Afterword
THE CABALA
I began writing my first novel [The Cabala] thirty-one years ago—in a small hotel on the left bank of the Seine, where so many American novels have been begun.
—Thornton Wilder on receiving the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, April 1952
Mr. Thornton Wilder’s publishers, Albert and Charles Boni, must have been in a fine frenzy of dismay and delight as the successive chunks of The Cabala made their tardy appearances in the office.
—Herbert Gorman, Introduction to the Modern Library edition of The Cabala, #155, May 1929
LATE TO HIS PARTY
Deeply impressed with his highly polished literary style, the recently established New York publishing house of Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., published Thornton Wilder’s novel The Cabala on April 21, 1926. The first printing was reliably reported at the time to have been 3,250 copies. Befitting a debut book, the dust jacket was unadorned with outside testimonials; the publisher’s endorsement on the back read:
It is seldom that publishers find an author whom they may recommend unreservedly. The biting irony and exquisite phrasing in which this young author couches his intimate story of the high aristocratic group in Rome today seems to us of the highest order. It is a book to delight every admirer of the exotic in writing.
It is a time-honored obligation of friends to come to the aid of an author, especially on the occasion of the first book. Whatever lay ahead, Boni had good reasons for believing that future printings of the dust jacket could contain quotable language from the author’s notable literary friends and admirers. Boni would not be disappointed. It is no surprise that a Yale tie was the common denominator for this anticipated publicity; Wilder, who had received his undergraduate degree there in 1920, had lit up the sky as an acclaimed prize-winning student author.
What amounted to a Wilder Yale alumni booster club included two of the author’s former teachers: William Lyon Phelps, perhaps the best-known popular lecturer on literature in the country during this era; and Henry Seidel Canby, who, in 1924, had traded the classroom for the New York literary scene where he became a founder and editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. The club also included such classmates and close friends as John Farrar, editor of The Bookman, an important literary monthly; Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, who cofounded Time magazine in 1923, and had garnered a circulation of more than 200,000 readers by 1926; and Norman Fitts, book reviewer for the influential Boston Evening Transcript. During his senior year in Yale College in 1919, Fitts had established a recognized “little magazine,” S.4.N., on whose editorial board Wilder served and in which he published occasionally until it closed down in 1924.
Wilder referred to his fans collectively as “Gossip Fair,” noting that they had been waiting for his literary debut for years. Gossip Fair had grounds for its opinion; so stunning had been Thornton Wilder’s undergraduate literary record that although he was only twenty-nine when The Cabala was published, he was judged “unacceptably late to his own party.” While aware of this view it appears never to have represented a burden for Wilder. As he was frantically pulling together the manuscript of his first book in June 1925, he wrote to his close friend Les Glenn, “My emergence is long delayed, dear Les, but irresistible!” To his brother, Amos, he assigned a hard number: “Excuse me saying that I waited six years beyond the time when Gossip Fair assigned me a debut.”
A RATHER SOPHISTICATED LITERARY CURIOSITY
Books from Yale men ornament the spring lists with persistence. Thornton Wilder, whose undergraduate days were marked with brilliance, has written what promises to be a rather sophisticated literary curiosity in “Cabala,” which will be his first published book.
—The Bookman, April 1926
Talent and notoriety aside, how did Boni view the marketplace prospects for a novel The Bookman hailed “a rather sophisticated literary curiosity”? The answer is no surprise. Despite his publishers’ enthusiasm about Wilder’s style and faith that friends in high places would work hard for the book, Boni saw its new author’s appeal limited to a highly cultivated readership. In short, they assumed that The Cabala would not be a bestseller.
The author’s background reflected the esoteric. The biographical note on the dust jacket offered this description:
THORNTON WILDER was born on April 17, 1897, Madison, Wisconsin. He spent his early years in China where his father was Consul General, and later prepared for college in California. He was graduated from Yale in 1920, after which he spent two years in Rome. The Cabala grew out of that experience of these two years. After this he taught at Lawrenceville and is now devoting his time to studying and writing at Princeton Graduate School.
For the record, Wilder spent a total of two years in China as a boy and only eight months, not two years, in Rome, after college. But give or take a publisher’s exaggeration, there did appear to be more than a tincture of the exotic about his life to go along with his educational credentials.
One fact in this biography was accurate: The Cabala was inspired by his stay in Rome after Yale, as reflected in Wilder’s dedication of the book: “To my friends at the American Academy in Rome, 1920–1921.” Although neither his formal training nor vocational interests qualified him for full admission to one of the American Academy’s two established programs, his credentials were strong enough for him to obtain a self-paid place, thanks to the Academy’s lean times, and empty beds following World War I. This allowed him to participate in the life of an institution with a notable address on a notable hill in Rome to the degree that he wished. Many years after, he recalled his position and the freedom it offered:
The students on the Janiculum Hill were divided into two disparate and even inimical groups. There were on the one hand the Prix de Rome men who had been carefully selected for great promise in architecture, painting and sculpture, and music. In my time there were no women among the artists. And there were the classical students, men and women, also selected from among scores of applicants to work in archeology, Latin literature, and Roman history. With very few exceptions these two groups kept to themselves, sat at meals themselves, and enjoyed parties and excursions by themselves. The two groups were often designated as “geniuses” and the “grinds.”
I was neither a prize man nor a qualified classical scholar. I was a fish who swam in both waters.
And we know from letters to friends and home, Wilder not only swam with both geniuses and grinds, but also explored the city on his own, sat at many a non-Academy table, and attended many a party. To his sister Isabel, he wrote in the spring of 1921:
I seem to be living in Italy for the sole purpose of receiving the confidences of ladies in distress. The details of woe, broken engagements, insult and injury I’ve had to listen to from grand dame to servant-girl would freeze your spine. There’s something in the air over here: everyone is unhappily in love every minute of their lives, and only too glad to find a sympathetic eye and ear.
Wilder, pen always at hand, left Rome for Paris, where he stayed for several months in the spring and summer of 1921. Here, in a hotel on the left bank, followed by a cold-water flat on the Rue St. Jacques, Wilder began a work of prose about a group of fascinating and very unhappy individuals in Rome, including a prince of the Church. The writing did not go easily. As he wrote his mother, “I struggle over the descriptive passages in Romans and despair of ever writing prose.”
Struggle he did. Wilder worked on his “Romans” intermittently from September 1921 to mid-November 1925, a period encompassing his four years as a French teacher and assistant dormitory master at the Lawrenceville School, a private boarding school for boys in New Jersey, and his first semester of graduate study in French Literature at Princeton University. During the Lawrenceville period, a major contributing influence on his work was his reading in classical French literature, anchored by such authors as La Bruyère and Saint-Simon, coupled with a passionate interest in contemporary authors, particularly Marcel Proust. The membership of Wilder’s “cabala” were, as he would often say, inventions of his imagination—an imagination fueled by his literary record, tested against the sights, people, and landmarks of post–World War I Rome in fact and memory.
STOP AND GO
The making of the manuscript breaks down into two periods—before and after the Boni firm opened the door to Wilder on March 3, 1925. In the earlier period, we encounter a writer feeling little pressure to complete his “Roman Memoirs” (as he identified them) and endlessly writing and rewriting. Moreover, although he appears to have had a conception of some larger whole, it is clear that his drive for compression of language and theatrical characterization meant that his work-in-progress marched forward as discreet short stories, or “portraits,” as he also referred to them.
If Gossip Fair did not understand Wilder’s delay with destiny, it is adequately explained by his profession as a resident teacher and dormitory master in a boy’s boarding school, a job entailing endless hours that also spilled over into summer tutoring. Still, in addition to many “stolen hours” reading in the nearby Princeton University Library, there were free nights, off-duty weekends, pieces of long vacations, and, starting in 1924, a month-long writing residency at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His progress on fiction was further complicated by his competing passion for drama and attending theater. Stories of Wilder working on his “Roman Memoirs” in Davis House (the Lawrenceville student dormitory where he lived) remain part of that school’s lore. During this time, however, the would-be novelist haunted theaters in New York, Philadelphia, and Trenton, all located within two hours of the school.
