Thornton Wilder (35 page)

The narrator soon encounters the members of the Cabala and begins to form his own relationships with them. There are Elizabeth Grier, a wealthy American spinster, Vassar College trustee, and dominant force in the Cabala; Her Highness Leda Matilda Colonna, duchessa d'Aquilanera, and her young son, the doomed prince Marcantonio, who has “fallen on bad ways”; the cultured Frenchwoman Alix, princess d'Espoli, unhappily married to an Italian prince; the ancient, reputedly wise Cardinal Vaini, who has spent his life on the mission fields of China; and the fervently devout Mlle. Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine. There is even a cameo appearance in the novel by John Keats.

Samuele, who is in Rome to study ancient history, charms his way into the inner circle of the Cabala, some of whose members enlist his help in solving seemingly insoluble problems. The duchessa d'Aquilanera implores Samuele to help reform her sexually promiscuous, self-destructive teenage son, Marcantonio, who ultimately commits incest and then kills himself. The unhappily married princess Alix d'Espoli turns to Samuele in hopes he can help her win the affections of the indifferent, unavailable James Blair. Alix confronts “that cavern of horror in her nature: she seemed always to be loving those that did not love her,” Samuele observes.
⁷⁸
He takes an almost prurient interest in Alix's despair: “I was trembling with a strange happy excitement, made up partly of my love and pity for her, and partly from the mere experience of eavesdropping on a beautiful spirit in the last reaches of its pride and suffering.”
⁷⁹
She considers suicide in the thrall of her hopeless, unrequited passion for Blair, but Samuele tries to set her on the road to redemption.

Into the imaginative fiction of
The Cabala
are woven strands of Thornton's own experiences with unrequited love, helping to explain why he devoted such detailed attention to Alix's rejection by Blair. Whereas Samuele narrates the stories of the other Cabalists from a more distant, third-person point of view, he paints a close-up portrait of Alix's unhappiness and her doomed efforts to seduce Blair. In doing so Thornton delineates characteristics that illuminate his own experience. He reflects that “while we are in love with a person our knowledge of his weaknesses lies lurking in the back of our minds and our idealization of the loved one is not so much an exaggeration of his excellences as a careful ‘rationalization' of his defects.” Through Samuele he observes that “the mere fact of being loved so, whether one could return it or not, put one under an obligation.” In the concluding incident of Alix's chapter, the author demonstrates how deep and lingering such a wound can be.
⁸⁰

Samuel's next adventure involves the earnest Mlle Astrée-Luce de Morfontaine, an elderly woman defined by her absolute belief in the teachings of the church, and her conviction that only a return to the doctrine of the divine right of kings can ensure the future of European civilization. She hopes that Samuele can help her present her case to the cardinal, who so blatantly disappoints and disillusions her that she tries to kill him. Fortunately he is saved, only to die en route to China, where he had lived for many years, and where he had hoped to rediscover his own spiritual balance.

The final chapter of
The Cabala,
“The Dusk of the Gods,” is a mystical and at times mystifying culmination of the novel. Samuele goes to Marcantonio's grave. He writes notes of appreciation and farewell, closes out his apartment, gives his dog to a friend. He has a long visit with Elizabeth Grier, who has pronounced Samuele the reincarnation or at least the avatar of the god Mercury—the messenger. On his voyage back to the United States, Samuele invokes the presence of the poet Virgil, who appears to give him the message that Rome cannot be the Eternal City because “Nothing is eternal save Heaven.” Virgil goes on to say, “Romes existed before Rome and when Rome will be a waste there will be Romes after her.”
⁸¹
In lines that foreshadow later work—
The Woman of Andros
and
Our Town
—Virgil mourns the earthly life he loved:

 

When shall I erase from my heart this love of [Rome]? I cannot enter Zion until I have forgotten Rome.—Dismiss me now, my friend, I pray thee. These vain emotions have shaken me. . . . (Suddenly the poet became aware of the Mediterranean:) Oh, beautiful are these waters. Behold! For many years I have almost forgotten the world. Beautiful! Beautiful!—But no! What horror, what pain! Are you still alive? Alive? How can you endure it?
⁸²

 

As the ghost of Virgil “faded before the stars,” Samuele's voyage continued “toward the new world and the last and greatest of all cities.”
⁸³

