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Thornton Wilder & Amos Wilder PDF

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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

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.