’d write forewords as well.

  Edward Albee

  New York City, 2011

  PREFACE

  “THE HISTORY OF A WRITER”

  The history of a writer is his search for his own subject, his myth-theme, hidden from him, but prepared for him in every hour of his life, his Gulliver’s Travels, his Robinson Crusoe.

  —THORNTON WILDER,

  “James Joyce, 1882–1941”

  When he was in his seventies, Thornton Niven Wilder wrote a story about an American teenager running alone through the countryside near the school in Chefoo, China, where he had been sent to live and study. The boy had sought special permission to run long distances by himself outside the China Inland Mission School boundaries, near the Bohai Sea. Awkward at the competitive team sports the other boys enjoyed, he was an outsider, a misfit in a crowd. He was most at home in books and his imagination, and these solitary runs freed him to think and to daydream.

  This unfinished, unpublished self-portrait was a fusion of memory and imagination, fiction and fact. “Already at that age I had the notion I would be a writer,” Wilder reflected many years later, after he had written books and plays that resonated for countless people in the United States and around the world.1

  His history as a writer spans three-quarters of the twentieth century, and he left behind a tantalizing trail of evidence—thousands of letters, journal entries, manuscript drafts, and documents that reveal his evolution as a person and an artist. “Art is confession; art is the secret told . . . ,” he said when he was thirty-one and suddenly famous around the world as a novelist. “But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.”2 It is challenging enough for a biographer to attempt to do justice to the visible, exterior life—but where to turn for revelation of the “whole drama of the inner life”?

  Because of the magnitude of his surviving papers—from childhood until his death in 1975—we can witness close-up Wilder’s search for his own subject, his own myth-theme, his own true self. He left a richly detailed record of his lifelong education, much of it self-propelled. He left revealing portraits of his pivotal friendships and of his extraordinary family. This biography concentrates on his history as a writer and the drama of his inner life, but it is also a family saga, starring Thornton Wilder, with strong supporting roles played by his father, mother, and siblings.

  He was a multifaceted man—son, brother, student, teacher, scholar, novelist, playwright, actor, musician, soldier, man of letters, international public figure. He was also enigmatic, intensely private. A twinless twin, he was schooled in solitude, accustomed from boyhood to living in self-doubt and shadows. He belonged to a close-knit, complicated family—two brilliant parents, five gifted children, and, for him, the specter of the twin brother lost at birth. From the year when he was nine until he was twenty-two, his family lived s
cattered around the globe, bound together by letters. Providentially most of those letters were saved after making the rounds from one parent or child on one continent to another parent or child oceans away.

  The compelling evidence of Wilder’s life, public and private, is contained in thousands of his papers housed in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as well as in countless other papers and documents released or discovered in the years since his death. His sister Isabel, the keeper of the flame, died in 1995 at the age of ninety-five. Until the end of her life she was working on her own book about her brother and their family, and so had withheld crucial papers, records, and photographs—enough to fill nearly ninety banker’s boxes. After her death, these resources went to the Beinecke Library as well. This uncataloged trove includes artifacts that ignite the imagination—the mother’s fading album of memories and dreams, kept when she was a teenager; the father’s worn brown leather diaries written in China; the family’s passports stamped with ports of call around the world; and their intimate letters and papers.

  When Tappan Wilder became the manager of his uncle’s literary estate, he opened additional resources to Wilder scholars and students, and on his watch many more papers have been discovered, released, and collected. There are papers and documents enough to keep a throng of biographers, scholars, and critics busy for at least the next few decades. This biography, the first to emerge from that vast archive, narrates Wilder’s life, private and public, and provides the history and context of his creative work, published and unpublished. This is not, however, a volume of literary criticism. The exhaustive documentation in the endnotes is a guide for readers, and may also be a compass for future students, scholars, and critics.