It came down to this: until 1924, Wilder was in no particular hurry to publish. He loved teaching and the steady income it provided, as well as the supportive community that Lawrenceville represented—a community that meant a great deal to a young man raised all over the world. What would someday become The Cabala moved forward in a stop-and-go fashion. The following excerpt from letters to his family in 1922 suggests his reading and writing style in this period:
You will grin to hear that I have taken up again my imaginary memoirs of a year in Rome. . . . The memoirs are made up of formal portraits . . . interspersed with every now and then a complete little “conte” dropped into [the] current, told by some character, like Canterbury pilgrims. I have been reading the endless tomes of Saint-Simon.
—April 11, 1922, from Lawrenceville School
Just as soon as I get a fair copy made of BOOK I, I look it over and with my blue pencil start indicating alterations; within an hour the whole script is unsightly. My only consolation is that every touch has been an improvement. This has happened five times already and it is about time the thing were perfect, but I still find shell holes. . . .
—July 20, 1922, from Newport, Rhode Island
Well, a good deal more has been written and almost the whole projected. I am doing a vast amount of reading (I am never able to see afterwards where I found the time to do yesterday’s, or where I shall find it tomorrow; but the inveterate reader somehow contrives—in spite of the fact that I am conspicuously faithful in my school duties). For instance my second book is an elaborate satire on the French Royalist party.
—November 5, 1922, from Lawrenceville School
PICTURE TO YOURSELF A STAGE
The year 1924 was a turning point in Wilder’s development as an artist. With some money in his pocket from teaching and tutoring, and excitement about being associated with the MacDowell Colony and the recently established Laboratory Theatre in New York, Wilder found himself dreaming of publishing more than just short pieces in the period’s “little magazines.” In 1923, at S.4.N., Wilder’s Yale friend Norman Fitts launched a book publishing subsidiary. As best as can be determined from the evidence, only Fitts’s serious illness, which forced him to close S.4.N. late in 1924, kept Wilder from making his major publishing debut with the third volume in this new venture. The book was to contain ten of his short-short plays (or “three-minute playlets,” as they were known); several other short pieces of fiction; and “Five Roman Portraits.” Judging from their titles, these portraits represented most of the subject matter later found in The Cabala. And what title did Wilder propose for this volume? His choice honored his allegiance to the dramatic side of his art: Picture to Yourself a Stage.
The failure of the S.4.N. venture concluded the first chapter in The Cabala’s prehistory. But no sooner had that door closed than another opened. A Yale tie again figured in the story. In the summer of 1924, following an apprenticeship of two years with Alfred A. Knopf, Wilder’s Yale classmate Lewis Saunders Baer moved to the position of secretary-treasurer at the publishing firm of Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. Here he learned, no doubt through the Yale grapevine, that his classmate Thornton Wilder might have a manuscript looking for a publisher. Soon after, what appears to have been a version of Book One of The Cabala changed hands. After weeks of silence, on March 3, 1925, Wilder received the letter that would-be authors dream of receiving: “I am more than delighted to report,” wrote Baer, “that we are all crazy about it. Albert Boni feels so strongly about your style that he is very anxious to see more.” With shades of Gossip Fair in the background, Baer went on:
I knew this would be the result of our reading, because I remember so distinctly how impressed I was at your stories in college. I do hope we will be able to get together a book which can mean the start of your career as an author, in print I mean. No one would be happier than I.
Although Albert & Charles Boni was a new publishing house, its founding brothers were experienced, inventive book men. Albert Boni was a well-known figure in the trade through his role as a founder of the Boni & Liveright Publishing Company and the Modern Library, both in 1917. His brother Charles cofounded Little Leather Library, a publishing venture that succeeded in targeting a market for a series of classic works of literature, and was the predecessor to the Book-of-the-Month Club. In 1923, the brothers joined forces. Albert, who had also played a role in establishing the Theater Guild, was particularly interested in modern European letters. In 1920 he had edited a popular edition of French verse, and he later saw to it that the work of such authors as Proust and Colette were represented among the early titles of his new publishing venture. Given his taste in fiction, it is no surprise that Albert Boni was attracted to Wilder’s prose and “anxious to see more.”
Because few early drafts of The Cabala survived, we know all too little about how the five Roman Portraits destined for Picture to Yourself a Stage evolved into a novel called The Cabala. What we do know is that over an eight-month period beginning in March 1925 and ending in late November, Wilder revised existing copy once more and added new material, including Book Five, “The Dusk of the Gods.” The title The Cabala dates from this period, at the end of which, in November, Wilder finally received a book contract. Why did the Boni firm withhold this document until the last minute? The answer has to be that until they were confident they had enough material to make a book from an author practicing compression with an all but religious fervor, the Boni brothers did not wish to offer a contract.
The history of The Cabala as a legal entity began on November 19, 1925, the day Wilder signed a book contract for a novel identified in Article 1 as The Caballa, as it was often spelled at the time. As noted, the transformation of a series of portraits into a novel had taken place during his last semester of teaching at Lawrenceville, a summer job, and much of the first semester of his year of graduate studies at Princeton. Wilder burned the candle at both ends to accomplish his mission, as suggested by these excerpts from letters to his mother:
I am still on the Alix d’Espoli story. I hope it will move people as it does me. I sit at the foot of my bed writing until I am—prevented.
—June 10, 1925, Lawrenceville School
I am sending you Book Four today. It is terminated but not finished. . . . “It will have to do.” I never thought I should have to say that of anything of mine, but I am frantic to finish this five-year thing and get back to my plays. . . . But first I must finish the Epilogue to the Memoirs.
—November 2, 1925, Graduate College, Princeton University
THE DEBUT OF AN AMERICAN STYLIST
The Cabala was published on April 20, 1926, by Boni in the United States, and in October of the same year in England by Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd., using a Longmans cover and Boni-supplied pages. Any fair reporting on the book’s reception must treat the two editions as one.
Reviewers were almost uniformly enthusiastic about the novel. While the occasional notice pointed to elements of wisdom and insights about human nature in Wilder’s story, critics above all praised his style, a viewpoint expressed in the lordly New York Times that has followed the book ever since: “The appearance of Thornton Wilder’s Cabala marks the debut of a new American stylist.” That many others agreed, picking up on the novel’s satire, irony, wit, and epigrammatic style, is suggested by this collage of phrases from the dailies: “[The] prose is exceptionally beautiful; its texture has a rare consistency of distinctive weaving.” (New York Post Literary Review); “The writing is beautiful in the extreme.” (Sheffield, U.K., Independent); “It has the cool sparkling quality of a champagne cocktail.” (New York Tribune); “A remarkable maturity and sureness of its style.” (Yorkshire, U.K., Post); “To students of style it is well worth careful perusal.” (Portsmouth, U.K., Evening News)
Wilder’s friends from Gossip Fair joined the parade, as expected. William Lyon Phelps wrote in Scribner’s, “An exquisite work of art, written with beauty, grace and charm.” Time called The Cabala “one of the most delectable myths that ever issued from the hills of Rome.”
Something akin to a fanfare appears to have occurred when Wilder returned to the American Academy in Rome in late October 1926. As he wrote his family about the novel’s reception in this special place,
I went up [to] the Academy, had tea with the prizemen in my beloved halls, was taken home to dinner by the director and around the faculty for brief calls. The book has been read by all with a sort of scandalous delight. Even old Romans take it as the hot stuff from the secret circles.
Finally, as the good news rolled in, Wilder found himself compared favorably to a remarkable range of successful and popular authors of the period, among them James Branch Cabell, Walter Pater, George Moore, Carl Van Vechten, Anatole France, Norman Douglas, Elinor Wylie, Max Beerbohm, and Aldous Huxley.
While no novel is immune to negative press, what is unusual about The Cabala is how few outright knocks Wilder’s first book received. In England the august Times Literary Supplement put the American in his place by observing that “the book . . . has a certain deceptive brilliance, an aggravating air of ‘knowingness’ and familiarity with European culture that may have helped its American popularity.” When arrows arrived, they typically did so as comments on technical matters, such as Wilder’s choice to avoid quotation marks and the numerous typos in the first printing. One feature of the first printing of The Cabala, well known to book collectors, is the more than two dozen errors it contains, due to inadequate proofreading by the author and the apparent resetting of the book at the last minute to increase its page size. Dorothy Bacon Woolsey in the New Republic found the otherwise “excellent suggestive writing marred by inexcusable typographical errors, misspelling, total omission of words, and astonishing inaccuracies in punctuation.”
