Thornton Wilder: A Life

By Penelope Niven and Edward Albee

"Thornton Wilder: A Life brings readers face to face with the extraordinary man who made words come alive around the world, on the stage and on the page." —James Earl Jones, actor

"Comprehensive and wisely fashioned….A splendid and long needed work." —Edward Albee, playwright

Thornton Wilder—three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, creator of such enduring stage works as Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and beloved novels like Bridge of San Luis Ray and Theophilus North—was much more than a pivotal figure in twentieth century American theater and literature. He was a world-traveler, a student, a teacher, a soldier, an actor, a son, a brother, and a complex, intensely private man who kept his personal life a secret. In Thornton Wilder: A Life, author Penelope Niven pulls back the curtain to present a fascinating, three-dimensional portrait one of America's greatest playwrights, novelists, and literary icons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062097774

Book preview

THORNTON WILDER

A Life

PENELOPE NIVEN

WITH A FOREWORD BY EDWARD ALBEE

DEDICATION

To Jennifer, my daughter,

who shares the journey and lights the way

EPIGRAPHS

Art is confession; art is the secret told. . . . But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.

—THORNTON WILDER,

On Reading the Great Letter Writers

How does one live? he asked the bright sky. What does one do first?

—THORNTON WILDER,

The Woman of Andros

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraphs

Foreword

Preface: The History of a Writer

1. Godly Folk

2. A Foretaste of Heaven

3. Being Left

4. Foreign Devils

5. Parental Expectation

6. All Aspiration

7. Literary Development

8. The Art of Writing

9. Distant Sons

10. Flowering into Literature

11. Heroes

12. His Own Tune

13. Choice Souls

14. All My Faults and Virtues

15. Millstones

16. The ‘Way Within’

17. My Real Vocation

18. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

19. The Finest Bridge in All Peru

20. Preparation and Circumstance

21. Variety, Variety

22. Home

23. Strands and Threads

24. Our Living and Our Dying

25. The Village and the Stars

26. Chalk . . . or Fire

27. Perseverance

28. Seeing, Knowing and Telling

29. The Eternal Family

30. The Closing of the Door

31. Wartime

32. Post-war Adjustment Exercise

33. Searching for the Right Way

34. Kaleidoscopic Views

35. The Human Adventure

36. Tapestry

37. Life and Death

Epilogue

Guide to Notes and Sources

Notes

Acknowledgments

Permissions

Index

Photographs

About the Author

Also by Penelope Niven

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

Whenever I’m in a theater group and the discussion turns to the essential American playwrights—the ones whose accomplishments define our culture—I’m always startled and confused that Thornton Wilder’s name comes to the fore so infrequently.

Eugene O’Neill is there, of course, in spite of his frequent tin ear. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a great play, perhaps the only one of his in which everything comes together fully—the mind and the ear—in a way the other best ones only occasionally approach.

Tennessee Williams is there, naturally, for the poetry of his language, the intensity of his dramatic structure, and the three-dimensionality of his characterizations.

Arthur Miller is included as well, as much as anything for the sociological and political importance of his dramatic concerns.

But why is Thornton Wilder so infrequently placed up there where he belongs?

If I were asked to name what I consider to be the finest serious American play, I would immediately say Our Town—not for its giant Americanness but because it is a superbly written, gloriously observed, tough, and breathtaking statement of what it is to be alive, the wonder and hopeless loss of the space between birth and the grave.

While I prefer The Skin of Our Teeth—another first-rate play—to most of Wilder’s novels, he was no slouch there either.

This new biography of Wilder, comprehensive and wisely fashioned, gives us sufficient view of his methods, his public and private life, and the reaches of his mind to begin to understand with what intellectual and creative sourcings he was able to write so persuasively about things that greatly matter.

This book is a splendid and long-needed work.

A side note: I was a twenty-two-year-old very mediocre poet when I met Thornton Wilder at the MacDowell Colony. I forced my poetry on him. He read it and took me to a small lake where he plied me with bourbon and told me to stop writing poetry, that it was no good. He suggested perhaps I start writing plays instead.

I wonder if he knew that one day I’d write forewords as well.

Edward Albee

New York City, 2011

PREFACE

THE HISTORY OF A WRITER

The history of a writer is his search for his own subject, his myth-theme, hidden from him, but prepared for him in every hour of his life, his Gulliver’s Travels, his Robinson Crusoe.

