We don’t think of Thornton Wilder as a prolific playwright. Yet look at all these one-act plays being published in only the first of two volumes. And these two volumes of plays will not contain the big three, and will also not include The Trumpet Shall Sound (his 1926 New York theatrical debut directed by Richard Boleslavsky for the American Laboratory Theatre), or his 1932 translation of André Obey’s The Rape of Lucrèce (starring Katharine Cornell and designed by the visionary Robert Edmond Jones), or his adaptation of A Doll’s House (directed by Jed Harris and starring Ruth Gordon, a highlight on Broadway in 1937). Has its run of 144 performances for a New York production of an Ibsen play been equaled?
It will take at least a third volume for us to finally read The Merchant of Yonkers, which failed on Broadway in 1938 (the same year Our Town opened), in spite of being directed by the legendary Max Reinhardt. Wilder swore he would validate that play one day. And he did, sixteen years later, in its reincarnation as The Matchmaker. Perhaps a later volume will contain portions, if not all, of the massive and unfinished Emporium, which occupied him so in the 1950s. Prolific for a man who said a wastepaper basket is a writer’s best friend.
This collection of seventeen one-act plays is really three collections. The first batch of six plays, published in 1931 as The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act, contains three plays that are simply masterpieces: The Long Christmas Dinner, The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and Pullman Car Hiawatha (all influenced by the Japanese Noh theatre and the writing on Noh theatre by the French playwright, Paul Claudel). These three plays were the workshops, the laboratories, for Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Two realistic plays from his Yale days: Queens of France and Love and How to Cure It; and a play he later disowned, Such Things Only Happen in Books (which could have been a George S. Kaufman/Moss Hart revue sketch) are also collected here.
It took nearly thirty years for the next two collections of one-acts to be attempted. He entitled these two cycles “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “The Seven Ages of Man.” These had to be important: they just couldn’t be seven deadly sins. He announced in his journals, November 24, 1958, that “maybe all my seven could be les péchés capitaux.” In a 1961 interview with Arthur Gelb in the New York Times, Wilder said that he had completed “the first segment of what is expected to be my artistic summing-up,” a double cycle of fourteen one-act plays. He would later say he regretted saying this.
He completed to his satisfaction only two of “The Seven Ages of Man” plays: Infancy and Childhood, which were produced in 1962 by New York’s Circle in the Square, as part of an evening now called “Plays for Bleecker Street.” Youth (Gulliver) and The Rivers Under the Earth (which may or may not be Middle Age, and may or may not belong to the cycle) were only recently recovered from the Wilder Archive at Yale.
He got further along with “The Seven Deadly Sins,” but, after the forays of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth and Pride into the outside world, he consigned the latter two (with the exception of a German translation of Pride) to burial in his archives, along with Envy, Wrath and Avarice, which he considered unfinished. These plays are all bitter and bleak as the early plays are full of comfort. What happened to the author of those early plays who described himself thus: “the most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that doesn’t revolt against Necessity and is constantly renewed in Hope”?
Read The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five illustrating Sloth and hear Hawkins talking about his commuter train going in and out of the city to the suburbs:
Hoping against hope that there’ll be . . . a wreck, so we can crawl out of the smoking, burning cars . . . and get into one of those houses. Do you know what you see from the windows of the train? Those people—those cars that you see on the streets of Bennsville—they’re just dummies. Cardboard. They’ve been up there to deceive you. What really goes on in Bennsville—inside those houses—that’s what’s really interesting. People with six arms and legs. People that can talk like Shakespeare. Children . . . that can beat Einstein. Fabulous things . . . We’re so expert at hiding things from one another—we’re so cram-filled with things we can’t say to one another that only a wreck could crack us open.
These seven plays are filled with the people who have not escaped by the skin of their teeth. These are the people of Our Town who lived long enough to learn the price you pay for staying smugly in your own Grover’s Corners. Emily said, “Oh life, you are too wonderful.” I know what these seven plays are. These are the plays if Emily had lived.