All in all, The Cabala enjoyed remarkable critical success. If its sales kept it from the bestseller status that other Wilder novels would achieve, the numbers were nonetheless impressive. It appeared that the market for the exotic was larger than anticipated. In its first year, Wilder’s first novel sold 5,357 copies in the United States, probably more than twice what Boni needed to sell to break even, and as many as another thousand in Great Britain. His debut may have been delayed, but from the beginning, it exceeded expectations, as suggested by the author’s happy words to his friend Les Glenn in September, six months after The Cabala’s initial appearance:
Our book is now well through the third printing. We thought it was intended for a restricted circle of reflective sophisticates but all sorts of people are reading it, understanding little, but driven on by the faintly snobbish feeling that it’s high-brow and “beautiful” and modern.
And the novel kept selling. By the eve of the appearance of Wilder’s second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in November 1927, sales of The Cabala totaled some seven thousand, and the book was in its fourth printing. Its strong reception naturally registered quickly on that sensitive barometer of literary fortunes, the dust jacket. By the summer of 1926, the book was festooned with no less than eight blurbs—four on the front and four on the back. Sales were strong enough for Boni to justify advertising the novel in Publishers Weekly and The Saturday Review of Literature. On the outside, no member of Gossip Fair was more active on the book’s behalf than John Farrar, editor of The Bookman. Besides an enthusiastic review (“a talent so authentic and so startling”) and several tidbit stories (among them that Wilder pronounced “Cabala” with the emphasis on the first syllable), Farrar highlighted the novel with the only triple star in a 1926 list of fifty recommended books for summer reading.
“ALSO BY THORNTON WILDER”
In the end, a first book can do an author no greater service than guaranteeing publication of the second. From the moment of The Cabala’s appearance, his publisher was urging Wilder on. Twenty months later, on November 3, 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey was published. There was nothing naked about the dust jacket this time: “AUTHOR OF THE CABALA,” appeared under the title, and the back of the jacket featured five Cabala blurbs under the header “ALSO BY THORNTON WILDER.” Although expecting to do better with The Bridge, Boni still viewed Wilder’s readership as limited, and guardedly published a first printing of 4,000 copies, 750 more than the first printing of The Cabala. “Once more,” read the dust jacket, “it may be prophesied that this book will stir the most sophisticated reader.”
The appearance of The Bridge of San Luis Rey did not stir the few; rather, it ignited one of the great explosions in American twentieth-century literary history. By 1929, more than 300,000 copies had been sold in the United States and England, the novel had been serialized in the Hearst newspaper chain, a film version had been released, and Wilder had received the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In September 1930, in The Delineator, Professor William Lyon Phelps wrote of the impact on Boni, “[The Bridge] was accepted by the publishers because they thought so fine a book ought to be printed, but they had no belief in its success with the public, and they have not yet recovered from the shock.”
How did The Cabala weather this extraordinary success? Very well indeed. Seeking to understand the phenomenon of The Bridge, critics and readers turned back to Wilder’s first novel. This led to a fresh crop of thoughtful reviews, especially in England, where a new Longman’s Green originated edition of the novel appeared in March 1928. Thanks to the power of The Bridge, The Cabala’s Second Coming was capped by its publication as Number 155 in the Modern Library in May 1929. By then, total sales of The Cabala stood at nearly 19,000 copies in the United States alone, and negotiations were far advanced for the first foreign-language editions, of which there have been eleven through the years.
Because of its inevitable comparison with The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Cabala has long been judged a succès d’estime. But even in its infancy, as this account suggests, the novel was something more than that. With an eye on its subsequent history, we cannot forget that besides its many foreign editions (fourth in number only to The Bridge, The Ides of March, and The Eighth Day), The Cabala has been in print almost continuously.
Wilder always reserved a special place in his artistic heart for his first novel. He even considered the idea of adding new chapters for it in 1940. In 1962 he read a selection from it as part of “An Evening with Thornton Wilder,” a gala event arranged at the State Department Auditorium by members of President John F. Kennedy’s cabinet. The author remained grateful to a tale marked, as he later put it with bemused affection, by a “frequent display of far-fetched information.”
Finally, there is the author’s last and greatest compliment to his first book: Theophilus North, his final novel, published in 1973, two years before his death. In this story, an all-seeing young man moves in and out of the houses of the mighty and not so mighty in Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1926, in much the same way Samuele visits palazzos in Rome in 1921. Theophilus North is Thornton Wilder’s American Cabala, the former his evening light, the latter his morning.
READINGS
READING 1: THORNTON WILDER, COLLEGE GRADUATE
A. B., Yale Class of 1920, English major, Latin minor.
“The plan is for him to sail September first . . . to Naples—and attend the American Classical School at Rome for a year. He is going to study Latin, Italian and the usual archeology.”
—Thornton Wilder’s mother, Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder, to Bruce Simonds, her son’s Yale classmate, August 15, 1920
READING 2: CHARLES MALLISON’S YEAR IN ROME: “THE PROFOUND IMPRESSION THAT A YEAR IN ITALY CAN MAKE”
The “Memoirs of Charles Mallison: The Year in Rome,” is a 4,200-word manuscript dating possibly from Wilder’s year in Rome. The kernel of The Cabala story is here: an American innocent abroad meets James Blair and Miss Grier and is soon caught up in the occult. Like Samuele and Thornton, Mallison and Wilder share many similarities, among them a common birth year (1897), ties to China, the authorship of many unpublished plays, and, of course, a memorable year in Rome at an impressionable age. In fact, Mallison and Wilder arrived in Rome the same month and year after spending time in Sorrento.
This excerpt includes the opening lines and four of the footnotes Wilder added to this playfully ambitious “memoir,” the earliest known pass at what would someday be The Cabala. Up to publication, as he informed his brother, Wilder was removing “notes of burlesque, smartalecisms and purple-rhetoric.”
The Memoirs of Charles Mallison: The Year in Rome
Transcription:
In an earlier series of memoirs I have described my life through my twenty-first year.
In a previous series of memoirs1 I attempted to describe the changing matter of a boy’s mind, written by the boy himself during the changes.2 With the completion of the Boy Sebastian, I thought my studies in introspection were over and set about the composition of plays and novels. Although the present book discovers me again describing my life, the interval that separated the two works saw a certain change in the temper of my mind. In this book I record as tirelessly what I discovered about me, as in the previous book I recorded what I saw passing in my mind. The profound impression that a3 year in Italy can make upon a youthful spirit prepared by wide reading and a habit of reflection opens as great an opportunity for the subjective method of my first manner as, surely the school years which served as background for the Boy Sebastian; but the novelty of European manners, the multiplicity of things seen and above all the rapid acquisition of an extensive circle of acquaintance inevitably and perhaps wholesomely belied the anticipations of study and self-examination. I am become a genre painter and a portrait painter rather than the water-colorist of subjective fancies.
The very first day of my life in Rome showed how completely I had outgrown the old taste for self-analysis. My first evening’s walk with its view of the Colliseum and the Forum of the Cancelleria and the Massimi Palace, the river and the bridges, the Veneto and its hotels and embassies stirred in me the determination to saturate myself with the legends and tradition, ancient and old and recent and modern of Rome. There and then I invested myself in nothing but curiosity. The event showed me that my intention had been too ambitious, that I had gradually to sacrifice the Romes—those superimposed cities of contrasting epochs—to the Romans. Archaeological and historical studies gradually gave way to personal encounters. Moreover when I had restricted my study to the living Romans, I had to restrict it still further to what must be called Roman Society and Distinguished Transients. . . .
By chance I was taken on my third day to see the two people in Rome who were most able to create rich opportunities for further acquaintance. James Blair took me to tea on that Tuesday afternoon in the apartments of Miss Grier at the Palazzo Barberini; and in the evening to one of the Saretor Basilis’ demonstrations of the occult, 13 Via Fontanella di Borghese.
READING 3: ON TO PARIS
This picture, dated May 1921, shows Wilder, book in hand, with a fellow resident of the American Academy in Rome at the Rome Railroad Station. It shows him on the day of his departure from Rome for Paris via Florence. In Paris, Wilder worked on The Cabala.
