The Cabala and the Woman of Andros, page 1
Dedication
To my friends at the American Academy in Rome, 1920–1921
T.W.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword by Penelope Niven
The Cabala
Book One: First Encounters
Book Two: Marcantonio
Book Three: Alix
Book Four: Astrée-Luce and the Cardinal
Book Five: The Dusk of the Gods
The Woman of Andros
A Nephew’s Note
Afterword by Tappan Wilder
Acknowledgments
About the Author
By Thornton Wilder
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
From boyhood Thornton Niven Wilder devoted every scrap of time he could spare or steal to creating plays, poems, and stories. Endowed with an intense imagination, boundless curiosity, and an affinity for vivid stories, he dreamed about the books he would write. As a teenager he began composing a series of three-minute playlets for three characters. (“Authors of fifteen and sixteen years of age spend their time drawing up title-pages and adjusting the tables of contents of works they have neither the perseverance nor the ability to execute,” he wrote years later in the foreword to an edition of his short plays.) The young Wilder possessed the ability and the perseverance as well as the dreams, and as a college student frequently saw his work in print, usually in undergraduate publications.
From 1920 until 1926, when his first novel, The Cabala, was published, Wilder was a graduate student and a school master, earning his bread-and-butter income teaching prep-school French and tutoring on the side. In the coveted leftover hours, he poured himself into the reading and writing that had always been his primary occupation. He also gravitated to the theaters from New York to Philadelphia, for he had fallen in love early with the magic of the stage.
Wilder was twenty-nine when The Cabala appeared on the American literary scene, earning good reviews and modest royalties. It was followed in 1927 by a spectacular popular and critical success—the bestselling Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, hailed internationally as an overnight sensation. In reality, it had been a fifteen-year-long overnight—a persistent apprenticeship of reading, writing, thinking, imagining, and experimenting, often while “caught,” as Wilder said, “in the quicksands of Teaching.” The Bridge of San Luis Rey brought honors, celebrity, and fortune—and for decades its vast shadow would overwhelm and even obscure the significance of The Cabala and The Woman of Andros, the novels that immediately preceded and followed it. This new volume sheds light on Wilder the novelist and on the two novels standing on either side of The Bridge.
In 1920, twenty-three years old and fresh out of Yale College, Thornton Wilder booked passage on the French ocean liner Providence, bound for Italy and the future. He embarked with great excitement and very little money on what he later called his “Italian year,” becoming a visiting student in the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome.
Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder, his mother, had always nurtured his imagination, his dreams and his artistic sensibilities. She was particularly pleased with her son’s plans to travel to Italy, where she and other family members spent time over the years. She translated the poems of Giosué Carducci from Italian into English, wrote poems of her own, introduced her children to classical literature and Greek drama, took them to the theater to see the plays of Ibsen and Shaw as well as stock company plays, and awakened in Thornton his lifelong love of music and of European literature and culture. He took with him to Italy a grounding in classical mythology, history, and literature, including Dante’s work. It is no wonder that in the fall of 1920 he was captivated by the treasures of Rome—art, architecture, music, literature, and his new enthusiasm, archeology.
“After I’d graduated from college I was sent to Europe to study archeology,” Wilder recalled decades later. “One day our class in Rome was taken out into the country to dig up a bit of the Etruscan world, a street. Once thousands of people had walked it. The rut was very deep. Those who have uncovered such a spot are never the same again.” He wrote that each of us possesses “something of the mind of an archeologist” and that while people in previous centuries knew “that many people had lived and died a long while ago” and that “there were many people living on the earth,” the modern mind grasps the reality that
millions and billions have lived and died, and that probably billions and billions (let us not despair of the human race) will live and die. The extent of this enlarged realization alters the whole view of life.
Wilder’s pivotal Italian year helped to forge his vision of the individual’s relationship to the universe, the infinite permutations and combinations of the basic life events, or plots—birth, struggle, love, aspiration, defeat, transcendence, death.