The Cabala
is more than an entertainment, more than a young novelist's first and sometimes affected display of talent and promise. There are glib, overwrought passages, some strained characterizations, and a smattering of esoteric literary allusions that verge on ostentation. But overall there is glittering style, replete with lyrical descriptive passages; metaphors deftly woven from musical terms; occasional comedy and parody; witty, sometimes biting irony—and, as Thornton described it, “mordant” social satire.
⁸⁴
There is also high drama, at times farce, at times melodrama, at times tragedy. On one level the book can be read as a tragicomic allegory. The reader can laugh with and at Samuele and the Cabalists and at the same time pity them. As Samuele, at their instigation, becomes embroiled in the lives of the Cabalists, he sometimes witnesses and sometimes precipitates events, including tragedies—the suicide, the unrequited love affair with a desperately unhappy ending, the shattering crisis of faith.

“Marcantonio,” the second episode, can even be viewed as a paradoxical allegory about the dangers of intemperately advocating temperance (echoes of Amos Parker Wilder's tendencies). Book 3, “Alix,” dramatizes the intense suffering of unrequited love, and the compensations the rejected lover seeks. Book 4, “Astrée-Luce and the Cardinal,” depicts the crisis when religious faith is challenged, and explores the impact of the loss of spiritual belief, as well as the harm that can be done when clergymen disillusion their most faithful followers.

“Who can understand religion unless he has sinned? who can understand literature unless he has suffered? who can understand love unless he has loved without response?” the cardinal says to Samuele.
⁸⁵
These are the three central questions posed in
The Cabala.

17

“MY REAL VOCATION”

Dear Master, I cried, how shall I know If this be my real vocation? . . . I was told that destiny herself was the mother of decision, and that my vocation would be settled by events not by consideration.

—SAMUELE TO SAREPTOR BASILIS, THE SEER,

in Thornton Wilder's
The Cabala

 

New Haven, New York, and Europe (1926–1927)

T
he Cabala
was published on April 20, 1926, by Albert and Charles Boni, and to Thornton's chagrin, many pages were marred by careless errors. Most of them were not his fault, he wrote his brother, but some critics would pounce on them, blaming the author whose name, after all, was on the text. “The final proofs were perfect, I feel sure. But at that stage the firm suddenly decided that the book was too short and began expanding it by all the devices known to the trade. In the respacing of lines therefore many must have been broken and crazily repatched by the typesetter: but a few of the errors remain my maxima culpa!” He reported to Amos that almost no one liked the last section of the novel, book 5, “The Dusk of the Gods.” “I should have ‘prepared' it more consistently thru the earlier. Well—all in all, I have learned lots of lessons.”
¹
He was preparing himself for the possibility that the book might receive “a brief and decent” burial.
²

The Bonis waited for the reviews, not planning to advertise the book until “some blurbs begin.” Even if his book failed to reach an audience, Thornton consoled himself that at least he could earn his living “elsewhere” and find “elsewhere” his “real pleasures.”
³
He was all too aware of his shortcomings as a novelist, he told Amos: “I am too young and too undedicated a person to achieve a restrained Grand Style (which I pretend after)—notes of burlesque, smartalecisms and purple-rhetoric creep in and are only discovered when it is too late. Let me promise you tho that tons of bunk were deported in the successive readings of the proof. Hope for the best.”
⁴

As it turned out, Thornton and the Bonis were pleasantly surprised by the reviews, which were mixed but overwhelmingly positive. Theodore Purdy, Jr., at the
Saturday Review
found the novel disorganized and the writing at times “imitative,” but still he called
The Cabala
a “sophisticated extravaganza,” and numerous critics praised Wilder's style.
⁵
Thornton's Yale friend John Farrar, writing in the
Bookman,
enthusiastically endorsed the book in a review headlined “Brilliant, Bitter, Imaginative,” noting that even while Wilder's imagination was “bizarre,” it was “restrained.”
⁶
Some critics praised the book as charming, witty, authentic, brilliant, mature, beautiful, ironic, irresistible; others dismissed it as esoteric, strange, disorganized, imitative, inaccurate in its depiction of the Catholic Church, and full of inexcusable mechanical errors. Agnes Repplier in the Catholic journal
Commonweal
charged that Thornton Wilder did not “know the Church of Rome.”
⁷
She said some “very harsh things,” Thornton wrote to a friend. “Some of them are true and some are extravagantly unjust.” Nevertheless he wanted to share the review with friends so they could, “for completeness' sake,” read “the enemy's point-of-view”—one of the few times in his career that he would ever comment on a review.
⁸

