• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

But that story about the "some of us" orities: "If anyone gives you a shiny new equipment, the better." And the less to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. At the who "love to cook" captures only one cooking utensil for Christmas, you're as said about it, the better: "Your cooking same time, he was a consummate Amer- mode of modernity and only one mod- thrilled as a janitor with a new bucket is a personal thing, like your sex life, ican theater professional, even playing ern iteration of the kitchen. There are of cleaning solvent," she writes. "The and it shouldn't be the subject of gen- the Stage Manager in innumerable per- other scenes, and these are absent from less attention paid to your cooking eral conversation." • formances of Our Town. And despite Wilson's engrossing book, though the Pulitzers, Broadway hits, and celeb- they're almost certainly a lot more com- rity friends, Wilder never acted the pri- mon than her absorbing AGA saga. ma donna. He didn't fuss or go in for star One scene is, of course, the kitchens of THE CHAMELEON turns; he simply got on with his work. the poor and struggling; another is the kitchens of middle-class people unen- Thornton Wilder's multifaceted life and work enelope Niven, best known for chanted by food and its preparation. her biographies of Carl Sandburg What's a pleasure for Wilson and me is By Michael Dirda P and Edward Steichen, opens her a pain in the ass for a lot of people. In Life with a brief account of her subject's the past few years, fiftieth-anniversary austere New England ancestors, whose editions of two of America's most popu- Yankee virtues of thrift, temperance, lar cookbooks appeared. One—you've Discussed in this essay: and Christian high-mindedness were guessed it—was Mastering the Art of Thornton Wilder: A Life, by Penelope Niven, HarperCollins. 848 pages. $39.99. taken to unfortunate extremes by Wild- French Cooking, by Julia Child, whose harpercollins.com. er's father. Three days before his wed- batterie de cuisine is now a foodie shrine Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays and Writings on Theater, edited by J. D. ding, Amos Parker Wilder felt morally in the Smithsonian. The other—which McClatchy. The Library of America. 888 pages. $40. loa.org . obliged to tell his bride that he would I bet you haven't guessed—is The I Hate Thornton Wilder: The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Other Novels 1926-1948, edited never get over his love for another wom- to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken, whose by J. D. McClatchy. The Library of America. 731 pages. $35. loa.org . an. As his wife, Isabella, later wrote, he pots and pans are now presumably in a Thornton Wilder: The Eighth Day, Theophilus North, Autobiographical Writings, "never did. Never has." She once called landfill. More than 3 million copies of edited by J. D. McClatchy. The Library of America. 864 pages. $35. loa.org . their wedding day "the worst day that I Hate were sold, and, after the book ever befell either of us." had been out of print for some years, the For a while, Amos ran a newspaper rights were eagerly snapped up by pub- oor Thornton Wilder! He was a land of the living and a land of the in Madison, Wisconsin, but eventually lishers who reckoned it was "in sync awarded the Pulitzer Prize three dead and the bridge is love, the only he wangled a post as U.S. consul gen- with lifestyles today" and that there p times, produced not one but two survival, the only meaning." eral in Hong Kong. The constant so- were millions of home cooks still yearn- high school classics—the short novel Alas, the strikes against Wilder cializing of their new diplomatic life ing to whip up something quick and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and the don't stop there. He remained unmar- overwhelmed Isabella, who grew in- tasty with a packet of onion-soup mix, play Our Town (1938)—and essentially ried, enjoyed the company of elderly creasingly neurasthenic and depressed. some canned peas, and that indispens- wrote the book for the phenomenally ladies, liked to pal around with hand- During the first six years of their mar- able tin of cream-of-mushroom soup popular Broadway musical Hello, Dolly! some young men, and seems to have riage she had dutifully produced four without using any piece of kitchenware Most of his seven novels became best- been either that old-fashioned thing, children, as well as the stillborn twin more exotic than a Jell-0 mold. The sellers, as well as selections of the Book a confirmed bachelor, or that politi- of Thornton. Eventually Mrs. Wilder middle classes, too, know their way very of