{"id":78931,"date":"1984-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1984-01-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-skin-of-his-teeth\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:15:34","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:15:34","slug":"the-skin-of-his-teeth","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/the-skin-of-his-teeth\/","title":{"rendered":"The skin of his teeth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span> cannot believe that the reputation of Thornton Wilder, either as a novelist or as a playwright, has not suffered a greater diminution than Gilbert Harrison has implied by writing Wilder\u2019s biography.<\/a>[1]<\/a> We should be grateful that he has done so. There is no necessary connection between the rank of a writer\u2019s professional achievement and the interest attaching to his day-by-day existence. Harrison has given Wilder\u2019s life a unique interest simply by organizing its sequences with copious documentation, notably from Wilder\u2019s personal correspondence. As a result, Harrison has uncovered, very far from his intention, I\u2019m sure, a dumbfoundingly consistent history of self-concealment.<\/p>\n

Those who think of Wilder as principally the author of that bare-stage, bare-language attempt to find big meanings in limited circumstance, Our Town<\/em> (1938), will need the reminder that Wilder had made an extraordinarily successful debut as a stylist in prose fiction twelve years earlier, with a curious pastiche, The Cabala<\/em>, (the final version of what had first been entitled Memoirs of a Roman Student<\/em>). Past and present overlap in this self-consciously erudite fable of one year in the Eternal City centered on a handful of somewhat decadent characters who Wilder claimed were inspired less by his firsthand observations in Italy than by his reading of Proust, La Bruy\u00e8re, Saint-Simon, Thomas Mann, and Lytton Strachey. (It became Wilder\u2019s custom to call attention to the scope of his researches by the pretense of modestly exposing his indebtedness.) Considering that the puritan hero, returning to the United States, exchanges imaginary dialogue with Virgil, who tells him that Rome is dying and he should \u201cseek out some city that is young,\u201d we can safely add Dante and Henry James to Wilder\u2019s probable sources.<\/p>\n

Critical approbation was unanimous at home.<\/p>\n

Critical approbation was unanimous at home. In the fervor of the Twenties, when the European-American dialectic was a crucial event for so many potential expatriates, The Cabala<\/em> satisfied an urban need for the worldly European touch, leavened with the moral corrective implicit in the exile\u2019s return. For some years, a terminal sentence in this novel was as widely quoted as the famous last sentence of The Great Gatsby<\/em>: \u201cThe shimmering ghost [of Virgil] faded before the stars, and the engines beneath me pounded eagerly toward the New World and the last and greatest of all cities.\u201d This resonant image encouraged readers with its conviction of finality and discovery, with its rejection of nostalgia for the Old World and loyalty to the pristine values of the New.<\/p>\n

Any such identification of the book\u2019s hero with its author was not, however, justified in the sequel. Wilder\u2019s repudiation of Europe and the past was more sententious than authentic; before long he was re-crossing the Atlantic for another Grand Tour, establishing a pattern to which he constantly returned: beginning a literary project in settled surroundings, then, for reasons which always presented themselves as plausible, escaping to one place after another more conducive to absolute concentration. In the summer of 1926, after publication of The Cabala<\/em>, he began writing The Bridge of San Luis Rey<\/em> at the MacDowell Colony; but by September, in need of more money than he was expecting from royalties of The Cabala<\/em>, he accepted a well-paid commission to chaperon Andrew Townson, a young proto-student in need of culture, on a tour of European cities. With his unwilling charge in tow, Wilder visited not only cathedrals by the dozen but also a host of literary celebrities, in London, Oxford, Berlin, Rome, and Munich, all the while experiencing twinges of guilt for his postponement of Bridge<\/em>, whose Peruvian characters were shadowing his spare moments. In Munich, the completely bored young Townson fled his avuncular presence, which of course meant for Wilder the end of the Townson funds on which he had been traveling.<\/p>\n

From Paris, Wilder managed to squeeze a shamefully inadequate advance for the partly written Bridge<\/em> from his publisher, Boni. Miserably homesick, he wrote his mother that his pension<\/em> was uncomfortable, the French had no soul, American compatriots were self-sufficient, and if Mother didn\u2019t love him he would throw himself into a river or an ocean or a fire (Harrison\u2019s paraphrase). \u201cI am not married and you\u2019re all I\u2019ve got. I\u2019m lonesome. That\u2019s all. I shall either drink and drink and drink, or come home. Which will you have?\u201d That he neither drank and drank and drank nor, just yet, went home Harrison assures us. \u201cInstead, he took the next train to the Riviera for a Christmas holiday at the Pension Saramantel in Juan-les-Pins\u201d with a group of American Oxonians. In that same letter he had assured Mother that he was beginning to understand the conditions under which he could best work: \u201cresidence under foreign skies among few or casual friends is not one of them.\u201d \u201cA remarkable statement,\u201d Harrison observes, \u201cgiven that those were precisely the conditions under which much of his best work was done.\u201d<\/p>\n

