The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder
Nemoianu, Virgil
BOOK R E V I E W S I n his last great book (1973) Thornton Wilder imagines a character, a young man who sets himself the formidable task of fulfilling nine life ambitions. Young...
...I am ready to go even farther and to suggest that the best American answer to the Brideshead Revisited TV series would be an equally well-cast and textfaithful series of The Eighth Day...
...So why did Bellow become the Eric Sevareid of American novelists...
...He mastered the techniques of the modern i n n o v a t o r s and gracefully absorbed the motifs of the great Western tradition...
...Above all, alienation is manifested in productivity and work...
...the businessman with ulcers...
...It seems quite possible that what happened to Waugh will happen to Wilder...
...yet he never protested or cried over their passing...
...This is of course a proposition that runs directly counter to the conventional wisdom of most intellectuals in the last two centuries: Existentialists or Romantics, Marxists or Catholics, they all agreed that human alienation, the breaking of the bonds of community and the loss in emotional warmth, the loneliness of the individual, the loss of a center, and the failure of meaningful labor are fearsome and evil things indeed...
...Ashley is saved, his son is steered in life by the "Church of the Covenant," a small group of half-Indian believers living in communal simplicity...
...He therefore showed how this explosive alienation, the emergence of the unattached individual, with its emphasis on efficiency and productive work implies by necessity such things as a stable and loving family, a wonder-filled and capacious faith, even a special relationship to the soil...
...Two or three interesting things follow...
...If you lifted all of the digressions since Herzog and pasted them in a book, you would have a chrestomathy of superb journalism...
...His commitment to goodness and order as permanence is wonderful to behold, and yet change and dismantling gave him a kind of serene pleasure: He had a firm belief in life that never allowed him to see what was happening and emerging as bad...
...He does not understand why Bellow kept trying to avoid him...
...We need to realize the influence that Wilder undoubtedly exerted on writers as different as Goyen, Updike, Vidal, and perhaps Barth...
...in 1935 Freud suggested he become his son-inlaw...
...This brings us to the second interesting consequence...
...Harris is a Pavlovian leftist, and at every opportunity he tried to recruit his man into the Cause, antiwar division...
...Was there tension between Wilder and his closest relatives...
...ties that he wanted to write Bellow's biography...
...Ashley, the hero of The Eighth Day, the victim of a judiciary error, is obliged to flee the country, break off ties, thus in fact actualizing what in his deeper self he had been all along...
...My check for $ _ _ _ is enclosed...
...the clubwoman who cannot remember one word of the morning lecture...
...The desperate attraction of the German public to him in the early postwar decades followed from this sense as did the pouting indifference of the French cultural elite...
...If you wonder why Bellow should feel pressure from such quarters, read Mark Harris's Saul Bellow: Drummlin Woodchuck...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, IN 47402 the tremendous creative energies of his children who all gain a creative prominence of some kind...
...Order your copies of the Spectator's timely analysis of a problem Ihat is more than a question of conscience - - i t is a question of health...
...it takes an immense toll in shattered lives and minds...
...We need an edition of the journals as complete as we can get...
...The most serious objection to Wilder--that he is too tame, too effortless somehow, too blandly pedestrian would, I am sure, be quite soon dispelled by such publications...
...Humboldt's Gift was several cuts above its two neighbors...
...Village Voice puts the figure at 1 , 6 0 0 . . . As a consequence of this jackrabbitry, young men leading the gay life in America's large cities are infecting and reinfecting one another with a variety of diseases that suggests that the proper term to describe their behavior is suicidal...
...Bellow complained, for example, that "what-can-be-done with literature is for many intellectuals, certainly the most influential of them, infinitely more i m p o r t a n t than books . . . . We have passed from contemplative reading to movement, to action, to p o l i t i c s . . , intellectuals are curiously busy with social questions . . . . " He goes on to say that one of the nice things about Hamlet is that Polonious is stabbed...
...We need good analytical studies of Wilder's politics, his teaching, the critical influences 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 198s upon him...
...We need more complete records of the impressions of friends and relatives...
...Harris, a novelist and putative friend, decided in the late sixGeorge SimJohnston is a writer living Reviewed by John Podhoretz in the in New York...