the Month Club. Throughout his cally incorrect thing, a closeted ho- boldly took her two younger daughters well in and out of the microwave; they career, Wilder served as U.S. literary mosexual. Whichever the case, Wild- to Italy, then moved to Berkeley, Cali- are a profitable market for Whole ambassador to the world, going on good- er hardly lived up to his last name. fornia. Years would go by before the Foods's ready-made Harvest Squash will missions to South America, attend- Worst of all, he was your father's kind family reunited. They all became invet- Soup and Marks & Spencer's heat-and- ing conferences in Europe, and appear- of writer—successful. erate letter writers. serve chicken Kiev; they eat out a lot; ing on the cover of Time magazine with As Penelope Niven demonstrates in Amos proved to be a lackluster, even they often eat alone; and with many of the American flag in the background. her capacious and authoritative Thorn- incompetent, foreign-service officer. In- them, the made-from-scratch meal for All of these were, of course, terrible ton Wilder: A Life, Wilder was in fact stead of wine he would serve grape juice the whole family is an endangered spe- career moves. Even before Wilder's among the most cosmopolitan of men, the work of a funnier Brecht, a more movie stars as Montgomery Clift and at official functions. While his elder son, cies. Just as the kitchen has become a death in 1975 at the age of seventy-eight, a writer who never repeated himself, a loquacious Beckett. Tallulah Bankhead. In the 1930s he also named Amos, won paternal ap- more social space, so the dining room he had come to be widely, if wrongly, fastidious stylist with a flair for every It may further surprise readers to tipped that era's literary kingpin, Alex- proval for his athletic prowess and reli- has fallen into relative disuse. perceived as the gray-flanneled Rotarian kind of comedy, from the most ironic to learn that Wilder met, and was es- ander Woolkott, to assist a promising gious bent, Thornton was derided as a We talk a lot about food, but much of American letters, at once middlebrow, the most farcical, a major interpreter of teemed by, a greater number of emi- eighteen-year-old actor named Orson "delicate, girl-playing aesthetic lad" who of it is just talk: our kitchens may be patriotic, and—pick one—sentimental Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, fluent nences than that tuft hunter Truman Welles. In the late 1950s, he suggested liked to sing and to play the violin and well appointed, but the equipment, like or sententious. That his work repeat- in French, German, Italian, and Span- Capote could even dream of. Wilder that a young poet named Edward Albee piano. Both boys attended a German- the cookbooks—and a bit like the fish edly obsessed over the family and family ish, and a guy who could hold his liquor chatted with Sigmund Freud, received should try his hand at plays. run school in China before being knife—is often for show. Bee Wilson life didn't help. Out of context, even his at least as well as his friends Hemingway fan mail from Albert Einstein and T E. Wilder's affability and even temper, shipped to a boarding school in Califor- speaks to some of us, Peg Bracken to most-quoted sentence—from the close and Fitzgerald. Just as nearly all of Wild- Lawrence, counted heavyweight boxing steady application to his craft, and un- nia. Thornton was often lonely, espe- others. Wilson's people sit around in of The Bridge of San Luis Rey—sounds er's novels remain fresh, readable, and champion Gene Tunney a close friend, wavering devotion to his family can cially for his mother. their kitchens, trading stories about as hokey as a Hallmark card: "There is remarkably difficult to categorize, so worked harmoniously with Alfred seem unromantic, almost insipid. But he Because two of the family's forebears had helped endow Oberlin College, and sous vide machines and immersion Michael Dirda is the author, most recently, of some of his plays, such as the famous The Hitchcock on the script for Shadow of a was, in many ways, a European-style blenders. Bracken's people are just as Classics for Pleasure (Harcourt) and On Skin of Our Teeth (1942) and The Long Doubt (1943), discussed existentialism intellectual, his favorite writers ranging because it was a theologically minded contemporary but have different pri- Conan Doyle (Princeton University Press). Christmas Dinner (1931), could almost be with Sartre, and consorted with such from Madame de Sevigne and Goethe institution with a tradition of social Photograph of Thornton Wilder by Danford Barney 0 The Wilder Family LLC and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc.

Load more

  4

Copy Link