Down the years, Wilder recapitulated with variations this flight and retreat, with increasing means for doing so elaborately. Without the excuse of being imminently broke in Paris or any other European capital (his income from best-selling novels and plays was staggering), he repeated the emergency patriotism of his 1927 complaint and his renunciation of the international scene. Even so, the ecstatic and gossipy passages in the letters and journals, helpfully quoted by Harrison, are far more abundant than the countermands with which Wilder periodically put the brake on himself, as if it were sinful to enjoy without remorse the world of affluence, talent, and the eternal supper party. Beyond a point, Wilder could not very well predicate an opulent Epicurean Europe by contrast with an anonymous, middle-income America, the less so as he was wined and dined and applauded at a comparable social level in the United States. (Harrison\u2019s chapter, \u201cHappy Years,\u201d allows us to infer that Wilder knew no one who wasn\u2019t in the Chicago social register or the international Who\u2019s Who<\/em>). Yet, his stock evasion did tend to reserve America for the fundamental virtues of a provincial, anti-intellectual setting that in fact he had never inhabited.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>t becomes increasingly difficult to decide which of Wilder\u2019s protests on this subject has in it a grain of candor. His adulation of Gertrude Stein (his Mother-away-from-Mother) may be one of them, but his enlisting her in a private conflict he had already settled or never seriously suffered from is, if comical, one of his least authentic exercises in flattery. At the height of his Stein-Toklas worship, he wrote to her, following their summer visit together in the Haute-Savoie, that he was now mad<\/em> about America! \u201c[And] you did that to me\u2014my country, \u2019tis of thee. I always knew I loved it, but I never knew I loved it like this. Every Child\u2019s restaurant, every shoe-blacking parlor. I don\u2019t feel as if I ever had to leave it again. I was born into the best country in the world. Gertrude told me so.\u201d Lost on him, apparently, was the irony that he had learned love of country from a professional expatriate. And he chose not to remember that eight years had passed since he had accepted America on the persuasive recommendation of Virgil redivivus<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Far from being inspired by the great Gertrude, his transition in literature from the relatively exotic worlds of The Cabala<\/em>, The Bridge of San Luis Rey<\/em>, and The Woman of Andros<\/em> to the dining rooms and trains, if not the blacking parlors, of America was under way by 1930 with his mini-versions of Our Town<\/em>, the one-act plays Happy Journey from Camden to Trenton<\/em>, Pullman Car Hiawatha<\/em>, and others. The novel Heaven\u2019s My Destination<\/em> had its genesis in 1932, was published in 1935, and was instantly a prodigious success, commercially and with influential critics (such as Edmund Wilson and Henry Seidel Canby). Scarcely a celebration of the America that had fathered the rhetoric of his prodigal-son idealism, this work is rather a satirical treatment. George Brush, a Salvationist textbook salesman, personifies \u201ca Short History of the American Mind raised by exaggeration into humor: Idealistic but unclear; really religious, but badly educated in religion.\u201d That was only one of many explanations offered by Wilder himself. In time he came to think of the book as a failure because he had intended it to serve as a hope \u201cthat a wise government would repair the appalling condition into which the country had [sunk].\u201d An astonishing afterthought! certainly far from the account he had imparted earlier to Sigmund Freud (whom he had met in Vienna). To him he described the work as satirical because Freud had asked why on earth he wanted to write about an American religious fanatic: a subject which could not be treated poetically. No American critic at the time seems to have shared Wilder\u2019s belief that he had written a political reform novel; perhaps this is why Wilder complained that everyone had misunderstood him. If they had, it must be one of the most lucrative misunderstandings on record. That Heaven\u2019s My Destination<\/em> sold a total of 187,318 copies (hardcover and paperback combined) by 1965 and was translated into eight languages including Punjabi is as mysterious to me as the 1935 ovation and Gilbert Harrison\u2019s present reluctance to join the unimpressed minority. Having tried in vain to reread it without skipping (I don\u2019t find the Western-highway America convincingly specified and George Brush is for me too boring to be funny), I favor Freud\u2019s opinion above all others.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>e can infer (some of us can recall) that the acclaim given to Our Town<\/em> is explainable by the contingency of its debut in 1938 (the year of Munich). Employing \u201cGrover\u2019s Corners, New Hampshire,\u201d as a microcosm of community, Wilder appealed to the isolationist sentiment of many Americans for whom the wickedness of all those complicated Europeans and their burden of history invoked a reactionary allegiance to safe, sound, and indigenous limits, where \u201cEurope\u201d is confined to \u201cPolish Town across the tracks\u201d (in the words of the Stage Manager who explains the layout of the empty stage). As reassuring as the circumscribed social geography was the shortcut staging (Wilder\u2019s disingenuous version of the Noh play or the theater of Moli\u00e8re, which he had introduced in his one-act pieces): a few chairs and benches did duty for buildings or cemeteries, arched trellises were pushed onto the stage for garden settings, and in dumb-show the actors scatter imaginary food from imaginary aprons to imaginary chickens, a boy tosses a ball to \u201cdizzying heights,\u201d bumps into \u201can Old Lady invisible to us,\u201d and the Stage Manager, relentlessly arch, concludes the first act with, \u201cThat\u2019s the end of the First Act, friends. You can go and smoke now, those that smoke.\u201d (Today, he could make this more excruciating by throwing in a warning from the Surgeon General.)<\/p>\n

