Arts and Letters

Our Town was playing in Honolulu when I read of Thornton Wilder's death just before Christmas last year; and a few days later when I came to San Francisco, it was also playing in a theatre just down from my hotel. Malcolm Cowley tells me that it is performed somewhere in the world every day of the week, every night of the year. I suspect it has been played in every state of the union during this year of the bicentenary. If there is such a thing as "the great American play," Our Town may very well be that ideal creation of which young writers like to dream. But even before Thornton Wilder turned playwright, he had written at least one novel for which a similar claim might be made. As Wilder advanced in his career, one could not say whether he was a novelist turned playwright or a playwright turned novelist: the two kept house so decently and comfortably together in the way certain poets—one thinks of Coleridge or Matthew Arnold or T. S. Eliot—double with ease as literary critics when they are not writing their verses. In England Somerset Maugham and J. B. Priestly, in our time, were novelist-dramatists, but neither had quite the high form or emotional depth of Wilder. And when one thinks of all the novelists and poets who have lost their nerve the moment they have ventured into the theatre—Henry James called it a "straightjacket" and an "abyss"—the ease and brilliance of Wilder's double-genius may well arouse our wonder. He was a born story-teller; but quite clearly he was also the favored child of Thalia.

His imagination on stage seemed quite as inexhaustible as in his novels. He was never at loss for the play of conversation, for character, for the swift moment of drama; his inventions seem to have a spontaneity that reminds me of the way Mozart is supposed to have casually jotted music while awaiting his turn during a game of billiards. The secret of Thornton Wilder's creativity may be read in everything he wrote as fiction or drama. He seems to have been born with a quick and sensitive feeling for human aspirations and dreams, a sense of human ecstasy and laughter. And he was one of our rare writers who, faced with an astounding world-success as novelist in the second book he brought out, was neither smothered nor drained by this success. So many first successes either use up the experience of an aspiring writer, or suffocate him in the marketplace. Wilder blithely pocketed his success and went on a walking tour in Europe with the then world-boxing champion who had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare. Later when a strident voice from the left demanded of Wilder that he cease writing about remote things like the civilized and corrupt aristocracy in Rome or Greece or Peru, and deal with every-day America, he paused and gave us what may very well be considered by posterity a novel-mate to Our Town. He called it Heaven's My Destination and made of it a high-American comedy of the salesmanship of material things and of God, so to speak out of the same basket.

I suspect that success did not hinder Wilder's creativity because he possessed a rare kind of wisdom and the endowment of its serenity. Such deep inner richness can never be exhausted. He wrote always out of a fundamental idea, a philosophy, what we might call a private religion. He accepted the world and all its imperfections with the calm fatalism that what must be will be; and that there is always some good—if mysterious—reason for its being. Man, he believed, is an inveterate finder and maker, like the poets; what is more, he is tenacious and invincible in his will to life and he always lives in a crumbling world, which he always wants to remake. Above all, Wilder believed that the mystery of worlds made and remade belongs to a grand if unfathomable design stemming from man's illusion that he lives in an eternity. There had been, he reminded us, the five days of God's creation. On the sixth day God made man. After the day of the Sabbath, on the Eighth Day, it was man's turn, as a creature of God, to do his own making. We are the children, said Wilder, of the Eighth Day. This thought is expressed in one of the most beautiful and humane of his novels: humans start from scratch again and again: we awake every day to new realities. The first act curtain of The Skin of Our Teeth is unforgettable in its statement of this thought: in the midst of a descending new ice age, a tenacious father desperately makes his son recite the multiplication tables in the hope that these at least may survive beyond the new glaciers. I am reminded also of the exquisite words spoken by Virgil's ghost to the narrator, homeward bound after adventures in Rome (in Wilder's first novel, The Cabala). Virgil says to him out of a sense of timelessness: "Nothing is eternal save Heaven. Romes existed before Rome and when Rome will be a waste, there will be Romes after her. Seek out some city that is young. The secret is to make a city, not to rest in it. When you have found one, drink in the illusion that she too is eternal."

