Thornton Wilder & Amos Wilder

34 Pages·2012·0.98 MB·English

Thornton Wilder
& Amos Wilder
Writing Religion in Twentieth-Century America
Christopher J. Wheatley
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
Introduction
Brothers in Arms
The plays and novels of Thornton Wilder have often attracted reli-
gious interpretations. These interpretations, however, are profoundly
ahistorical and have ignored significant elements of the nineteenth-
and twentieth-century context of Wilder’s work as well as their his-
torical settings. In doing so, such explications have failed to reveal
Wilder’s pervasive sense that religious themes are always contested and
always shaped by historical forces. In other words, an individual’s ap-
prehension of the sacred is dynamic rather than static, and the mani-
festations of the sacred are plural rather than monist. Further, most
critics have ignored the most immediate religious context for Wilder’s
work: the scholarship of his brother, Amos Niven Wilder, Hollis Pro-
fessor of Divinity at Harvard, an ordained minister, a biblical scholar,
and a published poet. Both brothers saw themselves in a battle, not
against the modern age, but against those who would, consciously or
not, reduce faith to antiquarian interest.
In his introduction to The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other
Plays (1928), Thornton Wilder describes how he began to come up
with titles for the plays in the collection while he was in his teens and
wrote many of them while still an undergraduate at Oberlin and Yale.
This not only indicates how early Wilder discovered his vocation as a
writer, but it also shows his initial and ongoing interest in diverse re-
ligious traditions; among the early titles that turned into plays are
1
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
2 Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder
“Brother Fire” (featuring Brother Francis, a character obviously de-
rived from Saint Francis) and “Proserpina and the Devil” (a puppet
show that synthesizes Greek and Christian mythology).1 Many of the
plays seem anachronistic for the 1920s, and Wilder’s description of
some of the subject matter is presented as a challenge to accepted lit-
erary and social practices of the time:
The last four plays here [“Mozart and the Gray Steward,” “Hast
Thou Considered My Servant Job?” “The Flight into Egypt,” “The
Angel That Troubled the Waters”] have been written within a year
and a half. Almost all the plays in this book are religious, but reli-
gious in that dilute fashion that is a believer’s concession to a con-
temporary standard of good manners. But these four plant their flag
as boldly as they may. . . . I hope, through many mistakes, to discover
the spirit that is not unequal to the elevation of the great religious
themes, yet which does not fall into a repellant didacticism. (CP,
653–54)
This statement provides an explicit justification for critics interested in
Wilder’s religious beliefs. One biographer, Richard Goldstone, sees
Wilder as ultimately a nineteenth-century man who, despite his enor-
mous erudition, world travels, and literary experimentalism, was very
much the product of his father’s earnest New England, Congregation-
alist background: “We must remember that Wilder’s world was essen-
tially the world of the nineteenth century; he was born before 1900
and the old century conditioned his moral and spiritual Weltanschau-
ung, together with that of all his intimates.”2 Exactly why being born
in 1897 restricts one to a nineteenth-century worldview is unclear.
But even more important, Goldstone ignores elements of the nine-
teenth century that, for better or worse, shape most of us in important
ways even in the twenty-first century: the nineteenth century of Dar-
win, Marx, Frazer, Nietzsche, and, at the turn of the century, Freud;
the nineteenth century in which the developing sciences of astronomy
and geology threatened to turn humanity into a meaningless cosmic
accident, and in which the individual felt himself dwarfed by the im-
mensity of space and time.
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
Introduction 3
Moreover, Lincoln Konkle also argues that Goldstone’s charac -
teri zation of Wilder as a Puritan is both ill informed and pejorative.
Nevertheless, Konkle, too, insists that “the tradition Wilder’s drama
and fiction stem from is heavily doctrinal, Puritan, and didactic.”3
Konkle is surely right to see traces of the Puritan heritage in Wilder’s
work; few American writers escape the Puritan legacy, just as few can
escape the philosophical traditions of pragmatism. Both are simply part
of the culture, absorbed by osmosis; and this is true whether one was
raised Protestant, Catholic, Jew, agnostic, or atheist. Wilder himself
identified in 1931 a pervasive Puritan belief that Americans feel them-
selves to be “permanently, directly, and responsibly bound to world
destiny.”4 But Konkle’s version of Puritanism is very much that of the
seventeenth-century settlers of Massachusetts. And, as Amos Wilder
has shown, “There are many differing aspects and amalgams of the
Calvinist and wider Protestant heritage in our society”; a part of this
heritage was avowedly progressive.5 In any case, Wilder’s introduction
to The Angel That Troubled the Waters specifically repudiates didacti-
cism in literature: “Didacticism is an attempt at the coercion of an-
other’s free will, even though one knows in these matters beyond
logic, beauty is the only persuasion” (CP, 654).
