Of all the characteristics which set Thornton Wilder apart from the other great American writers of his generation and which make him something of an odd man out, it is his unexpected serenity which most unsettles. Even when dealing with tragic events, he is possessed of a decided equanimity. The shock of such events—a collapsing bridge in eighteenth-century Peru or (no less harrowing) a young girl’s twelfth birthday revisited from beyond the grave in Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire—is always captured from a vastly wider, indeed, a cosmic, perspective. The effect, curiously enough, is to bring those calamitous moments closer, to make them painfully familiar, as though they formed part of our own experience.
Such serenity has nothing to do with mere cheerfulness (though Wilder seems to have been a bracingly cheerful man), nor with aloofness (Wilder loved life with enormous gusto), nor with some specious, peculiarly American “optimism” (which he lampooned with mischievous affection). Nor is Wilder’s serenity a matter of bland indifference. It is a tragic stance. It represents an acceptance of the ultimate dismantling of all our dreams, expectations, and most fervent longings; at the same time, it holds these up close, cherishing them as momentary flickerings of significance, the way children cup fireflies in delighted hands. It is a stance which brings with it the recognition that, though we lose everything, the lives lived, the love given and received, confer a value beyond loss.
In the