“How perfect it is, my being here!” he exulted in a letter home from Italy in 1920. “How much happier a chance has fallen than a year in Paris or London or New York. Rome’s antiquity, her variety, her significance swallow these others up, and I feel myself being irresistibly impelled toward saying of her that she is the Eternal City.” He wrote to his father that he wanted to develop a literary consciousness that took into account “the artistic anxiety of the European” and a “new abundance and range of America.” He said that his foray into ancient Rome evoked in him a new appreciation for the American experience.
Amos Parker Wilder, father of Thornton and four other precocious children, was a journalist, consular official, and platform lecturer, with ambitious yet practical dreams for his sons and daughters. He deplored the fact that four of them seemed bent on becoming “‘artistic’ writers, that is to say unmarketable.” Many years later, Wilder wrote that his father “had read my numerous works with deep concern; they appeared to him to be—borrowing a phrase he had picked up in China—‘carved cherry stones.’” The Wilder children were well acquainted with this metaphor, for their father used it often when he sought to discourage their interest in writing.
Amos Wilder hoped that Thornton would return from Italy in a year’s time “uncorrupted” and equipped to earn a living. He worried about his son’s seeming inability to concentrate and persevere, his tendencies toward woolgathering and dilettantism. Amos concluded that teaching was the best fit for Thornton’s temperament, and with the help of strong references from two of his son’s Yale professors, secured a teaching post for Thornton. By the autumn of 1921, the traveler was settling into his job as assistant housemaster for Davis House and French teacher at Lawrenceville School, a few miles from Princeton, New Jersey.
At night, his duties done—lessons prepared, papers graded, and young charges asleep—Wilder turned to his reading and writing. Years later, former students in Davis House recalled hearing Wilder’s footsteps tracing a steady pattern across the floorboards as he worked on the novel and the plays he was writing after hours. He had rejoiced in his sojourn in the land of Virgil, Cicero, Tasso, and Dante. It was enough, he said, “to set the imagination racing.” As he worked on his first novel in his spare time, he was transmuting the Italian experiences, real and imagined, into art.
Wilder’s papers reveal some of the winding pathway from conception to completion of the novel, an imaginary memoir of a young American mingling with a small clique of privileged, eccentric residents of early-twentieth-century Rome. He referred to his story variously as “Notes of a Roman Student,” “Roman Memoirs,” “The Trasteverine,” and “The Memoirs of Charles Mallison: The Year in Rome,” among other titles. Along the way Wilder experimented with characters and structure, with voice and style, even momentarily groping, like other writers of the time, for a literary response to World War I. “The whole memoirs are to be a sort of adieu to the romance and medievalism that barely survived the war,” he wrote to his mother.
As was his habit, Wilder was deeply influenced by his reading—the plays of French dramatist Paul Claudel, for instance, especially Le Père Humilié (1920), depicting the decline and dissipation of noble families; Pierre Champagne de Labriolle’s Histoire de la Littérature Latine Chrétienne; and Ernest Renan’s Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse. In July 1922, temporarily free of his teaching and house-parenting duties, Wilder rented a room on the top floor of the YMCA in Newport, Rhode Island, set up his Underwood typewriter and spent several hours a day typing the book he was composing in longhand. He wrote to his father that he had “carved some cherry stones,” and was working on “a type of sentence, on a hint from Lytton Strachey, wherein you crowd under one trait in common a host of disparate details, in order to give an impression of rich complicated life.”