—THORNTON WILDER,

James Joyce, 1882–1941

When he was in his seventies, Thornton Niven Wilder wrote a story about an American teenager running alone through the countryside near the school in Chefoo, China, where he had been sent to live and study. The boy had sought special permission to run long distances by himself outside the China Inland Mission School boundaries, near the Bohai Sea. Awkward at the competitive team sports the other boys enjoyed, he was an outsider, a misfit in a crowd. He was most at home in books and his imagination, and these solitary runs freed him to think and to daydream.

This unfinished, unpublished self-portrait was a fusion of memory and imagination, fiction and fact. Already at that age I had the notion I would be a writer, Wilder reflected many years later, after he had written books and plays that resonated for countless people in the United States and around the world.¹

His history as a writer spans three-quarters of the twentieth century, and he left behind a tantalizing trail of evidence—thousands of letters, journal entries, manuscript drafts, and documents that reveal his evolution as a person and an artist. Art is confession; art is the secret told . . . , he said when he was thirty-one and suddenly famous around the world as a novelist. But art is not only the desire to tell one’s secret; it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time. And the secret is nothing more than the whole drama of the inner life.² It is challenging enough for a biographer to attempt to do justice to the visible, exterior life—but where to turn for revelation of the whole drama of the inner life?

Because of the magnitude of his surviving papers—from childhood until his death in 1975—we can witness close-up Wilder’s search for his own subject, his own myth-theme, his own true self. He left a richly detailed record of his lifelong education, much of it self-propelled. He left revealing portraits of his pivotal friendships and of his extraordinary family. This biography concentrates on his history as a writer and the drama of his inner life, but it is also a family saga, starring Thornton Wilder, with strong supporting roles played by his father, mother, and siblings.

He was a multifaceted man—son, brother, student, teacher, scholar, novelist, playwright, actor, musician, soldier, man of letters, international public figure. He was also enigmatic, intensely private. A twinless twin, he was schooled in solitude, accustomed from boyhood to living in self-doubt and shadows. He belonged to a close-knit, complicated family—two brilliant parents, five gifted children, and, for him, the specter of the twin brother lost at birth. From the year when he was nine until he was twenty-two, his family lived scattered around the globe, bound together by letters. Providentially most of those letters were saved after making the rounds from one parent or child on one continent to another parent or child oceans away.

The compelling evidence of Wilder’s life, public and private, is contained in thousands of his papers housed in the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as well as in countless other papers and documents released or discovered in the years since his death. His sister Isabel, the keeper of the flame, died in 1995 at the age of ninety-five. Until the end of her life she was working on her own book about her brother and their family, and so had withheld crucial papers, records, and photographs—enough to fill nearly ninety banker’s boxes. After her death, these resources went to the Beinecke Library as well. This uncataloged trove includes artifacts that ignite the imagination—the mother’s fading album of memories and dreams, kept when she was a teenager; the father’s worn brown leather diaries written in China; the family’s passports stamped with ports of call around the world; and their intimate letters and papers.

When Tappan Wilder became the manager of his uncle’s literary estate, he opened additional resources to Wilder scholars and students, and on his watch many more papers have been discovered, released, and collected. There are papers and documents enough to keep a throng of biographers, scholars, and critics busy for at least the next few decades. This biography, the first to emerge from that vast archive, narrates Wilder’s life, private and public, and provides the history and context of his creative work, published and unpublished. This is not, however, a volume of literary criticism. The exhaustive documentation in the endnotes is a guide for readers, and may also be a compass for future students, scholars, and critics.

Just as Wilder took liberties with form and style in drama and fiction, he played with the mechanics of writing, especially punctuation. His letters and manuscripts were often animated with bold underscores in ink or colored pencil; with paragraph symbols; and with the equal sign—more emphatic, he thought, than the ordinary colon. But because Wilder the writer was far more attentive to substance than to mechanics, and because he could be cavalier about spelling and punctuation, occasional silent corrections have been made. Otherwise, you will encounter Wilder’s words on the page exctly as he put them there. Thanks to the profusion of his letters and journals, and the generosity of his literary executor, much of Wilder’s story is told here in his own voice.

In addition to the voluminous record of his later life—the celebrity years—extraordinary records document the first four decades of Wilder’s life and work, the years that are the foundation for all that follows. I have examined those pivotal years with a virtual microscope. I have put a telescope to the nearly four decades that come afterward, a period of flourishing art and life illuminated by the seminal years.