  Just as Wilder took liberties with form and style in drama and fiction, he played with the mechanics of writing, especially punctuation. His letters and manuscripts were often animated with bold underscores in ink or colored pencil; with paragraph symbols; and with the equal sign—more emphatic, he thought, than the ordinary colon. But because Wilder the writer was far more attentive to substance than to mechanics, and because he could be cavalier about spelling and punctuation, occasional silent corrections have been made. Otherwise, you will encounter Wilder’s words on the page exctly as he put them there. Thanks to the profusion of his letters and journals, and the generosity of his literary executor, much of Wilder’s story is told here in his own voice.

  In addition to the voluminous record of his later life—the celebrity years—extraordinary records document the first four decades of Wilder’s life and work, the years that are the foundation for all that follows. I have examined those pivotal years with a virtual microscope. I have put a telescope to the nearly four decades that come afterward, a period of flourishing art and life illuminated by the seminal years.

  Among Wilder’s unpublished papers are handwritten reflections on biography, and I have taken them to heart. He wrote, “To BIOGRAPHIZE = means TO WRITE A LIFE = . . . TO BIOGRAPHIZE IN THE HIGHEST SENSE OF THE WORD: TO REVIVIFY. . . .” He went on to say,

  The most intimate feeling of living

  is the perpetual alternation

  of hope and dejection

  of Plans and Defeat

  of Aspiration and Rebuff.3

  How to revivify such a life? How to understand the “hope and dejection,” the “Aspiration and Rebuff”? Much of the drama took place in Wilder’s mind and spirit—“the inward life,” he called it. Fortunately he left deeply private revelations of that life in his journals, letters, and manuscripts. Other facets of his life are embedded in his published novels and plays. All told, he left behind countless “signposts, footprints, clues” that can lead us deep within his extraordinary mind and spirit.4

  He was a refined gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for and about “Everybody”—a fact his audiences around the globe have embraced. Within the circumference of his creative work there stands the person, his private, inward self, sometimes hidden and sometimes revealed in his art and in his papers.

  Thornton Wilder became a man, like the boy in China, running alone, transcending the boundaries, searching for his Gulliver, for his Robinson Crusoe, for himself.

  1

  “GODLY FOLK”

  The Wilders were Baptists,—plain, stern, godly folk.

  —AMOS PARKER WILDER,

  History of Dane County

  Maine, Connecticut, New York, and Wisconsin (1862–1906)

  Thornton Niven Wilder and his twin brother were delivered into the world prematurely on April 17, 1897, in an apartment at 14 West Gilman Street in Madison, Wisconsin, to Amos Parker Wilder, a loving, domineering father, and Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder, an equally strong, devoted mother.1 The other Wilder twin was stillborn, leaving his brother Thornton a haunting legacy of loss and incompletion as well as a survivor’s instinctive guilt. According to family memory, Amos Parker Wilder had planned to name the lost child Theophilus, after his own Wilder grandfather (a second son), and other ancestors given that name. Thornton was a frail infant, carried carefully on a small pillow for the first months of his life. As he grew older and stronger, the energetic, curious boy played with his brother, Amos Niven Wilder (who was born on September 18, 1895). They were joined on August 28, 1898, by a sister, Charlotte Elizabeth, and then on January 13, 1900, by another sister, Isabel. The youngest sister, Janet Frances, would not come along until June 3, 1910.

  “We bring from childhood the passionate expectation that life will be colorful, but life is seldom ever as exciting as it was when we were five and six and seven years old,” Thornton Wilder wrote when he was in his thirties.2 During the early years of his life, he was shaped and molded in Madison, Wisconsin. He described himself as “a bookish, musing, sleep-walking kind of boy” who appreciated his Midwestern beginnings.3

  The four older Wilder children grew up spending idyllic summers in the village of Maple Bluff on Lake Mendota’s northeastern shore on the outskirts of Madison. The Wilders built a modest summer cottage there in 1901. Isabella designed it, and they called it Wilderness.4 The Winnebago Indians had once staged their summer encampments in the dense woods lining McBride’s Point, the beach where the Wilder children played, and an occasional Indian mound or artifact could still be discovered there.5