Yet another critic commenting on The Angel That Troubled the
Waters, David Garrett Izzo, claims that “Wilder rejected the Chris-
tianity of his youth, even to the point of considering its dogmatic as-
pects ultimately deleterious to Western Civilization”; Wilder was, in
fact, “a Karmi Yogi” who “believed in the Vedantic unicity of one/
many, east/west, many faiths into one faith, the all in the All concur-
rently accounted for in the eternal now which obviates the artifice of
time.”6 All of Wilder’s works, in Izzo’s view, are parables of the path to
“goodness.” Without much effort, one could multiply examples of
scholars who have explicated Wilder’s works in relation to different
religious or spiritual traditions. Rhea B. Miller detects the influence
of the Russian Christian existentialist Nicolai Berdyaev in Wilder’s
later works.7 Thomas E. Porter sees Northrop Frye’s “apocalyptic
myth” in Our Town.8 And many have pointed out Wilder’s close read-
ing of Kierkegaard, with Paul Lifton and Donald Haberman offering
particularly good exegeses of Kierkegaard’s influence.9
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
4 Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder
Wilder might well have been surprised by this wide variation. In
a letter to Stanley J. McCord on May 3, 1962, he confesses, “I’m always
embarrassed—astonished and embarrassed—when anyone proposes
doing a thesis—or a mere paper—on me. This is not from modesty
but simply that I don’t see my work as sufficiently complex to afford
material; it all seems sort of self-evident to me.”10 But what is striking
about these divergent readings of Wilder is how compelling most of
them seem, even when they are contradictory. The poetic density of
his language very much repays rereading. Nor is it difficult from Wild-
er’s published and unpublished works to make a case for his familiarity
with almost any writer one can think of. Fluent in French, German,
Italian, and Spanish, he read the major works of those cultures in their
original languages, and he certainly knew all the major literary and
philosophical works of classical Greek and Roman civilization. He
adapted Ibsen for the Broadway stage and translated Sartre for Off-
Broadway. He published scholarly articles on dating the plays of the
Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega in Romance Philology
and annotated Joyce’s Finnegans Wake obsessively. Thus, Wilder can be
seen both as a central figure in an American literary tradition and as
an American interacting with world literature. Indeed, he lectured on
the topic of Goethe and World Literature. Few readers can share Wild-
er’s enormous erudition. Moreover, his career was both lengthy and
productive. His first full-length play, The Trumpet Shall Sound, was
published serially in the Yale Literary Magazine beginning in 1919, and
his last novel, Theophilus North, was published in 1973. If there were a
unifying trope that covered all of Wilder’s career, then his works
would be a great deal less interesting than they in fact are.
While Wilder’s works may unconsciously reflect an American Pu-
ritan tradition, he was very much an avowed modernist, at least for-
mally.11 In his sister Isabel’s quasi-autobiographical novel Mother and
Four, Spencer may well be a portrait of the young Thornton at Yale:
Spencer, Carlo, and their friends lived in a busy world they had cre-
ated for themselves under the patronage of the university. They were
snobs in and out of term time and they were tyrants. They judged a
man by his knowledge of Proust and James Joyce and D. H. Law-
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
Introduction 5
rence. Spengler and The American Mercury—that big squarish book
and that bright green magazine—were their badges. They made and
broke reputations through their mouthpiece, The Newton Literary
Magazine, known as the Newt.12
This cannot be taken as an unqualified picture of Wilder since The
American Mercury, founded by George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken,
did not begin publication until 1924, and Wilder graduated from Yale
in 1920. But the rest of the list certainly sounds like what Wilder
(and many other bright young men and women) would be reading at
the time.
Certainly, Wilder’s English themes at Yale reflect a young man’s
condescension toward the American intellectual and literary tradition.
