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<text>
<title>
(1950s) An Obliging Man:Thornton Wilder
</title>
<history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
TIME Magazine
January 12, 1953
An Obliging Man
</hdr>
<body>
<p> "On my grave," says Thornton Wilder, "they will write:
`Here lies a man who tried to be obliging.'" And he gives a
nervous bark of laughter--the laugh, slightly louder than the
occasion warrants, of a man accustomed to putting strangers at
their ease.
</p>
<p> No one could mistake this faintly fussy, professorial-
looking character for a man of the people. Yet he has written
some of the most authentic Americana of his time and numbers
among his friends prizefighters, Chicago gunmen, waitresses, and
a gambler who is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Full of
bubble and bounce, he has the ready grin of the seasoned meeter-
of-people. He puts on no airs, and has an immense interest in
human beings, young and old, whom he treats with fatherly
didacticism (I should scold you very severely," he told a girl of
a few minutes acquaintance).
</p>
<p> Last fortnight he was in Innsbruck, Austria, lecturing to
students on writing. A few days later he was in Munich, followed
by a train of young people. A few days after that, he was in
Switzerland. Wherever he went he talked--in English, French
or German--bounding in and out of chairs, filling his young
audience's ears with an endless stream of neat, witty, slightly
pedantic but somehow most exciting talk.
</p>
<p> Ostensibly, Thornton Niven Wilder was in Europe to finish
a new play and work on a book of essays. But as usual he was
finding it impossible not to be obliging. The three-time
Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Our
Town, The Skin of Our Teeth) was not acting like an orthodox
author. In his 55 years, he rarely has.
</p>
<p> Being obliging has taken up a great deal of Wilder's time
and effort, but it has also given him an extraordinary
education. Besides devouring the books of many nations, he has
fed full on people and places, indulging his appetite for life
as if "I was going to live 150 years." He speaks French, German,
Italian and Spanish, and has lived in Yucatan and Rome, Hong
Kong and New Haven. He has sat at the feet of Gertrude Stein,
stood by the sickbed of Sigmund Freud, acted as interpreter for
Ortega y Gasset, hiked down the Rhone with Gene Tunney,
hobnobbed with a Chicago gunman named Golfbag.
</p>
<p> He gives as freely as he gets. He has always been a
teacher, often a professional teacher--at Lawrenceville, the
University of Chicago, Harvard. He cannot go to a party without
taking something along to read aloud, he cannot cross the ocean
without becoming the Pied Piper of the ship, His habit of pacing
about a room, lecturing to his friends (Now, my kinder, let me
tell you about..."), once led Theatrical Director Garson
Kanin to remark: "Whenever I'm asked what college I've attended,
I'm tempted to write `Thornton Wilder.'" Over the years,
Thornton Wilder College has taught a number of courses, in and
out of classrooms. His latest course: what it is to be an
American.
</p>
<p> Life with Father. "Teaching." says Wilder, "is a natural
expression of mine. It is part of my inheritance." His father,
Amos Parker Wilder, was a Maine Congregationalist who took the
pledge at seven, a Ph.D. in economics at Yale, and finally
bought a newspaper in Madison, Wis. By the time a set of twins
came along (Thornton's brother was stillborn), Amos Wilder had
developed his own notions of education. Outside his own home,
he was all charm and wit; as an after-dinner speaker, he could
rival Chauncey Depew. But in his own home, he was a dominie
indeed.
</p>
<p> His wife Isabella had French blood in her veins and gaiety
in her heart, and she, too, had notions about education. While
Amos read Scott, Dickens and Shakespeare for their moral lessons
("He thought that King Lear was about how fathers should be nice
to their daughters," says Thornton), his wife read Yeats and
Maeterlinck for their beauty. Mr. Wilder was always fearful for
his children's spiritual safety, and was forever lecturing them
on how to defend themselves against a wicked world. "Now, dear
boy," he would say, twirling his amethyst watch fob, "even if
you are at a bishop's table and you are served wine, I want you
inconspicuously to turn down the glass." (He meant
`conspicuously,'" Thornton smiles.)
</p>
<p> Thornton was the second of five children, and his father
had anxious plans for each of them. Amos, the eldest, was to be
a minister (he is now professor of New Testament at Chicago);
Charlotte a doctor (she became a professor and poet); Isabel a
nurse (she became a novelist); and Janet a scientist (she gave
up zoology for marriage). When it came to Thornton, father
Wilder had little hope. "Poor Thornton, poor Thornton," he would
say, "He'll be a burden all his life."
