American writers were just beginning to discover postwar Paris, and some were on the verge of settling there as expatriates. Ezra Pound was already there, as was the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, living comfortably on the Left Bank, often on borrowed money, some of it from Edmund Wilson, whose heart she had already broken. Wilson, now writing for the New Republic, arrived in Paris on June 20, 1921. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had been there but had recently departed because, Fitzgerald wrote to Wilson, they “had just had a misadventure in Paris due to Zelda’s having tried to make sure of the hotel elevator by tying it fast to their floor.”25 Ernest Hemingway would arrive in December 1921, and the Fitzgeralds would move back to Paris for a longer sojourn in 1925.
In contrast, Thornton, who had yet to meet these contemporaries, was a transient observer in Paris, far more at home in Rome. While others came to Paris and stayed on to write, Thornton Wilder came to the city of Proust, wrote briefly, mostly about Rome, and then went quickly home. He had read Proust, and consciously or not, would import some Proustian devices into his own work—a richness of language and imagery; vivid portraits of eccentric characters, the strands of their lives interwoven in a novel’s seemingly disjointed plot; themes of suffering and unrequited love; detailed attention to social mores and structures.26 Proust had published his last book, The Guermantes Way, in May 1921. Thornton was most likely unaware that summer of 1921, as he wrote in his cheap hotel room, that in a cramped fifth-floor apartment near the Arc de Triomphe, the great Proust, fallen on hard times, had put down his pen, never to publish again.
Thornton knew the work of the French novelist, poet, and playwright Jules Romains (1885–1972) and, discovering his Paris address, worked up the courage to call on him—a visit Thornton looked back on with chagrin. He realized only afterward that such a visit out of the blue by an unknown young American—who purported to be writing an article about Romains—must have seemed “ludicrous,” and, Thornton blushed to remember, “I had no suspicion what bad French I was speaking.”27 But Romains (the pseudonym of Louis Farigoule) was kind to him, giving Thornton an advance copy of his farce M. le Trouhadec saisi par la débauche (Mr. Trouhadec Seized by Debauchery). To help him with his alleged article, Romains directed Thornton to a 1918 journal essay discussing Romains’s literary philosophy of unaminism, which held, Thornton wrote, that “drama is vital in proportion as it uses group-force and marshalls little crowd-psychology units; this eliminates most of Ibsen & a lot of Shakespeare, but throws a bit of light on some great plays,” such as “the supernaturalism of Japanese drama, the ancestral curse of the Greeks, the perpetual faction of the German romantics.”28 Romains’s concept of group force took root in Thornton’s imagination and grew to support one of the four “fundamental conditions of drama” that he would set forward in a 1941 essay, “Some Thoughts on Playwriting.” He wrote, “The theater is an art addressed to a group-mind. . . . It is the presence of the group-mind that brings another requirement to the theater—forward movement.”29
As he did in his encounters with other writers of fiction and drama, Thornton ingested Romains’s ideas, tested them against what he knew of Romains’s writing to see if the author’s theory materialized in his literary work, and then considered whether any of the ideas could energize his own work in progress. While Thornton thought originally and independently about his own fiction and plays, he also steeped himself in literary tradition, learning from an eclectic array of “teachers” whose work spanned centuries and cultures. He was their apprentice, experimenting, testing, trying—not depending on anyone else for encouragement or practical help. He would do whatever he would do in his own time, in his own way.