About Ben Franklin’s Autobiography, the beginning of the pragmatist
tradition in America, he sneers, “He is the dreadful man who would
be glad to lead his life over again, ‘with minor alterations.’” Wilder is
just as hard on Hawthorne, clearly an important voice in the Puritan
literary tradition: “As a matter of principle I view the story that is half
story and half allegory with aversion; and when, proportionately, the
story tends toward the realistic, and the allegory toward the heavily di-
dactic, like the lovers in Dante, ‘in that book I read no more.’”13 The
instructor graded that theme a B. And Wilder insists on the primacy
of the aesthetic in works of fiction. About Uncle Tom’s Cabin he writes,
“There are two factors that ought not to influence a critic in the ap-
preciation of a novel. Its economic or moral effects; the extent of its
popularity” (B+).14
In the 1920s, Wilder was very much au courant with literary trends.
Edmund Wilson discovered while riding in a taxi with Wilder that he
had read Proust closely and not uncritically. He subsequently wrote a
review detailing the influence of Proust on Wilder.15 Proust, in Within
a Budding Grove, satirizes those who call for a literature that upholds
social and moral standards. M. de Norpois, the earnest purveyor of
moral uplift, criticizes Bergotte for his emphasis on form because “we
may be overwhelmed at any moment by a double tide of barbarians,
those from without and those from within our borders.” M. de Nor-
pois’ criticism of “Art for Art’s Sake” is that “it is all very precious,
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
6 Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder
very thin, and altogether lacking in virility.” Proust, of course, is well
aware that such criticisms will be made of his own work, but he allows
the reader more than a hundred pages to reflect on the claim before
he dismisses it: “The arguments of M. de Norpois (in the matter of
art) were unanswerable simply because they were devoid of reality.”16
All considerations in art must be secondary to aesthetic imperatives.
Thus, while I believe that Wilder’s works allow us to reflect on the re-
ligious issues therein, they must be examined in the context of the
modernist moment in literature, when skepticism toward conven-
tional pieties, both religious and artistic, forced writers into new forms
inspired by new ideas from economics, sociology, and psychology.
Wilder was, according to Wilson writing in the late 1920s, in the first
rank of American writers, along with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and
Dos Passos.17 Although Wilder writes of historical subjects in a way
that none of those writers do, they are his intellectual contemporaries,
rather than New England Puritans or Eastern mystics.
I shall argue that no single religious or philosophic system can ac-
count for the variety and complexity of Wilder’s works, which are too
often seen as independent of the debates over meaning and value that
have raged since the decay of the great medieval synthesis in the sev-
enteenth century. To explain what I mean by that, I would like to ad-
dress the ways that Wilder sees an interest in, or focus on, religious
themes as an authorial position increasingly regarded as irrelevant by
the modern world, or, at least, by its educated members. Wilder admits
in the quotation from The Angel That Troubled the Waters cited above
that a “contemporary standard of good manners” requires that most of
his plays be religious only in a dilute, attenuated sense. The four ex-
plicitly religious plays fly a flag that invites battle. And, later in the in-
troduction, Wilder suggests that the battle will be difficult, perhaps
hopeless: “The revival of religion is almost a matter of rhetoric. The
work is difficult, perhaps impossible (perhaps all religions die out with
the exhaustion of the language), but it at least reminds us that Our
Lord asked us in His work to be not only as gentle as doves but as wise
as serpents” (CP, 654). “Rhetoric” here keeps its traditional sense; it
is the art concerned with persuasion or for communication on s ubjects
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
Introduction 7
where logic is inappropriate because the subject is incapable of dem-
onstration. But the persuasion used for religious subjects faces an up-
hill fight. The language of religion is almost exhausted, and the
reference to Matthew 10:16—“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in
the midst of wolves; be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as
doves”18—indicates that the religious writer, like the apostles, faces
powerful opposition.