...January 1981 American Spectator.--Ed...
...Please send me cop~e"~'o-"f-"Gay Times and Diseases...
...This devastating expose of the d i s e a s e s that plague American homosexuals, of the lifestyles that allow these diseases to thrive and spread, and of the dangers the) pose to non-homosexuals is must reading at a time when Americans are being asked to accept homosexuals into the mainstream of their culture...
...Wilder was all these things in addition to being a writer--indeed, one of the best prose stylists ever to emerge in America: suave, cosmopolitan and polished...
...Bellow is one of the best intellectual break dancers around...
...Bellow, in fact, has produced some wonderful nonfiction pieces over the years, and they should be collected, if only because now you have to ferret them out in books whose ominous titles, such as The Writer's Dilemma, make you want to read them in a plain brown wrapper...
...Not since H.G...
...This was, I am sure, a symptom of the feelings of both toward America as a whole...
...As a literary figure, Wilder belongs squarely with Joyce and Eliot, Proust and Thomas Mann, Picasso and Stravinsky in the era of high modernism, that is to say in the era of quotation and combination, ironic appropriation, relativism and multiple reference, tragicomic insecurity and cultural nostalgia...
...In a word, Wilder outlined a humanism of alienation as nobody before and, so far, nobody after him has done...
...Harrison also, more than previous biographers, quotes generously from letters, diaries, and notes...
...Sammler's Planet and The Dean's December gave the impression that their author had written a hundred or so jeremiads for the New York Times op-ed page and decided instead to slice them up and serve with fictional filler...
...We need new editions of Wilder's scholarly and critical writings (the small selection American Characteristics brought out in 1979 is not nearly enough...
...His family background had been as conservative as imaginable: His father and his intellectual environment had been staunch Taft Republican, stern Calvinists, upholders of nineteenthcentury virtues and Colonial Puritan traditions...
...Whether we will place Wilder on that higher plateau of American letters where the Melvilles and the Faulkners reside (as I think we eventually will) can remain for a while a matter of reasonable disagreement...
...It is very occupying...
...Wilder himself did not make things easy for his readers, hiding his meanings under two layers: one containing the middle-brow and stingless storyline (with touches of home-grown philosophy), the other the amazingly learned web o f allusions and references...
...But until then anybody who wants to find a touchstone of sanity and objectivity, beyond the little everyday political happenings, or who wants to gain a good clear focus on what America is all about, could do a lot worse than reading Thornton Wilder...
...The most learned among America's great writers could without contradiction to himself rise up in arms against Eliot's concept of cultural elitism and in favor of full aesthetic democracy...
...But, alas, as Gertrude Stein advised Hemingway, remarks are not literature...
...We come in the world to learn and to find out, a character in The Eighth Day suggests...
...We would recognize the basic tension between the darker colors of Calvinist redemptionism and the light of classical progress, which must have been sometimes agonizing to him as he came back to it in book after book...
...he was not even beyond the occasional good word for the rich and famous, speaking with shrewd sympathy of their need for reassurance by the gossip columnists...
...Wilder noticed a basic paradox of the American historical experience: that as often as not the reactionary nostalgia for the past leads to unexpected alid explosive progress, while progressive impulses tend to preserve and to resume...
...Meanwhile his Olympian respect for tradition, detail, and the harmonies of imperfection must gain him the affection of any conservative-minded intellectual...
...Harrison quotes from Wilder's notes: "The American we know--the American which we and foreigners so often laugh at and despise--the American in ourselves who is often the subject of our own despair--the joiner, the go-getter, the moralizer...
...H a r r i s o n ' s The Enthusiast has great merits...
...This is the argument George Gilder and others have been making recently with a good deal more combative gusto...
...Wilder himself was content with describing the house of Ashley (the archetypal alienated American) as the house of Jesse, and attributes to it as a motto "Make straight in the desert a highway for our God," that is for the coming God...
...His curiosity was absolute and, that something was and was alive, he found, must be of far greater merit than any contingent attribute...
...They are inventing a new kind of human being--a new relationship between one human being and another--a new relationship between the individual and the all...