Among Wilder’s unpublished papers are handwritten reflections on biography, and I have taken them to heart. He wrote, To BIOGRAPHIZE = means TO WRITE A LIFE = . . . TO BIOGRAPHIZE IN THE HIGHEST SENSE OF THE WORD: TO REVIVIFY. . . . He went on to say,

The most intimate feeling of living

is the perpetual alternation

of hope and dejection

of Plans and Defeat

of Aspiration and Rebuff.³

How to revivify such a life? How to understand the hope and dejection, the Aspiration and Rebuff? Much of the drama took place in Wilder’s mind and spirit—the inward life, he called it. Fortunately he left deeply private revelations of that life in his journals, letters, and manuscripts. Other facets of his life are embedded in his published novels and plays. All told, he left behind countless signposts, footprints, clues that can lead us deep within his extraordinary mind and spirit.⁴

He was a refined gypsy, wandering the world, writing, he said, for and about Everybody—a fact his audiences around the globe have embraced. Within the circumference of his creative work there stands the person, his private, inward self, sometimes hidden and sometimes revealed in his art and in his papers.

Thornton Wilder became a man, like the boy in China, running alone, transcending the boundaries, searching for his Gulliver, for his Robinson Crusoe, for himself.

1

GODLY FOLK

The Wilders were Baptists,—plain, stern, godly folk.

—AMOS PARKER WILDER,

History of Dane County

Maine, Connecticut, New York, and Wisconsin (1862–1906)

Thornton Niven Wilder and his twin brother were delivered into the world prematurely on April 17, 1897, in an apartment at 14 West Gilman Street in Madison, Wisconsin, to Amos Parker Wilder, a loving, domineering father, and Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder, an equally strong, devoted mother.¹ The other Wilder twin was stillborn, leaving his brother Thornton a haunting legacy of loss and incompletion as well as a survivor’s instinctive guilt. According to family memory, Amos Parker Wilder had planned to name the lost child Theophilus, after his own Wilder grandfather (a second son), and other ancestors given that name. Thornton was a frail infant, carried carefully on a small pillow for the first months of his life. As he grew older and stronger, the energetic, curious boy played with his brother, Amos Niven Wilder (who was born on September 18, 1895). They were joined on August 28, 1898, by a sister, Charlotte Elizabeth, and then on January 13, 1900, by another sister, Isabel. The youngest sister, Janet Frances, would not come along until June 3, 1910.

We bring from childhood the passionate expectation that life will be colorful, but life is seldom ever as exciting as it was when we were five and six and seven years old, Thornton Wilder wrote when he was in his thirties.² During the early years of his life, he was shaped and molded in Madison, Wisconsin. He described himself as a bookish, musing, sleep-walking kind of boy who appreciated his Midwestern beginnings.³

The four older Wilder children grew up spending idyllic summers in the village of Maple Bluff on Lake Mendota’s northeastern shore on the outskirts of Madison. The Wilders built a modest summer cottage there in 1901. Isabella designed it, and they called it Wilderness.⁴ The Winnebago Indians had once staged their summer encampments in the dense woods lining McBride’s Point, the beach where the Wilder children played, and an occasional Indian mound or artifact could still be discovered there.⁵

During the long, bitter Wisconsin winters, the children spent quiet days at home in Madison with their mother, who loved poetry, drama, music, and philosophy. Their robust, outspoken father kept a frenetic schedule, editing his newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal, and traveling to make speeches about politics, municipal planning, and current events. Amos Parker Wilder was born February 15, 1862, in Calais, Maine, the son of Charlotte Topliff Porter and Amos Lincoln Wilder, a dentist. His paternal grandfather, Theophilus Wilder, ran a grocery store in Milltown, Maine.⁶ Amos Parker Wilder, called Parker by his family, described his Wilder relatives as Baptists,—plain, stern, godly folk. They were descended from the Wilders who came from England’s Thames Valley to settle in Hingham, Massachusetts, in about 1636.⁷ Parker Wilder’s religious heritage was an amalgam of Baptist and Puritan principles, Congregationalist philosophy, and the Hebrew strain he said he inherited from his mother’s family. His great-grandmother, Betsy Marks Porter, was the daughter of Capt. Nehemiah Marks of Derby, Connecticut, son of a Jewish family who converted to Christianity.⁸

