The Woman of Andros / the Ides of March Page 8

  Suddenly a light dawned upon Mysis: ‘He is at the temple! How could I have forgotten that he was under the vow of silence and that he must be there!’ And turning she started to enter the road.

  ‘You must not go to him at the temple,’ said Simo sharply. ‘I shall come down to the harbour with you now and buy your mistress from the Leno.’

  He returned to the house for his cloak, then walked into the town with Mysis hurrying at his heels. Dawn was breaking as he descended the winding stairs to the square. Against the streaked sky he saw the mast of the Leno’s boat. The Leno was not only a dealer in slaves; he was a wandering bazaar and sold foreign foods and trinkets and cloths. If an island were large enough he came ashore and conducted a fair and a circus. And now in the first cold light of morning Simo could see on the raised portion of the deck a brightly coloured booth, a chained bear, an ape, two parrots, and other samples of the Leno’s stock in trade, including the household of Chrysis. Philocles had remained on shore and for two hours had been standing at the parapet uttering short broken cries towards his companions. Being a Greek citizen he could not be sold into slavery and was to be transported later to Andros.

  Simo descended the steps of the landing with Mysis and was rowed out to the boat. While he concluded his transaction with the black and smiling Leno Mysis sank upon her knees before Glycerium, telling her of this good fortune. But Glycerium derived no joy from the news. She sat between Apraxine and the Ethiopian girl, amid the bundles of their clothes, and for weariness she could scarcely raise her eyes or move her lips. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I shall stay here with you. I do not wish to go anywhere.’

  Simo approached them. ‘My child,’ he said to Glycerium, ‘you are to come with me now.’

  ‘Yes, my beloved,’ Mysis repeated into her ear, ‘you must go with him. All will be well. He is taking you ashore to Pamphilus.’

  Still Glycerium remained with bent head. ‘I do not wish to move. I do not wish to go anywhere,’ she said.

  ‘I am the father of Pamphilus. You must come with me and good care will be taken of you.’

  At last and with great difficulty she arose. Mysis supported her to the side of the boat and there taking her farewell she whispered to her: ‘Goodbye, my dear love. Now may the gods bring you happiness. I shall never see you again, but I pray you to remember me, for I have loved you well. And wherever we are, let us remember our dear Chrysis.’

  The two women embraced one another in silence, Glycerium with closed eyes. At last she said: ‘I would that I were dead, Mysis. I would that I were long dead with Chrysis, my dear sister.’

  ‘You are to come with us too,’ said Simo to Mysis, who having known even greater surprises obediently followed him. The little group was rowed in silence to the shore. The Leno’s oarsmen struck the water, his bright coloured sails were raised, and his merchandise left the harbour for other fortunes.

  The sun had already risen when Pamphilus returned with swift and happy steps to his home. There he discovered Glycerium sleeping peacefully under his mother’s care. There was not a sound to be heard on the farm, for his mother, already invested with the dignity of her new duties as guardian and nurse to the outcast girl, had ordered a perfect quiet. Argo was sitting before the gate, her eyes wide with wonder and pleasure at the arrival of this new friend. Simo had gone to the warehouse and when he returned, for all his happiness, he moved about with lowered eyes, driven by the constraint in his nature to act as though nothing had happened.

  In the two days that followed, all their thoughts were centred about the room where the girl lay and all their hearts were renewed under the fragile claims that Glycerium’s beauty and shyness made upon them. Simo seemed, after Pamphilus, to have best understood her reticence and to have been understood by her; a friendship beyond speech had grown up between them. This flowering of goodness, however, was not to be put to the trial of routine perseverance, nor to know the alternations of self-reproach and renewed courage; for on the noon of the third day Glycerium’s pains began and by sunset both mother and child were dead.

