Abstract
This article explores the relevance and vitality of Wilder’s works to contemporary audiences of 2011. It establishes four criteria—breadth, depth, heat, and light—by which to judge serious literature and states that we should “be impressed by how many points [Wilder] scores.” Wilder, it maintains, embodied Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Man Thinking,” and fused this quality with his own identities as a moralist, showman-shaman, and modernist; these four personae allowed Wilder to react in writing and art to over six decades of human struggle and to set those struggles against the backdrop of previous writers striving to make sense of humanity’s place in our complicated world. Following DeGrazia’s article are fifteen responses that take DeGrazia’s arguments as a springboard for their own reflections on the relevance and immediacy of Thornton Wilder in 2023 and beyond.
My memory isn’t what it used to be, but I have no trouble recalling how moved I was listening to Emilio DeGrazia’s appreciation of Thornton Wilder in the fall of 2011. He delivered his remarks at the Word Players Theatre in Rochester, Minnesota, his appearance tied into that stage’s imaginatively conceived Wilder Short Play Festival. What moved me of course was the passion with which DeGrazia spoke about the values in Thornton Wilder’s works for his own life as well as for the world—especially for the world—beyond the academy. Whatever one’s views of DeGrazia’s opinions, I am confident that readers of his piece will be struck by the range of issues and topics he raises in this passionate commentary on Thornton Wilder’s long and successful career of “showmanship” and “Man Thinking.”
I personally view DeGrazia’s appreciation as a highly entertaining and wonderfully thoughtful verbal fireworks display, and “Thornton Wilder: Why Here? Why Now?” has never been far from my desk. When I become discouraged with transgressions by publishers, agents, scholars, writers, dramatists, the public, and my own idiotic mistakes, I read Emilio DeGrazia and I feel better. His words, in short, remain for me as provocative and invigorating as when he spoke them more than a decade ago in Rochester. I am grateful that the editors of the Thornton Wilder Journal find DeGrazia’s fireworks a still fresh and useful device for soliciting commentary about Thornton Wilder’s place and value in our “here and now.” Emilio DeGrazia deserves the last word: all thanks to him for discovering Wilder and for his permission to publish his findings.
A. Tappan Wilder
A. TAPPAN WILDER, Thornton Wilder’s nephew, served as the Literary Executor of the Wilder Estate from 1995 through 2023. He is the co-editor of The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder: Volume I (1997) and the editor of The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder: Volume II (1998). He has also contributed afterwords to the HarperPerennial reprintings of Wilder’s novels and plays.
I want to thank Thornton Wilder for having the good sense to put pen to paper in such meaningful ways. In doing so he has passed on a legacy of plays, playlets, novels, and commentaries that resonate with as much passionate intelligence today as they did decades ago when he gave them, like gifts, to the world and to me, now, personally. I’m here to speak about him, but as I entered into my dialogue with his works, I found him speaking not only to me but for me.
To most Americans the word “amateur” conjures something to do with sports. Terms like “amateur football player” carry a certain oxymoronic weight that can stigmatize men who remain boys for life. But in French the word “amateur” more properly and literally means “lover”—of wine, men, women, song, food, or any other good thing. I confess to never having had a professional interest in Thornton Wilder during any of the almost four decades I taught literature at the college level. I didn’t know enough about Wilder to care. But I am now a genuine amateur, a lover of Mr. Wilder’s considerable accomplishment as an author of American literature.
Until just months ago I really hadn’t read much of his work. Decades ago I too read and liked his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and I had seen Our Town as a high school kid. But for years Mr. Wilder’s seven novels, full-length plays, playlets, collections of essays, and commentaries took their place on crowded library shelves, elbowed out of view by invading hordes of new books, many of which made up for their lack of manners, morals, and learning by showing off their flash, flesh, and foolishness. In what are called, ominously, the “canon wars”—those brutal battles fought behind university doors over what books deserve to live or die (that is, be read, assigned, remembered, and, ahem, valued)—Mr. Wilder’s books stood silently apart, like conscientious objectors who take a longer view of the battles being fought.
To qualify myself for this talk I went back to The Bridge of San Luis Rey and I immediately saw why it struck such a strong chord as a best-seller in 1927, a time when the Danielle Steels, Tom Clancys, and John Grishams would not have had a chance to be at the top of the charts. Then I dove into The Eighth Day, and it immediately carried me away. I’ll be frank: I’m old enough now to accuse most of the books I read of wasting the little time I have left. I loved The Eighth Day, a novel that sat untouched on my shelves for forty years. I wasn’t surprised to learn, on finishing it, that it had won the National Book Award. Then came the playlets, some essays, and the full-length plays, Our Town again, The Skin of Our Teeth, The Matchmaker, and, perhaps the best of all, the relatively unknown The Alcestiad, a play that is maybe too good to be fully appreciated by a contemporary audience looking for easy entertainment. I’m not done reading and rereading Mr. Wilder, and I’m developing a deeper admiration and respect for what I find in him.