...One imagines that this crass and vulgar book represents only one of the kinds of ideological noise to which Bellow has been subjected since the late sixties, and his later novels can perhaps be understood as an exercise in contracoustics...
...As a playwright, Wilder belongs to t f~ 1 e i s--O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Albee--who have been both literate and successful...
...Wilder could thus seamlessly weave together progress and tradition, with no resentment or anguish...
...It is a rich and fascinating tableau, and one we seldom see: America in response to Wilder virginally, comically worried, not quite daring to look at itself naked in the mirror, yet happy that the image is not ominously deformed...
...Wilder's education had taken place under the sign of Babbitt's and More's influence: reverence for classical values, moral gravity, the cent r a l i t y of mankind's great philosophical and religious traditions in any human endeavor...
...But a more nearly definitive assessment of Wilder will have to wait for a while...
...The a u t h o r emphasizes Wilder's restlessness and enthusiasm (one friend said that he was like a panther, standing completely still only when listening to music) and thus goes some way toward delineating for us a better and multi-dimensional Wilder, not the bland simple drawing to which we had been used...
...Indeed, he was perhaps the one great writer produced in the wake of'neo-humanist ideology...
...The trauma of a new beginning turns him into a kind of lay saint and unleashes GAY TIMES AND DISEASES "According to Dr...
...He frequented celebrities like Henry Luce and Albert Schweitzer, Max Reinhardt and Gertrude Stein...
...In the manner of Boswell, he began to hang all over Bellow like a bad suit...
...Some of those pieces, the ones written about fifteen years ago, have a curious ring now...
...W~lder realizes that alienation is also connected with liberty and creativity, with lack of prejudice and an almost infinite opening toward hope and the possibilities of the universe...
...for instance, Wilder wrote 656 pages of notes about Finnegan's Wake and 1198 pages of notes on Lope de Vega that have never been published...
...Brittling Sees It Through has such a plague of unsolicited opinion ravaged the work of a first-rate novelist...
...One has the impression that this most cerebral of novelists finally felt it necessary to strike back at what he called the "brutal profs and bad-tempered ivy league sodomites" who feed on "stale ideological French chocolates...
...Amazingly, he still won three Pulitzers and had a huge devoted readership...
...And finally it is easy to notice the wariness of our own cultural authorities toward Wilder: the careful understatements of Edmund Wilson, the intense cold rage of the old proletarian Left, the adroit co-options of the newly moderate liberalism (Harrison is a former editorin-chief of the New Republic), the clumsy and insecure friendliness of the rich and powerful, the spontaneous open warmth of the regular reader, the puzzled and timid approaches of the religious, the furtive and apologetic attraction of the educated...
...These observations by nationallysyndicated columnist Patrick J. Buchanan and medical researcher J. Gordon Muir are taken from their recent a r t i c l e , "Gay Times and Diseases," which ran in the August 1984 American Spectator and is now available in reprint...
...and although the narrator, Charles Citrine, does manage to get in his two bits at every opportunity, he is not, like Sammler and Dean Corde, looking down from a crow's nest halfway to heaven...
...The best way to approach Wilder is to read carefully The Eighth Day, his voluminous and ambitious late novel (1968) of which the reviewer of a distinguished New York monthly recently admitted he had never even heard...
...THE ENTHUSIAST: A LIFE OF THORNTON WILDER Gilbert Harrison/Ticknor and Fields/S19.95 Virgil Nemoianu public institution and often rewar~ted with some of the highest honors the Republic had to bestow, not to mention numerous foreign prizes and decorations...
...de S~vign...
...We do not read novels for the same reasons that we read essays...
...Young Theophilus North wants to be a saint, an actor, a magician, an archaeologist, a lover, an anthropologist, and a few other things...
...There is s .omething in Wilder, a curious quality, beyond his merits as a writer, or his interest as a public and social figure, that makes him important in a way disproportionate to his achievement...
...he knew the problematics of existentialism and the dilemmas of an ambiguous universe...
...Although the book was not autobiographical, it does catch the flavor of the many successful vocations of Wilder's own life...
...the characters at least seemed to exist for reasons other than sounding off...