THORNTON WAS eager to get to England to see his mother and sisters and Aunt Charlotte, now general secretary of the World Committee of the YWCA, based in London, and making occasional trips to France and Italy. Perhaps, he wrote to his father dramatically, he would spend some of his passage money so he could visit his mother, even if it meant returning to the United States in steerage, or as a deck boy, or a hand on a cattle boat.30 Dr. Wilder immediately provided more money. “I do want you and your mother to have a time together, and for you to see something of England,” Dr. Wilder wrote to his son, who often cringed when he opened his father’s letters for fear they would be full, as they usually were, of commands, advice, and recriminations about morality or money. This time, his father wrote, “Always feel free to ask me for things but if I decline believe it is for a good reason.”31
Across the ocean from each other that summer, father and son wrestled in slow-moving transatlantic letters with the question of what would become of Thornton in the fall. Perhaps he could find work as a journalist in France or the United States, Thornton speculated. “I have long told you, journalism is so degenerate that young fellows are wanted not for their best work but for ‘snappy stuff,’ ” countered his father, the journalist. He urged his son to come home. He would provide for Thornton, he promised, while they found him a “program—as constructive as possible.”32 Dr. Wilder was determined to get his son out of Paris: “The decay in much of French-city-life is so dreadful, and you thrown into the theatrical and degenerate ends—I need not tell you I am praying for you.” He wanted his son to learn the language and the culture, but not at the risk of becoming “corrupted—perhaps cynical, reckless—even coarsened.” Sternly he cautioned, “Get on pay roll (not occasional income) save gradually to a nest egg—be captain of your own soul.”33
In July, Dr. Wilder received notice of the perfect solution to save Thornton from such peril: “The Blair School offers you a position as Latin dept. head,” he wrote to Thornton, instructing him to cable: “Accept.” Dr. Wilder would then negotiate “as favorable a contract as possible.”34 Thornton was not an outstanding scholar at Yale, but, for the most part, he was strong in Latin, as his professors affirmed. In addition to his flair for the language, he had demonstrated a deep comprehension of the literature, as well as a talent for translation. Before he left Yale, there had been preliminary discussions with Dr. John C. Sharpe, headmaster of the Blair Academy in Blairstown, New Jersey, about the possibility of teaching Latin there. Prodded by Thornton’s Yale Latin professor, Dr. Clarence Mendell, matters had moved along to the point of a possible meeting in New York between Thornton and Dr. Sharpe. Now Thornton cabled his acceptance of the unexpected job offer, and wrote to his father in more detail: “Don’t try to hold him up to a certain wage. I may not suit, and to be well-paid but unsatisfactory [is] horrible . . .”35 He could imagine “the staggering difficulties of teaching Latin in a boys school—the study-hour discipline—the keeping down of rough-house in dormitories—the fixing of attention in class—But I rather rise to the hope of being able to do it, not without a certain exhilaration.”36
Ever conscious of expense, Dr. Wilder had notified Thornton of the Blair opportunity by mail—an economy that proved to be very costly. By the time Thornton received his father’s letter and Dr. Sharpe received Thornton’s cable in response, he had offered the chairmanship of the Latin Department to someone else. Dr. Wilder reported this fact to Thornton in a letter August 5, softening the news with word that Dr. Sharpe would like to meet Thornton on his return from Paris, “intimating that he might have something else to offer.”37 Dr. Wilder also informed Dr. Mendell at Yale about the disappointing news from Blair Academy, and Mendell suggested that he send a letter of inquiry to Mather A. Abbott, the new head of the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.
If there was an offer from Lawrenceville, Dr. Wilder wrote to Thornton, “I shall assume you would accept the post and practically accept it for you—tho’ writing you about it.” Lawrenceville was a “great school,” he reminded his son, and he was glad to know that Thornton was willing to come home and get to work. In the meantime Papa urged him to keep up his “intensive work on French” and to come home with a “working knowledge” of German as well—although, he added, “I must not ask the impossible!”38
&nb
sp; Although he did not acknowledge his own culpability for the loss of the Blair Academy opportunity, Dr. Wilder worked fiercely to find his boy another job. He received good news in mid-August from Mather Abbott: Lawrenceville needed a French teacher and assistant housemaster, at an annual salary of fifteen hundred dollars. Could Thornton Wilder teach French? Dr. Wilder assured Dr. Abbott that he could and he would. Cables would be sent this time, the cost ignored by all the frugal Wilders. Thornton would make a quick trip to see his mother in England, and sail home from there in time to begin teaching.