Young Parker Wilder especially revered his grandfather Porter, who lived to be ninety and was strong, kind, religious, one of the best of men, Parker wrote proudly, noting as well that his grandfather was a ship owner and lumberman of importance in the St. Croix Valley on the border of Maine and Canada.⁹ The Porter family also held shipping and lumber interests in New Brunswick, Canada. Parker’s father worked and saved his money to finance dental school. He practiced dentistry first in Calais, and then in Augusta, where he invested in an oilcloth factory, which became his principal—and prosperous—business until his death at the age of seventy (Sole Manufacturer of Wilder’s patent ‘Drum-Made Floor Oil Cloths,’ his 1888 letterhead proclaimed).¹⁰

Young Parker Wilder inherited his father’s drive and ambition, along with his ancestors’ plain, stern, godly traits. When he was seven, he pledged himself to a life of total abstinence from alcohol. As a teenager, he learned the skills of telegraphy from Frank A. Munsey (1854–1925), the young man who managed the Western Union office in Augusta, a bustling shipping and publishing center as well as the capital of Maine. Parker Wilder mastered the craft well enough to earn money during his college years as a part-time telegrapher.¹¹ He made the most of his public school education and a year at Highland Military Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then, largely through his mother’s encouragement, went off to Yale in the fall of 1880. He adored his mother, and savored childhood memories of the family’s summer vacations at Squirrel Island or Mouse Island, Maine: We dug clams and caught young mackerel, sometimes from the net of big fishers in the Bay, he remembered. In the more important years I went to Squirrel or Mouse with my Mother and we had quiet, rich days together. She was a tender, restful, heaven-associating soul, yet all sense and balance.¹²

He described her effusively in an autobiographical sketch he wrote for his own children: Strong in body, possessed of great sense, having had many advantages in her youth, of a hopeful, serene nature, always able to see a bend in the road ahead, and wont to relate all the ordering of life to prayer, Mother has been and is one of the most normal and best women I have known.¹³ Deliberately or not, Amos Parker Wilder implied a contrast between his mother and his wife, who was not always physically strong, or hopeful and serene, or optimistic about the road ahead, or prayerful, or, for that matter, normal, in the sense of the conventional, traditional nineteenth-century wife and mother.

Isabella Thornton Niven Wilder was, as much as she possibly could manage to be, her own person. A minister’s daughter from Dobbs Ferry, New York, she was refined, cultured, and extraordinarily intelligent. Despite her independent spirit, her father thwarted her hopes of going to college to study medicine, as well as her plans to teach or otherwise establish an independent career.¹⁴ He was proud of his daughter’s brilliance, but he still held firmly to his conventional opinions about a lady’s proper place in polite society.¹⁵ She was educated at the Misses Masters Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies and Children in Dobbs Ferry. Her father had helped the Misses Masters lease the Dobbs Ferry residence that housed their school for the first six years.¹⁶ Not simply a finishing school for young women, the school offered a strong liberal arts curriculum—literature, history, Latin, psychology, astronomy, mathematics. Isabella wrote poetry, translated the poems of others from French and Italian, played the piano skillfully, knew and enjoyed the literature of the theater, and competed in local tennis tournaments.¹⁷

She was born in February 1873 to Elizabeth Lewis Niven and Dr. Thornton MacNess Niven, Jr., a highly respected Presbyterian clergyman who was the son of the noted engineer, builder, architect, and businessman Thornton MacNess Niven of Newburgh, New York. T. M. Niven, Sr., who had started out as a stonemason, was described as a man of wealth, a vigorous writer, and a fine public speaker.¹⁸ In 1839 he had designed and built a house for his family at 201 Montgomery Street in Newburgh, a sturdy, spacious edifice still in use in the twenty-first century, along with other buildings he designed, such as the Newburgh courthouse. In 1841 the navy commissioned him to supervise a ten-year-long, three-million-dollar project—the construction of its first dry dock. Dry Dock Number One in the Brooklyn Navy Yard was also the first dry dock to be built in New York. T. M. Niven arranged for massive blocks of prime granite to be floated down on barges from Maine to be installed in tiers in what was hailed as one of the greatest structural achievements of its day.¹⁹ He went blind in his eighties, after failed cataract surgery, but the loss of vision did not keep him from other pursuits, such as composing hymns and poems, including Meditations of an Old Blind Man on His Eighty-eighth Birthday, written on February 3, 1894, the year before he died.

