The Woman of Andros / the Ides of March Read online

  THE WOMAN OF ANDROS

  THE IDES OF MARCH

  Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was a novelist and playwright. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of his seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and two of his major plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1938 and 1943 respectively.

  Penelope Niven is the author of critically acclaimed biographies of poet Carl Sandburg, photographer Edward Steichen and Thornton Wilder.

  Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) wrote numerous short plays, essays, short stories, and novels including Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

  The Woman of Andros

  The Ides of March

  The Woman of Andros

  The Ides of March

  Thornton Wilder

  FOREWORDS BY PENELOPE NIVEN AND

  KURT VONNEGUT

  CAPUCHIN CLASSICS

  LONDON

  THE WOMAN OF ANDROS

  by Thornton Wilder

  © 1930, 1958 by The Wilder Family LLC.

  Reprinted by arrangement with The Wilder Family LLC

  and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Foreword © 2006 by Penelope Niven

  Afterword © 2006 by Tappan Wilder, Literary Executor The Afterword to this volume is constructed in large part from unpublished material drawn from Thornton Wilder Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, supplemented by Wilder family holdings and published sources not easy to come by. The author’s literary executor hopes that readers will fi nd that this approach brings the novel and its creator into view in an informed and intimate fashion. Readers are referred to www.thorntonwilder.com for additional information.

  THE IDES OF MARCH

  by Thornton Wilder

  © 1948, 1957 by The Wilder Family LLC.

  Reprinted by arrangement with The Wilder Family LLC

  and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Foreword © 2003 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

  Afterword © 2003 by Tappan Wilder, Literary Executor The Afterword to this volume is constructed in large part from unpublished material drawn from Thornton Wilder Archive at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, supplemented by Wilder family holdings and published sources not easy to come by. The author’s literary executor hopes that readers will fi nd that this approach brings the novel and its creator into view in an informed and intimate fashion. Readers are referred to www.thorntonwilder.com for additional information.

  Capuchin Classics, 128 Kensington Church Street, London W8 4BH

  Telephone: +44 (0)20 7221 7166 Fax: +44 (0)20 7792 9288

  E-mail: [email protected] www.capuchin-classics.co.uk

  Châtelaine of Capuchin Classics: Emma Howard Cover design by Stephanie Clair

  ISBN: 978-1-907429-36-1

  eISBN: 978-1-907429-48-4

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY.

  CONTENTS

  The Woman of Andros

  Foreword by Penelope Niven

  The Woman of Andros

  Afterword by Tappan Wilder

  The Ides of March

  Foreword by Kurt Vonnegut

  Foreword by Thornton Wilder

  Book One

  Book Two

  Book Three

  Book Four

  Afterword by Tappan Wilder

  The Woman of Andros

  FOREWORD

  On a manuscript draft of his third novel, The Woman of Andros, Thornton Wilder wrote that the idea first came to him in the spring of 1928. The first two ‘conversations’ in the book were written at Axeland House, Horley, Surrey, where he and his mother and two of his three sisters spent several months after the great success of his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He planned ‘much of the later parts’ of The Woman of Andros while attending services in Surrey churches – Redhill and Outwood in particular. By October 11, 1928 he was at the Pension Saramartel in Juan-les-Pins, making a clean copy of the completed sections of the novel.

  Wilder was always writing as he travelled – or travelling as he wrote. He continued the work on The Woman of Andros in New Haven, Connecticut, in April 1929, and, during that summer at the MacDowell Colony, a retreat for artists, writers and musicians in Peterborough, New Hampshire. From Peterborough, he wrote one of his first letters about his work to a new friend, Lady Sybil Colefax. Their friendship and correspondence would last until her death in 1950. He told her that Chrysis, the Woman of Andros, was ‘developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson,’ full of sayings and parables. In September and October 1929, Wilder wrote in London at the Hotel Savoy, and in Oxford, Paris and Munich. He finished the novel January 4, 1930, in the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

  Wilder described The Woman of Andros as his first novel, ‘in the sense,’ he said, ‘that the others were collections of tales, novelettes, bound together by a slight tie that identified them as belonging to the same group.’ Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. published the book February 21, 1930 – 30,000 copies in a prepublication printing, and 20,000 more on the day of publication. The book flap copy quoted the Boston Evening Transcript critic who had hailed Wilder as one of the ‘most discussed figures in the English speaking world.’