“Lawrenceville you know is the smart prep. school for Princeton and entertains only big husky team material,” he wrote to his mother. “Oh, how well dressed I must be! I’d better grow a mustache for maturity,”39 All his life he had had to wear “strange wild cheap ballooning clothes,” he wrote to his father with regret. “There are certain green years in the early teens when every boy and girl wants to dress beautifully before other girls and boys; in Charlotte and me such stirrings at Berkeley High were overwhelmed and betrayed and I doubt . . . whether we will ever be able to carry ourselves well, or (should the wind change) even wear expensive clothes properly in our life.”40
“PEOPLE SAID to me Never Teach school. You will be so unhappy. It will deaden you.” These were Thornton Wilder’s words to his own favorite teacher, Charles Wager, in November 1921 during his first semester of teaching at the Lawrenceville School. He went on: “But what happy surprises you find here; how delightful the relations of the teacher and an interested class; casual encounters with retiring boys on the campus, and at lights-out the strange big protective feeling, locking the doors against dark principalities and powers and thrones.”41
The Lawrenceville School was established in 1810, and when Thornton arrived, thin, anxious, and poorly dressed, he stepped with trepidation into a long tradition of excellence. He had to learn quickly how to teach. He thought he was at least an adequate assistant housemaster at Davis House, and he found “times of great pleasure in the class-room when I know I’m not merely adequate but really good.” Much of the time, however, he was “still in Europe,” he confessed to his father. “I especially cannot forget Italy.” But there were moments when he felt that he had an instinct for teaching and “that art of holding twenty intelligences in hushed attention” would justify his going to Lawrenceville “in the capacity of unprepared teacher and unsuitable companion.”42
Thornton settled into the disciplined school schedule as the autumn leaves drifted over the beautiful Lawrenceville campus. He seemed always either to be recovering from today—grading papers, longing for rest, snatching moments to write—or preparing for tomorrow: lesson plans in the rudiments of French, which he often felt unqualified to teach; or in French literature, where he was very much at home. He found that it required “an awful lot of crude health to be a teacher,” he wrote to his father that fall. “Even in one’s best-behaved classes one must follow each recitation with deadly concentration, and keep glancing around the room at intervals with a sort of fierce nervous awareness—and yet at the same time appear serene and fat.” He had to be a “monster of vitality.”43
He carried the constant responsibility of supervising the thirty-two boys in Davis House. Four evenings weekly, from seven until ten, he sat in his study and the boys came to him as needed for help with their homework, or homesickness. When he heard the “sound of scuffling” he would “descend the stairs with majestic and perfectly audible advance, dispensing awe and order like fragrance.”44 He supervised the frantic preparations for lights-out, and then patrolled the house, locked the doors, checked the windows—and finally, as quiet settled over the three floors of the house, savored the respite, the privacy, and, if he was not too weary, the precious moments for writing.
He was growing more effective in the classroom, and more comfortable with the boys out of class. He organized an English Club, seven boys who gathered to read “very earnest bad original poems to one another.” They took walks “through the bare tree trunks of a hesitant Spring,” he wrote home. He liked working with “imaginative boys from homes and schools that never fed an imagination,” and found that even his “flattest remarks on books or style or even people are manna to them.” He treasured the “awkwardness and charm and rush of their opening minds.”45
Thornton looked at other teaching jobs early in 1922, including one at Amherst, for he worried that his Lawrenceville contract would not be renewed. He was surprised and relieved to be offered a contract to return for another year. To Edwin Clyde “Tubby” Foresman, the Lawrenceville football coach and the master of Davis House, Thornton wrote, “I count myself especially lucky to have been assigned to your house; I owe you everything for having lifted me over my First Year so patiently.”46 He genuinely enjoyed the Foresmans; the coach was “a little stout man, an old football celebrity with blunt ideas and a jovial reticent manner,” and his attractive wife was “much superior intellectually, a Cornell graduate, but domesticating rapidly.” She spoke French and Latin and played four-hand piano with Thornton. The Foresmans had a daughter, Emily, a “squirming little girl with a piquant French face.”47