</p>
<p> Chefoo to Cheesecloth. Thornton was certainly different.
Whatever school he attended--the Kaiser Wilhelm School in
Shanghai, where his father served as consul general, the
missionary school at Chefoo, the public schools of Berkeley,
Calif., the Thatcher School at Ojai, Calif.--he was the
delight and despair of his teachers. A shy, skinny boy in knee
pants, he was wrapped in a cloud of make-believe; his greatest
pleasure was to dress his sisters up in cheesecloth and get them
to act one of his own one-act plays.
</p>
<p> At Berkeley's Emerson Grammar School he was already reading
Russian authors, and during study periods, he would spring from
his seat to pace about the rear of the classroom, a book in his
hand. He never cared what his classmates thought of him, or how
he looked, or whether his shoelaces were tied. Nor does he care
today; his tie is frequently askew, his suits (he has four)
slightly wrinkled. He lapped up mythology ("Vulcan," he wrote
at eleven, "was the god of goldsmiths, ironsmiths, leadsmiths,
silversmiths, coppersmiths, brassmiths and Mrs. Smiths--there
now, I'm all out of breath"). He harassed the public library for
Shakespeare, George Moore and Mme. de Sevigne. He wrote letters
to an imaginary friend called George: "I must go now as I am up
for a fight with a boy named Saul who called me a freak and
announced his intention of making a dessert for pigs of me if
I did not take off my hat before him...Lovingly, Thornton
Niven Wilder."
</p>
<p> Pigs and Princesses. At the Thatcher School, Thornton wrote
a play called "The Russian Princess--An Extravaganza!,"
covered his first-year algebra book with the tables of contents
for imaginary books ("Quadratics in those days could be
supported only with the help of a rich marginal commentary").
By that time, Mr. Wilder had decided that Thornton should spend
his summers working on a farm. Thornton worked--after his
fashion. He fed the pigs, dreamily pitched the hay, declaimed
"to the cows in the stanchions the judge's speech from Barrie's
The Legend of Leonora."
</p>
<p> When the time came for college, Mr. Wilder decided that
Yale, his own alma mater, was too worldly for his boys, so Amos
and Thornton went to Oberlin. There Thornton fell under the
spell of a great teacher. Professor Charles Wager was a kindly,
quiet man who described himself as an "umbratile nature" (one
who lives in the shadows of great men); but when he spoke of
Victorian literature, or carried his students on the tide of his
enthusiasm from Homer to Dante, the shadows vanished. From
Wager, Thornton learned a lesson he was never to forget: "Every
great work was written this morning."
</p>
<p> "Oh, Tut-Tut-Tut..." After two years at Oberlin, World
War I took Thornton into a coast-defense unit ("I rose by sheer
military ability to the rank of corporal"). But by that time he
was a Yaleman after all. Thornton wrote for the Lit, joined the
Elizabethan Club, quoted Goethe with Sophomore Robert Hutchins.
Thornton's room became a salon, where he would read his plays
aloud or hold forth on the gloomy beauties of George Gissing.
Professor William Lyon Phelps exclaimed: "I believe he is a
genius." Mr. Wilder demurred: "Oh, tut-tut-tut. Billy, you're
pulling my boy up way beyond his parts."
</p>
<p> AFter Yale Thornton needed a job, and teaching seemed to
be about all he was good for. Mr. Wilder decided he should go
to the American Academy in Rome, where he could improve his
Latin by studying archaeology. For nine months, Thornton basked
in Rome. Then a cable from his father called him home: "Have
job for you teaching next year Lawrenceville. Learn French."
Thornton hastily set about learning to teach it.
</p>
<p> Greatest Profession. One autumn day in 1921, "expecting to
be met by the headmaster demanding the past participles of
French verbs," Thornton arrived on the oak-studded campus near
Trenton, N.J. There, for six years, while his expatriate
contemporaries were scribbling and scrounging on the Left Bank.
Wilder nursed and nudged a generation of Lawrenceville boys. "I
am the only American in my generation," says he, "who did not
`go to Paris.'"
</p>
<p> He performed his duties with gusto. His big study in Davis
House was always crowded, but neither the babble nor the
questions ever bothered him. Each night, "after the lights of
the house were out, and the sheaf of absurd French exercises
corrected and indignantly marked with red crayon," the boys in
the rooms below would hear him begin his nightly pacing. They
then knew that "Mr. Wilder is writing." During his months in
Rome, he had filled dozens of blankbooks with notes for a series
of character sketches. By 1926, he had finished his first novel,
The Cabala.
</p>
<p> Pieces of Ivory. The book was a critical success. It was
a mannered, exotic tale about a circle of aristocrats "so
powerful and exclusive that...Romans refer to them with
bated breath." ("Tell Mr. Wilder," said one of the high-born
ladies with some amusement, "that we are not really so
interesting.") The book was a precocious effort of a precocious
young man, groping for something as yet beyond his powers. He
hinted that his characters were ancient gods in modern dress,
and that one minor figure was a portrait of Keats. In effect,
Wilder had bundled Rome's entire past into one package and
labeled it "1920." This, says he, was something he learned at
the American Academy: "If you have ever wielded an
archaeologist's pickax, you are never the same again. You see
Times Square as if it were an archaeological specimen 2,000
years from now."
</p>
<p> In the 20's, he seemed to be concerned with everything but
America. In 1925-26 he took a year's leave from Lawrenceville
to study for an M.A. at Princeton in French literature. In a
one-act play by Merimee, he found the germ of an idea for another
book. One day he sat down and wrote: "On Friday noon, July the
twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and
precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." Thus began The
Bridge of San Luis Rey.
</p>
<p> To the amazement of his publishers--and of his father
("Well, of course, dear boy, I suppose every dog must have its
day...")--the Bridge was a runaway success. Its style was
highly polished, its theme somewhat ambiguous, but "everybody"
read it or talked about it. The bashful schoolteacher was
suddenly famous. "A star of the first magnitude!" cried Billy
Phelps. "The stuff of genius!" echoed William Rose Benet. The
Bridge won the Pulitzer Prize, sold 300,000 copies in a year,
was translated into French, German and three other languages.
In Peru, tourist guides managed to find a site for the bridge
that Wilder had invented.
</p>
<p> On the strength of his success, Wilder resigned from
Lawrenceville and wrote a third novel. The Woman of Andros,
inspired by a play of Terence, was equally polished, and it too
was a success. (With half a tongue in cheek, Wilder likes to say
that the first paragraph of The Woman of Andros is "one of the
most beautiful in the English language." The paragraph begins:
"The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadows of
night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left
in darkness. The great cliff that was one day to be called
Gibraltar held for a long time the gleam of red and orange,
while across from it the mountains of Atlas showed deep blue
pockets in their shining sides. The caves that surround the
Neapolitan gulf fell into a profounder shade, each giving forth
from the darkness its chiming or its booming sound. Triumph had
passed from Greece and wisdom from Egypt, but with the coming
on of night they seemed to regain their lost honors, and the
land that was soon to be called Holy prepared in the dark its
wonderful burden...") As the royalties poured in, Wilder built
his parents a house in New Haven ("the house the Bridge built")
and took his sister Isabel off to Europe. He dined with Arnold
Bennett, heard G.B. Shaw lecture Mrs. Hardy on the merits of
vegetarianism ("In the next room, my wife will lay before you
the decaying carcasses of animals"). He went to Berlin, attended
the theater almost every night, continued a project of reading
all the great books of Germany.
</p>
<p> Slaves and Coal Mines. But as the '30s wore on, the "star
of the first magnitude" began to dim a bit. Social significance
was on the ascendant, and left-wing realism the rage. Wilder
began to be referred to as the "Emily Post of culture...the
prophet of the genteel Christ..." Cried the New Republic:
"Where are the modern streets of New York, Chicago and New
Orleans in these little novels?...Where are the child slaves
of the beet fields...[the] death of the coal miners?..Let
Mr. Wilder write a book about modern America."
</p>
<p> Eventually Mr. WIlder did write a book about America, but
it did not please the poets of the proletariat. George Brush,
hero of Heaven's My Destination, was a little like Wilder
himself: Brush badgered people on trains ("Brother, can I talk
to you about the most important thing in life?"), laid down the
law to women ("Women who smoke are unfit to be mothers")
generously helped burglars to loot ("Because I have a theory...") and scribbled soul-saving mottoes on hotel blotters. To
some critics, the witty Heaven's My Destination seemed little
more than a joke--and it was not the time for jokes.
