The Cabala and the Woman of Andros, page 26
J. D. McClatchy, Robin Wilder, Jackson Bryer, and the staff of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library have provided unwavering support for this book and the project it is part of. Noa Wheeler and Ellen Wilhite helped with many a practical task. Two individuals deserve a special salute: Hugh Van Dusen for his faith in these novels and the larger project of which they are a piece, and Penelope Niven, the Thornton Wilder biographer, for her wisdom and encouragement from beginning to end and for providing a Foreword that is a model of the art. Any errors in the Afterword are my responsibility, and I welcome corrections.
SOURCES AND PERMISSIONS
With the exception of sources noted below, all excerpts quoted from unpublished sources are from Thornton Wilder’s correspondence, manuscripts, and related records in the Thornton Wilder Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, or from the Wilder family’s own holdings, including many of Thornton Wilder’s legal and agency papers. Silent corrections in spelling and punctuation have been made when deemed appropriate. The Sibyl Colfax letters are held in the Thornton Wilder Collection, Fales Manuscripts, Fales Library, New York University, and Marvin J. Taylor’s assistance is gratefully acknowledged. Dr. Eve Katz provided the English translation of Ernst Renan’s words.
PUBLICATIONS
Wilder’s Foreword to The Angel That Troubled the Waters is reprinted in American Characteristics & Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1979; Authors Guild Backinprint edition, 2000), 95–99. Unless otherwise noted, all rights for all published and unpublished work by Thornton Wilder are reserved by the Wilder Family LLC. Thornton Niven Wilder: The Memorial Service was privately printed in 1976 by Yale University. Passages from his works read at this service appear on pages 14–19.
IMAGES
Unless otherwise credited herein, the images in this volume are taken from material in the Wilder Archives at Yale or are held by the Wilder family. The Eva Hermann caricature appears with the permission of the Artists Rights Society. The three indicated photographs, including the author picture probably dating from 1924, appear with the permission of the Lawrenceville School and were provided by the helpful Jacqueline Haun, Archivist of that institution.
About the Author
In his quiet way, THORNTON NIVEN WILDER was a revolutionary writer who experimented boldly with literary forms and themes, from the beginning to the end of his long career. “Every novel is different from the others,” he wrote when he was seventy-five. “The theater (ditto). . . . The thing I’m writing now is again totally unlike anything that preceded it.” Wilder’s richly diverse settings, characters, and themes are at once specific and global. Deeply immersed in classical as well as contemporary literature, he often fused the traditional and the modern in his novels and plays, all the while exploring the cosmic in the commonplace. In a January 12, 1953, cover story, Time took note of Wilder’s unique “interplanetary mind”—his ability to write from a vision that was at once American and universal.
A pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century letters, Wilder was a novelist and playwright whose works continue to be widely read and produced in this new century. He is the only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Drama. His second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, received the Fiction award in 1928, and he won the prize twice in Drama, for Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1943. His other novels are The Cabala, The Woman of Andros, Heaven’s My Destination, The Ides of March, The Eighth Day, and Theophilus North. His other major dramas include The Matchmaker, which was adapted as the internationally acclaimed musical comedy Hello, Dolly!, and The Alcestiad. Among his innovative shorter plays are The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden and The Long Christmas Dinner, and two uniquely conceived series, The Seven Ages of Man and The Seven Deadly Sins, frequently performed by amateurs.
Wilder and his work received many honors, highlighted by the three Pulitzer Prizes, the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Order of Merit (Peru), the Goethe-Plakette der Stadt (Germany, 1959), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1963), the National Book Committee’s first National Medal for Literature (1965), and the National Book Award for Fiction (1967).
He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897, to Amos Parker Wilder and Isabella Niven Wilder. The family later lived in China and in California, where Wilder was graduated from Berkeley High School. After two years at Oberlin College, he went on to Yale, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1920. A valuable part of his education took place during summers spent working hard on farms in California, Kentucky, Vermont, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. His father arranged these rigorous “shirtsleeve” jobs for Wilder and his older brother, Amos, as part of their initiation into the American experience.
Thornton Wilder studied archaeology and Italian as a special student at the American Academy in Rome (1920–1921), and earned a master of arts degree in French literature at Princeton in 1926.
In addition to his talents as playwright and novelist, Wilder was an accomplished teacher, essayist, translator, scholar, lecturer, librettist, and screenwriter. In 1942, he teamed with Alfred Hitch-cock to write the first draft of the screenplay for the classic thriller Shadow of a Doubt, receiving credit as principal writer and a special screen credit for his “contribution to the preparation” of the production. All but fluent in four languages, Wilder translated and adapted plays by such varied authors as Henrik Ibsen, Jean-Paul Sartre, and André Obey. As a scholar, he conducted significant research on James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and the plays of Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega.
Wilder’s friends included a broad spectrum of figures on both sides of the Atlantic—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Alexander Woollcott, Gene Tunney, Sigmund Freud, producer Max Reinhardt, Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, and Garson Kanin. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Wilder was especially close to Gertrude Stein and became one of her most effective interpreters and champions. Many of Wilder’s friendships are documented in his prolific correspondence. Wilder believed that great letters constitute a “great branch of literature.” In a lecture entitled “On Reading the Great Letter Writers,” he wrote that a letter can function as a “literary exercise,” the “profile of a personality,” and “news of the soul,” apt descriptions of thousands of letters he wrote to his own friends and family.
