The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (11 page)

In addition to a pointed reminder that Thornton Wilder cared so deeply about drama that he was willing to take a creative risk with his public, it is helpful to see
The Woman of Andros
as a novelistic form of
The Angel That Troubled the Waters.
Besides its brevity – at 23,000 words,
Andros
barely qualifies as even a short novel – there are kindred themes. The four playlets added after 1926 show Wilder wrestling with similar and sober questions of morality and religion. The title playlet, for example, written in June 1928 as he was beginning to write the novel, has an angel informing a Chrysis-like figure that his time for healing at the sacred waters has not yet arrived. ‘In love’s service,’ the angel says, ‘only the wounded soldiers can serve.’ We know from later interviews that one of Wilder’s first three novels began as a play. Surely it is
The Woman of Andros.

In addition to attracting significant attention to his curious little playlets,
The Bridge
also provided Wilder with the money to write as he felt most comfortable writing, and would do so the rest of his career. His pattern was to sequester himself for short-term stays of a few days or a few weeks in the United States or abroad in hotels, pensions, or apartments. His notations on the manuscript of
The Woman of Andros
open the door on the creative process of a writer on the move:

The Woman of Andros.
Idea first came spring of 1928. First two conversations written at Axeland House, Horley, Surrey; and much of the later parts clearly planned during church attendances at Red Hill, Outwood,
etc.
The copying out of already completed portions begun into this book Oct 11, 1928. Pension Saramartel, Juan-les-Pins. A lot (Towards Chrysis monologue in the cove) done in The Law Dorm’s 76 Wall St New Haven April 1929. Then Sept-Oct Oxford-Paris-Munich.

The notation includes two locations where he had in fact worked earlier on
The Bridge
– the pension in Juan-les-Pins, and a short-term rental in a Yale Law School dormitory. But his list is incomplete. We know from letters and records that Wilder also did considerable work on the manuscript in London’s Hotel Savoy, and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He also discovered that he worked well on ships crossing the Atlantic. (‘Baby does best on boats,’ he was later fond of saying.) As a result, the
Adriatic,
the
Lapland,
and the
Cedric
are part of the making of
Andros.
The manuscript’s peripatetic journey ended at the famed Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, for it was here, on or about January 4, 1930, only six weeks before publication, that Wilder completed the last lines of his third novel.

These excerpts offer a glimpse of Wilder’s often-obscure reading in a religious vein as he was writing
The Woman of Andros:

Have you read much of Abbé Bremond’s Histoire Litt du Sentiment Religieux? I’m working thru the first volume because Francis de Sales has always been one of my favorites (Sainte Chantal, his sister-in-the-Lord, was Mme de Sévigné’s grandmother. But I first got to know him through your Abbé Huvet.)

– Wilder to his brother, Amos (an ordained minister),

October 25, 1928, from Juan-les-Pins

It’s still the
Woman of Andros,
my
hetaira,
developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson. Her sayings and parables and her custom of adopting human strays is weighing down the book. But die she must and with unhellenic overtones, an
anima naturaliter Christiana
[a Christian spirit by nature]. I love to think that Terence’s play on which, ever so inexcusably, I base the
novella
was a favorite with Fénélon and John Henry Newman.

– Wilder to Lady Sybil Colefax,

July 24, 1929 from MacDowell Colony

Whenever he moved about, the celebrated Pulitzer Prize–winning author attracted reporters. The recurring question was predictable: What are you writing now, Mr. Wilder? In response the author was usually brief and guarded, typically saying that his new novel involved the ancient world, a play by Terence, and a Greek island. He also commonly said he would write plays after completing the novel. Occasionally he offered further detail.

In addition to working on his novel, as early as the fall of 1928, Wilder turned to the question of the design of the book and how it would be presented to the public. In addition to knowing that lightning does not strike twice in the same place, he cared about these practical questions for two reasons. First, he felt that the Boni firm inappropriately exploited
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
by serialisation and careless handling of subsidiary rights, and second, he recognised that his story about life and death on an obscure Greek island was very different from
The Bridge.
His terminology for how he wanted his new novel presented to the world was ‘conservative arrangements.’ He did not want to see it serialised in the William Randolph Hearst newspapers, as had happened with
The Bridge,
and he wanted to prohibit limited editions such as those for
The Cabala
and
The Bridge
that had turned into objects of frenzy in the collectors’ market.