  That night after many months of drought it began to rain. Slowly at first and steadily, the rain began to fall over all Greece. Great curtains of rain hung above the plains; in the mountains it fell as snow, and on the sea it printed its countless ephemeral coins upon the water. The greater part of the inhabitants were asleep, but the relief of the long-expected rain entered into the mood of their sleeping minds. It fell upon the urns standing side by side in the shadow, and the wakeful and the sick and the dying heard the first great drops fall upon the roofs above their heads. Pamphilus lay awake, face downward, his chin upon the back of his hand. He heard the first great drops fall upon the roof over his head and he knew that his father and mother, not far from him, heard them too. He had been repeating to himself Chrysis’s lesson and adding to it his Glycerium’s last faltering words: ‘Do not be sorry; do not be afraid,’ and he had been remembering how with the faintest movement of her eyes to one side, she had indicated her child and said: ‘Wherever we are, we are yours.’ He had been asking himself in astonishment wherein had lain his joy and his triumph of the few nights before: how could he have once been so sure of the beauty of existence? And some words of Chrysis returned to him. He recalled how she had touched the hand of a young guest who had returned from an absence, having lost his sister, and how she had said to him in a low voice, so as not to embarrass those others present who had never known a loss: ‘You were happy with her once; do not doubt that the conviction at the heart of your happiness was as real as the conviction at the heart of your sorrow.’ Pamphilus knew that out of these fragments he must assemble during the succeeding nights sufficient strength, not only for himself, but for these others, – these others who so bewilderingly now turned to him and whose glances tried to read from his face what news there was from the last resources of courage and hope, to live on, to live by. But in confusion and with flagging courage he repeated: ‘I praise all living, the bright and the dark.’

  On the sea the helmsman suffered the downpour, and on the high pastures the shepherd turned and drew his cloak closer about him. In the hills the long-dried stream-beds began to fill again and the noise of water falling from level to level, warring with the stones in the way, filled the gorges. But behind the thick beds of clouds the moon soared radiantly bright, shining upon Italy and its smoking mountains. And in the East the stars shone tranquilly down upon the land that was soon to be called Holy and that even then was preparing its precious burden.

  AFTERWORD

  We don’t at the moment know the date of publication, but a new book by Wilder is a genuine literary event.

  – ‘The Phoenix Nest,’ Bookman, September 7, 1929

  Mr. Wilder has said somewhere that all his books have been studies of how men and women meet their fates.

  – Henry Seidel Canby, Saturday Review of Literature,

  March 1, 1930

  Thornton Wilder conceived the idea for The Woman of Andros at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in the spring of 1928 in the midst of a literary explosion titled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The fallout from this event would determine how and where Andros would be written, designed, and marketed by its publisher, Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., and would help to shape its reception by critics and the public. It would also give Wilder leverage for publishing drama, his other literary passion.

  Before The Bridge of San Luis Rey transformed his life, Wilder had taught and served as a dormitory master at Lawrenceville School from 1921 to 1925, before departing on a two year leave of absence to complete The Cabala and take a graduate degree at Princeton University. Because he did not earn enough royalties from his first novel to stake himself for at least another year of writing or to persuade his publisher to underwrite such a program, he returned to teach at the school in the fall of 1927, three months before The Bridge was published. By the end of 1928, sales of The Bridge had reached more than 300,000 copies in the United States and England
. After one of the most celebrated debuts in twentieth-century American literature, Wilder found himself the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the toast of the English-speaking world, and a wealthy man.

  The stunned author also found his stunned publisher at his side reminding him of a significant new fact in his life: now that Wilder was an author with an enormous following, it was his obligation to write the next novel as quickly as possible. The man who had written The Bridge of San Luis Rey appeared to see his duty. In February 1928, amid the madness of trying to teach; run a dormitory; and handle the phone calls, correspondence, and visits generated by his newfound fame, Wilder informed Boni that the next novel would be entitled The Woman of Andros. He apparently described it with no more detail than he gave his mother in a brief and harried note: ‘The Woman of Andros – after play by Terence – Aegean island. Paganism with premonitions of Xianty.’

