When Sigmund Freud first read Heaven’s My Destination, he threw the book across the room. Wilder had visited Freud at his villa outside Vienna in the fall of 1935 and had given him a copy of the novel, which had been published earlier that year. Freud would have none of it. “I come from an unbroken line of infidel Jews,” the doctor explained; as a boy he had been lectured at by his father that “there is no way that we could know there was a God; that it didn’t do any good to trouble one’s head about such; but to live and do one’s duty among one’s fellow men.” But what had actually annoyed Freud about the book was, he said, the fun it made of religion. “Why should you treat of an American fanatic?” the old doctor asked. “That cannot be treated poetically.”
Or so Wilder records the meeting in his journal. Of course, Freud wasn’t the only reader to have been upset. Some thought it filled with an austere religious fervor, others thought it a broad satire of American Protestantism. Wilder himself, speaking with an interviewer many years later, recalled some of the public reaction to his hero, George Brush:
George, the hero of a novel of mine which I wrote when I was nearly forty, is an earnest, humorless, moralizing, preachifying, interfering product of Bible-belt evangelism. I received many letters from writers of the George Brush mentality angrily denouncing me for making fun of sacred things, and a letter from the Mother Superior of a convent in Ohio saying that she regarded the book as an allegory of the stages in the spiritual life.
In fact, the book’s first reviewers were puzzled because it could be read either way, because Wilder seemed such a dispassionate narrator, because the moral scales weren’t tipped to one side or the other. Again, Wilder explained that Heaven’s My Destination
was written as objectively as it could be done and the result has been that people tell me that it has meant to them things as diverse as a Pilgrim’s Progress of the religious life and an extreme sneering at sacred things, a portrait of a saint on the one hand and a ridiculous fool jeered at by the author on the other. For a while I felt that I had erred and that it was an artistic mistake to expose oneself to such misinterpretations. But more and more in harmony with the doctrine that the writer during the work should not hear in a second level of consciousness the possible comments of audiences, I feel that for good or for ill you should talk to yourself in your own private language and be willing to sink or swim on the hope that your private language has nevertheless sufficient correspondence with that of persons of some reading and some experience.
From the very beginning of his career, Wilder had been speaking his own “private language,” however it may have been schooled by the example of older stylistic masters. The baroque suavities of The Cabala, the vividly poised moralizing of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the chaste decorum of The Woman of Andros, had all earned for their author a reputation as a writer of chiseled refinement. And because each novel was so different from what had preceded it, the range of his imagination was also lavishly praised. Early and easy success, however, invariably pushes one’s detractors front and center, and in 1930 Wilder was confronted by an especially vicious attack on both his achievement and his sensibility. Writing in The New Republic, critic Michael Gold ignited a controversy that we must believe singed Wilder and without a doubt inflamed the magazine’s letters column for weeks to come. Gold, whose ardent Communist views made Wilder the convenient embodiment of “a small sophisticated class that has recently risen in America—our genteel bourgeoisie,” dismissed the novels as “chambermaid literature” and accused Wilder’s writing of “the shallow clarity and tight little good taste that remind one of nothing so much as the conversation and practice of a veteran cocotte.” It was a vulgar, snide, tendentious piece, and it went on to hammer at Wilder’s lack of “nativism.” Why had he taken refuge in a “rootless cosmopolitanism”? Italy, Peru, Greece—remote cultures and effete characters—glossy high finish and etiolated aristocratic emotions. Why, in other words, wasn’t Wilder a Tolstoy, or at least a Sinclair Lewis? Instead, his serenity is that of a corpse: “Prick it, and it will bleed violet ink and apéritif.” Why won’t Wilder plunge into the burly realities of American life, the world of stockbroker suicides and labor racketeers, steel mills and back streets, prairies and mesas? “Let Mr. Wilder write a book about modern America,” Gold concluded. “We predict it will reveal all his fundamental silliness and superficiality.”