That Wilder could address these questions in the first place was another significant result of the success of
The Bridge.
His new status gained him an agent in all but name to help him wield power, his trusted new attorney, J. Dwight Dana of New Haven, Connecticut. As a result of the shifting relationship with his publisher, the Wilder-Boni contract for
Andros,
signed on December 18, 1929, contained special provisions forbidding any ‘first edition . . . sold at a special price nor restricted to a relatively small number of copies,’ and any ‘cheap edition . . . to be published nor any republication or reproduction rights granted by publisher except upon the request of the Author communicated to the Publisher by said J. Dwight Dana.’ Wilder also asked his publisher a month before publication, to ‘send wrapper to me and blurb material as soon as it is done,’ reminding Boni ‘to be sure that because of the very subject-matter no faint colour of Hearst-Cosmopolitan enters into the format or publicity.’

The novel greeted the public on February 21, 1930, with an announced pre-publication printing of 30,000 copies and another 20,000 on the day of its birth, numbers illustrating how popular Wilder had become since
The Bridge’s
first printing of 4,000 copies. The book’s design reflected Wilder’s desires for dignity and simplicity of appearance. The dust jacket, in fact, contained not a single blurb about the new novel or any of Wilder’s previous books. Instead of the testimonials that filled the dust jackets of
The Bridge
and, especially,
The Cabala,
the back of the
Andros
jacket contained only a list of seven current Boni books, each with a short tagline description.
Andros
led the list with this announcement: ‘The long-awaited successor to
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
It is a study in the inner life of a few characters passing through circumstances that are common to domestic life in all times and places.’ The inside front flap repeated this language word for word, with an additional sentence alerting readers not to expect another
Bridge:
‘In contrast to Mr. Wilder’s earlier novels the characters in
The Woman of Andros
are simple village dwellers.’

The remaining space on the front flap was filled with a brief tribute from
New York Herald Tribune
critic Isabel Paterson, saluting Wilder’s ‘classical temper’ and his signature theme of ‘the ageless problem of love and death.’ The back flap was devoted to a 200-word extract from an article by Norman Fitts in the
Boston Evening Transcript.
It told the now-obligatory story of how an ‘obscure prep-school teacher’ in less than two years had become one of the ‘most discussed figures in the English speaking world,’ an author who wrote about a subject that was ‘the one . . . favoured by great writers – the human soul.’

Lightning did not strike twice when
The Woman of Andros
appeared. However, the news was good enough through the first six months to judge the book’s record a partial strike. The novel was a bestseller for twelve weeks between April and June 1930, reaching the number-one position at least once. By the end of June it had sold 65,994 copies in the United States and was also selling well in England. American sales fell off dramatically after June, and at year’s end stood at approximately 70,000. These numbers were strong enough to earn
Andros
third-place on the year’s list of the ten top-selling novels, and to earn Wilder royalty income of more than $16,000 – a notable sum in 1930.

Much favourable press lay behind these figures. While a number of critics were frank to say that they were not sure they understood Wilder’s contemplative novel, they were, as with his first two novels, enthusiastic about its style, praising the novel’s ‘craftsmanship’ and ‘workmanship.’ No word was more employed than
beauty:
‘Beauty is the key-word of this new novel.’ (
Saturday Review,
London); ‘In every page, one feels that Wilder is writing for the ages – a creation of beauty.’ (
New York Telegram
); ‘Vivid beauty’ (
Dominion News,
Morgantown, West Virginia); ‘efficient beauty’ (
Boston Transcript
); ‘the fire of beauty’ (
Bristol Times,
UK). Isabel Paterson wrote in the
New York Herald Tribune,
‘Mr. Wilder’s prose is as clear and as pure as the Castilian spring from which he has drawn its present inspiration.’ Mary Lamberton Becker in
The Saturday Review of Literature
threw up her hands: ‘Nothing one can say about it is so convincing as to quote it,’ she observed, joining other critics in citing especially the opening lines of the book.

