The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Lincoln Konkle Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer, eds. The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Pp. xxxviii + 768, illustrated. $39.95 (Hb). It goes without saying that any Thornton Wilder aficionado should read the recently published collection of his correspondence, for it is, in effect, a life in letters, and Wilder (1897–1975) lived one of the least ordinary and most literary lives among writers. Against the backdrop of two world wars, the Great Depression, the invention of the atomic bomb, and a culture-altering youth movement, Wilder lived in China, Wisconsin, California, Ohio, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Illinois, and once established as a writer, spent as much time travelling in Europe as he did living in the United States. He wrote prize-winning plays and novels, screenplays, libretti, translations, and scholarly articles; worked as a secondary school and college instructor and gave countless public lectures; served in both world wars and as a cultural diplomat; and met and became friends with some of the most influential writers and intellectuals of his time. Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer have given us the full arc of that life in Wilder’s own words through this collection of 336 letters written between the ages of 12 and 78. [End Page 384] The collection is divided into six parts, each covering a decade of Wilder’s life. The story the letters tell is most dramatic in the first section, “Beginnings: 1909–1920,” which presents a portrait of the artist as a young man chomping at the bit to begin his writing career. The “bit” would be his father, Amos Parker Wilder, who did not approve of his son’s literary ambitions (which were encouraged by his mother, Isabella, especially when Amos was overseas serving as consul general in China). In the letters, young Thornton writes to his father, pleading to be given the opportunity to learn and practice the craft of a playwright, which was his earliest and ultimate ambition: “I write plays as I eat,” he wrote at Oberlin College (59). In subsequent sections, one is astonished at the wide range and sheer number of the famed contemporaries to whom Wilder wrote: from theatre people such as Katharine Cornell, Cheryl Crawford, Noël Coward, Ruth Gordon, Helen Hayes, Edward Albee, Alan Schneider, and Irene Worth, to writers such as Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. His letters often respond to those outside the arts who wrote him, such as Albert Einstein, or describe his meetings with those in and outside the arts: Jean-Paul Sartre, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Ezra Pound, Sigmund Freud, Eleanor Roosevelt, Albert Schweitzer, and John F. Kennedy. As to Wilder’s private and inner life, the letters surprise, reaffirm, and leave ambiguous. He admonishes his older brother, “[Y]ou haven’t learned Morals, you’ve learned the Code of Morals. Politeness and Celibacy are a matter of indifference to God. Go deeper. If possible, sin yourself and discover the innocence of it” (141). As to the question of Wilder’s own sexuality, there are letters that might be read as expressing homosexual feelings but also references to heterosexual activity (e.g., an admission that he expected to be engaged to one or the other of two coeds at Oberlin, or that he visited two brothels, one in France and one in Mexico). He makes a telling statement in his late fifties: “[I]n fact, I’m one of the most extreme goers-alone I ever came across” (531). Though his religious interests and feelings are often expressed, one also finds letters in which Wilder seems to be foreshadowing Theatre of the Absurd: “Since in the twentieth century the Sublime has departed the earth, let us at least cherish the beautiful image of the ridiculous” (285). Any director of productions of Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, or The Matchmaker (or its musical incarnation Hello, Dolly!) will want, at least, to use the index to locate the passages concerning these plays, which reveal surprising insights into Wilder’s intentions in writing his theatrical works. Of his most famous play, he writes, There...