As always, Wilder entrusted his dreams and his work-in-progress to his mother, who took a keen interest in her son’s reading and writing. “Just as soon as I get a fair copy made of BOOK ONE,” he wrote to her, “I look it over and with my blue pencil start indicating alterations; within an hour the whole script is unsightly. My only consolation is that every touch has been an improvement.” He was weaving an intricate tapestry of comedy, satire, irony and tragedy, and by August 1922, he sent his manuscript to the editors of The Dial, then one of the prestigious literary journals in the United States. “I am submitting under separate cover the MSS of a series of imaginary memoirs of a year spent in Rome, entitled ‘The Trasteverine,’” Wilder wrote. “These give the appea rance of being faithful portraits of living persons, but the work is a purely fanciful effort in the manner of Marcel Proust, or at times, of Paul Morand. Attached hereto find return postage. Very truly yours, Thornton N. Wilder.”
The Dial declined the manuscript, but expressed an interest in seeing more when the book was further along. The Double Dealer, a monthly magazine in New Orleans, published an excerpt from the novel. (This journal published other fledgling writers—Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Edmund Wilson, and Amos Niven Wilder, Thornton’s older brother, who wrote poetry.) Wilder’s journal of that time reveals his continual experimentation and his struggles with form and direction. On September 9, 1922, he wrote,
There is a great book in the idea; I have fertility of invention, but I soon tire of the clumsiness of my phrasing. I think my reluctance to go on with it is not mere lack of perseverance, but a consciousness of the real difficulty of combining the real and the fantastic; it must be long brooded.
The conscientious if somewhat unorthodox schoolmaster created a flamboyant cast of characters in the five sections of the book. The members of the Cabala are introduced to the reader by James Blair, a young American scholar in Rome, and friend of the novel’s narrator, another young American, nicknamed Samuele. The Cabalists, says Blair, are “Fierce intellectual snobs” who are “very rich and influential,” so much so that everyone else fears them and suspects them of “plots to overturn things.” Furthermore, they are “so wonderful that they’re lonely,” and they derive “what comfort they can out of each other’s excellence.” Soon we meet the energetic Miss Grier, wealthy American spinster, Vassar College trustee, and a dominant force in the Cabala; Her Highness Leda Matilda Colonna duchessa d’Aquilanera and her young son, the doomed, handsome prince Marcantonio, who has “fallen on bad ways”; the cultured French woman Alix, Princess d’Espoli, unhappily married to her Italian prince; ancient, wise Cardinal Vaine, who has spent his life in the mission fields of China; and the fervently devout Mlle. Astrée-Luce de Marfontaine. There is even a cameo appearance in the novel by John Keats. Wilder’s lodging in Rome in 1920 had been a stone’s throw from the house where Keats died in 1821. Wilder wrote to his mother about his character’s “bored attendance at the sick-bed of a not very likable poet, a faithful description of his tubercular symptoms day by day, his terror and weakness, and finally his funeral in the Protestant Cemetery—the death of Keats faithfully documented and seen through the veil of ‘my’ dislike and revulsion.”
The young American narrator of The Cabala’s interwoven stories calls himself “the biographer of the individuals” in the novel, not “the historian of the group.” He is also sometime-mentor, would-be savior, and occasional perpetrator of events—a character device Wilder would use in future fiction. He sought to evoke in the novel both the Rome he experienced and the Rome he imagined:
From all these eccentrics and madmen and scoundrels—thousands of portraits—is supposed to arise the hot breath of life more romantic than Jules Verne—an escape from routine and weariness and stenographer’s anaemia, and a reproduction of the feeling that Rome gives you when you’re no longer in it.
“Of course it is only written to please myself,” Wilder wrote to his mother. “There is nothing in it except what I am madly curious about; no compromise made for people who do not like the particular forms of strangeness and disorder that I like.”
Wilder observed in later years that The Cabala “presumes to give a picture of contemporary life among the highly privileged members of Roman society. That picture is almost entirely imagined.” He had met very few members of the aristocracy, he said, and “no members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.” He noted that the book’s sources could be found “in the reading of Marcel Proust, the memoirs of the Duke of Saint-Simon, and the characters of La Bruyère. These works I devoured rapturously in the reading-room of the Princeton University Library on the free evenings afforded me by my first job—teaching eight miles away at The Lawrenceville School.”