  By the time Wilder had finished his third novel, he had enjoyed a wealth of new experiences and friendships, as well as international celebrity, and enough of a fortune to build a house for his family in Hamden, Connecticut, and otherwise support his parents and three sisters. He had seen the first New York production of one of his plays, The Trumpet Shall Sound; had published The Angel That Troubled The Waters, a collection of his early short plays; and had toured the country as a platform lecturer with resounding success, speaking to full houses on ‘The Relation of Literature and Life,’ ‘The Future of American Literature,’ ‘Enthusiasms and Disappointments of Play-Going,’ and other topics. (His lecture agent, who also represented Hugh Walpole, arranged for the two novelists to debate whether fiction or non-fiction shed more light on the human experience. Four thousand people attended the debate in Washington, D. C.)

  By 1930 Wilder had bought his first automobile, had struck up friendships with two other young novelists making their mark, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and had taken an internationally publicised ‘walking tour’ in Europe with world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney (‘as fine a person as you’d want to meet,’ Wilder wrote to Hemingway before the trip). When Fitzgerald wrote to Wilder about The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder answered with an autobiographical snapshot:

  I have been an admirer, not to say a student, of The Great Gatsby too long not to have got a great kick out of your letter. It gives me the grounds to hope that we may sometime have some long talks on what writing’s all about. As you see I am a provincial school-master and have always worked alone. And yet nothing interests me more than thinking of our generation as a league and as a protest to the whole cardboard generation that precedes us from Wharton through Cabell and Anderson and Sinclair Lewis.. . . I like teaching a lot and shall probably remain here for ages; a daily routine is necessary to me. I have no writing habits, am terribly lazy and write seldom.

  With typical self-deprecation, Wilder underplayed his discipline as a writer, for his journals and letters testify to his habitual absorption in his work. As he wrote The Woman o
f Andros, based in part, he said, on a Greek comedy by Terence, Wilder was immersed in Greek drama and philosophy, spending time in ancient Greece in his imagination, his reading, and his preparations for lectures he would give at the University of Chicago, when he became a part-time faculty member in 1930. On a trip to England, in September 1929, he sketched ideas for the lectures in his journal: ‘What fifth century Greece thought of itself; how it was viewed by successive ages and by modern archeology; how it was viewed by “specific great authors.” ’ He wanted to learn Greek, and he was re-reading Aeschylus and Euripides.

  When asked why he chose remote ages and settings for his early novels, Wilder answered ‘Because I am not yet ready to do something modern. I cannot yet reconcile a philosophic theme with the ringing of doorbells and telephones.’ Actually, in Wilder’s novels as well as his plays, literal setting and time are almost incidental – embroidery rather than scaffolding. He experimented with setting in fiction just as he experimented with sets on stage. The ‘sets’ of his novels are draped in richer detail than the minimalist sets for his plays, but in Wilder’s fiction, as in his drama, time and place are not fundamental to the story. Character and theme dominate.

  This is especially the case in The Woman of Andros, set on Brynos, an imagined Greek island, before the birth of Christ. (One interviewer reported that Wilder had said the novel was set in 400 BC, but he commonly wrote that it was ‘about 200 BC – that is, in the decline of the Great Age of Greece.’) Wilder’s major character, the woman of Andros, is Chrysis, a beautiful, intelligent hetaira, or highly cultured courtesan, who is the benefactress of a household of dependent ‘stray human beings,’ misfits, outsiders like herself, whose physical and/or emotional needs Chrysis seeks to fulfill. She and her younger sister Glycerium love the same god-like young man. Throw into the brew two worried fathers, a contemplative priest of Apollo, some suspicious islanders, a battle-worn sea captain, and an avaricious pimp, and you are in for a compelling concoction of myth, fable and fantasia, laced with memorable aphorisms. (‘The loneliest associations are those that pretend to intimacy,’ for example. ‘It is true that of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.’ ‘Stupidity is everywhere and invincible.’)