The Niven ancestors had immigrated to the northeastern United States from Bowmere, a small village on the island of Islay off the west coast of Scotland, now known for producing uncommonly good Scotch, and in the New World they became engineers, masons, architects, merchants, and ministers. Isabella’s father, an 1855 graduate of Williams College, prepared for the ministry from 1856 until 1858 at the Newburgh, New York, Theological Seminary of the Associated Reform Church, for which his father had drawn the architectural plans in 1837. When the seminary closed in 1858, his father, who opposed abolition, dispatched him to complete his studies at Union Theological Seminary of Virginia, a Presbyterian school.²⁰ After graduating from the seminary in the middle of the Civil War, Thornton M. Niven, Jr., was ordained by the West Hanover, Virginia, Presbytery, preached in various churches in Virginia, and served as a chaplain under Gen. Stonewall Jackson.²¹ After the Civil War, Niven became pastor of the Greenburgh Presbyterian Church in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Isabella Thornton Niven was the Nivens’ second child. Her older brother, Archibald Campbell Niven, died of tuberculosis in 1891 at the age of twenty, leaving a heartbroken family behind.²² His letters indicate that he was a patient in 1889 in the famous Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, founded by Edward Livingston Trudeau in 1884—one of the foremost tuberculosis treatment centers in the country.²³ Archie Niven’s parents later sent him to Pasadena, California, where the climate was touted as ideal for treating tuberculosis. They hoped in vain that he could recover from what he called his terrible disease in a letter written from Pasadena May 15, 1891, shortly before his death.²⁴ His mother and sister Charlotte were with him when he died.

Isabella’s mother, Elizabeth, was much indulged by her husband because she was often ill, most likely with gynecological problems, leaving to Isabella many of the daily duties that usually fall to a minister’s wife. Isabella’s dynamic younger sister, Charlotte, was freer to go her own way. She was a gifted pianist who hoped to become a concert performer. Instead she would build a globally useful and visible career for herself as an officer of the international Young Women’s Christian Association. Dr. Niven needed one of his daughters to stay in the home and help him in his ministry in ways his wife was not always able or willing to do. This seemed to be Isabella’s destiny, not only as the older daughter but as the eldest surviving child.

Parker Wilder met Isabella Niven at a vacation house party in Dobbs Ferry, and from the first he was drawn to the lovely young woman—her gentility, her elegant good looks, her accomplishments—and her pedigree.²⁵ Her father’s people had been successful in business and the ministry—but her mother’s people had helped to shape history. Not only were Isabella’s father and paternal grandfather prominent figures in their own right, but her maternal great-grandfather was Arthur Tappan, a wealthy merchant and a leading abolitionist, who had been elected first president of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and, after his break with abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (and the society’s decline), was voted first president of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840. The Tappans had money, and used it for important causes. In 1835 Arthur Tappan began to make significant financial contributions to support the development of fledgling Oberlin College, the first coeducational college in the United States, and the first to have a race-blind admissions policy.²⁶ His generous patronage of Oberlin was conditional; he specified that students should be admitted irrespective of color, that entire freedom should be allowed on the anti-slavery question, and that a high order of religious instruction should be given, especially in favor of revivals of religion. He also supported the idea of the coeducation of males and females—an idea, unfortunately, which was not shared by some on the Niven branch of Isabella’s family tree.²⁷ Arthur Tappan’s brother, Lewis, had arranged for and helped to finance the defense of the slaves in the Amistad slave ship mutiny case, and chose John Quincy Adams to assist in presenting the case successfully to the Supreme Court.²⁸

Isabella Niven possessed rare good looks and personal charm, as well as a fine intellect and a courageous, independent spirit.²⁹ From 1892 through 1894 she kept a scrapbook recording her interests in her late teens and early twenties. She was a strong student at the Misses Masters School in Dobbs Ferry, earning 90s or above in all eleven of her courses, including first honors in six. After graduation she studied at the Dobbs Ferry University Extension Center, established in 1893, passing her course in the masterpieces of English literature with honors.

In her scrapbook she saved invitations to dances and parties, along with programs of tennis tournaments she played in and concerts she attended—including John Philip Sousa’s Grand Concert at the Manhattan Beach Hotel on Coney Island, July 20, 1893. She traveled to Chicago to see the great World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893—an enterprise that had, coincidentally, moved journalist Parker Wilder so profoundly that he composed an oration that was published in its entirety—filling a full newspaper page—on April 28, 1893, just before the official opening of the exposition on May 1.³⁰

Also tucked between the leaves in Isabella’s album were pressed flowers, and evidence of an evolving courtship: An undated news clipping reports that Mr. A. P. Wilder participated in a discussion at the Splendid Gathering at the Quill Club’s monthly dinner. Another undated clipping, headlined Patria Club Election: Prominent People Attend the Annual Meeting of the Organization Last Night, noted that the evening’s topic was The Industrial Emancipation of Woman, and that Amos Parker Wilder was elected recording secretary of the club, which was founded on the cardinal principle of the inculcation of patriotic sentiment, and admitted both men and women to membership.³¹ Saved also was an invitation to a dinner party in New York, with a note from her hostess: When I hear from you I will write to Dr. Wilder inviting him.³²