  During the long, bitter Wisconsin winters, the children spent quiet days at home in Madison with their mother, who loved poetry, drama, music, and philosophy. Their robust, outspoken father kept a frenetic schedule, editing his newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal, and traveling to make speeches about politics, municipal planning, and current events. Amos Parker Wilder was born February 15, 1862, in Calais, Maine, the son of Charlotte Topliff Porter and Amos Lincoln Wilder, a dentist. His paternal grandfather, Theophilus Wilder, ran a grocery store in Milltown, Maine.6 Amos Parker Wilder, called Parker by his family, described his Wilder relatives as “Baptists,—plain, stern, godly folk.” They were descended from the Wilders who came from England’s Thames Valley to settle in Hingham, Massachusetts, in about 1636.7 Parker Wilder’s religious heritage was an amalgam of Baptist and Puritan principles, Congregationalist philosophy, and the “Hebrew strain” he said he inherited from his mother’s family. His great-grandmother, Betsy Marks Porter, was the daughter of Capt. Nehemiah Marks of Derby, Connecticut, son of a Jewish family who converted to Christianity.8

  Young Parker Wilder especially revered his grandfather Porter, who lived to be ninety and was “strong, kind, religious, one of the best of men,” Parker wrote proudly, noting as well that his grandfather was “a ship owner and lumberman of importance in the St. Croix Valley” on the border of Maine and Canada.9 The Porter family also held shipping and lumber interests in New Brunswick, Canada. Parker’s father worked and saved his money to finance dental school. He practiced dentistry first in Calais, and then in Augusta, where he invested in an oilcloth factory, which became his principal—and prosperous—busine
ss until his death at the age of seventy (“Sole Manufacturer of Wilder’s patent ‘Drum-Made Floor Oil Cloths,’ ” his 1888 letterhead proclaimed).10

  Young Parker Wilder inherited his father’s drive and ambition, along with his ancestors’ “plain, stern, godly” traits. When he was seven, he pledged himself to a life of total abstinence from alcohol. As a teenager, he learned the skills of telegraphy from Frank A. Munsey (1854–1925), the young man who managed the Western Union office in Augusta, a bustling shipping and publishing center as well as the capital of Maine. Parker Wilder mastered the craft well enough to earn money during his college years as a part-time telegrapher.11 He made the most of his public school education and a year at Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then, largely through his mother’s encouragement, went off to Yale in the fall of 1880. He adored his mother, and savored childhood memories of the family’s summer vacations at Squirrel Island or Mouse Island, Maine: “We dug clams and caught young mackerel, sometimes from the net of big fishers in the Bay,” he remembered. “In the more important years I went to Squirrel or Mouse with my Mother and we had quiet, rich days together. She was a tender, restful, heaven-associating soul, yet all sense and balance.”12

  He described her effusively in an autobiographical sketch he wrote for his own children: “Strong in body, possessed of great sense, having had many advantages in her youth, of a hopeful, serene nature, always able to see a bend in the road ahead, and wont to relate all the ordering of life to prayer, Mother has been and is one of the most normal and best women I have known.”13 Deliberately or not, Amos Parker Wilder implied a contrast between his mother and his wife, who was not always physically strong, or hopeful and serene, or optimistic about “the road ahead,” or prayerful, or, for that matter, “normal,” in the sense of the conventional, traditional nineteenth-century wife and mother.

  Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder was, as much as she possibly could manage to be, her own person. A minister’s daughter from Dobbs Ferry, New York, she was refined, cultured, and extraordinarily intelligent. Despite her independent spirit, her father thwarted her hopes of going to college to study medicine, as well as her plans to teach or otherwise establish an independent career.14 He was proud of his daughter’s brilliance, but he still held firmly to his conventional opinions about a lady’s proper place in polite society.15 She was educated at the Misses Masters Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies and Children in Dobbs Ferry. Her father had helped the Misses Masters lease the Dobbs Ferry residence that housed their school for the first six years.16 Not simply a finishing school for young women, the school offered a strong liberal arts curriculum—literature, history, Latin, psychology, astronomy, mathematics. Isabella wrote poetry, translated the poems of others from French and Italian, played the piano skillfully, knew and enjoyed the literature of the theater, and competed in local tennis tournaments.17