Despite the fact his defenders rushed into print, Wilder—who never publically commented on Gold’s attack—was said privately to be hurt. Though I doubt Gold’s article was a direct cause, it may have started a train of thought, one that gathered considerable baggage in the years directly following, when Wilder had moved on to a lively part-time teaching base at the University of Chicago and was also crisscrossing the country on the lecture circuit. He hadn’t written about America before because, as he once explained, “I didn’t know enough about it.” He had plucked his characters from books. Now he learned firsthand the scenery and sounds of America and was ready to take advantage of them. In any case, his very next novel was distinctly “American.” It set itself down in the Mississippi Valley and points west during the Depression, offered an array of social types, analyzed their living conditions and legal system, and probed both the country’s beliefs and its true religion, business. It was enough to warm any Marxist’s heart. In a letter to John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson wrote: “Thornton Wilder has taken up the challenge flung down by Mike Gold and written the best book of his life. I wish you would overcome your prejudice against him and read it.”
It would be inaccurate to claim that Wilder had deliberately remade himself as a novelist—had, as it were, gone native. (Though Our Town arrives just three years later.) The settings and characters of Heaven’s My Destination bear subtle affinities with Wilder’s fiction, both earlier and later. And its hero, George Brush, shares the ardent loneliness of all of Wilder’s protagonists. But it is fair to say that Wilder did turn from the exquisite cadences and lambent, layered textures of his first three novels. His style here is drier, flatter, jumpier. It’s the effort to create an “American speech” for his book, to give its narrative the clipped, moral tone of its cast and culture. It’s what might be called a Grant Wood style. Of course Wilder was not writing a satire, though he’s content to skewer pretensions and injustices. Instead, he’d set out to write a comedy, and he needed a light touch to capture the incongruities of American life, at once innocent and egotistical. It is a comedy in the highest sense, and moves easily from hayseed farce to superstitious magic (Father Pasziewski’s spoon) to moral argument (the concluding courtroom scene is the book’s masterstroke).
It’s said there are only two stories, two basic situations which all novels weave variations on. In one, our hero leaves home and is beset by adventures. In the other, a stranger comes to town and occasions adventures. Heaven’s My Destination combines the two patterns. Its premise is an old joke—did you hear the one about the traveling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?—and its plot has put readers in mind of the perilous progress of Bunyan’s Christian pilgrim or of the chivalric quest of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It’s clear from his own testimony that, indeed, Wilder had such figures in the back of his mind as he worked. Candide or Tom Jones, Pip or Stephen Dedalus—literature abounds in innocents and their “education.” The hero of Wilder’s novel, George Brush, seems a familiar enough figure. (His name too is familiar, and calls up the once ubiquitous door-to-door Fuller Brush man, as well as a more recent teetotaling, fundamentalist president.) In the movies he might have been played by Tom Hanks or James Stewart—or even, as Wilder apparently hoped, Gary Cooper. But, though we know he was born in Michigan and graduated from Shiloh Baptist College in South Dakota, he still seems a mysterious presence, and that’s because Wilder intended to portray a saint—the sort of person who is always more than a little unworldly. He appears and disappears faster than mortals ought. “I’m the happiest man I’ve ever met,” he boasts while assuming the sorrows of others. Even saints have to live in the world, however, and the novel’s epigraph, taken from The Woman of Andros, tells us about the narrative shape of this book: “Of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.” As he brushes up against the world, with its whorehouses and seedy hotels, its newspapermen and thieves, he does not learn the ways of the world, the world learns his ways. Still, battered and defeated, as unloved and lonely at the end of the novel as he was at its start, exactly a year earlier, he changes less in his own eyes than in ours. We witness his awkward age with an amazement that tempers to pity. “I may be cuckoo,” he says at the end, in a way that any reader may both admire and deplore, “perhaps I am: but I’d rather be crazy all alone than be sensible like you fellows are sensible. I’m glad I’m nuts. I don’t want to be different. Tell the fellows I’ll never change—.” The only thing to do with Gandhi—George’s own particular patron saint—is to follow him or shoot him. All saints are first fallen men, and the women men fall for have a lot to answer for. George was converted by a drug-addled sixteen-year-old tent evangelist named Marian Truby, and his one roll in the hay loft with Roberta Weyerhauser drove him to seek and marry her—with disastrous results. He is drawn to these women, and to older matronly women as well, like Queenie and Mrs. Crofut, because he longs for love. His head is filled with ideas, his heart is empty. He wants “an American home,” a Norman Rockwell family image, but saints aren’t allowed wives and kids. Instead, as George says, and it is a mean substitute, “I have the truth.”