  Wilder draws his readers into the interior lives of some of the inhabitants of Andros, especially lovely, alluring Chrysis. His 1929 journal reveals that she was his frequent imaginary companion as he worked on the book at the MacDowell Colony and on a trip to England with his mother. Revelations and lines of dialogue came to him as he took long walks, or rode the train, or spent hours at night copying the book by hand on the sea voyage from England to New York, beset by his habitual doubts. ‘From time to time the whole book seems mistaken,’ he fretted in his journal in October 1929:

  Have I let myself go again to a luxury of grief? I remember this haunted me through the writing of The Bridge and I am still not sure whether that is the way the world is. Already I have begun to reduce some of the expressions. This perpetual harping on the supposition that people suffer within. Am I sufficiently realist?

  He indicated that there were autobiographical traits in three characters – Chremes, one of the fathers of Brynos, this ‘happiest, and one of the least famous of the islands’; Chrysis, the Woman of Andros herself; and the young priest of Aesculapius and Apollo. Space here does not permit an exploration of Wilder’s life to illuminate that intriguing premise. There is, however, a prophetic, life-affirming scene in the novel that points us toward pivotal themes in Wilder’s future work. If you have seen or read Our Town, which appeared eight years after The Woman of Andros, you will recognise the story Chrysis tells her banquet guests about the Greek hero who begged Zeus to permit him to return to earth for just one day. Granted his dangerous wish, the hero, like Emily in Wilder’s play, discovers that the ‘the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure.’ He kisses ‘the soil of the world that is too dear to be realised.’

  From the earliest pages of his first novels and plays, Wilder examined the universal quandaries encapsulated in the questions the young man Pamphilus asks in The Woman of Andros: ‘How does one live? What does one do first?’ In March 1930, Wilder wrote to Norman Fitts, then the Boston Evening Transcript critic, ‘It seems to me that my books are about: What is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it? In other words: When a human being is made to bear more than a human being can bear, what then?’ Wilder’s novels and plays pose evocative questions about spiritual belief and the mysteries of the mind and the spirit. He came to believe that the questions about the ‘vast themes’ took precedence over the answers, contending that writers ‘have only one duty, namely to pose the questions correctly.’

  This challenge absorbed and tantalised him. Wilder’s first two novels and his early plays oscillated between story lines and search for meaning, between fable and examination of faith – but the emphasis rested on story and style rather than on substance and revelation. His focus changed with The Woman of Andros, however. Here the story is driven by the characters and their multifaceted search for meaning, including Wilder’s ongoing examination of the ‘sufficiency of love.’ The young man Pamphilus, for instance, perceives in many of his fellow islanders ‘a sad love that was half hope, often rebuked and waiting to be reassured of its truth.’ He asks, ‘But why then a love so defeated, as though it were waiting for a voice to come from the skies, declaring that therein lay the secret of the world.’ The islanders in The Woman of Andros struggle with the nature of the ‘perpetual flames of love’ that burn in the human heart – romantic love, especially first love; love for family; love of wisdom; even love for the unlovable in society. ‘If I love them enough, I can understand them,’ Chrysis reflects. She believes that life’s most difficult burden is ‘ the incommunicability of love.’ Ultimately Chrysis comes to the encompassing love of life itself: ‘Remember me,’ she says, ‘as one who loved all things and accepted from the gods all things, the bright and the dark.’

