The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume II Read online

  Sudden sounds of violence from the parlor. Stumbling. Breaking furniture.)

  MR. GRAHAM’S VOICE: How dare you—you young—devil!

  (Silence. Mrs. Graham does not move.)

  Gertrude! Gertrude!

  (John appears at the door, somber, and a little dazed. He is holding the stick. Mrs. Graham does not look at him.)

  JOHN: I’ll take my blue suit.

  MR. GRAHAM (Off): Gertrude!

  (John becomes aware that he is holding the stick. He throws it back into the parlor. He returns to the parlor and reappears with his suit wrapped in a brown-paper parcel. He starts to leave via the audience; then pauses, drops the parcel and going to Mrs. Graham leans over her with his hands approaching her throat.)

  JOHN: Give me that!

  MRS. GRAHAM (In terror, defending her throat): John! What you doin’? What you doin’?

  JOHN: I’m taking that lockit.

  (He breaks it and holds it before him.)

  That’s the only thing I ever stole.

  MRS. GRAHAM: All right. You didn’t steal it. I give it to you.

  JOHN (Looking about him): Of all the hundreds and thousands of farms I could’a been sent to—I was sent to this one!

  MRS. GRAHAM (Proudly): Anyway, in this one you got one thing: you heard about the Emporium firsthand.

  JOHN: I’ll bet it ain’t much.

  (He dashes down into the audience and leaves the auditorium by the aisle.)

  MR. GRAHAM’S VOICE: Gertrude—get Dr. Krueger—go, get him—

  (Mrs. Graham goes slowly out back.

  Sound of galloping horse at the back of the auditorium.)

  MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE (Looks at the audience, smiles, rubs his hands): I guess that’s the end of the scene.

  NOTES TOWARD “THE EMPORIUM”

  After stopping for several years, Wilder returned to work on “The Emporium” in the summer of 1953. The notes in this section contain, in Wilder’s words a “series of notations toward a continuation of ‘The Emporium,’” written between August 1953 and June 1954. Because Wilder did not, in fact, bind them into his journals (see the August 2, 1953 journal entry below), Mr. Gallup retained their identity by publishing them as an appendix in The Journals of Thornton Wilder: 1939–1961.

  August 2, 1953

  (Hors-Série)

  MacDowell Colony

  Peterborough, NH

  “The Emporium”

  As I take up “The Emporium” again, I shall begin a series of notes here. I may or may not bind them into the Journal later.

  My difficulty with it was that it was going on a road all too moralizing and didactic: the choice of Hercules and the development “par la femme l’idéalité entre dans la vie, et sans elle que serait l’homme?”* I’m not afraid of truisms; but I must believe in them vitally for myself, and I must present them tragicomically.

  With that Orphanage and Farmhouse Scene the hero is certainly Everyman in Everyhome. Then I go into his Relation-to-Standards.

  But what I’ve got now is too vast a portal for my Emporium-Craigie material; or rather, my Emporium-Craigie material is not being presented by me in a large enough way to permit it adequately to follow the Orphanage and Cleaning-Women Scenes.

  August 6, 1953

  Thursday

  Later

  Thinking about time I begin to wonder whether my gropings haven’t been halfhearted merely because I’ve been seeing the boy’s life story wrongly from the point of view of time. A myth must be staged as something already known. Its end must precede its beginning; or rather, its end is in its beginning and in every part of it. It loses its force the minute it is conceived as a story-in-succession, and unfolding-into-the-unknown; so break up, throw away any interest in it that may depend upon chronological progression.†

  Shouldn’t we look into the John story as into a pit, a gulf, a cistern? A myth is not a story read from left to right, from beginning to end, but a thing held full-in-view the whole time. Perhaps this is what Gertrude Stein meant by saying that the play henceforth is a landscape.

  (1) So today my mind has been pressing on the possibility that I begin the play with the New-Year’s-Eve-party-at-Craigie’s story”* (or with some “vision” that has not yet occurred to me—John’s reception into the Emporium or his death at its doors) and then work both backward and forward, and close the play with the Orphanage Scene.

  August 7, 1953

  Friday

  How can I best show, without overt moralizing pressures, the weakness of the Craigie Store (the inadequacy of the Ethical) and the strength of the Emporium? Answer: by an indication of the latent fears in the former.

  (2) Suppose at the new opening scene, the Annual Party, I have Ermengarde Craigie address the guests before her father’s arrival: “Let me remind you of two things: you know my father’s displeasure at any reference to another store in this city—let’s us remember not to mention any other store. And secondly, since some of you are new here, I think I ought to tell you that my father has been in a very nervous condition—we’re all so glad that he’s getting better—and I don’t want you to become alarmed if he seems—that is if he suddenly seems to be convinced that there’s a flood or—or that the earth is turning to ice, or that Philadelphia’s on fire. My father every now and then imagines these things.” And when Mr. Craigie enters that’s what he does: inveighs against the Emporium, and has a paroxysm lest the snow then falling will never cease. He’s stored the cellars with food. Ethics does not offer any relief to the basic fear in men; though millions try to make themselves believe so.

  This, then, can make writing the Emporium scenes easier: they are careless of fire and thieves. And when, in the reverse-movement of the new design for the play, we come to the scene on the Graham Farm, Mrs. Graham can be given ([in the theatre] at 10:35 [P.M.]) a truer, briefer, surer statement of the motto of the play and the character of the Emporium: that one can only belong to that that is not threatened with extinction.

  And instead of my single Noh-theatre ideal spectator, won’t I have five people over seventy—from the Veteran Department-Store Workers’ Garden Home—one blind, two deaf—and who must sit on the stage?

  And isn’t it possible that I open the play at the Craigie Party; carry it to the moment when Mr. Hobmeyer as messenger from the Emporium brings a summons to our young hero; then break the scene off? The whole play then unrolls and we resume that scene where we left off and continue to our finale. So that this play is a one-act play with interpolated switchbacks (or what are they called?).

  August 8, 1953

  Saturday

  Have been writing up the scene. Haven’t I found a way of expressing the abyss under the Ethical by the system of alarm bells? The Just Man, conscius recti, cannot dissipate or liquidate his fears; he can only ignore them; or, as we say, rise above them. They lie in wait to assail him at those moments when weakness or some sudden blow of circumstance (mis-chance) robs him of the will-constructed resolution not to confront them. And the long-time contemplation of the totality of experience is itself the enemy of his serenity. Many a stoic has significant resolution to be unshaken by the ills within his own life; can he sustain it in the contemplation of the ills of all mankind? Again there is a transition from quantity to quality: to remain sincere in the presence of a few ills is stoicism; to remain serene in the face of a myriad demands faith.

  August 9, 1953

  Sunday

  I have reached the point where Mr. Craigie offers John the store and his daughter’s hand. If this is to be the first scene in the play I am in a world of difficulties. The audience which receives this at 8:45 [P.M.] is in the presence of mere story-telling. Its only interest can be in what-will-happen-next. My dimensions are not wide and poignant enough to generate in this audience a passion to know, also, what happened before. This, then, is either not the first scene, or it is not correctly written. The play should begin with a vast reversal or a coming-to-himself.

  August 1
0, 1953

  Monday

  (3) Have begun a prologue(!): Mr. Hobmeyer addressing the crowd that’s waiting to get into the Emporium’s annual sale. Oh, the difficulty of it—to avoid the moralizing-didactic, to sound some large notes, and to establish the “crazy” aspect of the store.

  August 12, 1953

  Wednesday

  Each time I rewrite the new opening scene, it is better. To be sure, it has no explicit mention of any central aspect of John’s or Laurencia’s stories; but I think that from today I am free to write the plot, freed that is from that other aspect of writing which is searching for an idea.

  August 14, 1953

  Friday

  Now, again, I’ve been returning to the notion of chronological order—but this time inserting the Annual-Sale Scene after the Farmhouse Scene (taking the place of a scene I had several times written for that place: a scene in the Employment Office). The uneasiness I have about it comes from: (1) How many times in a play can you address the audience, each time identifying them with a different public? (Query: Did Shakespeare use his audience as the Roman mob in the scene of Caesar’s funeral orations? anywhere else?) (2) Can the higher-lower aspects of the Emporium be indicated in this way, at this moment—do they detract from the “touches” to be added in the next scene: the Laurencia-Hobmeyer, Laurencia-John conversations after the store’s closing-time? What I like is the introduction of John as an unseen questioner from the audience; and a possible first sketch of Laurencia in a relation to the waiting bargain-hunters. Let me now try this scene again, looking for ways to build up some real give-and-take between Hobmeyer-Bernice [the cleaning woman]-Laurencia.

  It seems impossible to find a way to trouble the waters in this scene by injecting doubt as to whether the Emporium is senile or asleep or all but nonexistent.

  August 18, 1953

  Tuesday

  Peterborough, NH

  Vacillation. Insecurity in progress. But what it comes down to is that I cannot make any decision about form or anecdote until I discover the next characteristic of the Store—the next image or merely fact or symbol—to feed the curiosity of the audience, which is the true life of the play. And the difficulty lies in the fact that I must present the characteristic under the form of a department store’s operation. And what I am looking for is something dealing with the fact that the Absolute “sells” primarily to the individual and is only individually perceived. And this I must do by presenting the contrast of this method to the method employed over at Craigie’s. The classic way of presenting this is, I suppose, Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the king who has no clothes. Each person sees the Emporium and its goods differently; while Craigie and all its objects are of equal valuation to all its customers.

  Now this I have done pretty well but only partially in John’s outburst to Laurencia (“old-fashioned—can’t find the doors”): what I need further is a figure for the relation between the customer and the goods.

  (4) (Rejected tries: to some eyes they are moth-eaten and rusty; some claim that when you take them home the colors fade, or the objects break.) Remembering that I’m after the idea of the suitability of each object to an individual purchaser, shouldn’t I search among motifs such as: the objects (claim the disparagers) are unsuitable for daily life; that they don’t—in many ways—fit?*

  Anyway, as I see it this motif—when I find it—should follow the motif of the has-no-doors-is-stuffy-etc. Yet I should be able to introduce it in the Mrs. Graham-John Scene (though I groan when I think of anything that overburdens that scene with overt symbolic material; so early in the play, it should catch up the spectator, mostly, as passionate human story). Now let me again go back and see if I can weave this into the Bargain-Sale Scene.

  (5) For a while I have considered putting all this material (except: how can I get a job at the Emporium?) into the present “third scene” by having Bernice arriving for work, pulling a hatpin from her hat (arriving after Laurencia’s discussion of the dome, the music, etc.). It is her duty to collect the complaints from the complaint boxes—to burn them. Mirthful or indignant, she reads several of them: “. . . that your wares are unsuitable for a modern American home. I regret I must transfer my patronage to Craigie’s. I hope you will accept this letter in the spirit in which it is written . . .” “Never, I repeat, never shall I put my foot in your store again . . .” (this letter is twelve pages) “to be so insulted by clerks,” etc.

  Yet this has the overwhelming disadvantage that it brings Bernice upon the scene before her big appearance as a cleaning woman, and presents her colloquial side without intimating her sybillic quality. Besides, one could wish to do better than read aloud letters.

  No, I must keep my meditations turning on the attributes of the Emporium itself—when I have those truly in hand the play will flow from them.

  And to the idea of Belonging: and here I seem merely to flounder from one tiresome moralizing formula to another: you belong to what you make (or give), not to what you receive.

  Later: Rewrote Laurencia resigning and first part of Laurencia-John. Raising the intensity on the realistic level; and the Bernice Scene. I think it’s now all better and moving forward.

  August 27, 1953

  (6) One thing keeps worrying me: apart from what I shall do with the Member of the Audience on stage, I seem to see in my mind’s eye that this Third Scene needs to be dressed with more people. The First Scene: doesn’t matter, it’s an auditorium; Second Scene, comes sufficiently to life with the opening speech of Mrs. Graham; the Third opens with the liveliness of getting the customers out of the store; but we need some higher liveliness here and that could be accomplished by the (pretty soon) arrival of a third actor (that’s why I tried also to introduce Bernice earlier—but that, in this last rewriting, I’ve disposed of). Certainly, it would be vivacious enough, if I could introduce a belated customer—an indignant insulted busybody, of the Craigie faction. To think over—but only if I can find legitimate working use for her later: just [as] I have two Seniors (Foster-Hobmeyer and Graham-Craigie) so would I be justified in having two Matrons?

  (7) In this writing I have discarded the former Prologue (John-Gillespie and Dr. Abercrombie) with all its attendant business. Do I regret it? Will it ultimately find a place?

  Now as to the Member of the Audience.

  September 7, 1953

  Twisting and turning. Rewriting scene after scene. Forever trying to focus and define the two great problems behind this play: what is the Emporium?; and how to bring into highlight the qualities it has in common with a department store while attenuating and veiling the qualities it hasn’t in common.

  (8) These last few days I have seen that it is unsuitable that I build the Second Part on a Laurencia-Gretchen story. The framework is too big for a “simple-life lone narrative” and the point that women are catalysts of the Absolute can be made clearly without lingering too long over our illustrative anecdote (all Emporium girls do not shipwreck their lives in its service; and this play must see to it that it is giving a report on all). So now I think that Laurencia quia Laurencia has only one scene. The play approaches the form of a succession of one-act plays at the same time that it approaches the form of an oratorio or mysterium. So now I am attacking the Third Scene (first floor of the Emporium) as a one-act play. John has been “annoying” Laurencia for almost a year. What is its climax? That Laurencia denounces and repudiates John? Something more.

  (9) Later:

  HOBMEYER: Sometimes I think that this—all this that we see—isn’t the Emporium at all.

  JOHN [Breathlessly]: What? What do you mean?

  HOBMEYER: All this selling—all this buying and selling.

  JOHN: Well, it’s a store, isn’t it? The Emporium’s a store.

  HOBMEYER: Yes, but—maybe it’s only a front. A front for something else that it’s doing.

  JOHN: Why, that’s crazy. Of course, it’s a store.

  HOBMEYER: But you’ve noticed yourself that it’s not i
nterested in selling—not interested in the same way that Craigie’s is.

  JOHN [Stopped for a moment]: Then what is it interested in?

  HOBMEYER: Come, it’s time to lock the doors. Go down that corridor.

  JOHN: Well, I know one thing: I’m never going to come here again. I don’t want to work in a place that you don’t know what it’s doing. I’m going to stick to my job at Craigie’s. At Craigie’s you know where you [are].

  HOBMEYER: You’re perfectly right about that, boy. At Craigie’s you know where you are.

  So we have the scene at Craigie’s party, culminating in John’s mock-speech and repudiation—he will return to the Emporium.

  November 26, 1953

  Key West

  Later

  (10) Now we’re putting back the Employment-Office [Scene] (of long ago) with the whole new emphasis throughout of: How do you get a job there?

  November 30, 1953

  Finished the scene on the Emporium floor—now the fourth. I think the shape is coming clearer. Some vestiges of Kitsch, alas.

  December 2, 1953

  Rewrote the former Prologue—now as a dream-sequence to open Part Two.

  Later: No, that won’t do.

  January 21, 1954

  Deepwood Drive

  Hamden, CT

  (11) Have been writing the Employment-Office Scene (now Scene Three), incorporating from Notion (under 2, above) the visitors from the Retired Employees’ etc. Now I think it’s going right. Great violence on the stage—John’s manhandling of the Employment Officer. I think that, at last, this is it. And now I have the stage dressed with these disparate on-watchers who themselves are dynamic feeders of the developing tensions. And more and more Scene Four takes its shape—getting nearer and nearer to Das Schloss from which I should not have departed in the first place. And all this new spurt of activity has had its point of departure from reading (through a glass darkly) an article in the latest (Drittes Heft, 1953) Die Neue Rundschau: Theodor Adorno: “Aufzeichnungen zu Kafka”—all the more useful too in that I cannot fully follow such thick involved German.