By spring 1922 Thornton began to contribute some of his salary to help support his mother, Isabel, and Janet, still living in England. Charlotte, working in Boston, was helping the family as well. Thornton was also sending modest amounts of money to Amos, still studying theology at Mansfield College, Oxford, and preaching in small chapels nearby. For a brief time Amos worked with Albert Schweitzer, who was giving a series of lectures in French at Oxford, and giving organ concerts to raise money to support his work in Africa. Because Amos knew French, he was engaged to help Dr. Schweitzer with his correspondence. This experience, combined with the reading of Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus led, Amos wrote, to his “life-long interest in New Testament eschatology.”48
His job secure for a second year, Thornton set out in July for Truro, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, to rest, write, and spend some time with Charlotte, who had returned from Europe and was working in Boston. En route he stopped in Newport, Rhode Island, to “look at the old battlefield” at Fort Adams.49 He decided to stay in Newport for a while. For four dollars a week, he rented a room in the small dormitory atop the Newport YMCA, where he enjoyed “abundant showers, clean beds” and the use of a swimming pool and gym. “Every day in the Gym I can be found hurling crowbars and fleeing among the trapezes,” he wrote to his mother.50 He swam each day in the high “menacing” surf at Newport Beach, and then stretched out in the sun and sand to read—or to think about nothing at all. He summed up the atmosphere in a letter to Charlotte: “I have a cheap little clean room, an intimate typewriter, a thousand vistas of an almost-Italian sea, the neighborhood of the Rich, excellent surf-bathing, and the use of a well-equipped Gym all to myself, an opportunity I am really using, and at whose results you will be pleased.”51
When he was not admiring the “beautiful and dangerous mists” arising from the ocean, he was enjoying long walks in the “wild and upthrusting” countryside, exercise that relaxed him and gave him time to think.52 He was only “a tepid believer in the efficacy of long walks as far as mere physique goes.” While he had taken long walks wherever he was—“At Thacher, Berkeley, Oberlin, New Haven, Europe (what glorious ones) and around Lawrenceville”—it was Thornton’s opinion that ten minutes of lifting weights or chinning on a bar yielded “twenty times the reaction” of a twelve-mile walk.53 But those long walks paid off for the writer’s mind if not his body, and he was often composing as he strode down country roads, untangling a snarl in a passage or dreaming up a new plot. He also explored Newport, as he had Berkeley, Rome, and Paris, until he felt he knew almost every inch of the place. Since Rome, he had habitually “excavated” the cities and towns he visited, absorbing their culture; probing their history, sociology, and psychology; wooing the people he met along the way into conversation and camaraderie, however temporary.
Sitting at an Under
wood typewriter in his room at the Y, Thornton worked for several hours each day typing the novel he had been writing in fragments of time over the past year. He detoured briefly to polish “A House in the Country,” a short story inspired by Chekhov.Thornton wrote a poignant account of a lonely clerk in a warehouse who had dreamed since boyhood of having a “big old house in the country and of filling it with relatives and friends over whom he saw himself playing the part of the benignant despot.” In the gentle progression of the story, Old Malcolm gradually slips from the sad drudgery of his real world into the companion-filled fantasy of his dream world.54 The tightly focused, understated story is a quiet counterpoint to the ambitious extravagance of Thornton’s unfolding novel. “I will try and place it somewhere,” he wrote to his mother, “but whether it is placed or not, it should have given pleasure to the little republic of Wilders.”55
To help pay his summer expenses, Thornton posted an advertisement in the local newspapers, seeking a summer job. “TUTORING,” it read. “An instructor in one of the foremost preparatory schools and a recent Yale graduate is willing to serve as tutor in French, English or Latin.”56 Meanwhile, as he typed, he was revising draft number six of the novel he was calling The Trasteverine, and “already a thousand and one felicities have been added and three thousand gaucheries cast out,” he said.57 It was set in Rome, and he needed books to augment his imagination and memory—Dante in Italian; Sidney Colvin’s Life of Keats—but to his dismay he found the local public library sparsely equipped for serious writers. He was reading English biographer and critic Lytton Strachey, and took to heart Strachey’s intimations about fusing “a host of disparate details” under one common trait “in order to give an impression of rich complicated romantic life.”58 Thornton was casting about on the wide seas of his reading, “fishing” for his own style and voice—and Strachey’s words set him to practicing, and then incorporating such richly complex sentences into his novel.