Wilder’s novel also received many mixed reviews. Some critics faulted him for an affected style: ‘Mr. Wilder’s fine writing has just the whiff of the self-conscious beauty of Ye Gifte Book.’ (
The New Yorker
); ‘Too sophisticated.’ (
New York Sun
); ‘Artificial and bloodless.’ (
The Saturday Review
). But these were mere quibbles about taste and technique compared to a body of critical opinion about whether Wilder’s subject matter was relevant. We must remember that
Andros
appeared in print in a new decade, an entirely different era for everyone who had lived through the 1920s. The novel’s publication date came almost four months after the Wall Street Crash, the event commonly cited as the start of the Great Depression. Influenced by the rising social and political tensions of a depression era, some critics granted that Wilder was employing an ancient stage from which to talk about timeless issues, but wondered if it was enough. ‘One reads with edification and pleasure whatever Wilder chooses to write,’ Edmund Wilson reflected in
The New Republic
in March 1930, ‘but precisely because he is evidently very much a first-rate man, one wishes one saw him more at home.’ Lorine Pruette, in the establishment
Book League Monthly,
made an obligatory bow to the novel as ‘a minor example of the exquisite,’ but also wondered about the relevance of Wilder’s story for contemporary readers. Pruette wrote in April 1930:

Paganism passes, doubting, troubled, seeking; Christ is born. But is this enough for us today? Mr. Wilder’s fable is concerned with the doubts and difficulties of to-day, while his answer lies two thousand years in the past. It is possible to suspect that in literature the utilitarians have had their day and that any affirmative writings will be hailed with a certain relief. When the fun has gone out of the study of offal, for the time being, men may very likely return to a contemplation of the stars, an age of faith may well be just ahead but faith in what? It scarcely seems that we shall find the answer in a backward glance. . . . The present trend is
The Woman of Andros
is clear enough. It has reverence and pity, tenderness and flashes of beauty, but it lacks the terror and the agony that would seem to have a rightful place in any story of a man’s life, it lacks strength as does the ineffectual figure of Pamphilus. And as the fourth in the uncounted series of productions, it makes the future unfolding of a serious artist distressingly suspect.

Michael Gold, the Communist editor of the leftist literary magazine
New Masses,
harboured no doubts about Wilder’s worth. In a review of
Andros
in April in his journal, he described Wilder as a ‘fairy-like little Anglo-American curate.’ Gold wasn’t finished: ‘Yes, Wilder writes perfect English but he has nothing to say in that perfect English. He is a beautiful, rouged, combed, well-dressed corpse, lying among the sacred candles and lilies of the past, and sure to stink if exposed to sunlight.’ This was too much even for one of Gold’s colleagues, J. Q. Neets, who defended Wilder the next month in the same publication: ‘Perfect English is not such a bad thing. Why object to a subtle use of words, to a splendidly organised prose?’ Neets asked. He admired Wilder’s ‘superb structure, his economy of means, his crystalline style,’ and observed that ‘A wise proletarian writer does not pooh-pooh the very real technical achievements of the bourgeois writers.’

Gold would have none of it. Offered space in the October 1930 fall book issue of
The New Republic,
he assaulted all of Wilder’s published work in a 2,200-word essay titled ‘Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ.’ He painted the Pulitzer Prize winner as a poster boy for a genteel bourgeois literary tradition devoted to hiding from society’s ‘real problems.’ Gold accused Thornton Wilder of cultivating a ‘museum . . . not a world,’ and identified
Andros
as ‘a still further masterly retreat into time and space.’ ‘Where are the modern streets of New York, Chicago and New Orleans in these little novels?’ Gold asked of an author whose work he summarised as a ‘synthesis of all the chambermaid literature, Sunday-school tracts and boulevard piety there ever were.’ He concluded his diatribe with a challenge: ‘Let Mr. Wilder write a book about modern America. We predict it will reveal all his fundamental silliness and superficiality, now hidden under a Greek chlamys.’