  In The Woman of Andros Wilder was still probing other questions he had posed in The Cabala and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, such as ‘whether the associations in life are based upon an accidental encounter or upon a profound and inner necessity.’ The characters in The Woman of Andros also grapple with the enigma of suffering, the mystery of death, the understanding of the ‘highest point towards which any existence would aspire.’ As the omniscient narrator, Wilder reflects 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.’ Chrysis epitomises that journey, ultimately concluding that ‘It is the life in the mind that is important.’ When external events defy her power to shape or control, she relies on the interior harmony of mind, heart and spirit for ballast and refuge.

  The Woman of Andros set off an obstreperous critical controversy in the United States when communist critic Michael Gold labeled Wilder ‘the poet of the genteel bourgeoise,’ attacking him for writing novels that synthesised ‘chambermaid literature, Sunday-school tracts and boulevard piety.’ He called Wilder a ‘fairy-like little Anglo-American curate’ who perpetuated a literary ‘retreat’ from the ‘real problems’ of a real world, and challenged him to write a book about ‘modern America.’ Numerous critics and readers came to Wilder’s defence, and the novel pleased many critics, including Gilbert Thomas, who wrote in the Spectator that Wilder ‘has achieved both sensationalism and sentimentality, and has given us a delicately written idyll that is poignant in its restraint and quiet beauty.’ The Times Literary Supplement reviewer, however, called the novel a failure, albeit with ‘a collection of exquisite parts.’ The Woman of Andros became a best seller, although not of the magnitude achieved by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, for so long the yardstick by which all of Wilder’s other novels would be measured. Even so, The Woman of Andros ranked third on the list of best-selling n
ovels in the US for 1930.

  Thornton Wilder spent his literary life perpetually evolving – becoming a playwright of bolder innovation and theme, becoming a novelist of deepening vision and complexity, writing for an ever-expanding global audience. And how did he write what he wrote? Slowly. Painstakingly. In seclusion, when he could, in remote places in his own country, in favourite habitats in Europe, or aboard ships at sea. Part time, while juggling professional, personal and family obligations. In longhand, with pen or pencil, a unit of three pages at a time. He believed that the ‘mechanical flavor’ of the typewriter interfered with the clarity of his thought and his work. He crafted elegant sentences, fluid paragraphs, pages infused with irony, verve, wisdom and beauty. He found in the act of writing not so much pleasure as ‘a deep absorption.’ And there was the alluring power and possibility inherent in the process of ‘imaginative narration.’ In his notes for a lecture on the novel as a literary form, Wilder wrote, ‘Consider the story-teller: Out of his head he invents souls and destinies.’ Wilder went on to say, ‘There seems to be some kind of law deep down in human nature whereby the most compelling means of communicating ideas about the nature of what it is like to be alive is to ENWRAP one’s illumination in a STORY.’

  Welcome to the world that Thornton Wilder, the story-teller, created in The Woman of Andros, to the invented souls that inhabit that world, and to the illuminations enwrapped in the story. In his fiction as in his plays, Wilder gives us the questions, sharp and clear, and leaves it to us to find the answers.

  Penelope Niven

  THE WOMAN OF ANDROS

  The first part of this novel is based upon the Andria, a comedy of Terence who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to us, by Menander.

  The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness. The great cliff that was one day to be called Gibraltar held for a long time a gleam of red and orange, while across from it the mountains of Atlas showed deep blue pockets in their shining sides. The caves that surround the Neapolitan gulf fell into a profounder shade, each giving forth from the darkness its chiming or its booming sound. Triumph had passed from Greece and wisdom from Egypt, but with the coming on of night they seemed to regain their lost honours, and the land that was soon to be called Holy prepared in the dark its wonderful burden. The sea was large enough to hold a varied weather: a storm played about Sicily and its smoking mountains, but at the mouth of the Nile the water lay like a wet pavement. A fair tripping breeze ruffled the Aegean and all the islands of Greece felt a new freshness at the close of day.