Nothing happens in this play. Oh, to be sure, birth, the penultimate hurdles, and death: these are narrated, rather than dramatized, by the Stage Manager, and the generic scheme of the author was of course fatal to any individualizing of character. Nobody visibly suffers, nobody breaks down, nobody is passionate, wicked, or remorseful. Emily, who carries as much of the story as can be endowed with that substantive, dies and returns to earth but declines to stay because, in limbo, she has come to understand that everything has its place in the sequence of eternity; she has been loved and love conquers all regrets for the unlived life. While I realize that a play finally comes alive in the theater<\/em>, through the impact of its personalities, I do think it needs paraphrasable content more sanguinary than this.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>f you couple Heaven\u2019s My Destination<\/em> with Our Town<\/em> you will have Wilder\u2019s problem (as a writer on America) in simplified, if dual, form. In his letters and journals, he often expressed, with admirable impartiality, his confidence in the essential advantages of democratic America. When he attempted to embody his confidence in an imaginative statement, such as the novel or play, the impulse to ridicule became irrepressible. And the only alternative to such an attitude, on the score of which he felt guilty, was the opposite one, that of complete sentimental acceptance. Whatever else, these alternatives readily betray the parental division in Wilder\u2019s life. His father, Amos Parker Wilder, as he appears in the view supplied by Harrison\u2019s inclusion of his letters, was a pious chatterbox. Thornton\u2019s reaction to his sermonizing correspondence (when his father was in China with the American Consulate and Wilder was in America or in Europe with his mother) appears on the surface to have been even-tempered and forbearing, but resentment was very likely deeper than toleration.<\/p>\n

Consequently, he turned to his mother, (who was no less incompatible with Amos Parker) for the understanding which he failed to get from the father figure. Against his more conscious inclination, however\u2014a common phenomenon\u2014he was impressed by the vein of iron in the puritan overseer of his childhood and youth. He never rid himself of the rage to moralize\u2014he tamed it with exposure to the Sybaris of theater, cafe talk, and the world of art\u2014and he never abandoned the lurking orthodoxy imposed on him by the Consul General at Shanghai, who had urged him to read and mark well The Pilgrim\u2019s Progress<\/em> and The Life of John Wesley<\/em> when he was thirteen. At the same time unable\u2014I\u2019d guess unwilling\u2014to find emotional reciprocity with any woman save his mother and his sister, he adopted in his credo all those sublimations of carnality which crop up in his literature, from The Bridge of San Luis Rey<\/em> (much talk of transcendence of death by love) to Theophilus North<\/em>, in which the dialogue suggests that its author had no conception of how men and women talk to one another under stress of emotion.<\/p>\n