From his old friend William Lyon Phelps, in
Scribner's Magazine,
came lavish praise, especially for the author's style, although, Phelps said, “I am not quite sure what it is all about.”
⁹
Wilder's debut, it was noted more than once, marked the appearance on the American literary scene of a promising new writer. In May a letter came to Thornton in Princeton from one of the critics who mattered most—his former professor Charles Wager. “It is just like you, full of your delightful airs and graces, but with what seems to me a sense for a situation that you did not even promise to have in the days of your former incarnation,” Dr. Wager wrote. “It is the real thing, if I am judge, and of course I think I am . . . if one can be daring and clever and vivid and at the same time write like a gentleman and a wit, I cannot see why one would regret it. Besides all this, there is something curiously like wisdom in your book, and this strikes me as best of all.”
¹⁰

“If I deserved to be happy no letter could have made me happier than yours,” Thornton replied:

 

How many hours I sat under your rostrum, burning with awe and emotion, while you unfolded the masterpieces. . . . I am an old fashioned believer and when I assert that I believe that lives are planned out for us I am always thinking of the fact that my father . . . sent his two sons to Oberlin where the younger could get the nourishment without which he would have remained a bright blundering trivial hysteric.
¹¹

 

The Cabala
quickly went into its second printing “with all the twenty-eight errata corrected,” Thornton noted.
¹²
The book would be published in England in October by Longmans, Green & Company, Ltd. Although not a bestseller, it sold in respectable numbers—5,357 copies in the United States in the first year. The Boni brothers approached Thornton with an unusual proposition: If he would turn over to them $1,250 in royalties due him, they would match that amount and “plaster the country with adv'ts, to try and ram it down the public neck as one of the six bestsellers of the Spring and perhaps recoup all that was invested.” Thornton turned them down. “In the first place I must eat,” he wrote to Amy Wertheimer. “In the second, it would be absurd to make a little goldfish go through the antics of a whale.”
¹³

 

THROUGHOUT THAT
hectic spring Amy sought Thornton's attention—asking to read his work in progress, wanting to give him a twenty-ninth birthday party, reproaching him when he did not write her long letters. He reminded her of the boundaries he had prescribed in January with “affectionate gentleness and affectionate firmness.”
¹⁴
Even their correspondence verged on “Not Fair Play,” he wrote to her in April, after a visit with his family in New Haven. Amy was married. She had children. He would continue to think about the limitations on their relationship, and he hoped she would as well. “It doesn't matter much what a poor unattached abstracted bachelor does; but it [is] very important what a lady with the network of attachment like yours does . . . your attention must be overwhelmingly centered where you are.” Worst of all was his conviction that “I am cheating. New Haven [his family] implies that.”
¹⁵

She answered him with “beautiful pages” and “just in that vein of restraint with wistfulness which (haven't we decided?) must be ours.” But he was worried that she was reading allusions to herself into his depiction of Alix in
The Cabala.
He cautioned her not to “wrench reflexions out of their context,” reminding her that “the earlier books [of
The Cabala
] were written before we met and have elsewhere their application.”
¹⁶

He defined himself for Amy in late April. He was trying to juggle all his “existences”: He was a graduate student; a “Sociable” who went to teas, dances, dinners, and movies; a teacher and a tutor; a published author concerned about the response to his new book; a writer filled with ideas for new books. It was a challenge to coordinate “all these persons I am,” he wrote, “and it's too exciting.”
¹⁷
Unknown to her, he confessed later, he was “leading the foxiest possible life trying to appear a gentleman and a Princetonian on a hobo's budget.”
¹⁸
His life was a whirlwind: In his few spare hours he was trying to finish his revisions to the last act of
The Trumpet Shall Sound
and write at least a few sporadic pages of the new novel; he was signing “a perfect tower of books”; the “Fox Film Company” telegraphed the Bonis that they were considering
The Cabala
for a film; the theatrical producer Charles L. Wagner “whom I don't know from Adam,” Thornton wrote, liked the characterizations in
The Cabala
and wanted to “discuss a play.”
¹⁹
Despite these demands on his time and energy, Thornton finished his M.A. requirements and the degree was “all won and over.” He was working on his new novel,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
“The book is going astonishingly,” he told his mother. “The weather is glorious and my health is perfect. But I'm all ‘sunk.' I'm coming to you about the 22nd or23rd and sleep up in the hall and get cured. You are the only thing I can count on in a tiresome world.”
²⁰

