How can my one lone cleaning woman give the impression I want? I wish I could have fifteen. At least, thank Heaven, I have the benefit of the stage-picture dressed with those members from the audience. Now to involve them. The first little man no longer demands the Prologue. What else does he do at his first appearance?
February 23, 1954
A succession of interruptions: dinners, guests, concerts. Not this time so distressing and harmful, because they have been confined to a few days—delimited and clearly terminated last evening, leaving few engagements before me now. (Though that other interruption, the real enemy, is there forever without intermission: correspondence, manuscripts submitted, etc. From that there’s no surcease, and talking about it is no alleviation.) This time I return to this problem here, after the interruption, with renewed spirit.
What the play needs is a larger deeper happier immersion on my part in what it’s all about. Today the emphasis is on happier, for the sign that all is going well in this portentous and often painful subject matter will be that it will be permeated with the comic.
Oh, the form isn’t bold and splendid and revolutionary enough. That’s why I’m so inhibited and tentative and scratchily groping.
Now let me put down some of the fancies that have been crossing my mind in this matter of form—not because they are the eureka, but because they give me imaginative practice in bold form-shattering invention.
(Before I put them down I want to add another thing: when I find the right form—the right statement for this cosmological comedy—wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could do it without those names of celebrated orphans—those names of the painters and music-makers of the Emporium? To other people—but not to me—they bring in the smell of professor and historian. Not to me, because “culture” is in me a second nature. Hitherto it has always seemed to me that the “comic” aspect of their introduction into the play—the anachronistic game, for instance—saved them from the academic stink—but even I, as I have expressed it several times in the Journal, am aware that in those names, through those names, is felt the hated didactic formal-symbolic strain. After all, Kafka did it without names.)
So to return to formal liberation, enlargement:
(1) Maybe that first Member of the Audience seated on the stage—maybe he objects:
MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: This scene in the Orphanage—I heard that that scene was the last scene in the play. Why—excuse me—are you playing it first tonight?
MR. FOSTER: If you make interruptions you must go back and sit down in the audience. It’s not important what you’ve heard. We on the stage are doing what we have been instructed to do.
MEMBER OF THE AUDIENCE: Well—but isn’t it true that this scene in the Orphanage used to be last?
MR. FOSTER: This is very tiresome. We can’t go on, if this is going to happen.
MRS. FOSTER [To Mr. Foster]: Since he’s brought the matter where the whole audience can hear him, we might as well explain. [She addresses the man] We have been instructed—I mean, the author says—that the order of the scenes in this play should be changed every performance. Some nights this scene comes first and some nights it comes last. Some nights we begin at the Fourth Scene and go through the whole play and end at the Third Scene. Some nights we begin at the Sixth Scene and end at the Fifth Scene.
—Would I stop the explication there? Anyway, something like. There’s an advance notice of the Wheel-motif.
(2) To resort, as I did in The Skin of Our Teeth, to a parodic (the dictionary also allows parodical) allusion to old-fashioned kinds of playwriting. To return more closely to what was the initial departure of this play, the Horatio-Alger novel—via the theatre contemporary to Horatio Alger. All this would involve throwing away the Orphanage Scene. I could here launch upon a long essay to show that one of the livelier expressions of our time (of collapse of old modes, of bewildered helplessness before new frights and new grandeurs) is the mock-heroic and the parody.
Now let these notations (and here is the benefit of the Journal) start a train of opening up and encouraging the imagination to all but anarchical freedoms—whatever the cost of time and effort.
June 17, 1954
(That was almost six months ago . . . Here I am back with some new impulses toward “The Emporium”—and at a moment when so many other corvées and projects surround me—nevertheless:)
It’s the Hero I haven’t got right—the Hero and the Girl. Since the play, by very reason of its mode of staging, to say nothing of the vast implications of the theme, the wrestling with the Absolute, is about the type Hero, let’s do the eternal Hero myth. I have been too much drawn into the Kafka hero, the frustrated pre-condemned struggler. That’s not my bent; I’m not the stuff of which nihilists are made; I’m not even sympathetic toward the broken-winged; all that derived from a mimetic sympathetic admiration for the Kafka vision, perhaps merely for the Kafka art, the virtuosity with which he could present his maimed soul. I want to liberate myself from the Kafka hero—and can we call Hero the man who dies “wie ein Hund”?—while at the same time retaining that element in Kafka which is real to me, the seduction and the ambiguity and the terror of the Absolute?