...In this book Wilder sets out to do something rather astonishing: to praise alienation and to show that it is not only a good thing, but also a chief hope for mankind...
...It is not easy to be an American because the rules aren't made yet...
...The answer may lie in Chekhov's remark that a writer should engage in politics to the extent that he needs to protect himself from politics--meaning, in Bellow's case, intellectual politics...
...Are the reported homosexual episodes part of a pattern or accidental...
...and when it comes to women's rights, the earnest and calm advocacy of Wilder carries alone more weight and conviction than all the thin shrieking of politicized academics of the last ten years put together...
...after fifty pages the reader does not understand why Bellow did not put a contract out on him...
...So far as the fiction goes, the long short story "The Old System," which appeared in Mosby's Memoirs and HIM WITH HIS FOOT IN HIS MOUTH AND OTHER STORIES Saul Bellow/Harper & Row/S15.95 George Sim Johnston S ! Pince his last collection of stories appeared in 1968, Saul Bellow, like his most famous creation, Moses Herzog, has felt the need to explain, to have it out, to put into perspective...
...He could lower what is complex (for instance, the intricacies of modern art) into simple, lapidary sentences and he could heighten what is simple (for instance, the moods and the emotions of mainstream America) into witty, ironic, sophisticated images...
...These were Wilder's highly traditionalist attachments...
...Alienation is thus quite similar to the energy hidden inside the atom that is released when the bonds holding the atom together are severed...
...They don't know it and they often do it awkwardly and fall short...
...The first is that a much better understanding of the American experience is gained, since alienation and rootlessness have always been associated with the American mind and mode of life...
...the publication of these additional materials would suddenly bring about a change in reputation...
...Wells wrote Mr...
...in 1928 he became Gene Tunney's friend and brought him along on a European tour...
...He calmly, articulately said so...
...The man who achieved distinction as a scholar--Wilder lectured around the world and served as Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard--was also the public servant who represented his country on numerous diplomatic and cultural occasions and the dazzling man of the world who made headlines in social columns...
...This brings us to a third interesting fact, which makes Wilder exemplary and truly central in American culture...
...And so they are, no doubt, but there is another side to the coin often overlooked by such a complaining and caviling society as ours...
...Besides, Wilder personally was deeply attached to the institutional greatness of the family and to a certain formality in social relations...
...By the fifties and sixties Wilder was a Virgil Nemoianu teaches comparative literature at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C...
...the millions in the movie houses gazing at soothing lies --all, a l l . . , are very busy doing something of great importance...
...I may be wrong but I simply cannot think of another major American writer more disencumbered of social and racial prejudice, more humble and inoffensive in the love of his country...
...The most important facet of Thornton Wilder, however, one dimly sensed by most everyone yet elusive to all the rather competent biographers and monographers of the last twenty years (Burbank, Papajewski, Goldstone, Linda Simon, Goldstein, and, now, Gilbert Harrison), is Wilder as an embodiment of some original, essential middle-class Puritan Americanness and of its avatars in the twentieth century...
...In the abundance of letters Wilder resembles the great Victorians, ~ot his electronic contemporaries...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 35 Wilder also dismissed the idea that Americans are naive, youthful, and healthy--on the contrary, he said, what they inherited from the age of colonizing and from the nation's later historical growth turned them into beings of extreme complication, full of emotional and mental tensions...
...in other works he draws from Terentius and Suetonius, Anatole France and Johann Nestroy and Mme...
...the exemplars are not clear...
...Kinsey, the average homosexual has 1,000 sex partners in a lifetime...
...75 for one 6.00 for ten 12.00 for twenty-five 45.00 for one hundred 200.00 for five hundred Name Address City S t a t e . _ Zip 4MAT The American Spectator, Reprint Dept., P.O...
...Even to this day~ the Republicans tend to push things forward, the Democrats to maintain and secure...
...Not that I mind Bellow's ideas or the way he puts them...
...We need a good edition of the correspondence...
...In The Skin of Our Teeth he freely uses Joyce's writings, in The Eighth Day he weaves in Horatio Alger and Mark Twain, Dostoevsky and Little Women, Kierkegaard and Gertrude Stein...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 37...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