If Heaven\u2019s My Destination<\/em> is in some ways a rebuke to Wilder\u2019s father or a parody of what remained in himself of<\/em> Father, no wonder he contradicted every outside opinion that came too close for comfort. Our Town<\/em> as surely absolved him from all suspicion of depreciating the grassroots American community and was well within the ambience of Mother\u2019s Day. But it was in the great first act of The Skin of Our Teeth<\/em> that Wilder found the equilibrium that illustrates his finest gift. Up to a point, and speaking dramaturgically, it resembles Our Town<\/em>: a skeletal and generalized subject staged without respect for the realistic convention. (As Euripidean voice, an Announcer takes the place of Our Town<\/em>\u2019s Stage Manager, and Wilder\u2019s script directions recommend a screen on the front curtain for projection of news and of substitutes for scenery.) The Skin of Our Teeth<\/em>, as its author described it, is \u201ca comedy about an Excelsior, New Jersey suburbanite, George Antrobus, his wife and two children with their maid Sabina [all 5,000 years old], how they survive fire, pestilence, the seven-year locusts, the ice age, the black pox and the double feature, a dozen wars and as many depressions.\u201d The first act, notably lighthearted, as perfect in its way as that of Our Town<\/em> is negligible, opens with an announcement that The Society for Affirming the End of the World has, after special session, postponed the event for twenty-four hours. And this tone is sustained with greater ease than the whimsies of the earlier play. The wit is cosmopolitan, the Antrobus family is treated far less sparingly than the inhabitants of Grover\u2019s Corners, and Wilder\u2019s device of having the characters complain of their entrapment by the author is often quite comical.<\/p>\n

\n

Mrs. Antrobus<\/em> (to the maid): You\u2019ve let the fire go out!\u2014have you milked the mammoth?
\nSabina<\/em>: I don\u2019t understand a word of this play.\u2014Yes, I\u2019ve milked the mammoth.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

At the end of the act, with the Ice Age upon them, Sabina comes to the footlights and begs the audience: \u201cWill you please start handing up your chairs? We\u2019ll need everything for this fire. Save the human race. (In the back of the auditorium, the sound of chairs being ripped up . . . .) Pass up your chairs, everybody. Save the human race.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the play could have ended there, it would deserve the adulation which has been addressed to the whole . . .<\/p>\n

If the play could have ended there, it would deserve the adulation which has been addressed to the whole; the episode is one of the most brilliant comic events in the American theater. Wilder had said in a one-act form all he had to say under the aspect of comedy about our compressed fears and the survival of the divine average. But after the first act, invention failed him and with it, drastically, the corroborative wit. The Atlantic City second act is appreciably less hilarious, the third is a disaster, losing all effect of spontaneity as it incredibly becomes a message from the author, monumentally awkward in those combative passages between Antrobus and his son, a gauche stand-in for the eternal Cain. Somewhere between the acts, Wilder had lost his ear.<\/p>\n

\n

Antrobus<\/em> (to his son): How can you make a world for people to live in, unless you\u2019ve first put order in yourself? Mark my words: I shall continue fighting you until my last breath as long as you mix up your idea of liberty with your idea of hogging everything for yourself. I shall have no pity on you. I shall pursue you to the far corners of the earth . . . .<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

It gets even worse, closing with an antiphonal in which Aristotle, Spinoza, and the Book of Genesis are solemnly quoted. Then, much too late to save anything, Sabina\u2019s familiar travesty from the first act returns: \u201cOh, oh, oh. Six o\u2019clock and the master not home yet. Pray God nothing serious has happened to him crossing the Hudson River . . .\u201d<\/p>\n

W<\/span>idler had lost more than his ear between the acts of this play. Never again was he to express in fiction or on stage the delicate balance that would rescue his work from over-seriousness or uncomfortable drollery. To the end of his days, with undiscouraged zest, it must be admitted, he announced high-sounding synopses with universal themes which, when written, if<\/em> written, fell dismayingly short of the great unveilings he had promised. With the wisdom conferred by hindsight we can see now that he was consistently evading the deeper insights that visited him as he wrote his journals and his confidential letters. And in 1950 he enacted the grand climax of all those pleasurable but at bottom frantic sorties into Europe which he had so often embarked upon. On this occasion he acknowledged to himself, in his journal, that he was probably guilty of a \u201cfalse relation\u201d he hadn\u2019t adequately probed: \u201cthat curious problem as to whether in many of my associations I am truly fond of people or merely indulging in self-approbation for the interest I take in them.\u201d He sounds as if he had resolved to cry halt to the gregarious life and settle down so that he could complete an unfinished play (The Emporium<\/em>). \u201cIf the autonomy of the inner man were only absolute,\u201d exclaims Harrison. \u201cThe reality was quite different.\u201d And all but incredible.<\/p>\n

The first eight weeks of 1950, readings and talks in and around New Haven, Princeton, New York, Washington, and Vassar were followed by a trip to Bermuda. By Harrison\u2019s account, by March he had<\/p>\n