Several of Isabella’s friends were getting married during those years, often with her father officiating and Isabella serving as a bridesmaid. She kept the invitation to the Michigan wedding of family friend William Lyon Phelps to Annabel Hubbard on December 21, 1892. Although there were suitors in her very active social life, none of them captured her attention for long. On their first meeting she found Amos Parker Wilder interesting but was not strongly attracted to him, and declined his wish to exchange letters. At their second meeting a year or so later, however, she changed her mind, and by spring of 1894, Amos Parker Wilder had declared his hopes and intentions to Dr. Niven.

Once they were engaged, Isabella was given to believe by the tall, charismatic Parker Wilder that she was not his first choice of wife. He had been engaged twice before, only to have the women break off the commitment. He was especially haunted by the memory of a young woman named Edith, who had the same comfortable build and dominating personality that his beloved mother possessed.³³ Nevertheless the engagement moved forward through letters flying back and forth between Amos on the road and in Madison, Wisconsin, and Isabella in Dobbs Ferry. A wedding was planned for spring of 1895, but Amos Lincoln Wilder fell ill and died of heart trouble at the age of seventy years and six months—one of the leading men of the city, according to the November 1, 1894, Daily Kennebec Journal, a dentist by profession but for twenty-four years a manufacturer of oil cloth. Incorrigibly practical, Parker Wilder suggested to the Nivens that they reschedule the wedding for December, since he had to travel east anyway for his father’s funeral. His budget would not permit two long trips away from Madison just months apart, he said, and the marriage date was changed accordingly. Isabella was twenty-one and Amos Parker Wilder was thirty-two when her father presided over their wedding in Dobbs Ferry on December 3, 1894.

Years later, when she was forty-four and her son Amos was twenty-two, Isabella wrote to him about the circumstances of her marriage. Three days before the wedding, she confided, when it was too late to turn back from it since eight hundred people were invited and my father and mother would have been horrified, Amos Parker told his bride-to-be that he was a widower at heart, that he had no ‘tenderness’ left in him from a long seven-years courting that came to nothing.³⁴

Of course I was stunned, Isabella wrote to her son, but with the courage of youth reviving next day, told myself he would forget all that, etc. But he never did. Never has.³⁵

AMOS PARKER WILDER had built quite a résumé in the decade between his graduation from Yale and his marriage. I matured late and so missed much at New Haven, he wrote later. I trifled much of my time away. ³⁶ During his college years, he wrote letters to his father that foreshadowed some of the letters his own son would send him from Yale years later—admitting his academic shortcomings, trying to justify the disappointment he knew his father would feel when he did not excel, and accounting penny by penny for every dollar his father gave to support him. Parker did not study as much as he should, he acknowledged, and he found that mathematics in particular came hard. He had written to his father on December 6, 1880, to prepare him for an academic-warning letter that was on its way from Yale. He was in the bottom third of his class, he confessed, and while he knew he should study harder, he defended himself on the grounds that he was not as well prepared as the boys from Andover and Exeter.³⁷ His academic performance was still disappointing in 1883, the year before he graduated, and he defended himself vigorously in a letter to his father: He was confident that he would pass his courses, and he would have done better had he not been compelled to do so much telegraphing last term.

If his father would just understand how much money he needed and provide it, he wouldn’t have to work so hard to earn money in New Haven. "I think if you would trust me a little more on money matters and let me exercise what little judgement I may have on expending a certain sum enough to pay all reasonable expenses things would move a little smoother and I know you would not receive anymore such letters," he complained.³⁸

In fact he made quite a name for himself at Yale—writing for the college newspaper; winning election as fence orator in his freshman and sophomore years, and class historian in his senior year; and being chosen for membership in the Pundits, a group organized in 1884 and made up of men noted for their wit and gifts of satire. He was also elected to Skull and Bones, Yale’s most prestigious secret society, founded in 1832 in the mode of the secret societies of university students in Germany. He was a popular, highly visible Yale man, noted for his ebullience and for his talents in singing, oratory, and mimicry.