So back to the Hero.
Let us bear in mind the eternal myth-patterns of the Hero—viewed not only as the Exceptional Man but as the potential in every man. His birth is surrounded with mystery. At first all he knows is the beatific, timeless, effortless floating in the womb. Then he is separated from that nirvana—the ego emerges as he becomes aware of an Outside which is not the self. He has two mothers: the benignant goddess of all living and the baleful enemy-mother who wishes to retain him in nirvana, to draw him back to the chaos of instinctual life. He has two fathers: the warrior-worker-creator to emulate; and the jealous old man who wishes to restrain and maim and kill him. He sets out on the quest for a treasure: the treasure is a virgin. He must win her through trials and perils.
At once I see that I have wasted time over the choice between Emporium and Craigie. (Yes, there is a play there, a theme there, but it is secondary to the more basic theme of the Hero’s journey—and it has led me all this time into a resort to the tiresome moralizing side of my “formation.”)
Let us say that our Hero does get into the Emporium at once, but at the ground floor: he is a package-wrapper in the basement.
The Girl is the daughter not of Craigie’s but of the Emporium. She is guarded against young heroes, because even Excellence becomes tyrannical and conservative-petrified. The Emporium is old-fashioned and airless; the Hero wins the daughter of the Emporium and the power to refresh and renew it.
Now I can play with this business of the Older Actress playing the successive Good and Bad Mothers; and the Older Actor playing the Good and Bad Fathers. The Orphanage-Mother is Good, but against John’s being sent away. The Orphanage-Father is Stern-Justice. The Farmer’s Wife is in one scene both Good and Bad. (Can that be done?)
There is in the first Emporium Scene (this is just groping now) no Laurencia? John comes up at closing time from the bowels of the Emporium and inveighs against its airlessness, etc., and hears, again, about the Virgin-Princess.
It also sounds (1) excruciatingly schematized and (2) oriented toward a sunburst of a happy-ending; but let’s see what can be done with it.
Now for some random ideas that accompany this new project:
In the Orphanage Scene: Mrs. Foster constantly asking the children have they eaten—dare I have her insisting that they each eat their mid-morning apple, and their mid-morning glass of milk. Their after-lunch nap.
In the Farmhouse Scene: John: “He’s always swinging that scythe” (or sickle—Hell, you run into symbols at every turn). Mrs. Graham alternately urges him to stay and incites him to the Emporium. —There’s no more about not seeing Gillespie or Schwingemeister—but isn’t it run by an old woman?
Where on earth is our Padre Nobile? Can it be indicated (as I did rather well in The Skin of Our Teeth) that the repressive acti
on of the fathers is a pure delusion in the young men’s minds?
Now we can do the scene that was formerly the Craigie Annual Party with a whole new effect. It is the Emporium Annual Party. Old Mr. Gillespie—invalid, and fearful—is the Decrepit King. He no longer throws his daughter at the young Hero—he resists him at every turn.
It’s now not so much a question as to whether it can be done, as one of whether I can catch fire from it. And whether the Opera-libretto cannot also be fed from some of these notions.
Where shall I begin to write on it? Not at the beginning, but at the (first) Emporium Scene. And here rises the question that if there’s no Laurencia, how do I get that background-conversation in? Does Miss Gillespie visit the store at closing time to call for her father? Is Mr. Hobmeyer still with us? And can we now “work” the members of the audience who are seated on the [stage]?
*Kierkegaard: Etapes sur le chemin de la vie, Gallimard, 1948. (Chapter, “In vino veritas,” page 54.)
†Perhaps I should say, for the record, that I arrived at this by a stage (yesterday) where I seemed to see the play as a succession of prologues: Prologue One: The Council of the Emporium founding an Orphanage; Prologue Two: The Orphanage; Prologue Three: The Farmhouse Scene; Prologue Four: The Emporium Council preparing to baffle, repudiate, invite, etc., the aspirant; Prologue Five: etc.
*That scene I began to write Tuesday (rewrite; earlier draft lost or destroyed) and without conviction; now I could find a new spirit about it.
*To remember: that Kafka records a moment in which K., seeing the Castle for the first time, has the impression that it resembles the town in which he was born—Kafka’s Castle, however, is also the Law.
*I see the dictionary gives calquer as copier servilement. I don’t mean that. I mean merely superimposed upon a variety of molds and prior achievements in theatrical art. They derive their air of originality from the facts that: (1) Very few persons knew (or profoundly knew) the great originals; and (2) The variety and disparateness of the models concealed the indebtedness; and (3) The indebtedness was one of admiration and love—which is seldom the case in such borrowings.
*It’s well to name here what I have been reading and seeing that has contributed: more and more Hölderlin; Ezra Pound’s translation of Sophocles’ Trachiniae [The Women of Trachis], comparing it line by line, in laughing amazement with old [Richard C.] Jebb’s; some ineffable passages of Balanchine’s choreography of Mendelssohn’s Scotch Symphony; and “tea” with Alma Mahler [-Werfel]—an Emporium girl, genre viennois, who flatters me to the last limits: “Mein Herz hat’ so geklopft, als wäre es einen König den ich erwartete.” As “tea” were champagne, caviar, and pâté de foie gras.
*Was that long a-borning? I don’t know. That is the kind of thing I blandly, balmily forget. I kept no Journal then. My impression is that it went quite blithely on, interrupted only by my ever-reprehensible enjoyment in distractions and by the everpresent interruptions caused by the mismanagement of life’s corvées.
PART
IV
The Alcestiad
WITH ITS SATYR PLAY
The Drunken Sisters
The Alcestiad, directed by Tyrone Guthrie with Irene Worth playing Alcestis, and temporarily titled “A Life in the Sun,” premiered at the 1955 Edinburgh Festival. Although well received by audiences, critics were less than kind, and Wilder withdrew the play’s English rights. After revisions and the addition of a satyr play, in 1957 it was successfully staged in German at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, the beginning of the successful career of Die Alkestiade before German-speaking audiences.
A revised English text, drawn from both the earlier English acting version and a German version published in 1960, did not appear in print until 1977, two years after the author’s death. The English acting edition was first published in 1980. The Bibliographic and Production Notes of this volume contain additional information about this play as well as about the opera that the composer Louise Talma and Wilder (as librettist) adapted from it. The opera premiered in Frankfurt am Main in 1962.
The text of the play and Isabel Wilder’s introduction to it appear here as they first appeared in the 1977 Harper & Row English edition. Wilder’s program note for the Edinburgh production also appears in its entirety.
Befitting its audience, Isabel Wilder’s introduction to the acting edition offers additional details about what she describes as the “near pageantry proportions” of the original and controversial Guthrie production:
There is food for the ear but the primary objective is to feed the eye. The Alcestiad is a drama of ideas which challenges thoughtful responses in an audience. It should not have to compete with stunning processions and extraneous by-play no matter how handsome or clever. Spectators whose attention is drawn from the stage by victims of Thessaly’s outbreak of plague clad in rags, crawling down the aisles of the auditorium, hideous with stage-putty sores exuding pus and blood from paint in the actors’ makeup boxes, very easily lose track of what is being said and done on stage. The play was nearly lost.
FOREWORD
by Isabel Wilder
Isabel Wilder (1900–1995), Thornton Wilder’s younger sister by three years, served as his personal agent for many years. In her own right she was the author of three novels published in the 1930s. She was also a member of the first graduating class of the Yale School of Drama in 1928. This introduction first appeared in the 1977 Harper & Row edition of The Alcestiad.
ON THE LAST PAGES of Thornton Wilder’s novel The Eighth Day,* my brother has one of the leading characters refute the usual image of the life experience as a river flowing onward between defined banks. Instead, the human adventure is described as a tapestry with indeterminate breadth as well as length and the individual pattern visible on both sides of the fabric. The story is outlined in colored yarn, the design perhaps wildly asymmetrical but nevertheless clear, truthful, complete. A record and a portrait.
Thornton’s tapestry was minute when at the age of seven or eight in Madison, Wisconsin, he first heard the name Alcestis while reading or being read to from Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable. The story of the daughter of King Pelias, princess of princesses in the myth and the song of pre-Christian Greece, captured his imagination—and his heart. The thread of her white yarn was knotted into his bit of fabric and she became a benign insistence in his inner consciousness, that hidden storehouse which is an author’s source and springboard. She was the haunting shadow of a play that would take years to write.
The knot in Alcestis’s thread was tied when the Wilder family moved to Berkeley, California, where the magnificent Greek Theater built [in 1903] into the hillside of a eucalyptus grove was a new and lively part of the life of the university and the town. Several times a year the Classics Department mounted productions of plays by Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripedes. Our mother joined the volunteer workers in the costume shop and stenciled furlongs of borders in the Greek-key or laurel-leaf patterns on gorgeously colored togas. She made a little blue one with shells around the hem for Thornton—and a green one for brother Amos—and sent them off to apply for roles as members of the Athenian mob. Thus Thornton discovered “total” theatre and the Golden Age of Antiquity. His experience until then had been a performance of As You Like It seen from the top gallery of a Milwaukee theatre. [In addition to crowd and chorus appearances in Greek dramas, a young Wilder also sang in several oratorios in this theatre.]
By now Thornton was ten; black-haired, blue-eyed, acquisitive and radiant. Even before this he had claimed his share of a writer’s allotment of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and had begun to tame them into a vocabulary that would allow him—in good time—to speak in his own way. He went to bed early and got up early to write, and the full range of his enlarging vocabulary was turned to inventing dialogue. He draped us and the neighbor’s children in yards of begged or borrowed cheesecloth and coaxed us into declaiming his grandiloquent speeches.
Four years later he was a boarding pupi
l in the China Inland Mission School in Chefoo. Studies in the classics began early in a British school preparing its pupils for the Oxford-Cambridge Examinations.
The first half of his undergraduate years was spent at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he became a privileged student and friend of a great teacher who was also a distinguished classicist—Professor Charles H. A. Wager. Alcestis’s thread wove a visibly increasing pattern during these years and later, following his graduation from Yale in 1920, when he spent eight months at the American Academy for Classical Studies in Rome. Not qualified as a Graduate Fellow, he nevertheless audited lectures, went on digs with the archaeologists and pored over fragile papyri. In the museums and art galleries of Italy he caught Alcestis’s shadow.
In the decades of the twenties and the thirties the tapestry grew in size and density. The design was of teaching—first French at The Lawrenceville School and then comparative literature, including the Greek dramatists, at the University of Chicago*—and lecture tours and scriptwriting in Hollywood. He published two volumes of short plays and four novels. One novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, brought him the first of three Pulitzer prizes and, at the age of thirty, worldwide fame weighted with a cumbersome bag of perquisites: honors, privileges, dazzling opportunities balanced by loss of privacy and hazards to body, mind and spirit.
During these years the first of Thornton’s long plays, Our Town, was produced to immediate success, and the second, The Merchant of Yonkers, to failure. André Obey’s play, Lucréce, which Katharine Cornell had commissioned my brother to translate for her, opened and closed while Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, adapted by him for Ruth Gordon, was a conspicuous success. [The run lasted one hundred and forty-four performances—a Broadway record.]
In the summer of 1939 Thornton returned home wonderfully free at last of all outside commitments, with his head full of plans for his own work. He had the beginnings of two projects, both plays. One did not have a name yet. The other was The Alcestiad. September came and Hitler’s armies flooded Holland and Belgium. Thornton had no choice: The Alcestiad was not a play for a war-torn world; the untitled project which became The Skin of Our Teeth was.