The Cabala was published by Albert & Charles Boni in 1926. The New York Times Book Review hailed the “debut of a new American stylist,” and called Wilder’s novel “a literary event.” According to the Saturday Review of Literature, the novel was a “sophisticated extravaganza.” Critics admired the novel’s charm, its irony, and its elements of comedy and satire. But it would soon be dwarfed by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, which followed in 1927 and quickly brought Wilder international fame, as well as his first Pulitzer Prize.
As he was finishing the second book, Wilder had written in a 1926 journal entry, “Some day someone will discover that one of the principal ideas behind my work is the fear of catastrophe (especially illness and pain), and a preoccupation with the claims of a religion to meet the situation.” That same year, in a later journal entry pocked with words blotted out, Wilder had this to say about his novels:
The Cabala was written because I brooded about great natures and their obstacles and ailments and frustrations.
The Bridge was written because I wanted to die and I wanted to prove that death was a happy solution.
The motto of The Bridge is to be found in the last page of The Cabala: Hurry and die!
In The Cabala I began to think that love is enough to reconcile one to the difficulty of living (i.e. the difficulty of being good); in The Bridge I am still a little surer. Perhaps some-day I can write a book announcing that love is sufficient.
There are riddles woven into these lines that a biographer works hard to unravel. And there is this question: What would Wilder’s third novel have to say about the sufficiency of love?
“Had a fine month at Peterborough,” Wilder wrote to his brother Amos in August of 1929. He had traveled to the MacDowell Colony that summer to work on The Woman of Andros, and he found “the long solitary hours in the Studio fine. Lots more Andros done but confused about the direction to take in the fourth quarter of it. No hurry, and no worry.” He described The Woman of Andros as his first novel, “in the sense,” he said, “that the others were collections of tales, novelettes, bound together by a slight tie that identified them a belonging to the same group.”
By the time Wilder finished his third novel, he had enjoyed a wealth of new experiences and friendships, as well as international celebrity and enough of a fortune to build a house for his family and otherwise support his parents and sisters. He had seen the first New York production of one of his plays, The Trumpet Shall Sound; had published The Angel That Troubled the Waters, a collection of short plays; and had toured the country as a platform lecturer with resounding success, speaking to full houses on “The Relation of Literature and Life,” “The Future of American Literature,” “Enthusiasms and Disappointments of Play-Going,” and other topics. He had bought his first automobile, had struck up friendships with two other young novelists making their mark, Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, and had taken an internationally publicized “walking tour” in Europe with world heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney (“as fine a person as you’d want to meet,” Wilder wrote to Hemingway before the trip). When Fitzgerald wrote to Wilder about The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder answered with an autobiographical snapshot:
I have been an admirer, not to say a student, of the Great Gatsby too long not to have got a great kick out of your letter. It gives me the grounds to hope that we may sometime have some long talks on what writing’s all about. As you see I am a provincial school-master and have always worked alone. And yet nothing interests me more than thinking of our generation as a league and as a protest to the whole cardboard generation that precedes us from Wharton through Cabell and Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. . . . I like teaching a lot and shall probably remain here for ages; a daily routine is necessary to me. I have no writing habits, am terribly lazy and write seldom.
With typical self-deprecation, Wilder underplayed his discipline as a writer, for his journals and letters testify to his habitual absorption in his work. As he wrote The Woman of Andros, based in part, he said, on a Greek comedy by Terence, Wilder was immersed in Greek drama and philosophy, spending time in ancient Greece in his imagination, his reading, and his preparations for lectures he would give at the University of Chicago, when he became a part-time faculty member in 1930. On a trip to England, in September 1929, he sketched ideas for the lectures in his journal: What fifth century Greece thought of itself; how it was viewed by successive ages and by modern archeology; how it was viewed by “specific great authors.” He wanted to learn Greek, and he was rereading Aeschylus and Euripides.