Wilder enjoyed acting and played major roles in several of his own plays in summer theater productions. He also possessed a lifelong love of music; reading musical scores was a hobby, and he wrote the librettos for two operas based on his work: The Long Christmas Dinner, with composer Paul Hindemith, and The Alcestiad, with composer Louise Talma. Both works premiered in Germany.
Teaching was one of Wilder’s deepest passions. He began his teaching career in 1921 as an instructor in French at Lawrenceville, a private secondary school in New Jersey. Financial in de pendence after the publication of The Bridge of San Luis Rey permitted him to leave the classroom in 1928, but he returned to teaching in the 1930s at the University of Chicago. For six years, on a part-time basis, he taught courses there in classics in translation, comparative literature, and composition. In 1950–1951, he served as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Wilder’s gifts for scholarship and teaching (he treated the classroom as all but a theater) made him a consummate, much-sought-after lecturer in his own country and abroad. After World War II, he held special standing, especially in Germany, as an interpreter of his own country’s intellectual traditions and their influence on cultural expression.
During World War I, Wilder had served a three-month stint as an enlisted man in the Coast Artillery section of the army, stationed at Fort Adams, Rhode Island. He volunteered for ser vice in World War II, advancing to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Army Air Force Intelligence. For his service in North Africa and Italy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, the Chevalier Legion d’Honneur, and honorary officership in the Military Order of the British Empire (M.B.E.).
From royalties received from The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder built a house for his family in 1930 in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven. But he typically spent as many as two hundred days a year away from Hamden, traveling to and settling in a variety of places that provided the stimulation and solitude he needed for his work. Sometimes his destination was the Arizona desert, the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, or Martha’s Vineyard, Newport, Saratoga Springs, Vienna, or Baden-Baden. He wrote aboard ships, and often chose to stay in “spas in off-season.” He needed a certain refuge when he was deeply immersed in writing a novel or play. Wilder explained his habit to a New Yorker journalist in 1959: “The walks, the quiet—all the elegance is present, everything is there but the people. That’s it! A spa in off-season! I make a practice of it.”
But Wilder always returned to “the house The Bridge built,” as it is still known to this day. He died there of a heart attack on December 7, 1975.
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By Thornton Wilder
NOVELS
The Cabala
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Woman of Andros
Heaven’s My Destination
The Ides of March
The Eighth Day
Theophilus North
COLLECTIONS OF SHORT PLAYS
The Angel That Troubled the Waters
The Long Christmas Dinner & Other Plays in One Act
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Vol. 1
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder Vol. 2
PLAYS
Our Town
The Merchant of Yonkers
The Skin of Our Teeth
The Matchmaker
The Alcestiad
The Beaux’ Strategem (with Ken Ludwig)
A Doll’s House
ESSAYS
American Characteristics & Other Essays
The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939–1961
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder
A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen
Copyright
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1958 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. It is reprinted here by arrangement with the Wilder Family LLC.
THE CABALA. Copyright © 1926 by Albert & Charles Boni. Copyright renewed © 1954 by Thornton Wilder. Copyright © 2002 by the Wilder Family LLC. THE WOMAN OF ANDROS. Copyright © 1930 by Albert & Charles Boni. Copyright renewed ©1958 by Thornton Wilder. Copyright © 2002 by the Wilder Family LLC. Foreword copyright © 2006 by Penelope Niven. Afterword Copyright © 2006, 2022 by Tappan Wilder. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Catherine Casalino
Cover images © Florilegius/Alamy Stock Photo (woman, left); © Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo (woman, right)
First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2006.
Reissued in 2022.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
Digital Edition AUGUST 2022 ISBN: 978-0-06-324450-4
Version 06292022
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-309785-8 (pbk.)
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1The Boy Sebastian: by Charles Mallison. Published by the Soochow Press, Soochow, China, 1913 in six unbound folio volumes. These interminable sheets describe in diary form, the events of the author’s life from his first recollections to the middle of his sixteenth year. They are written in a less disciplined style than the present work. An American publication would not be possible as a great deal of the matter would be bound to offend the censors of this country; but a one-volume selection is being prepared. Portions of the earlier work that illustrate the present memoirs will be quoted extensively in these footnotes.
2Charles Mallison was born Sept. 24, 1897. The portion of the Boy Sebastian in diary form covers the years 1909 to 1912, or from the author’s twelfth to his fifteenth year. The main revision and expansion of the diary took place in the year preceding the publication.
3Charles Mallison arrived in Rome on Oct. 4, 1920, after spending a month at Sorrento. [Wilder arrived in Rome October 14, 1920.]
The author is undoubtedly overmodest here. The reader may judge for himself of the erudition that enters, always as a secondary interest, into these pages. Friends who knew him at the time affirmed that his store of rather gossipy historical information was most extensive. Especially in the Old Rome between the Corso and St. Peters’, he overflowed with allusions and associations for every church and palace. To please himself however he knew far too little and in the monologue of discouragement that appears toward the middle of this volume he wonders whether it would not have been better for him to have retired to the labyrinths of the library of the Collegio Romano and devoted himself to the histories of the Popes.
1Wilder is referring to the opera The Woman of Andros composed by John Jacob Kessler, held by the John Jacob Kessler archive, Gaylord Music Library Special Collections, Washington University in Saint Louis Libraries, Saint Louis, MO.
Thornton Wilder, The Cabala and the Woman of Andros