He was not very happy, he wrote to Amy, probably because “through distraction and laziness I haven't written a word for so long, i.e. denied my
raison d'être
.”
²¹
He would be all right once he got home, he told her, for “there is one place in the world I am really at peace and that is on the little cot up in the hall in Mansfield Street, with my Father and Mother and Isabel tiptoeing about their affairs.” There was another reason for his weariness: “This little M. A. has been drinking a little too much lately having fallen into a crowd after his own heart—tough-guys, chemists and physicists and other non-introspectives,” he confessed to Amy.

 

Their major ordeals are just over and they are all for stealing the distilled alcohols reserved for experimental work in the biological laboratories and infusing it with whole groves of lemons and shaking violently at the level of the shoulders. Then I am almost happy, accepted as a mere fella among fellas. . . . I long to be ordinary as Elinor Wylie longs to be respectable
.
²²

 

It was important to Thornton to be “a mere fella among fellas,” but try as he might to be ordinary, he was remarkable. At twenty-nine, he was a successful teacher, his M.A. in French in hand; a published novelist, with a second novel under way; a dramatist whose play would open in New York in December. He would spend July on his second MacDowell Colony fellowship, where he could concentrate on writing the new novel and put the finish touches on
The Trumpet Shall Sound,
which Boleslavsky was “clamoring” to receive.
²³
His first novel was being reviewed all over the United States and in England, and earning modest royalties.

For most of his MacDowell residency, Thornton was buried in his work on the
The Trumpet Shall Sound
and
The Bridge of San Luis Rey,
struggling with the “still shapeless mass of the first two books” of the novel, he wrote to a friend.
²⁴
He found that
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
flowed from his pen “almost without effort, phrasing itself in a thousand beautiful accidents, but it is desperately sad.”
²⁵
He was “retelling the story of Mme de Sévigné's daughter, though under another name and in another age,” he wrote to Amy.
²⁶
After a few weeks, however, he tired of the “hothouse introspective conversation at Peterborough,” and considered going back to Princeton for better working conditions, or accepting Boleslavsky's invitation to spend a week at his Connecticut farm.

Thornton also wanted to “get one unencumbered honest-to-god visit with my own mother,” and enjoy some “congenial talks and salt-water swimming, the two enthusiasms of my life.”
²⁷
But when the director of the Lake Sunapee Summer School and Camp in New Hampshire asked Thornton to substitute for one of their French masters, he jumped at the chance to earn the extra income. In late July the camp director sent a roadster to MacDowell to take Thornton to Lake Sunapee, where he would stay until mid-September. He spent the morning hours teaching small groups of students and the afternoons swimming and taking long solitary walks. There was time for his own work, but he found it refreshing that most people at Sunapee paid no attention whatsoever to the fact the he had ever “meddled with writing.”
²⁸
“Once in a long while I add a paragraph to
The Bridge
,” he wrote to his mother, “but it's a tender-growing lily and is never smudged with mere industry.” He wished that he and his mother, just the two of them, could spend some time in September at “some sea-coast somewhere” while he finished the new novel. “It will go—again all right if you are near,” he told her.
²⁹

The Wilder family was, as usual, scattered for the summer—with Thornton in New Hampshire, his mother in New Haven, his father and Isabel in Maine with various members of the extended Wilder family, his brother at his church in North Conway, Janet on a farm in northern New Hampshire, and Charlotte traveling in France with friends and writing an article about the journey entitled “In a Corner of France.”
³⁰
In mid-September, for once, the entire Wilder family was together in New Haven, albeit briefly—“every known Wilder around one table,” Thornton wrote, “and a very emotional Grace from Father, who, as you remember, loves the Clan.”
³¹

Thornton marveled more than ever at his mother's spirit and achievements, and wrote a portrait of her in 1926, when he was twenty-nine and his mother was fifty-three: