Theophilus North Read online

  Dedication

  For Robert Maynard Hutchins

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword by Christopher Buckley

  1 The Nine Ambitions

  2 The Nine Cities of Newport

  3 Diana Bell

  4 The Wyckoff Place

  5 “Nine Gables”

  6 Rip

  7 At Mrs. Keefe’s

  8 The Fenwicks

  9 Myra

  10 Mino

  11 Alice

  12 “The Deer Park”

  13 Bodo and Persis

  14 Edweena

  15 The Servants’ Ball

  Afterword by Tappan Wilder

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Ad

  Works by Thornton Wilder

  Also by Thornton Wilder

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  I’ve spent the last few days reading up on the life of Thornton Wilder and now I’m thoroughly depressed. He was the only American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize in both Fiction and Drama, and as playwright of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth he received two in the latter category. He graduated from Yale, earned a master’s degree in French literature from Princeton. He taught at Lawrenceville, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, and lectured all over the place. (I won’t bother listing his honorary degrees.) He won the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was all but fluent in French, German, Italian, and Spanish and translated. His adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll’s House was playing just down the street from the Broadway theater where Our Town had opened. He occasionally acted in his plays. He wrote opera librettos and the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. He knew a vast amount about music and played a pretty mean piano. He served in World Wars I and II. He knew everyone and was close to Gertrude Stein and Sigmund Freud. Even his failures turned to gold. His 1938 play, The Merchant of Yonkers, closed after thirty-nine performances but was a smash later on in 1954 as The Matchmaker and even more so in 1964 as Hello, Dolly!

  He was beloved. The eulogies at his memorial service in 1976 make you wish you’d been his friend. But what makes me hate Thornton Wilder most is that at age seventy-six, when he could have slept late, gone on a cruise, or passed the time in front of the mirror rearranging the laurels, he wrote this extraordinary novel. And here’s the punch line: he appears to have written it in at least some small part to amuse his ailing and very good friend Robert Maynard Hutchins, founder of the Great Books series and president of the University of Chicago. So, what have you accomplished today?

  My yellowed paperback edition from 1974, the year after Theophilus North appeared in hardcover, is about to crumble, so it’s a good thing—as Martha Stewart would say—that HarperCollins is reissuing the book, along with eight others from the Wilder canon. The timing, as it turns out, is also propitious, and would surely amuse Wilder.

  Like another great American novel, Theophilus North is set in the 1920s, and, like The Great Gatsby, it is set in a place where, as Fitzgerald wrote, “people played polo and were rich together,” in this case, Newport, Rhode Island. Thornton Wilder was stationed there during World War I, and after graduating from Yale in 1920, he went back there and spent the summer writing his first novel, The Cabala, while supporting himself tutoring Latin and whatnot to the children of the rich. From his little room at the YMCA that summer of 1922, he banged out letters on his Underwood typewriter. One of them, to his mother, is worth noting: “almost every day I go bathing at Newport Beach, a place a little commoner than Idora Park. (The monde has long since restricted its own beach at the other end of the coast, where every cubicle in the bath-house bears its owner’s name traced in platinum wire.)”

  Another letter, written a few weeks later to a Yale classmate, goes on at some length in a P. G. Wodehousean vein: “You should know that Mr. and Mrs. Max Oser have taken the Millais Cottage and have already appeared several times at Bailey’s beach. All the world is dying to know if it is a ménage qui marche. Large bets were laid at Mrs. Raynam’s garden fête, both for and against. Mrs. Ogden Kindred was so eager to hear that she sent her gardener, borrowing over the hedge, Ohio-fashion, to find out the opinion of the servants’ table. . . . The Princess Antoine Bibesco has been staying with Mrs. Fogg at Shingles.” The letter concludes with an elaborate riff on a supposed tragedy that has recently befallen a young student in town named “Wilden,” who was pulverized while walking down Thames Street “when six Rolls Royces from the north met five Daniels from the south.”

  These are the seeds from which Theophilus North grew a half century later. I’d happily have read the 1922 Wodehouse version, but that half century of germination made the novel more orchidaceous than dandelion.

  The novel is the story of a young man who was born in 1897, then stationed in Newport during World War I, who went on to teach at a posh secondary school, then to spend a summer in Rhode Island making money by teaching tennis and tutoring. Autobiography, anyone? So far the only difference between Theophilus and Thornton is that Thornton returned in 1922 and Theophilus in 1926.

  Young Theophilus is a man of ambition—nine ambitions, to be precise. He sets out to fulfill them within what he calls, in the manner of Schliemann’s Troy, the nine cities of Newport. There’s the first city of the earliest settlers, the second of the eighteenth-century town and Revolutionary port, the third of the prosperous New England seaport, and so forth, down to the ninth: “the American middle-class town, buying and selling, raising its children and burying its dead, with little attention to spare for the eight cities so close to it.” I have spent some time on Aquidneck Island myself, and recognize all nine of Wilder’s Newport cities. In the 1960s, it was still very much a Navy town (fourth city) and as such, off-limits to us prep school boys, but we were allowed to check out the great mansions, or “cottages” along Bellevue Avenue (sixth city) built during the Gilded Age. Since Wilder’s death, a tenth city has been added, according to local historian George Herrick. It consists of hordes of porcine tourists on Thames Street dripping ice cream onto their I’M WITH STUPID T-shirts. Perhaps it’s just as well that Wilder is no longer with us to see this. But what a shame he missed the Claus von Bulow trials there.

  Theophilus’s nine ambitions are to be: saint, anthropologist, archaeologist, detective, actor, magician, lover, rascal, and free man. “Notice,” he tells us in an aside nicely appropriate to the Age of Enron and Arthur Andersen, “all the projects that I did not entertain: I did not want to be a banker, a merchant, a lawyer, nor to join any of those life-careers that are closely bound up with directorates and boards of governors. . . .” It will neither surprise you nor ruin your enjoyment to reveal that Theophilus fulfills all nine ambitions, and then some. But then this is a remarkable young man, with remarkable qualities. Indeed, almost angelic. Michael Kernan has noted that Wilder’s “basic approach to writing, in contrast to other great writers of his time, is that of a wizard, a magus, a waver of wands who summons up shapes from chaos, and conjures worlds out of clouds, all in an instant . . . Prospero figure—a controller of destinies—appears in nearly all Wilder’s works.”

  In an interview published in 1974 after the novel came out, Wilder called the book “a joking autobiography.” It was at the time number five on the New York Times bestseller list, where it would remain for twenty-six weeks. It had been enthusiastically reviewed in those pages. Anatole Broyard: “Once in a while we come across a book that challenges us to strip off our sophistication and paddle around in the old swimming hole of sentimentality. . . . Perhaps adults need fairy tales, too.” Granville Hicks called it “extraordinarily enterta
ining.”

  To be sure, there were dissenters. Newsweek discerned a certain “pallid playfulness” and The Village Voice Literary Supplement huffed that it was “thoroughly amusing but as deeply unsatisfying as tickling an arthritic with a feather to take his mind off the pain.” By the time the Avon paperback edition appeared, the Times had weighed back in to address that particular objection: “Some would call this old-fashioned, but it’s all done so engagingly that you’d have to be a misanthrope to escape its spell.”

  Theophilus is, let us be frank, a very rich nine-course meal. The postmodern sushi-fed literary sensibility may at first find itself feeling a tad hypoglycemic. But two things will stave off early-onset diabetes. First, there is the sheer zest and energy of the writing. Second, this is a profoundly subversive novel. Theophilus North flies in the face of those who call Wilder an old-fashioned literary bourgeois. He was as bourgois as one of his models, Molière.

  One can hardly blame him for telling the San Juan Star that the novel was a joking autobiography. Why screw around with Deeper Meanings when your book is number five? But in fact, Theophilus is rather more than that. It is, in a mighty subtle way, the autobiography of Thornton Wilder’s identical twin brother.

