The Woman of Andros / the Ides of March by Thornton Wilder
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.’
Gold’s challenge was met by an outpouring of letters, the majority of them favouring Wilder. Twenty-seven letters were published in six issues of the magazine before the editors drew the curtain on the controversy ‘on account of darkness.’ By that time this lively literary food fight had spread into the journals and weeklies, where it occasioned a broad debate about the relationship and responsibilities of writers to contemporary society. Thornton Wilder did not respond to Gold in print. Privately, he found it a ‘wretched affair’ and appears to have let it go. In any case, by the fall of 1930, as he had been saying publicly for several years, he had moved on to writing plays, one of which would generate a second lightning strike when Our Town opened on Broadway in 1938. But for better or for worse, the Gold attack clings like a limpet to the story of The Woman of Andros when literary historians put pen to paper.
Compared to Wilder’s other novels, Woman has had a quiet life for the past seventy-five years, although there have been eight translations, and musicians and film-makers periodically fall in love with its tone and story. Meanwhile, the deep shadow cast by The Bridge of San Luis Rey has receded, giving readers of The Woman of Andros a fresh opportunity to appreciate a novel constructed with controlled style and tensile strength about the ‘inner life of a few characters passing through circumstances that are common to domestic life in all times and places.’
Finally, the words of Chrysis offer a glimpse of Thornton Wilder’s own vision, and for this reason were read at his memorial service:
I want to say to someone . . . that I have known the worst that the world can do to me, and that nevertheless I praise the world and all living. All that is, is well. Remember some day, remember me
Tappan Wilder
Literary Executor
The Ides of March
This work is dedicated
to two friends:
LAURO DE BOSIS
Roman poet, who lost his life
marshalling a resistance against
the absolute power of Mussolini;
his aircraft pursued by those of the Duce
plunged into the Tyrrhenian Sea;
and to
EDWARD SHELDON
who though immobile and blind for over twenty years
was the dispenser of wisdom, courage, and gaiety
to a large number of people.
‘Das Schaudern ist der Menschheit bestes Teil;
Wie auch die Welt ihm das Gefühl verteure. . . . ’
– Goethe, Faust, Part Two ‘The shudder of awe is humanity’s highest faculty,
Even though this world is forever altering its values. . . .’
Gloss: Out of man’s recognition in fear and awe that there is an Unknowable comes all that is best in the explorations of his mind, – even though that recognition is often misled into superstition, enslavement, and overconfidence.
FOREWORD
Can you name an excellent American novelist who was equally adept as a playwright, or the other way around? Forget Ernest Hemingway. Forget Eugene O’Neill. Isn’t Thornton Wilder the only one? That native of the university town of Madison, Wisconsin, was fifty-one when this, his fifth novel, was published. With twenty-seven more years to live, he had by then seen four of his full-length plays, including the Pulitzer Prize 1938 masterpiece Our Town, produced as well.
As it happens, as I write in August 2002, Our Town is being performed by professionals before a packed house in a summer theatre only six miles due north of here. Thornton Wilder’s reputation is in no need of revival. When he died in 1975, his body, to say the least, was not chucked nameless and penniless into a pit of quicklime, as had been done to that of Mozart. He was wonderfully prosperous and is still popular as, in my opinion, the calmest, least strident, most humane and scholarly and forgiving and playful and avuncular American storyteller of the twentieth century.
He started out as a teacher at a prep school in New Jersey and went on from there, with a B.A. from Yale, to study at the American Academy in Rome, to an M.A. from Princeton, to teach literature at the University of Chicago and then Harvard and elsewhere. Once a teacher, always a teacher. In his writings he seems a teacher still, amiably, patiently encouraging his readers or auditors, as though they were students, to enjoy knowledge and a life of informed reasoning as much as he had. He is doing that tonight, six miles due north of here. He will do it to you as you read this book.
The subject he taught at the prep school wasn’t literature but French. So he surely knew by then this famous plaint about history by the French writer Alphonse Karr: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” In any case, Thornton Wilder obviously believed that, for the Julius Caesar in this book, literate, well read, unburdened by ignorance and superstition, is in all respects a modern man. The Ides of March, while set in Rome, might well be about a brilliant and all-too-human dictator in modern times, and what it could be like for the men and women who are close to one.
This book’s lesson, and the lesson taught even more didactically by his 1942 Pulitzer Prize play The Skin of Our Teeth, is that it is human nature which does not change, no matter the era or situation.
Thornton Wilder was born in the same year as my father, in 1897. Three American writers born within twelve years or less of them won Nobel Prizes for Literature. They were Sinclair Lewis, born 1885, Eugene O’Neill, born 1888, and Ernest Hemingway, born 1899, quite a hot trick, one might say, for the USA. That Thornton Wilder himself did not get one may have been due to the lack of immediacy and urgency and astonishment and suspense in all he wrote, although he otherwise wrote as well as anyone.