It requires a great fund of inner strength and sureness to possess so ripe a philosophy or religion. I am reminded of the tranquility of the old Chinese poets, a bit tipsy with the wine of life, who sat on their terrace, looked at the moon in some small pond and recognized heavens in nature, and the evanescence of experience. When he was a young man, Wilder participated in an archaeological dig in Rome. "After a while," he wrote, "we struck what was once a much travelled road over 2000 years ago—ruts, milestones, shrines. A million people must have passed that way… laughing, worrying… planning… grieving. I've never been the same since. It freed me from the oppression of vast numbers and vast distances and big philosophical questions beyond my grasp." It made him content, he said, with his own little half acre. He became, in effect, a Robinson Crusoe of the spirit; every novel and every play was a rediscovered road, a work of the Eighth Day, a rescue from life's eternal shipwrecks.

Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin on April 18, 1897. He went to school in California, in Hong Kong, in Ohio. He went to Oberlin and then transferred to Yale; and later he went to Princeton. He was from the first—by his movement in different landscapes, different worlds, among different peoples—a comfortable cosmopolite. He never had a chance to be a provincial. But he knew the provinces. He could say with assurance to this Academy, "Life is more surprising, more varied, more unpredictable than any generalities we may hold about it." For him life was an eternal surprise. Accepting our gold medal for his fiction, he told us in 1952 that the Germans have a useful word which English lacks, Menschenkenner, someone who has an instinctive capacity to understand how others feel and think. Wilder was all his life a Menschenkenner. He displayed his knowledge and humanism as writer, teacher, artist, soldier.

I have spoken of Our Town; and we remember also how in 1927 Wilder brought out The Bridge of San Luis Rey. No modern masterpiece of fiction has asserted itself with such promptness and ease, one might say with such elegance and suavity. The personal religion of which I have spoken is fully revealed in this work: the intensity of people's lives, the question of their fate, the way in which they are finders and makers unaware of posterity, because they have lived and believed—whether in the anguish and neurosis of the Marquesa, who writes passionate letters to her daughter little knowing that they will be quoted as classics long after, or in the vaudeville songs of Uncle Pio, set down for ephemeral audiences, which pass into folk music "borne everywhere along the highroads."

The world pinned its medals and accolades on Thornton Wilder until, as Malcom Cowley has put it, he was loaded like a September apple tree; indeed there came a moment, we remember, when he found the world was too much with him and he retreated into solitude for a spell, like a Chinese poet. His loyal sister of all the years remained his intermediary with the world, and she was the amanuensis of his retreat. His life in the desert was not an empty gesture. It was a period of meditation and gestation, a confronting of loneliness, an acting out of the themes of Wilder's novels and plays—the Crusoe-man making do on some legendary island, Thoreau testing himself in his hut, the Pilgrim Fathers coming to a new land to start America's Eighth Day.

I have a memory of one of his lectures on James Joyce when he was having his happy flirtation with the mysteries of Finnegans Wake. What I recall is his extraordinary vitality and spontaneity as a lecturer, his curious repose within the wonder and mobility of a restless animation. He walked; he paused; he stepped down from the microphone into the aisles; he tossed his ideas at us lightly as if they were tennis balls which would surely bounce back; he caressed his thoughts and played with them and launched them with a prodigality that I suppose he could afford; indeed his ideas were so numerous he could afford to be a spendthrift. This was our first meeting. In our talk afterwards, he showed me his over-written and underlined copy of Joyce's portmanteau words unravelled with delight in his notations. Years later, on one of the last occasions when I talked with him, I reminded him of his old enthusiasm and asked him whether he still read in Finnegan every day. He laughed. He had stopped long ago. I don't remember his exact words, but they were vivid and expressive; they lodge in my mind in the form of the French exclamation quelle fumisterie! He had had his fun with Joyce—we might say quite a bellyful. What now remains in my memory is his ardor, his constant eager delight in wanting to share observations and discoveries—secrets that seemed too good to keep to himself.

"The universe goes its mighty way," says Julius Caesar in Wilder's novel The Ides of March, "and there is very little we can do to modify it… At the closer range we say good and evil, but what the world profits by is intensity. There is a law hidden in this, but we are not present long enough to glimpse more than two links in the chain. There lies the regret at the brevity of life." The links, I suppose, are life and death. And it was Wilder's great gift to describe the journeys in between, to show how men and women demonstrate a constant will to survival and with this a profound need to build anew out of the eternal wreckage. There was in Thornton Wilder a remarkable sense of the ripeness of civilization. His works, in a land that lives so intensely in the present, assert in many ways all that is durable—and not least, let it be said, the power of love. Wilder knew always that he carried within himself a deep awareness of those thousands who had walked on that Roman road he unearthed in his early manhood.