But why here—and why now? What recommends Mr. Wilder’s works to us here and now? We could make a narrow claim: he’s one of us, a Midwesterner, who properly belongs here in Rochester, Minnesota, because he was born nearby—though it’s a highway I-90 stretch—in Madison, Wisconsin. But the family left Madison when he was young. During his boyhood he spent time in China, and then Berkeley, California, and from there he went on to college at Oberlin, then to Yale. He studied at the American Academy in Rome, and then taught at the elite Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. He went to Princeton for graduate work, and three novels and some short plays later began to teach at the University of Chicago. There he also taught in the university’s program for the community, an experience that put him in touch with ordinary people in a wider world. Understandably, then, his journeys from place to place exposed him to the common folk of “our town.” Is Wilder one of us? Does he speak to and for us here, in our town, a place like Rochester, Minnesota?
To someone from Rochester, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the town of Our Town, seems a long way from the Midwest, and closer by far to Yale and Lawrenceville than to Madison, Wisconsin. How do we account for the fact that the play still strikes a chord in us and perpetually renews itself on big-city and small-town stages all over the U.S.? The answer, I think, is that Our Town is not somebody else’s town; it is “our” town, a place teeming with familiarly representative people in any city or town, who, in making the daily rounds of their particular lives, perform important routines and rituals that are common to the greater part of humanity. Our town is a fictively credible place where the general functions of community are acted out: birth, work, daily life, marriage, process, change, death, and the greatest of these, love.
In his commentary, “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” Wilder observes that theater addresses what he calls “the group-mind” and that theater’s existence depends on “a crowd,” an audience (Collected Plays 694, 698). A play, unlike a poem or novel read in privacy, has the potential to achieve the ritual power we associate with public festivals. Wilder, who studied the Greeks and Romans, knew that the works of the Greek dramatists were part of annual sacred rites established in honor of Dionysus, god of fertility, the sap of life. How challenged Wilder must have felt having a sense of theater’s sacred past in mind as he saw modern times evolving into the entertainment age. How does a serious playwright resist the trivialization and vulgarization that sell? Although the Broadway musical and then the movie Hello, Dolly!, adapted from his play The Matchmaker, enjoy ongoing box-office success, what seems perfectly consistent throughout Wilder’s career as a writer is that he aimed for (in his words) “not a lowering of standards” but rather “a broadening of the fields of interest” (699). As a writer he had to balance conflicting claims—those made on him by his search for the general truths of humanity, and those made by what he termed the specific “circumstantial illustration” of the general truth. “When you emphasize place in the theater,” he said—in his “Preface to Three Plays”—”you drag down and limit and harness time to it” (685).
So why bother about Thornton Wilder here in Rochester now? Because Grover’s Corners, or any other place in a Wilder novel or play, is too small if we can’t see how Wilder saw us living in it too, and today rather than in some fictional yesterday. The Stage Manager begins Act 3 of Our Town with a philosophic monologue:
We all know that something is eternal. . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. . . . There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. (Collected Plays 196, 197)
“Eternal” is an endlessly enigmatic word for me, but we get the Stage Manager’s drift. If Our Town were staged in Montreal or Afghanistan or El Salvador we would hear different languages, see different costumes on stage, and perhaps feel out of place. But underneath the externals we would see important aspects of our true selves. “Let’s look at one another,” Emily says (with urgency) near the end of the play (Collected Plays 206). The moralist in Wilder was also the quiet visionary, always mindful of how true vision focuses on a common humanity that goes way back in time.
To what standards do we hold great works of art? Most people would say none, please, preferring to hide behind the mindless cliché that truth and beauty are both subjective and relative—“in the eye of the beholder.” I disagree, and I think Wilder would agree with me. What I see in his work generally is the application and satisfaction of criteria pervasive in the serious literature Wilder studied for years—criteria summed up in four simple words: breadth, depth, and what George Bernard Shaw called heat and light:
Breadth: We want the work of art to be about more than a single self in a singular place. We want the work to be about “our town.”
Depth: We want the work of art to go in and down—to explore the morass of psychology, philosophy, sexuality, the unconscious, madness even.