  In a letter to a Yale classmate after the book came out, Wilder wrote, “I was born an identical twin; he lived an hour; if he had survived he’d have been named Theophilus—second sons have been so named for generations in the Wilder line—so I wrote his memoirs. How right you are what a lot of lovely girls in it.”

  This is rather spooky, but it is the key to the book. According to Wilder’s nephew and indefatigable literary executor, Tappan Wilder, Thornton was “haunted all his life by his brother’s death and felt a kind of survivor’s guilt.” He points out that twins occur in a number of his uncle’s works: one of the five travelers killed in the fall of The Bridge of San Luis Rey was an identical twin; the doctor in Our Town has just delivered twins; and now here, in Wilder’s final, summing-up work, the protagonist is the twin who did not survive.

  Amid more than 200 linear feet of the Wilder archive at Yale are some handwritten notes on a legal pad with the heading, “Chapter Three: First Sketches Toward a Characterization of Theophilus.” Beneath, in his aging handwriting, it says, “two sons were born to the Wilders of Madison Wisconsin toward midnight on April 17, 1897. In those days, twins were not predictable, but an array of family names were waiting for the newcomer . . . but one of the twins died at birth. . . . Either little Theophilus or little Thornton died, leaving an identical replica of himself behind. The survivor was christened Thornton.”

  The notes go on at length about the metaphysics of twins. “Each twin,” he continues, “carries his ‘opposite number’ latest within himself. We are not only—as Pascal says every human being is ‘half angel, half beast;’ we are, in one person, halves of two different kinds of angel and halves of two different kinds of beast.” So Theophilus is Thornton’s literal doppelgänger, or ghostly double. While it’s hard to imagine that Thorton left anything undone in his life, he seems to have felt the need for one last fantastical go-around.

  It’s in keeping with the serendipity that ruled Wilder’s life that this novel is reappearing at a time when some of America’s leading capitalists are going through some pretty hard mirror-time (Enron, Martha Stewart—again!—WorldCom, executives being perp-walked to the booking station for fraud, tax evasion, insider trading). This makes the book—to use that dreadful term—rather relevant after all these years.

  “He chuckled to me once that it was his ‘Marxist novel,’ ” Tappan Wilder recalls. Robert Maynard Hutchins, to whom the novel is dedicated and for whom it was written, noted Wilder’s views on the subject of the moneyed classes in his eulogy at Yale’s Battell Chapel on January 18, 1976:

  Thornton used to say that he and I were brought up in the “late foam-rubber period of American Protestantism.” And the worst of that, he said, was that we didn’t have the courage to think what he called “window-breaking thoughts.” He quoted Karl Marx as saying, “Tell me in what neighborhood you live and I’ll tell you what you think.” Thornton thought that we had lived too long in the wrong neighborhood[s] . . . the neighborhood of late foam-rubber Protestantism and, as a semiprofessional money raiser, in the neighborhood of the very rich. “The rich,” he said, “need to be lapped in soothing words.” What was required was window-breaking rhoughts. The enemy was philistinism, parochialism, narrow specialization. The object of education—indeed of the whole of life—was the expansion of the imagination. This could lead to window-breaking thoughts.

  Also in the Yale archive is an incomplete semi-autobiographical sketch titled “Yale, 1920” in which Wilder postulates a law that “Private wealth arrests the advance of civilization; great wealth reverses it” (italics in original).

  Reasonable minds could spend a lively evening over brandy and Cohibas hashing this over. Did those 300-odd libraries that Andrew Carnegie endowed really “arrest” the advance of civilization? Did Andrew Mellon’s gift of his art collection to the United States “reverse” civilization? I’ll have another brandy, please, the XO. Point is, the DNA that flowed in Thornton Wilder’s veins was Maine-Calvinist. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, raised for a short but influential period amid mind-boggling poverty in China (though comfortable himself). His father and mother inculcated in him and his brother (a preacher) the paradigmatic values of the middle class. Wilder spent his life teaching and storytelling, when not dropping by for a drink at the Alqonguin with Ruth Gordon or Alexander Woollcott. His feet, unlike those of another midwestern boy who spent time at Princeton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, were planted firmly on the ground. The terra doesn’t get much firma than 50 Deepwood Drive, Hamden, Connecticut, living with your sister.