\n

done The Hague and Amsterdam, been overwhelmed by hospitality and dreamt of being a \u201cmoody, solitary stroller.\u201d We pick him up in mid-March in London; tea with Lady Colefax and Lady Rothermere, Beverley Nichols, Osbert Lancaster, choreographer Frederick Ashton; theater and supper with the Oliviers. Lunch in Paris with Toklas. Spain: Valladolid for Holy Week . . . . Having vowed that he wouldn\u2019t enter Italy, not even to visit \u201cthe adorable Beerbohms,\u201d he went to Rapallo [and adored] . . . . He returned to Paris with more engagements and had three crowded days in London the next week: Sybil\u2019s every afternoon from half-past four to seven with, \u201chold your hat,\u201d Noel Coward, Lord Wavell, T. S. Eliot, Barbara Ward, Hamish Hamilton, Lord Birkenhead . . . and others. Dover for the night; Oxford for lunch at Wadham College; Covent Garden with Sacheverell Sitwell, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter and Sir Shane Leslie; a matinee of Hamlet<\/em>.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Oh, oh, oh. Six o\u2019clock and the master not home yet<\/em>. On May 3 he flew there to be in Ohio for an appearance in a student production of Our Town<\/em> for which he took no payment. (In the preceding year he had earned $66,675.55.) On to Chicago, Potsdam, Stockbridge, Boston, Yaddo, Provincetown, Cambridge, Newport, Saratoga Springs. Thereafter a week of pub-crawling in Manhattan with Dylan Thomas, from which he actually escaped to the Red Lion in Stockbridge, where he succeeded in completing long stretches of The Emporium<\/em> by September. \u201cSix months had passed since that journal entry in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.\u201d After all this he resumed teaching at Harvard, including sixteen extracurricular lectures, and by the following March he had collapsed. Uncharacteristically, he blamed Harvard for having overworked him instead of facing the fact that he could never say no when his ego was importuned.<\/p>\n

What was it all about? The enthusiasm<\/em> which Harrison attributes to Wilder was synonymous with a form of creative escapism\u2014creative and endangered. It is impossible to suppose that he didn\u2019t enjoy this carousel of shifting scenery and dazzling luminaries, renowned for their talents, their brains, their hyphens, or their cuisines. To assume that his puritan conscience interfered with his relish of the spectacle and periodically undermined him is not a conclusion I\u2019d care to rest with, yet it\u2019s not irrelevant. Is it too fanciful to suggest that he was fleeing from a beast in his jungle that understandably he had no wish to confront? Much later he wrote to a friend, \u201cThe worst of having been brought up in the late foam-rubber phase of American Protestantism is that we don\u2019t have the daring even to think window-breaking thoughts.\u201d He recovered from the physical collapse of 1951, but Harrison reminds us that for sixteen years after that breakdown he produced no new novel or play except The Alcestiad<\/em> in 1955 (begun in 1939) and The Matchmaker<\/em>, a rewrite of The Merchant of Yonkers<\/em>. The Emporium<\/em> was never finished. (Harrison summarizes a novel I\u2019d never heard of, published in 1967, The Eighth Day<\/em>, which \u201cstarts as a murder mystery and grows into an extended meditation on the mystery of experience.\u201d)<\/p>\n

To find, in recent American letters, a writer who didn\u2019t crack up resoundingly, become an alcoholic, punch people\u2019s noses at parties, take to drugs, or commit suicide is something of a relief. Thornton Wilder simply faded away (as a significant writer, I mean), which is very sad. Yet, as a citizen, Wilder was both exemplary and ornamental. And he shared the wealth<\/em>! Harrison is eloquent on the subject of Wilder\u2019s enormous generosity, not only to family members but to almost anyone\u2014friend or unknown supplicant. Who would have wanted him instead to have been indifferent to his fellow man while he faced his beast\u2014if there was one!\u2014in order (so runs the rumor) to have created a masterpiece in a blinding flash of destructive insight?<\/p>\n

For some, self-knowledge is too costly.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n
  1. <\/a>The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder<\/em>, by Gilbert A. Harrision. Ticknor & Fields, 416 pages, $19.95. Go back to the text.<\/a><\/font> <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1927,"featured_media":130708,"template":"","tags":[745],"department_id":[561],"issue":[3274],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":61,"value_formatted":61,"value":"61","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page Number","name":"page_number","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"number","value":null,"menu_order":1,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"default_value":"","min":"","max":"","placeholder":"","step":"","prepend":"","append":"","_name":"page_number","_valid":1}},"featured_image_credits":{"simple_value_formatted":"

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