Heat: The work of art should make us feel deeply—pity and terror in tragedy, sympathy and community in comedy, an existential sense of the absurd in farce. We want the work driven by what Shaw called “moral passion.”
Light: A great work of art turns the lights on in our minds—to what we have never known and what we should not have forgotten. Through a great work of art our minds are born again.
Read or re-read any Wilder work and judge it against these four criteria. I think you’ll be impressed by how many points he scores.
It is also useful to consider the identities Wilder had available to assert and meld as he sat down to write. His active writing life touched six decades—from the pre– and post–World War I eras to the Depression and World War II, then to the 1950s and into the 1960s (and even the 1970s). Wilder’s mind had to wrap itself around the unspeakable violence of several wars, the privations of the Depression, the affluence living close to the privation, the invention, as Antrobus would have it, of the “wheel” (or automobile), the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, the advent of radio, the talkies, TV, and the rise of Hollywood as a cultural force. The Wilder who lived—in his mind—in the little cow town called Grover’s Corners was no longer the plain-folks, small-town American. Like my parents and many of us trying to keep up with unprecedented changes, we see history speeding up in strange and wonderful ways. We look at the cliché that history repeats itself with hope and dread—hope that “things will come round again” to stable and natural routines, while dreading that our terrible technologies and wars will explode their terrible powers and spiral out of control. Wilder saw these dilemmas coming on and kept asking himself, Who am I, and who are we, as Americans, and where are we going, and why? His framing of these questions even decades ago is still relevant to us here and now.
Given the alarming historical changes that Wilder experienced in his most creative decades, what identities—let’s call them “energies”—did Wilder stir into the alchemical stew of his writing?
First is “Man Thinking.” I take this phrase directly from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar.” For Wilder was an artist-thinker. He spent hours, weeks, years in books and libraries. He was, pardon the word, an “intellectual,” well read in the classics, mythology, philosophy, politics, religion, Freud, and creative literature. He was a teacher. He had an active, curious, insistent mind.
Second, paying homage to the tradition passed on by many nineteenth-century intellectuals, he was a moralist. Deeply embedded in him was what I earlier referred to as “moral passion.” He was acutely aware of, and troubled by, the Christian culture all around him, and his writing reflects his search for moral order in light of the ambiguities of this tradition. Main characters in all his major works seek for moral balance and clarity. Though his Caesar, in The Ides of March, has his flaws, he is, according to an old actress, Cytheris (who knows him in more than a biblical sense), a teacher, and “the essence of what he has to teach is moral, is responsibility. . . . He assumes that all men are both teachers and voracious learners; that everyone is vibrant with moral life. [And] Women are more subtle teachers than men” (Bridge 561, 562).
The teacher-moralist in Wilder had to function in the real world. Wilder’s profession as playwright required him to be showman-shaman, too. In his “Some Thoughts on Playwriting,” Wilder freely acknowledges that a stage production is “a world of pretense,” “a permitted lie” (Collected Plays 700), an artifice for “a crowd” (698), us, the mass public audience. The stage production “values” of commercial theater require that “Man Thinking,” the intellectual and moralist, too, has to endure the artifice that stage production requires—the costumes and makeup calculated to stimulate, the lights turned high or low, the actors’ lines recited from memory on a painted set. As a writer trying to reach “a crowd” he had to subject the naked truths of his written texts to the “permitted lies” deftly showcased by producers and directors trying to entertain and pay the bills.
Finally, Thornton Wilder was a modernist. If the intellectual in him was rooted in nineteenth-century habits of mind, he also lived in the world of Picasso, Dali, Einstein, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein—all of them confounding traditional lines of thought and art while passionately reconfiguring new ways of looking at the world. Wilder was mindful of the need to be not merely original but meaningfully experimental.
Did he assume these four identities easily? I think not. They were not masks he could choose to wear or not wear. They were all part of who he deeply was. According to his sister Isabel, he “always believed firmly that a wastebasket was a writer’s best friend” (Short Plays: Volume II 165), and this comment makes good sense coming from a writer who actually struggled to make his writing properly reflect the energies that compelled him to make good art. To revise is to re-envision. To re-envision is required when life is defined by change. It also prevents the hardening of intellectual arteries that makes dogmatic moralists of us, and fanatic extremists. Re-envisioning is the way the doors of freedom are kept open. Where’s that wastebasket?
What were some of the conflicts Wilder faced, and what were the questions he asked himself as he sat there staring at the blank page, with the wastebasket within arm’s reach?
