Thorton Wilder & the Gods

Notebook Thorton Wilder & the gods by James Como A quintessential American man of letters, both in history and among the members of a Thornton Niven Wilder (1897–1975) worked family. The narrator tell us that “our lives are a as a dramatist, novelist, critic, and scholar (no seamless robe,” rather like the “complex maze- one in his day knew more about Lope de Vega like design” in a rug admired by a young man or Finnegans Wake). Wilder was a polyglot looking for answers. “Turn it over,” he is in- and a cosmopolite of international renown— structed, and when he does so he sees the “mass an American in Paris who was an exception of knots and of frayed and dangling threads,” to the Lost Generation—and a distinguished which is the aspect that eternity—never far soldier. (He volunteered for service in World away in Wilder—presents to us in time. These War II in his forties, went through basic train- themes of design and provident love (especially ing, and served admirably enough to be both its obliquity) are typical Wilder’s work. promoted and decorated.) Yet much of his Only once in his long career, in his play The work is forgotten. Alcestiad, did Wilder abandon his obliquity— Sure, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Pulit- and with mixed success.1 As a child, he had first zer Prize for fiction in 1928) was made into heard of Alcestis and her husband, Admetus, a movie three times and may still be read in from Bulfinch’s Mythology. In one way or an- some high schools. And, sure, Our Town (Pu- other, he wrote about them—implicitly in The litzer Prize for drama in 1938) is a recurring hit Woman of Andros (1930) and explicitly in The on Broadway. And, yes, Wilder won a third Ides of March (1948)—until he could no longer Pulitzer in 1942 for his play The Skin of Our resist treating the myth formally. After a long Teeth (no other writer has won Pulitzers for gestation and many interruptions, The Alcesti- both fiction and drama). His work was pub- ad, or A Life in the Sun premiered in Edinburgh licly attacked by the Marxists in the 1930s and on August 22, 1955, and remains Wilder’s only awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in flop. There are good reasons. Wilder could not the 1960s, but still, how many readers can find a way to make the play work as theater. name anything else by Wilder? He was never happy with its dramaturgy, nor In the end, prizes and longevity are not the with Tyrone Guthrie’s direction, nor with his most telling points about his work. Rather, friend Montgomery Clift’s behavior (Clift was the point is this: for all of those decades there picky and pulled out), nor with Irene Worth, abides a piercing sensibility marked by a fusion whose attack of opening-night nerves slowed of reverence, gratitude, wonder, and Sehnsucht down the pace. In his review, Kenneth Tynan, (that stab of longing to which C. S. Lewis attri- butes his Christian awakening). Wilder’s pen- 1 Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on ultimate novel, The Eighth Day, which won the Theater, edited by J. D. McClatchy; Library of National Book Award in 1968, explores agape, America, 800 pages, $40. 78 The New Criterion May 2011 Notebook who previously had been thrilled by Wilder, in what ways we may find Them. You may called him “a schoolmaster who would like to well imagine—.” Exactly here, then, is the be a poet” and pronounced the play a “dramatic kernel of Wilder’s interest. nullity.” Wilder himself thought that his “intel- In his notes on The Alcestiad, Wilder tells us lectual passion” had been “dulled and dimmed” that stories about the gods have lasted precisely and that he had allowed “the old tnw-pathos, because “they are ambiguous and puzzling”: the human tug” to enter too largely; he had allowed it “to get out of hand.” That may be We are told that Apollo loved Admetus and Al- true of the play on stage, but it is not true of the cestis. If so, how strangely he exhibited it. It must piece as literature on the page. make for considerable discomfort to have the god of the sun, of healing and song, housed among The tale is simple enough. When Apollo’s one’s farm workers. And why should a divine love son the doctor Aesculapius restores a dead impose on a devoted couple the decision as to man to life, Pluto is o¸ended. Jupiter, at the which should die for the other? request of his underworld brother-king, kills the doctor. Apollo, in retaliation, kills Cy- This reflection is remincsent of Pamphilus, the clopes, the maker of Jupiter’s thunderbolts. narrator of The Woman of Andros (1930), as he