Wilder often specifically incorporates a modern skeptical attitude
toward religion and religious beliefs in his works. While there are mul-
tiple examples, one will suffice to indicate the breadth of his awareness
of the assault waged by some in the social sciences on the foundations
of religion. In his novel Heaven’s My Destination (1935), Burkin, the
itinerant film director, convinces the hero, George Brush, to let him
have half an hour so he can explain what George would know if he
had gone to a decent college. Burkin is an unattractive character, but
he nevertheless allows Wilder to introduce the intellectual traditions
that ultimately Brush’s naïve Puritanism must confront: “Burkin
plunged into primitive man and the jungle; he came down through
nature myths; he hung the earth in astronomical time. He then ex-
posed the absurdity of conflicting prayers, man’s egoistic terror before
extinction” (Heaven’s, 163). Freud, whom Wilder knew and whose
work he respected,19 claimed in Totem and Taboo (1913) that “the be-
ginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus com-
plex.”20 This is not a metaphor: Freud thought that some sons had
murdered their father and then recreated the father as a totem to ex-
piate their guilt, and that all religion flowed from this act. In The Fu-
ture of an Illusion (1927), Freud insisted that religion is a product of
man’s ignorance, analogous to the mental states of a child:
Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of hu-
manity; like the obsessional neurosis of children, it arose out of the
Oedipus complex, out of the relation to the father. If this view is
right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away from religion is bound
to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth, and that
we find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle phase of devel-
opment.21
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
8 Thornton Wilder and Amos Wilder
Here the modern age is the point where man turns from his child-
hood neurosis onto a necessary path to maturity. Any attempt to hang
on to religious belief is therefore not only immature; it also shows a
maladjustment to reality.
But Burkin’s deconstruction of religious belief does not just rely
on psychoanalysis. He also, through his reference to primitive man and
nature myths, introduces anthropology and Sir James Frazer’s explana-
tion of religious ritual in the immensely influential The Golden Bough
(1890). In a letter to his mother, for which the editors of Selected
Letters suggest a date of 1925, Wilder elaborates on Frazer’s assault on
religious belief:
I’m reading the Golden Bough, the one volume edition abridged
from twelve. Tons of folklore, witch doctors, how to make it rain,
May day myths, Spring ceremonies, resurrection legends . . . . the
evidence accumulating like a great Juggernaut trying to flatten out
any particular importance that might be reserved for Christian doc-
trine. But the theoretical interludes are a little pompous and repeti-
tive and there remains a chance that the notions I learned at your
knee may survive.22
The tone of the letter indicates both Wilder’s interest in religious
skepticism and his own intellectual balance, which his character Bur-
kin lacks.
In Frazer’s analysis of nature myths, he traces an intellectual de-
velopment in humanity from magic to religion to science. Originally,
man believes that he can manipulate nature by imitating its actions.
Thus, man sacrifices because he sees that the corn must die to be re-
born every year. When he sees that he cannot manipulate nature, he
posits higher beings who arrange natural events and whom he must
propitiate. Finally, he recaptures the magical belief in cause and effect,
but now through scientific observation:
Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of
the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of
nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older stand-
© 2012 University of Notre Dame
Introduction 9
point of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only
been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order
of natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee
their course with certainty and to act accordingly. In short, religion,
regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced by science.23
Frazer subsequently develops this into an analogy of history as tapestry,
with magic a black thread, religion a red one, and science a white one.
White, he is quite sure, will come to dominate.
Burkin moves back historically from Freud to Frazer in his cri-
tique of religion; and when he hangs man in astrological time, he has
moved back to the discoveries of the nineteenth century that so trou-
bled Tennyson after the death of his dearest friend. Sorrow tells Ten-
nyson of an empty, meaningless universe in In Memoriam:
“The stars,” she whispers, “blindly run;
A web is woven across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun;
“And all the phantom, Nature, stands—
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,—
A hollow form with empty hands.”24
The dinosaurs have come and gone, and nineteenth-century physics
has discovered the concept of entropy as symbolized here by the dying
sun. Tennyson has to win back his faith in the face of grief and the
destabilizing vision of modern science. That he does so indicates that
the march of science is not quite so irresistible as perhaps Freud and
Frazer believed it to be. Even the vegetation cults that Frazer analyzed
retained acolytes in the twentieth century. The startling fact of Jes-
sie L. Weston’s 1920 analysis of the myth of the Holy Grail in From
Ritual to Romance (which T. S. Eliot described as a book of great inter-
est in his notes to The Wasteland) is that Weston believes that the
“Grail is a living force” that “will rise to the surface again.”25
© 2012 University of Notre Dame