The enthusiast: a life of Thornton Wilder. - book reviews

National Review, June 1, 1984 by Thomas Mallon

The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder

IT IS AN odd experience to learn that the author of Our Town and The Matchmaker was once attacked for ignoring American subject matter in favor of dimly imagined classical worlds full of "little lavender tragedies.' But those are the grounds on which a leftwing writer named Michael Gold took exception to Thornton Wilder's novel The Woman of Andros in the pages of The New Republic in 1930. Although one tends to forget it, Wilder was indeed almost as likely to set his works in Rome or Peru as in Grover's Corners or Yonkers. Gilbert Harrison, himself once an editor of The New Republic, pays sustained and sympathetic attention to all of Wilder's imaginative worlds in this large new biography, which reveals a man whose far-flung sensibilities made him friends with Gertrude Stein and caused him to fill 1,198 pages of his journal with notes on the seventeenth-century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega.

The unhappy match of a slightly mystical mother with a father full of civic pieties gave birth to Thornton Niven Wilder on April 17, 1897. He spent much of his childhood in Wisconsin, but some of it in China, too. (Amos Wilder was Theodore Roosevelt's consul general in Hong Kong.) Thornton endured his schooldays as an outsider but not a rebel, and he discovered his vocation as a writer at Oberlin and Yale. If his mother's artistic leanings sent his literary imagination into distant worlds, some of his father's didacticism survived in his novels and plays (e.g., his injunction to place "a value above all price [on] the smallest events of our daily life') and led to his success as a teacher, first at Lawrenceville and then at the University of Chicago in the 1930s. Optimistic without being slaphappy, he took the long view of man, finding him essentially the same in the Ice Age as in the McKinley Administration and resisting, as his biographer puts it, "the temptation to believe that the human race is going to hell.' In this sense he was an extraordinarily daring writer for his day.

But if Wilder was a prophet of the ordinary, he ended up with too much honor in his own country. He produced relatively little after his service with Army Air Intelligence in the Second World War. A lot of the time he should have been writing was spent picking up honorary degrees, making UNESCO chat, and leading what Harrison calls a "flagrantly gregarious' life. The man who had dramatized the little ecstasies of home became a "perennial wanderer,' to France, Germany, Aspen, Arizona. He managed to produce The Eighth Day and Theophilus North in his last decade, but there were more projects abandoned than completed.

He was a generous man (""a pushover on contracts''), a writer of encouraging letters to the young and disappointed, someone who liked to chat with barflies and eat at Howard Johnson's. He was easy to work with and therefore left behind fewer anecdotes than a man of the theater usually does. There are stretches of The Enthusiast that are more dutiful than absorbing. (What a relief when Tallulah Bankhead shows up to make trouble! She was cast as Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth. When she and Wilder looked forward to an armistice day that would end the Second World War, she told him: "I've ordered the ambulance already.')

The man Harrison describes as an "enthusiast'--for food, travel, cross-country walking, and troops of friends --was also guarded and somewhat neutered. Harrison's biography rather emulates its subject in this respect. This book may be a relief from the monomaniacal bedchecks that often pass for literary biography these days, but it rushes away from discussion of sex almost as fast as Wilder did from its experience. Wilder apparently had an affair with one Samuel Steward, a college instructor and later an author of pseudonymous sex novels, but "the sexual act was so hurried and reticent, so barren of embrace, tenderness, or passion that it might never have happened. Steward felt that for Thornton the act was literally "unspeakable.''

"Thornton' remains just that to Harrison --"Thornton,' never Wilder. This is all right, because there was always something a little too young or a little too old about Wilder, a man who went straight from being a younger brother to being a friendly, elderly uncle without slipping into any of life's more essential roles in between. Harrison is sometimes less than probing in his explanations, but he is never pompous either. There is some strain in the writing, a little too much first-person-plural footsie with the reader ("It is that boy's story that we follow'), and some attempts to make chapter endings into cliffhangers where the cliffs are only a few inches high. But The Enthusiast is a diligent account of an imagination that was rather more complicated than will be suspected by those who have encountered it only by playing Emily Webb or George Gibbs in their junior year of high school.