</p>
<p> In 1930, when his old friend Robert Hutchins, the new
president of the University of Chicago, invited him to join the
faculty, he accepted with joy. It was an experience that neither
Wilder nor Chicago was ever to forget.
</p>
<p> Swinging Heads. For aspiring young authors, admission to
Wilder's course in creative writing (limited to 15 students) was
an accolade. His lectures in "The Classics in Translation" were
open to all and sundry, and all and sundry came. It was the big
campus show, with Wilder the happiest and hammiest of stars. He
would fling his arms about, jump from the platform and leap back
again. Talking at trip-hammer speed, he was sometimes in the
front of the class, sometimes in the back, sometimes at the
window waving to friends. Necks craned to keep up with him;
heads swung back and forth as if watching a tennis game. Wilder
could play the blind Homer, a Greek chorus or the entire siege
of Troy. He shook his finger at imaginary demons, crouched
behind his podium, peeked out from under chairs. Even his pauses
were planned, with an actor's timing, to keep his audience in
suspense.
</p>
<p> But teaching was more than lecturing; it was also being
"ready to answer any knock on the door." At all hours of the day
and far into the night, a steady stream of students would pound
up the stairs to his tower room in Hitchcock dormitory. They
took him to nightclubs, whirled him about the Loop; Wilder took
it all in and asked for more. He met Texas Guinan ("Come on up
here, Thornton," she would say in a nightclub. "Folks, give
Thornton a nice hand. He's the best little writer in these
United States"), talked with truck drivers, struck up
acquaintances with scores of waitresses ("If you've been there
three times, they stand there picking their teeth. I don't
pinch, I just relish human beings.").
</p>
<p> He also persuaded the university to invite Gertrude Stein
to give a series of lectures. That was the beginning of a
rewarding friendship. Later, when he resigned from Chicago and
set off again for Europe, he headed for her villa in Bilignin,
France.
</p>
<p> Invitation to Wander. There, while she rocked back and
forth in her chair with her little dog Lolo in her lap, Gertrude
Stein talked and talked. She talked, among other things, about
America. As Wilder listened, all his lessons--the digging at
Rome, Wager's "Every great work was written this morning"--fell into place. Gertrude Stein made a distinction between human
nature and the human mind. Human nature, she said, clings to
identity, to location in time and place. The human mind has no
identity; it gazes at pure existing and pure creating, and "it
knows what it knows when it knows it." It can be found in
masterpieces, for masterpieces alone report the ever-unfolding
and the boundless Now. But it can also be found in America,
which was brought up to believe in boundlessness. America's very
geography, said Stein, is "an invitation to wander."
</p>
<p> With these ideas ringing in his mind, Wilder wrote Our
Town. One of the first people he showed it to was his friend
Edward Sheldon, the wise father-confessor of the theater. "Of
course," said Sheldon, "you have broken every law of
playwriting. You've aroused no anticipation. You've prepared no
suspense. You've resolved no tensions." Sheldon was right. Our
Town had no scenery, and only a hint of a plot. It was really
the story of all towns, in all times and places.
</p>
<p> In spite of all its law breaking, Sheldon loved Our Town--and so, it turned out, did Broadway. On opening night,
someone asked Alexander Woollcott, who had tears in his eyes
what he thought of it. Said he, with his customary extravagance:
I'd rather comment on the 23rd Psalm."
</p>
<p> Ice and Flood. After such a quiet play, Wilder's
rambunctious The Skin of Our Teeth proved to be a jolt--so
much so that some 75 backers promptly backed away. It was a sort
of Hellzapopin with brains, the story of Everyman (Mr. Antrobus)
and the whole human race. Its action spread over 5,000 years,
took in the Flood, the Ice Age and Armageddon. "Our Town," says
Wilder, "it the life of the family seen from a telescope five
miles away. The Skin of Our Teeth is the destiny of the whole
human group seen from a telescope 1,000 miles away."