After graduation Parker Wilder threw himself into a series of jobs, some of them obtained through the Yale network. He taught for a year in a Connecticut boarding school and another year in Faribault, Minnesota, at Shattuck Military Academy, considered one of the best schools for boys in the Northwest. He spent two summers working at the Albany, New York, Journal; was hired in 1886 as a reporter for the Philadelphia Press; and soon returned to the Albany paper, where he was assigned to cover the state legislature. When he was twenty-six he became editor of the New Haven, Connecticut, Palladium, the leading Republican newspaper in New Haven, where he stayed for three and a half years. He traveled to Europe during the summer of 1891, but otherwise, he remembered, he worked all the time for many years.³⁹

From the beginning of this peripatetic decade, his avocation was public speaking, and the demand grew for Amos Parker Wilder’s entertaining, provocative speeches. Large and small newspapers of the 1890s carried reports of his political stump speeches, his Chautauqua lectures, his after-dinner discourses for civic and cultural groups, and his forward-looking commentary on issues facing American cities. While he was working on the newspaper in New Haven he had earned a doctoral degree at Yale, granted in 1892 in the Division of Economics, Sociology, and Government. He produced a thesis titled The Government of Cities, which was later printed in pamphlet form by the New Haven Chamber of Commerce. A political dispute led to his departure from the New Haven newspaper, and he wound up in New York for two years, moving from one paper to another. I have ‘lost my job’ a number of times, he wrote later, and suffered great depression. One who has failed in business, or who is utterly cast down from any cause will often do well to begin life under a new environment—to move to another place.⁴⁰ He decided to do just that. He was engaged to be married. He needed to support his wife and a family. He wanted to buy a newspaper and be his own boss. It was on June 19, 1894, with his modest savings augmented by borrowed money, that Amos Parker Wilder bought a half interest in the Wisconsin State Journal and moved to Madison. According to the Madison journalist Edward S. Jordan, Wilder was a scholarly young man, imbued with ideals and a brilliant, sensitive man, almost painfully honest, but with a subterranean fire of enthusiasm, and belief in MEN.⁴¹

BY MID-DECEMBER 1894, the Wilders were settling into married life in an apartment near his Madison newspaper office. By the sixth year of their marriage, despite her doctor’s ongoing concern about the impact on her health, Isabella had given birth to five children, one stillborn. (According to family memory, she had refused her husband’s request that their first daughter be named Edith, after his lost love.)⁴² Their son Amos was born September 18, 1895, a little more than nine months after his parents’ marriage. The twins were born when Amos was nineteen months old. Charlotte was born when Thornton was sixteen months old and Amos was not quite three. Charlotte would be eighteen months old when Isabel was born January 13, 1900. Thus, of the first seventy-two months, or six years, of her marriage, Isabella had spent about fifty-two months, or four years and nearly four months, being pregnant.

Her deliveries were relatively easy, but her pregnancies could be difficult, and her doctor did not think Isabella should be caring for two small boys and a baby girl in the last months of her fourth pregnancy, even with the occasional help of nurse Margaret Donoghue, who had assisted at the births of her previous children.⁴³ Worried about Isabella’s health and stamina, as well as the health and development of the unborn child, the doctor recommended sending baby Charlotte away during the last three months of Isabella’s pregnancy, to be cared for by the nuns in a Catholic hospital for babies and children. The Wilders were instructed not to visit for the first month so that Charlotte would get used to her new home. When Isabella returned a month later, the baby allowed her to hold and kiss her, but was so stiff and unresponsive that Isabella feared she had lost Charlotte forever.⁴⁴

Now with four small children to care for, Isabella could be seen walking up and down the street in her Madison neighborhood, pushing three little children in a large wicker baby carriage, with young Amos walking along beside. Sometimes neighbors saw Isabella herding her children with one hand and holding a book in the other. When she could find time to herself, she was active in French and Italian literary circles at the University of Wisconsin. One of her frequent pleasures was traveling to Chicago with Madison friends to go to the opera. In the spring of 1902 she spent three months in Europe, leaving the children in the care of their father and capable Nurse Donoghue while she traveled abroad in the company of three of her Madison friends.⁴⁵

Amos Parker Wilder, all the while, was an earnestly busy man. In addition to his growing administrative as well as editorial responsibilities at the newspaper, he avidly followed local, state, and national politics, writing and speaking about important issues. Madison was home to a lively, contentious mix of political opinions, and he often found himself and his newspaper caught in the cross fire. To foster open civil dialogue, he helped organize the Six O-Clock Club, inviting the town’s leading citizens, regardless of political viewpoint, to meet for conversation. He served as club secretary for seven years.⁴⁶