Heaven’s My Destination was written in the midst of the Great Depression, a time when all Americans were called on to redefine themselves. The national upheaval was a time of private soul-searching as well as of government programs. It was Wilder’s genius to have made George’s idealism seem like a solution that solves nothing. So cannily has Wilder drawn his portrait that his picaresque hero, in adventure after adventure, erodes the very sympathy he builds in us. George is annoying in part because we live—now as then—in a culture of Meddlers and Experts, a culture of tireless self-improvement, in which, from television spot or bumper sticker, we are constantly urged to get right with God, lose fifty pounds, quit smoking, discover the ultimate stain remover, and accept Jesus as our personal savior. No one wants to be goaded into goodness or exasperated to salvation. Above all, we loathe logic, and George Brush is not a romantic but a logician. Creatures of satisfying habits, we resent change, resent thinking about our comforts; we prefer the bromides and slogans, the sheer unselfconsciousness of animal life. “You’ll learn in time,” George is told. “I guess you’ll find your place in time, see? Only don’t come around us any more. We got our own ideas and our own lives all arranged, see? and we don’t like to be interrupted.”
But George is also annoying because he is a saint. “Isn’t the principle of a thing more important than the people that live under the principle?” he asks, and wonders why his marriage collapses. “It’s not important if Roberta and I are different, as she calls it. It’s not important if we don’t get on like some couples do. We’re married, and it’s for the good of society and morals that we stay together until we die.” This is his devastating innocence. It causes him to despair, and only a miracle can save him. The brilliance of Wilder’s technique in this novel is to reenact in the reader the same drama that the characters who encounter George face. We are asked to think, to see the light—and then watch the realistic shadows fall.
Wilder’s brother Amos, in his 1980 book Thornton Wilder and His Public, tried to trace the lineage of George Brush, and he put it most accurately when he noted that Brush’s ancestor is less a specific literary character than a mythological type: “the American Adam.” This is a figure central both to our literature and to our imaginings of ourselves. Thoreau and Whitman, Hemingway and Fitzgerald—our writers have tried continually to embody this innocent, vital ideal. Wilder was fond of Thoreau, whose own annoyingly soulful self-righteousness could have been a model for Brush’s. But in fact, it was Emerson (who couldn’t see the poison snake in the grass, in Wilder’s skeptical reckoning) who, in his clarion 1837 oration “The American Scholar,” most notably defined the American Adam, whom he calls “the scholar”:
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. . . . He must accept . . . the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest function of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thought. . . . Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions—these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day,—this he shall hear and promulgate.
This moves to the heart of what has been called the American Religion as both our greatest prophet, Emerson, and our subtlest analyst, William James, have seen it. George Brush is less a Baptist than a believer in this hybrid religion that doesn’t much resemble historical Christianity. The Christian asks, “Who will save me?” The American asks, “What will make me free?” And because the American strives for individuality and the pragmatism of feelings and experiences (rather than desires and memories), he lives as a solitary, his inner loneliness at home in an outer loneliness of wilderness or urban enormity. Salvation for the American comes not through the congregation or community but is a singular confrontation, an exclusive reliance on the empowered self. The American is known not by his pious submission but by his radical innocence. Here again is Emerson, with his scholar:
In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time—happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
In 1930, two years before he started working on Heaven’s My Destination, Wilder wrote to a friend about his earlier three novels, and saw in them a common theme. “It seems to me that my books are about: What is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose to it?” The best of those novels, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, asked whether “the intuitions that lie behind love are enough to justify the desperation of living.” There is, finally, a shimmering ambivalence in Wilder’s answer. In Heaven’s My Destination he asks if the honest man’s pursuit of truth is enough to sustain him in a deceitful world. I’m not entirely convinced Wilder could answer his own question, and neither was he. The ending of the novel seems rushed, substituting a crisis for a conclusion. Wilder admitted as much, both in his journal and in letters to friends. “Sure, I made a lot of mistakes,” he wrote to one. “As you say, at the close especially.” Twenty years later, he blamed it on a sense of “procrastination, the inability to call my wits together for a deep concentration” that forced him to rush toward the last page.
He was being too harsh on himself. It may be that, though the plot conforms to its circular mythic pattern, Wilder had so identified with Brush that he couldn’t in the end see the emotional ramification of his protagonist’s decisions. Asked by an interviewer if, as a young man, he resembled George Brush, Wilder answered:
Very much so. I came from a very strict Calvinistic father, was brought up partly among the missionaries of China, and went to that splendid college at Oberlin at a time when the classrooms and student life carried a good deal of the pious didacticism which would now be called narrow Protestantism. And that book is, as it were, an effort to come to terms with those influences. The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to escape. That is a very autobiographical book.