Who was Thornton Wilder? The bare bones. He was born April 17, 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, where his father owned and edited a newspaper. His identical twin brother did not survive the birth. With the exception of two spells in China, where his father served in the consular service, Wilder spent much of his childhood in Berkeley, California (where a neighbor bought Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” which young Wilder went to see over and over), and graduated from Berkeley High School in 1915.
He went on to Oberlin and then Yale for college; then to Italy to the American Academy in Rome where he studied archaeology (“Once you have swung a pickax that will reveal the curve of a street four thousand years covered over, which was once an active well-traveled highway, you are never quite the same again.”); to Lawrenceville, the elite prep school in New Jersey, where he taught for a number of years and published his first novels; then on to the lecturing at the University of Chicago.
In 1927, when he was thirty, his second published novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, set in Peru (which he hadn’t visited up to that point), received a sensational response—he won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1928; he was launched. But, in 1939, he said, “All my work, all of the earlier writing has been one long apprenticeship for the theatre.”
He lived on Deepwood Drive, Hamden, Connecticut, outside New Haven, in the house that The Bridge [of San Luis Rey] built; his sister Isabel acted as his amanuensis. The house was a home base as he traveled back and forth around the world.
He wrote seven novels, many plays and several screenplays. He was celebrated in America and Europe. In the 1950s, Our Town was even done on TV as a musical. Frank Sinatra played the Stage Manager, singing the hit song: “Love and Marriage” over and over, and Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint were George and Emily. The Skin of Our Teeth was the first American play Brecht chose to run in the repertory of the Berliner Ensemble; in the mid-1950s, the United States State Department sent it on a worldwide goodwill tour with the stars Mary Martin and Helen Hayes. In 1964, The Matchmaker became Hello Dolly without his having to lift a finger, he said, and it lavished money on him for the rest of his life. In 1973 he published his seventh novel, Theophilus North, which remained on the best-seller list for twenty-one weeks. In 1975 he died in his sleep while taking a nap. A good life. What do we do with him?
He never went out to sea like O’Neill or Melville or on the road like Kerouac or mad like Poe or even stayed in his room like Emily Dickinson. He was never on the river like Mark Twain. He served in two wars but never fought in a battle like Stephen Crane or shot big game like Hemingway. He never drank himself to an early death like Fitzgerald. He had many friendships from Sigmund Freud (even though he was never analyzed) to Katharine Hepburn, but no serious relationships. He didn’t have the political activism or the mythic private and public life of Arthur Miller. He didn’t create an indelibly personal world of torment as did Tennessee Williams. Where did his life experience, his bravado, come from?
In 1928, he wrote in a foreword to his first collection of plays, The Angel That Troubled the Waters:
During the years that these plays were being written I was reading widely, and these pages are full of allusions to it. The art of literature springs from two curiosities, a curiosity about human beings pushed to such an extreme that it resembles love, and a love of a few masterpieces of literature so absorbing that it has all the richest elements of curiosity. I use the word curiosity in the French sense of a tireless awareness of things . . . The
training for literature must be acquired by the artist alone, through the passionate assimilation of a few masterpieces written from a spirit somewhat like his own, and of a few masterpieces written from a spirit not at all like his own.
Wilder found his wilderness, his running off to sea, his trip up the Amazon, his polar expeditions, his Spanish civil war in the library. No wonder we can’t get a handle on him. He’s not the stuff of legends. The Wilder who said, “No man has a father after the age of twenty-one,” had two infatuations that validated his best work. Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth were each written under the spell of a different master, a spell so bewitching for him that it is love. Even though he prepared for Our Town in the three great one-acts in this volume, it was the spiritual tutelage of Gertrude Stein who gave him the intellectual validation and courage to go on and write such a seemingly homespun work as Our Town.
His adaptation of A Doll’s House led him to question Ibsen, whose naturalistic language was infused with symbols “which move like great clouds behind the ordinary parlor conversations.” (Noel Coward described an Ibsen play as a play with a stuffed bird on the mantelpiece screaming, “I’m the title! I’m the title!”) Wilder was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s clarion call:
Now listen! Can’t you see that when the language was new—as it was with Chaucer and Homer—the poet could use the name of a thing and the thing was really there? He could say, “O moon,” “O sea,” “O love” and the moon and the sea and love were really there. And can’t you see that after hundreds of years had gone by and thousands of poems had been written, he could call on those words and find that they were just wornout literary words? The excitingness of pure being had withdrawn from them; they were just rather stale literary words. Now the poet has to work in the excitingness of pure being; he has to get back that intensity into the language . . . it’s not enough to be bizarre.
The Thornton Wilder, who, in 1931, had written in The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden: “Goodness, smell that air, will you! It’s got the whole ocean in it. —Elmer, drive careful over that bridge,” was ready for the Stein he met in 1934 when she came to Chicago to lecture on “What Is English Literature?” She had not returned to America since 1903. In her, Wilder met an artist who wanted to find, as he put it: “a constant freshening of the ways of saying a thing.” She validated his gift of capturing the poetry of common speech. Otherwise, would its simplicity have embarrassed him? After all, he was now Thornton Wilder. His devoted sister Isabel wrote that “the astonishing success of The Bridge of San Luis Rey [in 1928] . . . may be said to have ruined his life . . . it weighted [him] with a cumbersome bag of perquisites: honors, privileges . . . balanced by a loss of privacy and hazards to body, mind and spirit.” Not only had he become Thornton Wilder, he had to surround himself with Stein and then James Joyce. Couldn’t The Skin of Our Teeth stand on its own? Why did Wilder so frequently have to announce its indebtedness to Finnegans Wake, so much so that he was unjustly accused by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson of having plagiarized it (a false accusation, which people claimed cost Wilder the Nobel Prize)?
He would write in his journal in 1960 that “Finnegans Wake is a vast compendium of techniques to reproduce the dream state.”
We have not one but two Thornton Wilders: the plain homespun Thornton of Gertrude Stein and the fantastical Ice Age Wilder of James Joyce. Who does Wilder remind me of?
And then I thought of a great American poem called “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
I thought about Stein’s mandate to purify the symbolic luggage around language. I remembered the detail that Wilder’s identical twin brother was stillborn. Wilder didn’t remind me of one person. He reminded me of two people. Let me take a page out of his 1928 preface to The Angel That Troubled the Waters, in which he said “no subject was too grandiose.” As he resurrected the young wife who dies in Pullman Car Hiawatha, let me give breath to the unnamed stillborn twin.
For I remember of whom Wilder reminds me. He reminds me of not one but of two great American poets—William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound (who happened to be classmates at the University of Pennsylvania and remained lifelong friends). The problem that confronted them in their youth was where to go for experience to feed their art. Each wanted to be a poet. How to do that? William Carlos Williams stayed in New Jersey as a doctor and found his source of experience there, writing of Paterson, New Jersey, as faithfully and plainly and mythically as Wilder would in Our Town. Ezra Pound fled to Europe to leap into the world culture. To take on the virtu of Dante, of Homer; the poems of China and Java. To reinvent the canto (Canto VII):
Eleanor (she spoiled in a British climate)
‘’Eλανδρος and ‘Eλπτολις, and
poor old Homer blind, blind, as a bat,
Ear, ear for the sea-surge;
rattle of old men’s voices.
And then the phantom of Rome,
marble narrow for seats
“Si pulvis nullus” said Ovid,
“Erit, nullum tamen execute.”
Think of the Wilder of Pullman Car Hiawatha and act 3 of The Skin of Our Teeth. Wilder didn’t mind that no one would understand the Greek and Hebrew that the philosophers spoke in those plays. The audience would know it was authentic. William Carlos Williams wrote in I Wanted to Write a Poem:
Innocense [sic] can never perish. I really believed that then, and I really believe it now. It is something intrinsic in a man. And I still care about simplicity. I have been outspoken all my life, but honestly outspoken. I try to say it straight, whatever is to be said.
And the brilliant rodomontade of Pound’s cantos, reinventing the Japanese form. What other man would T. S. Eliot trust to edit The Waste Land? One former American reaching out to another former American. The disparate relationship between William Carlos Williams and Pound seems to be what Thornton Wilder contained in one man. The spirit of that lost twin.
One Thornton lived in Hamden, Connecticut, on Deepwood Drive with forays into New Haven for lunch and the library, and wrote about New Hampshire and New Jersey and Rhode Island. The other Thornton summoned up the Ice Age and Atlantic City in high extravagance, peopled with philosophers who spoke in ancient Greek and Latin and Hebrew, and wrote novels of ancient Rome, and traveled to Europe and America receiving prizes and acclaim.
Thornton Wilder is so hard to get a handle on because he embodies the basic American dilemma. In the enormous mass of America, where do we go for experience? Are we William Carlos Williams? Or are we Ezra Pound? But then isn’t that the American story? It’s the story of Henry James, of T. S. Eliot. Where do we go for experience? It’s the theme of James’s The Ambassadors and The Portrait of a Lady; of Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth. Where do we go in the vastness of America—the youngest country as world powers go and the oldest country in influence? (Wilder had said if the nineteenth century was the English century then the twentieth century is the American century and that makes it the oldest country.)
Is this theme the same force in America that produced Edwin Arlington Robinson’s great American archetype Miniver Cheevy who
dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam’s neighbors . . .
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
Or worse, Richard Cory who
. . . we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place . . .
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
At the end of Our Town, one of the dead tells Emily after she’s returned from the living: “Now you know—t
hat’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”
That ignorance and blindness is what the optimist Wilder faced in these later plays, plays in which he struggled to find a language to reflect the despair of postwar America. Thornton Wilder had the gifts to manage the difficult balancing act of being both Williams and Pound up through the Second World War. He had found a way to live in his bifurcated world, staying at home and roaming the world . . . well, Europe . . . seemingly at home in his homespun world and in his worldview world. But where do we go for the real experience? Can America gives us this? Is this the theme of all these plays?
What’s exciting about having these last unpublished plays is seeing a writer trying to find a new vocabulary, a new diction, a new way of reflecting life after the war, after the dreadful fact of the atom bomb. In The Rivers Under the Earth, the last extant play of “The Seven Ages of Man” (we’re not sure if it is part of the cycle), is the first time we see the new voice coming together, where we see in its masterfully achieved simplicity the long plays Wilder might have written had he lived another lifetime. It is this regret for the life not lived (The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five) as well as the life lived (In Shakespeare and the Bible and Bernice) that bursts through the workshop plays and beckons to the postwar plays that would never be written, the plays searching out a language for the despair, the fear, the pessimism that is America’s guilty secret.
Thornton Wilder could not finish his work but that does not diminish his work. His dilemma becomes our obligation. Take the image of the parade of philosophers from Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Skin of Our Teeth, and imagine that parade not of philosophers but of playwrights from Aeschylus on down, through Plautus and Hroswitha and Calderon and Marlowe and Webster and Dryden and Behn and Strindberg and Shaw and Wilde and Pinero and O’Neill and Hellman and Orton and Albee and Hansberry and Shepard and Mamet and McNally and Wilson and Kushner, to every member of The Dramatists Guild, and to the next class of playwrights leaving Yale or NYU or Juilliard or whatever drama school or no drama school, or any of you readers of this book who’ve written even one play you’ve never shown anyone—join the march across the stage. Hear each generation saying, “Finish my work. Finish what I started. These are the questions I leave behind.” And we must answer theirs and leave our own unanswered questions for others to come from all over the globe and finish ours, and the generations after to finish theirs.