What I call “Man Thinking,” the moralist-intellectual, had what Wilder called the “academic stink,” the “smell of professor and historian,” “the hated didactic formal-symbolic strain” (Short Plays: Volume II 145). His life was maybe dull compared to Hemingway’s, for he spent so much of it in classrooms and libraries. Can reading philosophy or archaeology compete with deep-sea fishing or killing lions in Africa? I’m sure he looked up bleary-eyed from his midnight toil over a good book to ask: Is Thornton Wilder a wild enough man, or is he a dull boy? Has he lived intensely enough to write intensely good enough novels and plays?
And he probably asked himself this too: The showmanship, the shaman requirements of the writer of stage productions—do these shame or belittle me? The makeup, playacting, and paint—do they trivialize all those years of conscientious study spent in libraries? Do I lend myself to the purposes of kitsch—the vulgar spectacles used to such advantage by fascist regimes as a way of distracting the throng, giving the masses empty entertainment to distance them from the dirty work going on in the concentration camps and office cubicles of bureaucracies?
And doubtless he wondered, Do I preach too much? Ought I to preach in my plays, slip sermons into the speeches my characters make? Shouldn’t plays just be playful? With pulpit preachers and political demagogues inflicting their sense of moral superiority on the “crowd,” and with Experimental artists obscuring their agendas in their works, Wilder no doubt struggled with the problem of how to communicate his moral intentions in ways that were at once entertaining, credible, and true to his vision.
And what kind of modernist would he be—if modernist at all? Would he write a novel or play as incomprehensible as Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and thereby remove himself far above the accessible middle ground of the ordinary smart reader or audience? How deeply would he scratch the itch for originality that seemed to be the outward and visible sign that one belonged in the new, exciting, often bizarre, showy and somewhat irrelevant world of much twentieth-century art?
With these forces, energies, nagging him, “Man Thinking” had a lot to think about. How best to reconcile—or reject—the claims these forces were making on his work? How best incorporate them into organic relationship authenticating the depth and complexity of their source? How does a man of intellectual integrity validate his commitment to the studious reading and writing of books? John Guare, in his introduction to Volume I of The Collected Short Plays, nicely explains it to us: “Wilder found his wilderness, his running off to sea, his trip up the Amazon, his polar expedition, his Spanish civil war in the library” (xxi).
In the syntax of sentences he found life’s rhythms; in the imagery of words he found pictures worth a thousand words; in metaphor he found the meaning of myth and ritual. In the musty odor of books he picked up the scents of good life that often leave men of action behind. There Wilder would discover and concentrate what he called the “tireless awareness of things” that he makes the subject matter of his work (Short Plays: Volume II 6).
We find the moralist, too, but as person rather than as preacher. In his novels the moralist, as omniscient narrator, speaks too frankly and flatly to sound like God. In the dramas the moralist sometimes has a theater gig, notably as the Stage Manager. We rather take to what he and many of his wonderfully resilient, intelligent, and outspoken women say because we rather like and respect them a lot.
And the showman-shaman—what runs through his mind as Wilder the intellectual-moralist walks past the glitter of Broadway lights toward the glare and artificial spectacle of the theater life? Does he spend nights conjuring stage tricks that will make his mind and morals saleable, profitable? In his “Preface to Three Plays” he complains about the theater of his times: It’s “evasive” and “soothing” (Collected Plays 683), by which I’m sure he means merely distracting and entertaining, unwilling to confront important issues of the times. Are we surprised, then, to encounter so little stage machinery in Our Town, where the dramatic impulse is triggered not by special effects but by imagination’s ability to conjure what matters most, the inner actions and attitudes of the town and its inhabitants? How tempting it must have been for Wilder to create more kitsch, and how lucrative. How fortunate that the “Man Thinking” and moralist in him would not allow him to cheapen his work.
But what about The Skin of Our Teeth? In that play we enter an absurd world in which a main character has invented the wheel and alphabet, and where Sabina grunts as she tugs on a rope that literally moves the walls of the set. There’s a lot of fakery and fun, but not a moment’s foolishness. It’s in this play where we meet Wilder the modernist letting himself go, confronting, in 1942, the horrific facts of World War II with the deadly seriousness of a hilarious grim-faced clown. “And if I laugh at any mortal thing,” Wilder seems to say with Lord Byron, “’tis that I may not cry” (504).
How is Wilder—so conventionally tame in Our Town, and as intellectually moral as many stuffy nineteenth-century philosophers—how is Wilder also a wild modernist?