Writing about the glamorous dictator Julius Caesar, and in an era of horrifying new Caesars named Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini, Thornton Wilder chose the most placid of all literary forms! You have here a so-called epistolary novel, by definition without dialogue or narrative scenes or scenery, or flesh-and-blood characters. It is nothing but a collection of documents, whether real or imaginary, from which you are expected to draw your own conclusions!
Contrast, if you will, such a dusty archive with the vociferous pageantry of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, or Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw. And yet an epistolary novel turns out to serve to perfection a favourite plaything of Thornton Wilder. He showed off the plaything for the first time in 1927, in his bestselling, Pulitzer Prize novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is the possibility that some if not all human beings have inevitable destinies. What better way than by means of imaginary private journals was there for Thornton Wilder to create a Julius Caesar who expected to be assassinated, and who was startled on occasion by whom and what he had somehow become?
Yes, and as he wrote this, his fifth novel, Thornton Wilder himself was surely entitled to feel gaga from time to time about what a prominent person, albeit the most benign celebrity imaginable, he, the son of a newspaper editor in Madison, Wisconsin, had become.
Three Pulitzer Prizes so far! What the heck is going on?
One thing he had already become when only a student in the public high school in yet another university town, Berkeley, California, was a person who could read writings by Julius Caesar and Cicero and on and on in Latin. My father, the same age, became such a person in a public high school in Indianapolis, Indiana. So did tens of thousands of members of their generation nationwide. It was generally believed by American educators and parents back then (no longer the case) that studying useless Latin strengthened young people’s brains, just as the useless labour of calisthenics firmed up their physiques.
So we have the book you are holding now.
I myself never had to study Latin, although I went to the same high school that shaped my father. I was the Class of 1940. I am sorry now to have missed the two-thousand-year time trip he and Thornton Wilder took. That I didn’t have to learn Latin if I didn’t want to was a part of America’s response, I think, to the menace of brutally pragmatic and scientific European dictatorships. We weren’t at war with them yet, but it seemed high time for American education to strip itself of anything – for instance, Latin – that appeared remotely ornamental.
Even so, this much Latin I may have been able to recite when I was a kid, having heard it muttered or snarled so often by my father whenever he heard somebody really awful had died: “De mortuis nil nisi bonum.” That is not literature, I am told, but folk wisdom from ancient Rome.
All historical novels are science fiction since they are about time travel, and I am now put in mind of the trip Mark Twain took while writing A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. Mark Twain found the human beings at Camelot laughably inferior to Americans of his own time. Thornton Wilder could not have made such an odious comparison in a million years.
Yes, and if somebody were to offer me a million dollars to say something bad about the late Thornton Wilder, not a single word in any language would come to mind.
"Apolitical” is not an ugly word.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr
∗ ∗ ∗
Historical reconstruction is not among the primary aims of this work. It may be called a fantasia on certain events and persons of the last days of the Roman republic.
The principal liberty taken is that of transferring an event which took place in 62 B.C. – the profanation of the Mysteries of the Bona Dea by Clodia Pulcher and her brother – to the celebration of the same rites seventeen years later on December 11, 45.
By 45 many of my characters would have long been dead: Clodius, murdered by bullies on a country road; Catullus, though we have only St. Jerome’s word for it that he died at t
A number of the elements in this work which may most seem to have been of my contriving are indeed historical: Cleopatra arrived in Rome in 46, was installed by Caesar in his villa across the river; she remained there until his assassination when she fled back to her own country. The possibility that Junius Marcus Brutus was Caesar’s son is weighed and generally rejected by almost every historian who has given extended consideration to Caesar’s private life. Caesar’s gift to Servilia of a pearl of unprecedented value is historical. The conspiratorial chain-letters directed against Caesar were suggested by the events of our own times. They were circulated in Italy against the Fascist regime by Lauro de Bosis, reportedly on the advice of Bernard Shaw.
The attention of the reader is called to the form in which the material is presented:
Within each of the four books the documents are given in approximately chronological order. Those in Book One cover September 45 B.C. Book Two, which contains material relevant to Caesar’s inquiry concerning the nature of love, begins earlier and traverses the whole of September and October. Book Three, mainly occupied with religion, begins earlier still and runs through the autumn, concluding with the ceremonies of the Good Goddess in December. Book Four, resuming all the aspects of Caesar’s inquiry, particularly those dealing with himself as possibly filling a role as an instrument of “destiny,” begins with the earliest document in the volume and concludes with his assassination.