  Andros would be Wilder’s next work of fiction, but not his next book. In October 1928, the recently established New York publisher Coward-McCann published a modest trade edition of 2,000 copies of The Angel That Troubled the Waters, Wilder’s first book of drama. It contained sixteen three-minute playlets, the dramatic form Wilder had practiced passionately since high school. All but four of these short short plays were written or published before 1926.

  This detour into publishing drama was no surprise to his publishers, and they were not happy about it. Soon after The Cabala appeared in 1926, Wilder had approached Boni about publishing his playlets. Prospecting for the gold to be found in fiction, Boni had no interest in throwing away a contractual claim to one of the author’s next two books on a mere book of drama, goldplate at best. In April 1927, therefore, they gave Wilder permission to publish his playlets elsewhere ‘in some kind of limited edition.’ Wilder was not blind to the marketplace risks involved. As early as April 1926 he had put the matter this way to Boni’s secretary-treasurer Lewis Baer:

  My thought was that they [the playlets] were so frail that even if you did bring them out during the next two years it would probably be bad for ‘my booksellers’ and even, perhaps for most of ‘my readers.’ And yet I should love to get those little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably.

  Thanks to the leverage provided by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, there was nothing quiet or unprofitable about The Angel in print. The dust jacket language nails to the mast the relationship between the two books: ‘[These playlets] should prove of exceptional interest as showing the development of a talent that has astonished the critical world.’ The volume was widely and thoughtfully reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, although a number of critics were puzzled by its purpose and wondered whether it was really necessary to read Wilder’s juvenilia. The Angel also earned some gold, returning royalties to the author of more than $5,000 over two years, a modest sum compared to that moneymaker, The Bridge, which garnered more than $100,000 for Wilder in its first two years of shelf life.

  In addition to a pointed reminder that Thornton Wilder cared so deeply about drama that he was willing to take a creative risk with his public, it is helpful to see The Woman of Andros as a novelistic form of The Angel That Troubled the Waters. Besides its brevity – at 23,000 words, Andros barely qualifies as even a short novel – there are kindred themes. The four playlets added after 1926 show Wilder wrestling with similar and sober questions of morality and religion. The title playlet, for example, written in June 1928 as he was beginning to write the novel, has an angel informing a Chrysis-like figure that his time for healing at the sacred waters has not yet arrived. ‘In love’s service,’ the angel says, ‘only the wounded soldiers can serve.’ We know from later interviews that one of Wilder’s first three novels began as a play. Surely it is The Woman of Andros.

  In addition to attracting significant attention to his curious little playlets, The Bridge also provided Wilder with the money to write as he felt most comfortable writing, and would do so the rest of his career. His pattern was to sequester himself for short-term stays of a few days or a few weeks in the United States or abroad in hotels, pensions, or apartments. His notations on the manuscript of The Woman of Andros open the door on the creative process of a writer on the move:

  The Woman of Andros. Idea first came spring of 1928. First two conversations written at Axeland House, Horley, Surrey; and much of the later parts clearly planned during church attendances at Red Hill, Outwood, etc. The copying out of already completed portions begun into this book Oct 11, 1928. Pension Saramartel, Juan-les-Pins. A lot (Towards Chrysis monologue in the cove) done in The Law Dorm’s 76 Wall St New Haven April 1929. Then Sept-Oct Oxford-Paris-Munich.

  The notation includes two locations where he had in fact worked earlier on The Bridge – the pension in Juan-les-Pins, and a short-term rental in a Yale Law School dormitory. But his list is incomplete. We know from letters and records that Wilder also did considerable work on the manuscript in London’s Hotel Savoy, and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He also discovered that he worked well on ships crossing the Atlantic. (‘Baby does best on boats,’ he was later fond of saying.) As a result, the Adriatic, the Lapland, and the Cedric are part of the making of Andros. The manuscript’s peripatetic journey ended at the famed Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, for it was here, on or about January 4, 1930, only six weeks before publication, that Wilder completed the last lines of his third novel.

  These excerpts offer a glimpse of Wilder’s often-obscure reading in a religious vein as he was writing The Woman of Andros:

  Have you read much of Abbé Bremond’s Histoire Litt du Sentiment Religieux? I’m working thru the first volume because Francis de Sales has always been one of my favorites (Sainte Chantal, his sister-in-the-Lord, was Mme de Sévigné’s grandmother. But I first got to know him through your Abbé Huvet.)

  – Wilder to his brother, Amos (an ordained minister),

  October 25, 1928, from Juan-les-Pins

  It’s still the Woman of Andros, my hetaira, developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson. Her sayings and parables and her custom of adopting human strays is weighing down the book. But die she must and with unhellenic overtones, an anima naturaliter Christiana [a Christian spirit by nature]. I love to think that Terence’s play on which, ever so inexcusably, I base the novella was a favorite with Fénélon and John Henry Newman.

  – Wilder to Lady Sybil Colefax,

  July 24, 1929 from MacDowell Colony

  Whenever he moved about, the celebrated Pulitzer Prize–winning author attracted reporters. The recurring question was predictable: What are you writing now, Mr. Wilder? In response the author was usually brief and guarded, typically saying that his new novel involved the ancient world, a play by Terence, and a Greek island. He also commonly said he would write plays after completing the novel. Occasionally he offered further detail.

  In addition to working on his novel, as early as the fall of 1928, Wilder turned to the question of the design of the book and how it would be presented to the public. In addition to knowing that lightning does not strike twice in the same place, he cared about these practical questions for two reasons. First, he felt that the Boni firm inappropriately exploited The Bridge of San Luis Rey by serialisation and careless handling of subsidiary rights, and second, he recognised that his story about life and death on an obscure Greek island was very different from The Bridge. His terminology for how he wanted his new novel presented to the world was ‘conservative arrangements.’ He did not want to see it serialised in the William Randolph Hearst newspapers, as had happened with The Bridge, and he wanted to prohibit limited editions such as those for The Cabala and The Bridge that had turned into objects of frenzy in the collectors’ market.

  That Wilder could address these questions in the first place was another significant result of the success of The Bridge. His new status gained him an agent in all but name to help him wield power, his trusted new attorney, J. Dwight Dana of New Haven, Connecticut. As a result of the shifting relationship wit
h his publisher, the Wilder-Boni contract for Andros, signed on December 18, 1929, contained special provisions forbidding any ‘first edition . . . sold at a special price nor restricted to a relatively small number of copies,’ and any ‘cheap edition . . . to be published nor any republication or reproduction rights granted by publisher except upon the request of the Author communicated to the Publisher by said J. Dwight Dana.’ Wilder also asked his publisher a month before publication, to ‘send wrapper to me and blurb material as soon as it is done,’ reminding Boni ‘to be sure that because of the very subject-matter no faint colour of Hearst-Cosmopolitan enters into the format or publicity.’

  The novel greeted the public on February 21, 1930, with an announced pre-publication printing of 30,000 copies and another 20,000 on the day of its birth, numbers illustrating how popular Wilder had become since The Bridge’s first printing of 4,000 copies. The book’s design reflected Wilder’s desires for dignity and simplicity of appearance. The dust jacket, in fact, contained not a single blurb about the new novel or any of Wilder’s previous books. Instead of the testimonials that filled the dust jackets of The Bridge and, especially, The Cabala, the back of the Andros jacket contained only a list of seven current Boni books, each with a short tagline description. Andros led the list with this announcement: ‘The long-awaited successor to The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is a study in the inner life of a few characters passing through circumstances that are common to domestic life in all times and places.’ The inside front flap repeated this language word for word, with an additional sentence alerting readers not to expect another Bridge: ‘In contrast to Mr. Wilder’s earlier novels the characters in The Woman of Andros are simple village dwellers.’