</p>
<p> Though one of the things audiences liked about these plays
was their refreshing contrast to the orthodox treater. Wilder
makes no claims to originality. "My writing life, "says he, "is
a series of infatuations for admired writers." and he freely
acknowledges his debt. He is not a "maker of new modes," but a
"renewer of old treasure." Nor does he make any pretense to
profundity. All important truths, he insists, lie slumbering
inside everyone. A novel or a play is merely the key that
springs the lock: "Literature is the orchestration of
platitudes."
</p>
<p> But Orchestrator Wilder was concerned with more than
literature. He was also concerned with saying something about
America. What is it to be an American? It was not until four
years after the war, when he was invited to give the Charles
Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, that he answered that question
in full.
</p>
<p> Hints and Hand Clappings. By the time Wilder arrived in
Cambridge, he had served as a combat-intelligence officer with
the Air Force in Italy, had recently published a brilliant novel
about the Rome of Julius Caesar, The Ides of March. He had also
plunged deep into the study of U.S. authors: Whitman, Thoreau,
Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson. Out of these, he
formulated his thesis.
</p>
<p> "From the point of view of the European, an American is
nomad in relation to place, disattached in relation to time,
lonely in relation to society and insubmissive to circumstance,
destiny, or God. It is difficult to be an American, because
there is as yet no code, grammar, decalogue by which to orient
oneself. Americans are still engaged in inventing what it is to
be an American...
</p>
<p> "Americans could count and enjoyed counting. They lived
under a sense of boundlessness. And every year a greater throng
of new faces poured into the harbors, paused, and streamed
westward. And each one was one. To this day, in American
thinking, a crowd...is not a homogenous mass...but is one
and one and one...
</p>
<p> "Every human being who has existed can be felt by us to be
existing now. All time is present for a single time. Every
American has this sense, for the American is the first planetary
mind. Americans have the realization of the multiplicity of
human beings and their geographical extension. Many problems
which seem insoluble will be solved when the world realized that
we are all bound together as the population of the only
inhabited star."
</p>
<p> Bustle after Five. Wilder seems determined to get
acquainted with as much of that population as he can. Between
restless peregrinations, he settles for brief periods in the
"house the Bridge built" in New Haven. It is a simple, sunlit
house, perched on top of a hill: Wilder's sister Isabel keeps
house. When he is there, he usually gets up at 7 ("The bell of
Lawrenceville still rings in my head") and goes out for
breakfast--sometimes to the railroad station, a three-mile
walk. He eats whatever he feels like eating. "What did you have
for lunch?" Woollcott once asked him. "Lobster Newburgh, cocoa
and brandy," said Woollcott with a shudder: "That's the worst
meal since the Borden Breakfast." (The breakfast the Borden
family ate before Lizzie Borden allegedly took an ax and gave
her parents 40 whacks: mutton stew or soup, sugar cookies and
bananas.)
</p>
<p> New Havenites often see him striding about the town,
reciting to himself the paragraphs that will soon be transferred
verbatim to his notebooks. Like most authors, Wilder hates to
write. Sometimes he plays hooky in the Yale library. ("I flip
through an archaeological journal and read a piece about a new
excavation in Herculaneum. I even read medical journals"). He
"does" Finnegan's Wake, pores over Kierkegaard, works at his
hobby of dating the plays of Lope de Vega, strums on the piano
or reads a score of a Palestrina Mass. After lunch he usually
takes a long nap. After 5, visitors come ("I like bustle after
5."). Then, pacing about his living room, consumed with his
latest enthusiasm, Wilder will talk on and on into the night.
Sometimes he goes "roaming"--long solitary rambles.
</p>
<p> But New Haven--or any other place--can never hold him
long. To yield to all, said Gertrude Stein of him, is "not to
yield at all." The day always comes when he packs up a couple
of suits, throws in his stacks of unanswered mail, and heads for
the station. A few days later, a waitress in Tucson is apt to
find herself in deep conversation with a kindly, grey-haired
gentleman from the East; or a bellhop in Paris will note the
loquacious American who talks with such intensity in the hotel
lobby; or a group of students in Germany will hear a lecture
delivered with much waggling of eyebrows and flourishing of hands
by a distinguished author from the U.S.
</p>
<p> For one of his years and talents, he has written
comparatively little. And he has enough to write about to fill
those 150 years he would perhaps like to live. Even if he never
writes another book or another play, however, the world in
general and the U.S. in particular will certainly consider
itself much obliged to Thornton Wilder.
</p>
</body>
</article>
</text>