First, he is a metafictionist. That is, like Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov and John Barth and eternally new old-fashioned writers like Herman Melville, Wilder confronts the fact that we are made of the stuff of stories, and that, as the psychologist Jerome Bruner concluded at the end of a long career quest, we live and die by the stories we tell each other and about ourselves. So we find in Wilder self-conscious narratives that are on some level about the narrative process itself and its effects on us. His dramas are stage-managed constructs, and by making a stage manager a main character he has the courage to complicate our view of the world by drawing attention to its essentially fictive nature. Do we want the truth about “our town”? Then we have to confront the fact that it’s an imaginative construct—like a play. This view of life confounds the single-minded moralists, the dogmatists, intent on imprisoning the human imagination in its narrow-minded cells.
Wilder is modernist too in his attempt to address his art to the essentially absurd in life. The Skin of Our Teeth, so funny and fun, gives us a kaleidoscopic view of the human condition—its heroic Promethean ambitions, the tragic results of the greatest human inventions, the foolishness lurking inside good intentions, our bumbling along as a species toward heaven knows where. It’s 1942 in a world at war—and we’ll laugh away our deep sorrow and muddle along, get by, by the skin of our teeth, all of us silly, and decent heroes and strong heroines all. This sense of the absurd, articulated more explicitly by Camus, Wilder put on the stage as a fictive construct with which a whole generation could identify. Joseph Heller, whose World War II novel Catch-22 still resonates so powerfully with us today, must have known and loved the play.
Wilder the thinker-moralist is also modernist in his understanding of the power of suggestion. The canvases on which his dramas take place are seldom devoid of the broad brushstrokes of statement. Stage managers and main characters speak directly to us, but behind the speeches are often more subtle brushstrokes that hint at complex backgrounds, concepts, and bold understandings—call it humane learning. I would call many of his works, particularly some of the playlets, examples of figurative expressionism. Meaning in the playlets comes via indirection and hints. Unlike bold statements, which are confident and often ego-driven, calculated to make war, not love, hints and suggestions operate subversively to undermine cliché, propaganda, and dogmatism.
I would be remiss in ignoring what I find the most important modernist feature of Wilder’s work: his celebration of women and his refusal to marginalize them into their traditional subservient roles. Wilder had a complex view of gender that he posits through suggestions that subvert the stereotypes, and his respect for strong, smart women is consistent in his work. Listen to what just one has to say, Mrs. Antrobus, in The Skin of Our Teeth:
Well, just to have known this house is to have seen the idea of what we can do someday if we keep our wits about us. Too many people have suffered and died for my children for us to start reneging now. So we’ll start putting this house to rights. (Collected Plays 275)
Years of learning went into this little speech, not the least of which is Wilder’s understanding that the oppression of women goes back to ancient times, to its mythic expression in examples like Alcestis, and that this oppression, perhaps more so than any other, is at the bottom of many of the world’s problems, as we too well know today.
Finally, a few more words about the playlets. I see them too as modernist—the attempt to meld plays and poems. Sadly lacking in most twentieth-century poems is a strong narrative line. The modernist poem is small and relies for its power on our attentiveness to its suggestiveness. Unlike the traditional drama—which conforms to Freytag’s Triangle of rising action, climax and falling action—the modern poem’s narrative, if it has one at all, zeroes in on a small concentrated moment. Does Wilder’s fascination with the playlet reflect his suspicion that the shape of the traditional drama is not true to life—that our lives do not follow tidy dramatic arcs but rather are defined by our “now” moments, the disconnected and anti-climactic episodes that often happen to us circumstantially? Wilder, I think, was experimenting with the playlets to discover forms of drama more in tune with the nuanced and often nonlinear forms of modern poetry.
I conclude by offering this final thought. The character Death, in Wilder’s last and most profound play, The Alcestiad, says this: “When the gods come near to men, sooner or later someone is killed” (Collected Plays 372). In her foreword to the play, Wilder’s younger sister Isabel tells us that Thornton was convinced of the “extreme difficulty of any dialogue between heaven and earth” (Short Plays: Volume II 159). Wilder, not a nihilist and always in search of moral order, had a “terror of the Absolute” (147). All our reaching for truth and goodness, all our idealizing, all our technologies that promise to make us godlike, all our presumption to know the will of God—all these, Wilder suggests, can lead to extremes and tragic falls. If he refuses to point us toward some impossible heaven or abandon us in some existentialist pit of despair, where do we find his “eternal”—call it God, if we must? Here, down-to-earth, Wilder would say, in “our town.”
And if humane learning and the self-government necessary to democracy are to survive, we would have a lot to learn by welcoming Thornton Wilder’s works into our consciousness.
