An Obliging Man

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"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.

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).

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--bouncing in & out of chairs, filling his young audience's ears with an endless stream of neat, witty, slightly pedantic but somehow most exciting talk.

Ostensibly, Thornton Niven Wilder was in Europe to finish a new play and to 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.

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, 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.

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 & out of classrooms. His latest course: what it is to be an American.

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.

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.)

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."

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 Thacher 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.

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."

Pigs & Princesses. At the Thacher 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."

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."

"Oh, Tut-Tut-Tut . . ." After two years of 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 puffing my boy up way beyond his parts."

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.

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 of my generation," says he, "who did not go to Paris.' "

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.

Then they 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.

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." In the '20s, 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.

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 Abridge that Wilder had invented.

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. 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.

Slaves & Coal Mines. But as the '30s wore on, the "star of the first magnitude" began to dim a bit. Social significance was in 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." 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.

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.

Swinging Heads. For aspiring young authors, admission to Wilder's course in creative writing (limited to 15 students) was an accolade. His lectures on "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 & 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.

But teaching was more than lecturing; it was also being "ready to answer every knock at 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 acquaintanceships 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").

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.

Invitation to Wander. There, while she rocked back & 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." 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.

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"

Ice & 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 Hellzapoppin 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, "is 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."

Though one of the things audiences liked about these plays was their refreshing contrast to the orthodox theater, 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." 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.

Hints & 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.

"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 . . .

"Americans could count and enjoyed counting. They lived under a sense of boundlessness. And every year a greater throng of new faces poured into their 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 . . .

"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 realizes that we are all bound together as the population of the only inhabited star."

Bustle after 5. 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."*

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 & on into the night. Sometimes he goes "roaming"--long solitary rambles.

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.

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.

* 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 shadow 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 a 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 . . ."

* 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.

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