Apollo’s punishment is to serve King Adme- speculates similarly: tus as a common herdsman, no di¸erent from any other mortal laborer. It seemed to him that the whole world did not Admetus competes for Alcestis, a woman consist of rocks and trees and water nor were hu- of otherworldly beauty and divine delicacy, man beings garments and flesh, but all burned, and wins his bride through the help of Apollo, like the hillside of olive trees, with the perpetual even though Alcestis longs only to know and to flames of love,—a sad love that was half hope, serve Apollo. When Admetus’s death is fated, often rebuked and waiting to be reassured of its he learns that he will be spared only if some- truth . as though it were waiting for a voice to one else volunteers to die in his place. But no come from the skies, declaring that therein lay the one, not even his very aged parents, will do so. secret of the world. Only Alcestis is willing to sacrifice herself, and does. Hercules, however, is fond of Alcestis for That secret is tortuously di¸icult to suggest. her beauty and virtue. (He calls Antigone, Pe- In the notes, Wilder writes: “Following nelope, Leda, Helen, and Clytemnestra, each of some meditations of Soren Kierkegaard, I have whom he knows, “Dirt. Trash,” compared to written a comedy about the extreme difficulty Alcestis). A dear friend to Admetus, Hercules of any dialogue between heaven and earth, travels to the underworld and, with very great about the misunderstandings that result from e¸ort retrieves Alcestis, restoring her to Adme- the ‘incommensurability of things human and tus. Wilder’s greatest alteration is to deny Ad- divine.’” The unfathomable nature of love, metus any knowledge that a surrogate will save Kierkegaard writes, is that “it is indeed less ter- his life—or that his wife is that surrogate. rible to fall to the ground when the mountains Wilder touched on the story at a number tremble at the voice of the God, than to sit at of points in his career. Antedating the play is table with him as an equal. And yet, it is the The Ides of March, a riveting epistolary novel God’s concern precisely to have it so.” about the events and characters surrounding As late as January of 1955, Wilder was still that fateful day in 44 B.C. There Wilder gives wondering how to work out “the donnée of us Catullus’s version of the Alcestis myth, or a the numinous,” and in August of the same part of it, since we are told, at a crucial point, year he was almost grieving: “I am ashamed that “the narrative breaks o¸.” “And I?” Al- of this lukewarm imitative dilettante religi- cestis asks, “what am I to do? What I am do- osity. Pfui!” But this pessimism is as much ing now? My interest is to inquire into the existential as it is dramatic. Isabel Wilder, nature of the Gods—whether they exist and Thornton’s sister and until her death a keeper The New Criterion May 2011 79 Notebook of both the books and the flame, opines that as a mere sentimentalist. In response, I call her brother was a traveler and a socializer be- upon Amos Wilder, Thornton’s brother, writ- cause of his “deep loneliness,” and that “he ing in Thornton Wilder and His Public: had no sturdy last resource against the occa- sional conviction ‘I don’t belong.’” But in his Sometimes talent or virtuosity is combined notes, Wilder wrote that, as with Kierkegaard, with something more, some further stature or “an eternal truth has come into being in me scope or power of conception, and this is both . precisely like any other individual human rare and disturbing. For those excited by being.” Nevertheless, Wilder allowed that “as talent or contemporaneity all such untimely or writers we have only one duty, namely to pose timeless works will appear austere or insipid. the question correctly. It is not the task of liter- All about us—yesterday, today, tomorrow— ature,” he continued, “to answer the question. there is an unrecognized court in the hearts of But only a religious person will ask the ques- men and women which sifts the arts of an age tion correctly. Someone with religious faith and . breaks through our modern fates. can only write with the inspiration of faith.” Wilder’s own faith—“I am a Protestant and C. S. Lewis, who shares enough literary and a practicing Christian” he told George Wagner biographical a¸inities with Wilder for the two in 1953—may be perceived in the early debate in to be both professional and spiritual brothers, The Alcestiad between Apollo and Death: thought his own greatest work and his one true novel was Till We Have Faces.

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