Lawrenceville School
I take long walks in this priceless city, and I actually stay home in this nasty little room and write as I haven’t written for years. The fact that I write is the most important item in this envelope. . . . I stroll the quais, roam about Notre Dame, eat in the sidewalk before little dining restaurants, go to my worshipped Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, and come home and write delicious things for Amos’ and Charlotte’s grandchildren. [Reference to his brother and sister.]
—Thornton Wilder to his father, June 27, 1921, from Paris
READING 4: DENIZENS OF DAVIS HOUSE
Wilder did significant work on The Cabala in Davis House, the Lawrenceville School dormitory where he served as assistant housemaster for four years and housemaster his final year, 1927–1928. This photograph shows Wilder that last year sitting among the thirty-two boys who boarded in Davis House. The teacher-author had recently abandoned his middle initial and added a mustache.
“The whole week is passed in the company or earshot of boys. The dyer’s hand is tinctured to what it works in, and at length even I begin to think in terms of football scores, Victrola records and feeble jokes. At least seventeen meals a week I eat at a narrow table with eight of them; twenty-two times a week I unlock a classroom door and admit a band of reluctant learners; four evenings I supervise their study of two-hours-and-a-half and with a flashlight coaxingly persuade them to retire and sleep. . . . It is pure accident that I happen to like them, and that all this does not turn my stomach.”
—Thornton Wilder to his mother, circa September 1922
READING 5: AT DUSK—IN HIS HAND
This reading shows a draft of the opening lines of Book V of The Cabala, “The Dusk of the Gods.” Excised language is shown with the strike. Readers wishing to compare these words with the final text will observe many changes made by an author seeking, as he wrote his brother at the time of publication, “to achieve a restrained Grand Style.”
Transcription:
When my time came to leave home I set aside a few days for visits of piety, piety in the Roman sense. A strange urgency arose within me to finish the year with care. I went to Tivoli and strayed about the locked Villa Horace. I sat a while in Santa Maria in Trastevere. And I took two days off to visit Marcantonio’s grave. A strange urgency arose in me to finish off carefully the year. Yet even after these observances (and many more) I called on Miss Grier and on Donna Leda; I even sat for a while with Jean Perraye; I had a photographer make me an impression of Besuard’s portraits of Alix and Cardinal Vaini. Yet even after these observances something told me that my debt of affection was not paid.
READING 6: A NOTE ON WILDER’S USE OF THE CLASSICAL TRADITION IN THE CABALA
With its evocation of “Rome,” “Virgil’s country,” and “a long Virgilian sigh,” the first paragraph of The Cabala signals to classicists that they are in the presence of a work inspired by the great Latin poet, Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 bce). Virgilian resonances are prominent, including legends about whether Virgil has not died but is still alive. Wilder evokes the classical world by alluding to Latin and Greek literature, portraying contemporary Latin scholars, quoting Horace in Latin, and depicting landscapes and architecture suggesting antique Rome. Wilder combines Latin themes with allusions to Greek, biblical, medieval Italian, and English literature. The opening pages, for example, refer to Greek mythology (3), Renaissance artists (3, 6), and Dante (5–6).
On his first night in Rome, as another example, the narrator visits a dying English poet, based on John Keats, whom he comforts by praising poetry, including works of Sappho, Euripides, and Terence, as well as of Villon and Milton. The narrator’s attempts to comfort the Englishman with Greek, Latin, medieval French, and English poetry highlight the persistence and the value of great poetry through the ages, prefiguring Wilder’s integration of multiple literary sources throughout his work.
An aristocratic Roman coterie, known as the “Cabala,” welcomes the narrator into their privileged circle, eventually giving him the nickname “Samuele.” Often obsessed with power and past glories and beset with cynicism and hypocrisy, the members of the Cabala cause Samuele to question his puritanical tendencies, and to understand the risks of fanaticism, and of excessive devotion to the powerful or wealthy. Samuele, destined to be a writer, will not become pedantic and dry like James Blair who, although brilliant, responds to a woman’s love by haranguing her with long quotations from Livy and Virgil. Samuele will also not become contemptuous and nonempathetic like Cardinal Vaini, although the Cardinal is “the only person living who could write a Latin that would have enhanced the Augustans” (37–42).
With evocations of Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio, the spirit of Virgil appears at the conclusion of the novel, in a dialogue that also embraces Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and other creative artists. The words of Virgil to Samuele are strong echoes of the words of Creusa, who appears as a spirit to Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid. Creating an overall atmosphere of sadness and beauty, the Virgilian references, especially Virgil’s last words (134), underline Wilder’s reinterpretation of Virgil’s famous phrase, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt [“here are the tears of the world, and human matters touch the heart,” Aeneid 1.462]. Virgil anoints the narrator as his American successor, one who will become a writer in the classical tradition. While the narrator will follow Virgil’s advice: “give heed to your Latin” and “in the pride of your city . . . do not forget mine” (Cabala, 133), he will also be true to his own American background. Unlike the Cabala, Samuele will not be enslaved to the European past. Inspired by Greek and Roman authors, the narrator (and Wilder) will incorporate classical learning into his writings without being rigidly tied to the past. He will become a writer who will focus on Virgil’s own theme of “the tears of the world” to represent the shortcomings and brevity of human existence in all its wonder.
—Dr. Stephen J. Rojcewicz Jr.
THE WOMAN OF ANDROS
We don’t at the moment know the date of publication, but a new book by Wilder is a genuine literary event.
—“The Phoenix Nest,” The Bookman, September 7, 1929
When a situation is more than a human soul can be expected to bear, what then?
—Interview with Thornton Wilder in Fashions of the Hour, Chicago, Spring 1930
Thornton Wilder conceived the idea for The Woman of Andros at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in the spring of 1928 in the midst of a literary explosion titled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The fallout from this event would determine how and where The Woman of Andros would be written, and how it would be designed and marketed by its publisher, Albert & Charles Boni. It would also help to shape its reception by critics and the public and give Wilder the necessary leverage for publishing drama, his other literary passion which was very much on his mind.
EXPLOSION
Before The Bridge of San Luis Rey transformed his life, Wilder had taught and served as a dormitory master at Lawrenceville School from 1921 to 1925. During a two-year leave of absence from Lawrenceville, Wilder completed The Cabala and received a graduate degree in French Literature from Princeton University. Because he did not earn enough royalties from his first novel, The Cabala, to stake himself for at least another year of writing, he returned to teach at the school in the fall of 1927, three months before The Bridge was published. By the end of 1928, sales of The Bridge had reached more than 300,000 copies in the United States and England. After one of the most celebrated debuts in twentieth century American literature, Wilder found himself the toast of the English-speaking world, the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, and a wealthy man.
The stunned author also found his stunned publisher at his side, reminding him of a significant new fact of life: now that Wilder was an author with an enormous following it was his obligation to feed it with the next novel, and as quickly as possible, please. The acclaimed author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey appeared to see his duty. In February 1928, amid the madness of trying to teach, run a dormitory, handle the phone calls, correspondence, and visits generated by his newfound fame, Wilder informed Boni that the next novel would be entitled The Woman of Andros. He appears to have described it with no more detail than he gave his mother in a brief and harried note: “The Woman of Andros—after play by Terrence—Aegean island. Paganism with premonitions of Xianty.”
AN ANGEL APPEARS
The Woman of Andros would be Wilder’s next work of fiction, but not his next book. In October 1928, the recently established New York publisher Coward McCann published a handsome trade edition of 2,000 copies of The Angel That Troubled the Waters, along with an expensive companion boxed edition of 750 signed copies. This first published book of drama by Wilder contained sixteen three-minute playlets, each featuring three actors, the dramatic form Wilder had practiced passionately since high school. All but four of these short-short plays had been written and appeared initially in student publications during his undergraduate years at Oberlin and Yale; the final four were composed after 1926. Wilder himself viewed these plays as “belle lettres” designed to be read aloud among family and friends or enjoyed on the page in a comfortable chair next to a roaring fire, beverage in hand. The playlet’s contents represented brief excursions into what one student has usefully summarized as “the grand themes of life and death, faith and reason, creation and love.” Wilder, in his introduction to these playlets writes, “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.”
This detour into a curious corner of drama was no surprise to his publishers, and they were not happy about it. Soon after The Cabala appeared in 1926, Wilder had approached Boni about publishing his playlets. Prospecting for the gold to be found in fiction, Boni had no interest in throwing away a contractual claim to one of the author’s next two novels on a bizarre book of drama. In April 1927, they gave Wilder permission to publish his playlets elsewhere “in some kind of limited edition.”
Wilder was not blind to the marketplace risks involved. As early as April 1926 he had put the matter this way to Boni’s secretary treasurer Lewis Baer:
My thought was that they [the playlets] were so frail that even if you did bring them out during the next two years it would probably be bad for “my booksellers” and even perhaps for most of “my readers.” And yet I should love to get those little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably.
Thanks to the leverage provided by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, there was nothing quiet or unprofitable about the Angel in print. The dust jacket language of the Angel nailed to the mast showed the relationship between the play collection and The Bridge: “[These playlets] should prove of exceptional interest as showing the development of a talent that has astonished the critical world.” The volume was widely and thoughtfully reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, although a number of critics were puzzled by its purpose and wondered whether it was really necessary to read the playlets which they identified as Wilder’s juvenilia. Angel earned some gold, returning royalties to the author of more than $5,000 over two years, a modest sum compared to the success of The Bridge, which garnered more than $100,000 for Wilder in its first two years of shelf life, but a remarkable amount for a book of playlets.
THE ANGEL AND AN ISLAND
It is helpful to view The Woman of Andros as a novelistic successor to the playlets. First, there is the novel’s brevity, only 23,000 words, barely qualifying it as a short novel. Drawing on a few masterpieces of literature, it also reveals the author exploring human beings in extreme situations as they search for meaning. The title playlet The Angel That Troubled the Waters, written in June 1928, was just when Wilder was beginning to write Andros. The play was inspired by the story of the Bethesda Pool in the Gospel of John. In it, an angel informs a newcomer to the pool that his time for healing at the sacred waters has not yet arrived. “In love’s service,” the angel says, “only the wounded soldiers can serve.” In a similar way in The Woman of Andros, Chrysis, a slave and courtesan, is not allowed to be healed, therefore dramatically depicting questions of virtue and forgiveness. We know from Wilder’s later interviews that one of Wilder’s first three novels began as a play. Surely it is The Woman of Andros, based on Terence and the lost plays by Menander.
In addition to attracting significant attention to his curious little playlets, The Bridge also provided Wilder with the means to write as he would for the rest of his career; his pattern was to sequester himself in hotels, apartments, or pensions throughout the United States and abroad for stays of a few days, a few weeks, months, or even more than a year. His notations on the manuscript of The Woman of Andros open the door on the creative process of a writer on the move:
The Woman of Andros. Idea first came spring of 1928. First two conversations written at Axeland House, Horley, Surrey; and much of the later parts clearly planned during church attendances at Red Hill, Outwood, etc. The copying out of already completed portions begun into this book Oct 11, 1928. Pension Saramartel, Juan-les-Pins. A lot (Towards Chrysis monologue in the cove) done in The Law Dorm’s 76 Wall St New Haven April 1929. Then Sept-Oct Oxford-Paris-Munich.
The notation includes two locations where he had in fact worked earlier on The Bridge—the pension in Juan-les-Pins, and a short-term rental in a Yale Law School dormitory. This list, however, is incomplete. We know from letters and records that Wilder also did considerable work on the manuscript in London’s Hotel Savoy, and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Wilder also discovered that he worked well on ships crossing the Atlantic. (“Baby does best on boats,” he was later fond of saying.) As a result, the ocean liners Adriatic, Lapland, and Cedric are part of the making of Andros. The manuscript’s peripatetic journey ended at the legendary Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, for it was here, on or about January 4, 1930, only six weeks before publication, that Wilder completed the last lines of his third novel. (His publishers had been setting type as he submitted pieces of the manuscript.)
These excerpts from letters offer a glimpse of Wilder’s study of classic religious works as he was writing The Woman of Andros:
Have you read much of Abbé Bremond’s Histoire Litt du Sentiment Religieux? I’m working thru the first volume because Francis de Sales has always been one of my favorites (Sainte Chantal, her sister-in-the-Lord, was Mme de Sévigné’s grandmother. But I first got to know him through your Abbé Huvet.)
—Thornton Wilder to his brother, Amos (an ordained minister), October 25, 1928, from Juan-les-Pins
It’s still [The] Woman of Andros, my hetaita, developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson. Her sayings and parables and her custom of adopting human strays is weighing down the book. But die she must and with unhellenic overtones, an anima naturaliter christiana [a Christian spirit by nature]. I love to think that Terence’s play on which, ever so inexcusably, I base the novella was a favorite with Fénélon and John Henry Newman.
—Wilder to Lady Sybil Colefax, July 24, 1929, from MacDowell Colony
Whenever he moved about, the celebrated Pulitzer Prize–winning author attracted reporters. The recurring question was predictable: What are you writing now, Mr. Wilder? In response the author was usually brief and guarded, typically saying that his new novel involved the ancient world, a play by Terence, and a Greek Island. He also commonly said he would write plays after completing the novel. Occasionally he offered further detail.
In addition to working on his novel, as early as the fall of 1928, Wilder turned to the question of the design of the book and how it would be presented to the public. Assuming that lightning does not strike twice in the same place, he cared about these practical questions for two reasons. First, he felt that the Boni firm inappropriately exploited The Bridge of San Luis Rey by serialization and careless handling of subsidiary rights, and second, he recognized that his story about life and death on an obscure Greek island was very different from The Bridge. His terminology for how he wanted his new novel presented to the world was “conservative arrangements.” He did not want to see it serialized in newspapers (there were offers), as had happened with The Bridge, and he wanted to prohibit limited editions such as those for The Cabala and The Bridge that had turned into objects of frenzy in the collectors’ market.
That Wilder could address these questions in the first place was another significant result of the success of The Bridge. His new status gained him an agent in all but name to help him wield power, his trusted new attorney, J. Dwight Dana of New Haven, Connecticut. As a result of the shifting relationship with his publisher, the Wilder-Boni contract for Andros, signed on December 18, 1929, contained special provisions forbidding any “first edition . . . sold at a special price nor restricted to a relatively small number of copies,” and no “cheap edition . . . to be published nor any republication or reproduction rights granted by publisher except upon the request of the Author communicated to the Publisher by said J. Dwight Dana.” Wilder also asked his publisher a month before publication, to “send wrapper to me and blurb material as soon as it is done,” reminding Boni “to be sure that because of the very subject-matter no faint color of Hearst-Cosmopolitan enters into the format or publicity.”
“SIMPLE VILLAGE DWELLERS”
The novel greeted the public on February 21, 1930, with an announced prepublication printing of 30,000 copies and another 20,000 on the day of its birth, numbers illustrating how popular Wilder had become since The Bridge’s first printing of 4,000 copies and The Cabala’s first printing of 3,250. The book’s design reflected Wilder’s desires for dignity and simplicity of appearance. The dust jacket contained not a single blurb about the new novel or any of Wilder’s previous books. Instead of the testimonials that filled the dust jackets of The Bridge and The Cabala, the back of the Andros jacket contained only a list of seven current Boni books, each with a short tagline description. Andros led the list with this announcement: “The long-awaited successor to The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is a study in the inner life of a few characters passing through circumstances that are common to domestic life in all times and places.” The inside front flap repeated this language word for word, with an additional sentence alerting readers not to expect another Bridge: “In contrast to Mr. Wilder’s earlier novels the characters in The Woman of Andros are simple village dwellers.”
The remaining space on the front flap was filled with a brief tribute from New York Herald Tribune critic Isabel Paterson, saluting Wilder’s “classical temper” and his signature theme of “the ageless problem of love and death.” The back flap was devoted to a 200-word extract from an article by Norman Fitts in the Boston Evening Transcript. It told the now obligatory story of how an “obscure prep-school teacher” in less than two years had become one of the “most discussed figures in the English speaking world,” an author who wrote about a subject that was “the one . . . favored by great writers—the human soul.”
Lightning did not strike twice when The Woman of Andros appeared. But sales were strong enough through the first six months to judge the novel a partial strike in the marketplace. Wilder’s third novel was a bestseller for twelve weeks between April and June 1930, reaching the number one position at least once. By the end of June it had sold 65,994 copies in the United States and was selling well in England. American sales fell off dramatically after June, and at year’s end stood at approximately 70,000, arrested by the onset of what proved to be the Great Depression. The Woman of Andros’s numbers were nonetheless strong enough to place it third on the year’s list of the ten best-selling novels and earn Wilder royalty income of more than $16,000, a notable figure in 1930.
IS BEAUTY ENOUGH?
Much favorable press undergirded this success. While several critics were frank to say that they were not sure they understood Wilder’s contemplative novel, they were, as with his first two novels, enthusiastic about its style, praising the novel’s “craftsmanship” and “workmanship.” No word was more employed than beauty: “Beauty is the key-word of this new novel.” (Saturday Review, London); “In every page, one feels that Wilder is writing for the ages-a creation of beauty.” (New York Telegram); “Vivid beauty” (Dominion News, Morgantown, West Virginia); “efficient beauty” (Boston Evening Transcript); “the fire of beauty” (Bristol Times, U.K.). Isabel Paterson wrote in the New York Herald Tribune, “Mr. Wilder’s prose is as clear and as pure as the Castilian spring from which he has drawn its present inspiration.” Mary Lamberton Becker in The Saturday Review of Literature threw up her hands: “Nothing one can say about it is so convincing as to quote it,” she observed, joining other critics in citing especially the opening lines of the book.
Wilder’s novel also received many mixed reviews. Some critics faulted him for an affected style: “Mr. Wilder’s fine writing has just the whiff of the self-conscious beauty of Ye Gifte Book.” (The New Yorker); “Too sophisticated.” (New York Sun); “Artificial and bloodless.” (The Saturday Review). But these negatives about taste and technique amounted to quibbles compared to a small but determined and highly vocal body of critical opinion about whether Wilder’s subject matter was relevant. Here we remember that Andros appeared in print during the Great Depression, an entirely different era from the 1920s. Influenced by the rising social and political tensions of the time, critics granted that Wilder was employing an ancient setting from which to write about timeless issues and pose questions about human existence and meaning but wondered if it was enough. “One reads with edification and pleasure whatever Wilder chooses to write,” Edmund Wilson reflected in The New Republic in March 1930, “but precisely because he is evidently very much a first-rate man, one wishes one saw him more at home.”
Lorine Pruette, in the establishment Book League Monthly, made an obligatory bow to the novel as “a minor example of the exquisite,” but also wondered about the relevance of Wilder’s story for contemporary readers. Pruette wrote in April 1930:
Paganism passes, doubting, troubled, seeking; Christ is born. But is this enough for us today? Mr. Wilder’s fable is concerned with the doubts and difficulties of to-day, while his answer lies two thousand years in the past. It is possible to suspect that in literature the utilitarians have had their day and that any affirmative writings will be hailed with a certain relief. When the fun has gone out of the study of offal, for the time being, men may very likely return to a contemplation of the stars, an age of faith may well be just ahead but faith in what? It scarcely seems that we shall find the answer in a backward glance. . . . The present trend in The Woman of Andros is clear enough. It has reverence and pity, tenderness and flashes of beauty, but it lacks the terror and the agony that would seem to have a rightful place in any story of a man’s life, it lacks strength as does the ineffectual figure of Pamphilus. And as the fourth in the uncounted series of productions, it makes the future unfolding of a serious artist distressingly suspect.
Mike Gold, the Communist editor of the New Masses, harbored no doubts about Wilder’s worth. In a review of Andros in April in his journal, he described Wilder as a “fairy-like little Anglo-American curate.” Gold wasn’t finished: “Yes, Wilder writes perfect English but he has nothing to say in that perfect English. He is a beautiful, rouged, combed, well-dressed corpse, lying among the sacred candles and lilies of the past, and sure to stink if exposed to sunlight.” This was too much even for one of Gold’s colleagues, J. Q. Neets, who defended Wilder the next month in the same publication: “Perfect English is not such a bad thing. Why object to a subtle use of words, to a splendidly organized prose?” Neets asked. He admired Wilder’s “superb structure, his economy of means, his crystalline style,” and observed that “A wise proletarian writer does not pooh-pooh the very real technical achievements of the bourgeois writers.”
Gold would have none of it. Offered space in the October 1930 fall book issue of The New Republic, he assaulted all of Wilder’s published work in a 2,200-word essay titled “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ.” He painted the Pulitzer Prize winner as a poster boy for a genteel bourgeois literary tradition devoted to hiding from society’s “real problems.” Gold accused Thornton Wilder of cultivating a “museum . . . not a world,” and identified Andros as “a still further masterly retreat into time and space.” “Where are the modern streets of New York, Chicago, and New Orleans in these little novels?” Gold asked of an author whose work he summarized as a “synthesis of all the chambermaid literature, Sunday school tracts and boulevard piety there ever were.” He concluded his diatribe with a challenge: “Let Mr. Wilder write a book about modern America. We predict it will reveal all his fundamental silliness and superficiality, now hidden under a Greek chlamys.”
Gold’s challenge was met by an outpouring of letters, the majority of them favoring Wilder. In all, twenty-seven letters were published in six issues of the magazine before the editors drew the curtain on the controversy “on account of darkness.” By that time this lively literary food fight had spread into the journals and weeklies, where it occasioned a broad debate about the relationship and responsibilities of writers to contemporary society. Thornton Wilder did not respond to Gold in print. Privately, he found it a “wretched affair” and appears to have let it go. In any case, by the fall of 1930, as he had been saying publicly for several years, he had moved on to writing plays. After 1931 his one acts, including The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and The Long Christmas Dinner were soon being produced on amateur stages throughout the country.
THROUGH THE DECADES
Compared to the fireworks of the early 1930s, Andros has lived a quiet life down through the decades, despite nibbles by fans to adapt it for the stage, screen, and opera. Saint Louis composer John Kessler wrote an opera version of the novel in the mid-1930s from which famed Metropolitan Opera soprano Helen Traubel (1899–1972), a fellow Saint Louis native, apparently sang at least one song as part of her repertoire. Nothing further came of it. Actress Lillian Gish wrote to Wilder in 1947 inquiring about a film adaptation. Wilder’s lively response underscored the novel’s lack of dramatic tension, not to mention the challenges of the period costumes (“Modern man cannot wear that dress and appear real”). (See Reading 4.)
The novel, however, lives on. Most famously, Our Town, as the playwright often pointed out, was inspired in part by the story related by Chrysis to the young men on the island of Byrnos. Zeus seeks a favor that the King of the Dead cannot deny, much as he would like to. Here we find an all but word-by-word foreshadowing of the scene when Emily returns from the dead in a no-less-mythical place on her twelfth birthday.
No novel lives in an historical vacuum, and changes in culture cast light on once overlooked attributes of Wilder’s storytelling. For example, students and practitioners of Wilder’s works increasingly point out the centrality of leading female characters in his novels and plays, and the sensitivity with which he depicts gender roles. Here, to start a long list, Chrysis and Glycerium in The Woman of Andros join hands with the Marquesa de Montemayor and the Abbess in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Clodia Pulcher and Cleopatra in The Ides of March, and the central figures in Wilder’s dramas: Alcestis in The Alcestiad, Emily Gibbs in Our Town and, at the head of the line, the irrepressible Dolly Gallagher Levi in The Matchmaker. In 1999, classicist Jennifer Haycock noted, “The Woman of Andros anticipates the re-thinking a new unfettered idea of gender will require: an exploration of the limits and an understanding of the far-reaching structures of thought that rest on gender definitions,” an observation that applies to Wilder’s large cast of women.
READINGS
READING 1: THORNTON WILDER ON PARADE
This caricature of Wilder appeared in On Parade, a collection of forty-two caricatures of “Prominent Authors” published in 1929 by the German artist Eva Herrmann. Each drawing is accompanied by the author’s list of works and a self-selected descriptor. The cosmopolitan Wilder chose language he was using in public lectures and interviews: “I think of my work as being French in form and manners (Saint-Simon and La Bruyère); German in feeling (Bach and Beethoven); and American in eagerness.” Magazines and journals used this illustration at the time of the publication of The Woman of Andros.
© 2006 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/Bild-Kunst, Bonn
READING 2: CARVING CHERRY STONES—APHORISMS
The aphorism, defined variously as a “terse saying embodying a general truth” or “a short, pithy maxim,” lies at the heart of Wilder’s search for style in the 1920s. With the indicated exception, the aphorisms here are drawn from two unpublished sources in the Wilder Archive from the period when The Cabala and The Woman of Andros were written: a two-page typed manuscript identified as “Aphorisms” (Mss), and Wilder’s unpublished journal (J). Wilder credited his reading and writing in the Princeton University Library as his laboratory for sharpening this rhetorical form.
Gossip is the art of telling someone else’s tragedy as though it reflected credit on oneself. [Mss]
It is true that of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age. Chrysis in The Woman of Andros. [With slight variations, this aphorism appeared earlier in Wilder’s journal and manuscript, and later as the epigraph for Heaven’s My Destination, his fourth novel, published in 1935.]
We bend with pitying condescension over past civilizations, over Thebes, Ur and Babylon, and there floats up to us a murmur made up of cries of war, cruelty, pleasure and religious terror. Even as our civilization will some day exhale to its observers the same cries of soldiers, slaves, revellers and suppliants. [Mss]
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes. The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem-new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones. [J] [The first sentence appears in the Mss, and in Wilder’s foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters.]
EDUCATION: True influence over another comes not from anything said or done, but from the accumulation of a lifetime’s thoughts stored up in the eyes. [Mss] [This aphorism appears in The Woman of Andros as follows: “True influence over another comes not from a moment’s eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a life-time’s thoughts stored up in the eyes.”]
A great age of the theatre: when the play is more interesting than the talk about the actors. [J]
READING 3: INTERVIEWS—BEFORE AND AFTER PUBLICATION OF ANDROS
BEFORE . . .
A reporter in London found the celebrated author in a talkative mode as he prepared to leave for the United States after a long stay in Europe. The subject was the usual question: What is your next novel about, Mr. Wilder? Slightly cut, this is the piece that appeared in the London Sunday Times on October 20, 1929. Wilder visited Greece for the first and only time in 1966—a day trip to Athens during his ship’s brief layover in Piraeus.
The book, [Wilder] explained, is based on Terence’s comedy “Andria,” (“the girl from Andros”), which in turn is based on two lost Greek plays—Menander’s “Andria” and the same poet’s “Perinthia.”
Terence’s comedy concerns the adventures of a young Athenian gentleman who falls in love with the sister of a hetaira [a cultured courtesan], and who by a series of stratagems, in which a nimble-witted slave is involved, succeeds in gaining his father’s consent to the match.
“The action in my book,” said Mr. Wilder, “passes before the curtain rises in Terence’s comedy. It is the retrospective action of the story. In fact, it might serve as an introduction to Terence—but with certain facts changed.”
“In what ways have you changed the facts?” he was asked.
“Well,” replied Mr. Wilder with a laugh, “I have actually changed the lives, marriages and deaths of certain of the characters to suit my purposes. But there is more than this. There is a discrepancy in mood between Terence’s play—which is really a farce—and my novel.
“My book is really a study of a pagan soul. The background is Greece after the great age—Greece in 200 bc—a Greece in which some vestiges of past glories remain. And against this background I have shown a human soul in circumstances which are really more than the human soul can bear. Christianity has not yet come into the world, and the pagan, under the stress of fate, has nothing outside the world to cling to.
“My principal character is a hetaira who has lived in Corinth and other centres of civilization. And although it is as yet two centuries before Christianity, there is in her a strange, groping humanitarianism which leads her to fill her house with helpless folk, with the lame and the one-eyed, so to speak.
“Has the story a happy ending? Well, yes, in the sense that the ‘Bridge’ has a happy ending. And there is a plot which—just as in Terence—hangs on the efforts of a young man to get married.”
In conclusion, Mr. Wilder remarked that he had still two chapters to write—and that he had never been to Greece, the scene of his tale.
AFTER . . .
The Woman of Andros was the bestseller in the Book Department at the Marshall Field & Company store in Chicago when Wilder, now a part-time teacher at the University of Chicago, made an obligatory author’s visit in early spring 1930. As department store sales in this era accounted for twenty-nine percent of all book sales, we can assume that the author autographed many copies of his new novel after his talk and a reported “volley of questions.” This piece was published in the spring issue of the store’s house organ, Fashions of the Hour, with this accompanying note: “Some of the comments which Mr. Wilder made . . . are published here with his special permission.”
“Thornton Wilder Discusses His Latest Novel”
The scene of The Woman of Andros is laid on an imaginary island, Brynos, in the Aegean Sea, at about 200 bc—that is, in the decline of the Great Age of Greece. I did not write this book nor my others continuously day by day. I carry books about with me or keep them near at hand while I go about my ostensible profession, which is teaching. This one was begun at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Some of it was written at the MacDowell Colony at Peterborough, New Hampshire. Pages have been composed in hotel rooms in Munich and London.
It is even shorter than The Bridge. The habit of compression seems to be growing on me, and I begin to wonder whether I shall ever be able to write a long novel. As to the theme of the book, there are a number of themes on all levels. Some of the lesser themes are, I suppose: the difference between the matter-of-factness and almost the triviality of daily life as we live it and the emotion and beauty of the same life when we remember it, looking backward from years later.
Another theme is the wistfulness and bewilderment of the pagan soul and the elements of sincerity and faith even in superstition.
Perhaps the principal theme is the theme of all my books: namely, when a situation is more than a human soul can be expected to bear, what then? The Cabala was a series of three such extremities, three such “nervous breakdowns.” The Bridge said that there lay an intuition at the heart of the major attachments of life that offered a last sufficient strength for such crises.
Someday soon I hope to do a book for children with overtones for adults. For the present I shall try to write some plays.
If I work while teaching at the University, it will only be at great intervals. Time is always a notebook lying around with fragments of future pieces. One takes a long walk and without intending it one returns with new paragraphs to add to some project.
READING 4: A LETTER
New Orleans, La.
April 1. 1947
Dear Lillian:
It’s a joy to get a letter from you and to think about you.
Now as to this proposal, I don’t say yes or no, but I call your attention to the following points:
- The plot-lines have no real tension. The novel combines famous well-tried plot motives: the Magdalene-Thaïs story (or Fallen woman with heart of gold) and Camille (Fallen woman barred by social opinion from achieving a happy union). But my novel has robbed both of these stories of their popular pull. Chrysis is helplessly silent and dies having won a success only in her mind. And Glycerium-Pamphilus story is a matter of waiting helplessly and then coming to very little. All the characters are externally passive and engaged in waiting.
- Have you ever noticed that the one costume that always looks phoney and corny on the screen is the Graeco-Roman? Modern man cannot wear that dress and appear real. Think of the “Passion Plays” and the De Mille Quo Vadis, Ben Hur, and The Sign of the Cross. The only way to get away with it is by extreme “character” types, like Charles Laughton as Nero or Claude Rains as Caesar. Otherwise, everybody looks like dead chromo illustrations of ancient history.
- Readers of Andros write me all the time. The things they like about the book are the descriptions of nature, and the “thoughts” of the characters. Now there’s certainly room for thoughts on the screen, sure, but they only live on the screen when they are carried by strong situations and strong emotions. Now The Woman of Andros from the point of view of action is pale, muted, and passive. In a novel characters can suffer and meditate, but on the screen wouldn’t it all look dreary and spineless?
- Suppose you hopped up the plot for the screen. Contrived real clashes between the characters. Then I think you’d run into another danger, in those unconvincing costumes, no one would believe it. Lots of action and crisis but all looking like wax-works charades or a Sunday School pageant. To bring any vitality to Ben Hur they have to work up a vast spectacle and was there any real vitality? And to make Quo Vadis come alive don’t they crown the picture with a mighty orgy? (In Hollywood I used to have lunch with the script writer who was trying to think up a sensational item to “top” the orgy. I think he ended up with naked women bound to the backs of bulls. All concerned knew that the “story” wasn’t holding the audience, so that they had to inject sensation and spectacle).
But dear Lillian, I don’t say yes or no. I’ve always believed that you have a magnificent sense of all aspects of movie and theatre. At various times Pauline Lord and Blanche Yurka approached me about a play from it; an opera for Helen Traubel was written from it (she sang from it at concerts, but the opera was never put on).1 I feel that it was just about material for a short novel, some word-landscapes, and some semi-philosophic reflections: to expand it would break its back; to transfer it to the stage would reveal the fact that none of the characters really pull themselves together to do anything until it’s too late; and to picturize it would reveal that it falls into a series of melancholy tableaux.
All this is merely subject to your judgment and intuition. And it comes with
devotedly
Thornton
READING 5: IN HIS HAND
This holograph, of which the typed version appears below, depicts the next-to-final draft of one of the most admired paragraphs in twentieth-century American literature. Reading it has been said to turn people into writers on the spot. Readers here are invited to compare this version with the final text. The arrow points to the penultimate version, not shown here. in which only one minor change was made before it was set in type.
Transcription:
I Chrysis
The earth sighed as it turned in its course and Asia was left in darkness. Black night crept gradually along the Mediterranean. Triumph had passed from Greece and wisdom from Egypt, but with the fall of night they seemed to have regained their lost honors, and the land that was soon to be called holy prepared more richly its wonderful burden. A fair tripping breeze ruffled the Aegean and all the islands of Greece felt the new freshness at the close of day. The caves that surround the Neapolitan gulf fell into a profound shadow, but each continued to give forth its chiming or its booming sound, or its sound of applause. A storm played about Sicily and its smoking mountains, but at the mouth of the Nile the sea lay like a wet pavement. The great cliff that was one day to be called Gibraltar held for a long time a brilliant gleam of red and orange while across from it the mountains of Atlas began to show deep blue pockets in their shining sides.
READING 6: A NOTE ON WILDER’S USE OF THE CLASSICAL TRADITION IN THE WOMAN OF ANDROS
The classical tradition permeates The Woman of Andros, not only in the novel’s descent from Greek and Latin comedies, but also as the inspiration for the many changes Wilder incorporated. The author’s note immediately calls attention to the classics: “The first part of this novel is based upon the Andria, a comedy by Terence who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to us, by Menander.” Writing in Latin, Publius Terentius Afer (circa 195–159 bce), known as Terence, was a Roman slave of North African background who produced Andria in 166 bce. Terence’s own prologue indicates the play’s origin in the Greek comedy writer Menander (circa 342–290 bce). The fourth century ce commentator Aelius Donatus tells us that Terence made changes to his Greek antecedents by combining two separate plays of Menander, rewriting the first scene, introducing new characters, and adding a subplot.
Wilder’s revisions echo those of Terence in that he too included new plot elements and new characters while eliminating other dramatis personae, but his numerous transfigurations result in a reinterpretation of the Andria, and a guidepost for much of Wilder’s future work. Wilder made changes in the setting (the fictitious island of Brynos, a Greek community, but not Athens), the time of the action (although the novel does not specify the time, in later discussions Wilder usually referred to it as occurring circa 200 bce), and the genre (from dramatic comedy to narrative tragedy). Moreover, Wilder provides us with the full development of his characters, allusions to a wide range of classical tragedies and philosophy, and the inclusion of contemporary social issues. For example, the novel explores the themes of women’s education, women’s rights, immigration, and citizenship, motifs that were implicit in Terence but not fully explored in the Latin comedy, leading to a true conversation between texts.
The most striking modifications that Wilder has introduced into Terence’s comedy are the expansion of Chrysis’s character and her impact on others. Not simply a courtesan without intellectual attainments, she is now an educator and a sage, using elegant dinner parties to awaken the love of beauty, literature, and humanity in young men through her recitations of literature and Platonic dialogues. She instills in the protagonist Pamphilus an awareness and acceptance of earthly joys and sorrows, “the bright and the dark.” In developing the character of Chrysis, Wilder relies on the poet Sappho and two characters from Platonic dialogues—Aspasia, who teaches rhetoric to Socrates and composes speeches, and Diotima, who instructs Socrates in the progression of love from physical attraction to the love of the beautiful soul. The full appreciation of everyday life, its joys and its sorrows, is the message not only of Chrysis but also of many of Wilder’s later characters, including Dolly Levi and Julius Caesar. Chrysis’s fable about a dead hero granted his wish to return to earth for one day, but who soon asks to return to the grave because the world “is too dear to be realized,” will find its immortal expression in Emily Webb’s graveyard experience in Our Town. The Woman of Andros represents Wilder’s lifetime oeuvre in miniature: learned, poignant, beautifully written, and relevant to contemporary life. Rooted in the classics, with its changes inspired by other Greek and Roman examples, it transforms our understanding of the original works.
—Dr. Stephen J. Rojcewicz Jr.
SOURCES
Unless otherwise indicated in the narrative and readings or noted below, the back matter of this volume is constructed largely from Thornton Wilder’s words in unpublished manuscripts and letters in the Wilder Family Archives held in Yale’s Collection of American Literature (YCAL) in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Silent corrections in spelling and punctuation have been made when deemed appropriate. Use has also been made of the Yale Library’s holdings of undergraduate, alumni, and Yale Alumni Weekly records. I hope that readers find that this approach brings these two novels, and the artist who wrote them, into view in an intimate fashion. Any errors in the afterword are my responsibility and I welcome corrections.
My definition of a short novel as falling between 20,000 and 60,000 words is adopted from the schema Edward Weeks set forth in his selection of Great Short Novels, published in 1941 by the Literary Guild of America. I have also drawn for background on O. H. Cheney’s classic study of publishing, Economic Survey of the Book Industry, published originally in 1931 by R.R. Bowker Company, as reprinted in 1960. The Thornton Wilder Library afterwords in Wilder’s second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2021) and his fourth, Heaven’s My Destination (2020), contain, respectively, additional material about the relationship between The Cabala and The Bridge, and Mike Gold’s attack on Wilder in 1930.
QUOTATIONS AND PUBLICATIONS
The Cabala: Herbert Gorman’s lively Introduction to The Cabala is found in Modern Library Vol. 155 (May 1928), pp. v–xiii. His quotation appears on p. v.
The Woman of Andros: Dr. Edyta Oczkowicz’ description of the playlets is taken from her critical essay: “‘Carving Some Cherry Stones’: Disparities in The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays,” Thornton Wilder/New Perspectives, Jackson R. Bryer and Lincoln Konkle, eds. (Northwestern University Press, 2013), pp. 360–377, with quoted language on p. 361. Jennifer Haytock’s view of Wilder and gender appears in her essay “Woman, Philosophy, and Culture: Wilder’s Andrian Legacy,” Thornton Wilder New Essays, Martin Blank, Dalma Brunauer, David Garrett Izzo, editors (Locust Hill Press, 1999), pp. 207–216, quoted on p. 115. Thornton Wilder’s April 1, 1947, letter to Lillian Gish collected in The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder, edited by Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer (HarperCollins, 2008), is quoted on pp. 454–456. The original document is held in the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library, and used with permission.
IMAGES
Unless credited herein, the images in this volume are in The Wilder Family Archives in YCAL and appear with the permission of the Wilder Family LLC. The Eva Herrmann caricature was published in On Parade: Caricatures by Eva Herrmann edited by Erich Posselt (Coward-McCann, 1929), p. 168, and appears here with permission of the Artists Rights Society. The three photographs from the Lawrenceville School appear with permission of that institution and the helpful assistance of Jacqueline Haun, school archivist.
GENERAL BACKGROUND
Important new works for a general audience interested in learning more about Thornton Wilder’s life and works have become available since the first edition of this book was published. Key titles include the definitive biography Thornton Wilder: A Life by Penelope Niven (HarperCollins, 2012) and The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder, edited by Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer (HarperCollins, 2008). Wilder’s playlets in The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays (1928) are conveniently found today in The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Vol. II (Theater Communications Group Press, 1998); Collected Plays & Writings on Theater (Library of America, 2007); Thornton Wilder’s Playlets: Short, Short Plays for 3–5 Actors (Concord Theatricals, 2022).
SPECIALIZED STUDIES
Readers interested in greater depth about Wilder’s use of classical and religious themes are referred to Thornton Wilder, Classical Reception, and American Literature by Stephen J. Rojcewicz, Jr. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge Press, 2022), Thornton Wilder & Amos Wilder: Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America by Christopher J. Wheatley’s (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
Two websites feature extensive information about all of Wilder’s major works: www.thorntonwilder.com and www.thorntonwildersociety.com
Tappan Wilder
February 2022