  In his biography of Wilder, Gilbert Harrison asserts that “Thornton was not anti-money. But money, as Dolly Levi [from the aboriginal The Merchant of Yonkers] said, was like manure, ‘not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.’ ” (How many times have you heard that quote attributed to someone else?) Discussing the portrayal of the rich in Theophilus North, Harrison quotes from Wilder’s own journal:

  [Thorstein] Veblen missed the point about conspicuous waste; it is a repressive strategy. It is designed to cow the less fortunate into believing that the privileged rich are of a different order of man and are mysteriously entitled to their out-sized possessions.

  Never mind Marx—Lenin could have written that. But here we have a fuller version of his knowing smile with his nephew Tappan: Harrison writes that Thornton said in his sixties, “I’m getting to be a crypto-Marxian. . . . The unequal distribution of wealth vitiates against all exchange of ideas. Like the cuttlefish it exudes a black secretion.”

  So, a lot is going on underneath the glittery surface of Theophilus North. Given Wilder’s bring-on-the-guillotine views, his age and failing health, it’s downright remarkable that the novel doesn’t read like a bar rant by a cranky old Bolshevik.

  Wilder was never that, of course. He was, his nephew says, ever aware of a tendency within himself toward “the didactic direct,” to mount the nearest soapbox or pulpit stairs and start preaching. He was too much of an artist to fall for that. He was first, middle, and last a storyteller. This is what made him a pleasure to read when I was fifteen and still at age fifty. At its best, Theophilus North reads like one of those exuberant letters to his classmate and mother back in 1922. It may sometimes seem to pile on, but mostly it brims with delight, wit, prodigious learning, voice, bon mots, epigrams, apothegms, aperçus, grace, and yes, what a lot of lovely girls are in it. It may now be our winter of 2003, but in these pages it is still and forever the golden, enchanted summer of ’26.

  —Christopher Buckley

  Blue Hill, Maine

  The Nine Ambitions

  In the spring of 1926 I resigned from my job.

  The first days following such a decision are like the release from a hospital after
a protracted illness. One slowly learns how to walk again; slowly and wonderingly one raises one’s head.

  I was in the best of health, but I was innerly exhausted. I had been teaching for four and a half years in a boys’ preparatory school in New Jersey and tutoring three summers at a camp connected with the school. I was to all appearance cheerful and dutiful, but within I was cynical and almost totally bereft of sympathy for any other human being except the members of my family. I was twenty-nine years old, about to turn thirty. I had saved two thousand dollars—set aside, not to be touched—for either a return to Europe (I had spent a year in Italy and France in 1920-1921) or for my expenses as a graduate student in some university. It was not clear to me what I wanted to do in life. I did not want to teach, though I knew I had a talent for it; the teaching profession is often a safety-net for just such indeterminate natures. I did not want to be a writer in the sense of one who earns his living by his pen; I wanted to be far more immersed in life than that. If I were to do any so-called “writing,” it would not be before I had reached the age of fifty. If I were destined to die before that, I wanted to be sure that I had encompassed as varied a range of experience as I could—that I had not narrowed my focus to that noble but largely sedentary pursuit that is covered by the word “art.”

  Professions. Life careers. It is well to be attentive to successive ambitions that flood the growing boy’s and girl’s imagination. They leave profound traces behind them. During those years when the first sap is rising the future tree is foreshadowing its contour. We are shaped by the promises of the imagination.

  At various times I had been afire with NINE LIFE AMBITIONS—not necessarily successive, sometimes concurrent, sometimes dropped and later revived, sometimes very lively but under a different form and only recognized, with astonishment, after the events which had invoked them from the submerged depths of consciousness.