All of Wilder’s novels, of course, are at some level “autobiographical.” In this one, surely, there was a side to his own personality that Wilder projected onto Brush. He was not unaware of the overanimated intellectuality of his own social manner or of a certain emotional naïveté. In 1933, he wrote mockingly to a friend, “What a good parson I would have been. How diligent, and how I would have loved it. How anxiously I would have watched them gather; and how concerned I’d have been, visiting them in their homes. It would have played squarely into all my faults.” And behind his own manner were large shadows—above all, his father’s. Amos Parker Wilder was the embodiment of the zealous, interfering, righteous, moralizing Calvinist ethic. A letter to his children would say, for instance, that “the kingdom of Heaven is to be brought to earth, the bad fiends yielding—then it fills a youth with ardent aspirations to be in the midst of the fight—to give his fellow man the best that is in him. He knows that when he is right he is on sure ground—that the right must conquer.” Wilder, instinctively drawn to his mother’s softer, more cultivated and literary character, nonetheless inherited some of his father’s driven energies. The difference between them is that the son had a sense of irony. Late in his life, Wilder wrote to his oldest friend, Robert Maynard Hutchins, of his father’s “all too freighted unshakeable obtuseness.”
The inward gaze alerts us to nuances of characterization, but to dwell exclusively on George Brush would be to miss most of the comic brio of this novel’s storytelling as well as its astute realism. If John Steinbeck’s mighty Grapes of Wrath is the tragic novel of the Great Depression, then Heaven’s My Destination is its comic masterpiece. This was the era of “failing banks, falling businessmen,” and the touching scene of Brush’s Camp Morgan encounter with Dick Roberts, the suicidal real estate man, has an eerie edge. This was the era of an imploding economy and desperate measures, and Brush’s lectures to the bank president or the stickup man about his ingenious moral ideas have a still astonishing (because still right, still untried) poignancy to them. This was the era of crushing poverty and odd bedfellows, and Wilder’s description of Queenie Craven’s derelict boarding-house in Kansas City is wonderfully evocative:
a high, narrow, blackened edifice, standing amid the similarly blackened hulks of former mansions . . . its broken windows patched with newspaper, its yard full of weeds and overturned bath-tubs, against the last invasion of negro gamblers, cats and the night quartering of tramps. Queenie’s back windows overlooked a cliff strewn with bottles and automobile tires descending to a waste of railroad tracks and the sluggish soot-covered river.
This was the era too of Gandhi’s call to passive resistance, and his presence in the novel—along with Tolstoy’s—is an unlikely counter. But there is a side of George Brush’s crusade that has all the activism of the best of the New Deal. He wouldn’t think of cheating on his expense account, thinks everyone should be burdened equally by the Depression, has advanced views on child rearing and capital punishment, and in Louisiana once rode in a Jim Crow railroad car because he believes in the equality of the races.
But today we read Heaven’s My Destination less for its anatomy of an era than for its brilliant storytelling. There are countless cameo roles to appreciate—blowsy Margie McCoy, the gaggle of giggling prostitutes at the cinema, or little Rhoda May with the placard (I AM A LIAR) around her neck—each composed of small details with large implications. The opening scenario is ingenious. The narrative pace is exhilarating. And the big set pieces are ideally situated. The Molière in Wilder has a fine nose for hypocrisy and cant. The Marxist in Wilder (Groucho, not Karl) has a sure sense of comic timing, as when his friends get our hero drunk. Throughout the novel advanced ideas are dealt with nostalgically, and that’s because, as Wilder wrote in a letter, the novel is about “all of us when young; you’re not supposed to notice the humor—you’re supposed to look through it at a fella who not only had the impulse to think out an ethic and plan a life—but actually does it.” So what are we laughing at? The fella who does it? Or ourselves when young and filled with ambitions? The best comedies bring us smack against a contrary world and implicate both their cast of smart fools and our own tangled hearts. Heaven’s My Destination, Wilder’s funniest novel, is a comedy of American manners, a pageant of absurdities and miracles, logic and belly laughs, a truly sophisticated, at times even unsettling, corn-belt classic.
—J. D. McClatchy
Stonington, Connecticut