It took about 10 years—since I first became interested in literature—but this summer, I finally realized that Thornton Wilder was a great writer.
It may seem like a quaint sentiment. In the annals of 20th century literature, Wilder may come off as a doddering schoolmaster, plumped up with Latin and archaic arcana—a marginal figure along the likes of Borges, Woolf, Mishima, Joyce, Kafka, etc.
In his introduction to Wilder’s “The Ides of March,” Kurt Vonnegut acknowledged that, even alongside his contemporaries (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos) Wilder cut a pedagogic figure.
To high school students, he is the man who wrote “Our Town,” a play that is either venerated or personally vitiated. To award buffs, he is the recipient of three Pulitzer Prizes (two for drama, one for fiction, the only American to ever win in both categories) as well as the National Book Award.
To my mind, he seems lost in those annals, almost conspicuously so. He was never openly experimental, the way Dos Passos was in his “U.S.A. Trilogy;” he was never passionately forlorn, the way Fitzgerald was in his life; his work never stayed in one place (more or less) the way Faulkner’s did; he wasn’t a sporting man the way Ernest Hemingway was in life and work.
Yet, when you read his works, there is an energy and resonance, completely different from the aforementioned Americans, different from the aforementioned authors. It’s rather startling, when you begin delving into it. First, though, we should delve into Wilder terrain.
Wilder was born on April 17, 1897, in Madison, WI. His father, Amos Parker Wilder, was editor (and later part owner) of the Wisconsin State Journal—a position he held until 1906, when Amos became a Chinese diplomat under the Roosevelt administration. After that, Wilder grew up in both China and California. He earned a B.A. from Yale in 1920 and earned a Masters in French at Princeton in 1926.
Wilder served in both World Wars—in the latter as a lieutenant colonel. He taught high school French in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and literature at both the University of Chicago and Harvard. He wrote the script to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” which remains a classic thriller. Nonetheless, throughout his life, he believed he was more teacher than writer.
And while there might be credence to that claim, Wilder’s skills as a writer are barefaced—his qualities are overbrimming in his novels and his plays. Among his contemporaries, even if it wasn’t quite so pronounced, he was a supernal writer.
The experiments he wrought in his two Pulitzer dramas—“Our Town” and “The Skin of Our Teeth,” as well as in his short plays and in novels like “The Ides of March” and “The Cabala”—espouse an experimental metier that belie their scholarly or domestic tones.
Even if in his personal life he wasn’t wrecked by forlornness, Wilder’s books covered forlornness with a remarkable breadth and scope, across continents and centuries.
Wilder’s settings ranged from 18th century Peru to Caesar’s Rome to timeless book pages and paintings, but each possessed the singularity that Faulkner brought to Yoknapatawpha County.
And while he did not exude the sort of tough, manly quality Hemingway did, Wilder did exude a resiliency of intellect.
He tied all these qualities together, yet none of it would seem to add up to greatness. In fact, there is much that put me off Wilder—in some ways still puts me off. His classicism, his (occasionally) marked disinterest in the present (most of the time), his apparent detachment in light of the passions that roiled in his contemporaries; unlike his stage managers from “Our Town,” Wilder seemed to prefer life off the stage, out of view, outside the world of the living.
He could be very cold. He called literature the arrangement of platitudes, and on the surface he is a repository of such.
He also attracted criticism for perceived plagiarism of James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” in his play “The Skin of Our Teeth.” Indeed, the play was born out of Wilder’s obsessive study of Joyce’s book, insofar as Wilder was under the sway of that wordy ouroboros when he wrote the play.
But accusations aside, platitudes aside, classicism aside, so much of Wilder’s work radiates with a peculiar luminescence that his standing as a great writer (and not just as a great writer of old) should not be mitigated. Wilder was obsessed with humanity, obsessed with what he viewed as the whole—the great circling of the galaxy, the folding over of time over itself.
Perhaps the point to take away from this is that Wilder—more than teacher, more than scholar, more than award recipient, more than high school mainstay—was a great writer. That is his legacy.
Think Thornton Wilder is a thorn in your side? Tell Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