In 1902 he angered some of his fellow citizens when he tried editorially to ride both a La Follette and a Spooner horse going in opposite ways.⁴⁷ Both men were Republicans running for reelection—Robert La Follette for governor and John Spooner for U.S. senator. They were rivals, if not political enemies, and Wilder used his editorial podium in June 1902 to criticize La Follette’s political tactics, warning that Mr. La Follette’s political future lies not in rough riding, but in tact, fairness, in open, hearty co-operation with these elements of the party that seeks the just thing and will play fair. He went so far as to suggest that if La Follette’s political attempts to humiliate Spooner continued, there might be a great number of those who supported the Governor [who] would be most eager for his overthrow.⁴⁸ This was an insinuation that La Follette would not forget.

Dr. Wilder was a strong proponent of the suffrage movement, writing and speaking in favor of equal suffrage for the modern woman. He carried his message far and wide in speeches, arguing that the competency of the modern woman was a strong imperative for granting women the right to vote. While women may once have been mentally inferior, Wilder said, the ground had shifted, and the intelligence of the modern American woman was demonstrated in her growing participation in the professions. Now that women were no longer dependent on men, and no longer generically domestic, he contended, all arguments that justified the rights of men to vote at last applied as well to women, who needed the ballot to protect themselves, to enrich their lives, and to exert their influence for the good of the society. Women have quick intuitions, asserted Dr. Wilder, son of one strong woman and husband of another. The mother instinct would still be aggressive, and it is one to trust. It is a man’s government now, and shows the absence of woman’s conscience and devotion to simplicity and truth. Organized womanhood thrown into the disposal of problems, local and national, would be a power for good.⁴⁹

When he was not stirring up controversy with his editorials or captivating audiences with his speeches, he was busy at Madison’s First Congregational Church, the second-oldest church in the city. Amos and Isabella had joined the church on May 3, 1895, when he transferred his membership from the South Congregational Church in Augusta, Maine, and she hers from her father’s church in Dobbs Ferry, New York.⁵⁰ Even so the Wilders had traveled back to Dobbs Ferry so that baby Amos could be baptized by Isabella’s father in his church, but Thornton was baptized in Madison.⁵¹ Dr. Wilder was a church deacon for seven years, beginning in 1902, and also served long and exceptionally well as superintendent of the Sunday school.⁵² According to a story Thornton told many years later, his father would sit between his two boys for the Sunday services. During Dr. Eugene Grover Updike’s sermon, Dr. Wilder would let his boys draw pictures on the starched white cuffs of his shirtsleeves.

One of their neighbors recalled in later years that Dr. Wilder insisted that his newspaper must be clean enough for his children to read it, for he was alive to the needs of growing families.⁵³ Even then Thornton was known beyond the family for his curiosity, and he had already fallen in love with libraries. The children’s librarian at the public library more than once found him contentedly wandering the aisles of bookstacks open to staff only. She would lead the boy back to a small table laden with books from the children’s section and encourage him to read there.⁵⁴ The Wilder home was full of books, and the children grew up reading and being read to—Sir Walter Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, and many more. Sunday readings dipped into the Bible and the works of John Bunyan, George Fox, and Henry David Thoreau.

Often on Sunday afternoons Dr. Wilder took his brood for a walk around Madison. The children enjoyed the exciting and noisy city Water Works and the steps of the towering State House and the promenade along Lake Mendota. Isabel remembered that Thornton loved going with their father to the Wisconsin State Journal offices to see the printing presses spouting out the newspaper, and with his own hands to push the keys on Father’s typewriter to see words come out on paper.⁵⁵ His father introduced him to the thrill of words on paper, and his mother took him to see his first play, a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in a Milwaukee theater, where they had balcony seats.⁵⁶ His brother recalled that Thornton was addicted to clowning and striking poses, and took part early in the costuming and tableaux of Christmas events in the Sunday School.⁵⁷ These were the wonders of Thornton’s life as a small boy—ordinary days full of familiar pleasures, interspersed with extraordinary events that seemed to him immensely exciting and colorful.

His father especially treasured the memories of those years. He wrote to his children in 1910:

When your Papa is gone before remember that in our little cottage with [his] wife and children were the happiest years of his life. He had heavy burdens in the city but when he walked along the lake shore in the early evening and saw the lights of home, the cares slipped off like a harness—sweet children awaited him at the gate, or ran down to meet him—the mother with supper spread on the verandah; the pleasant converse, the reverent quiet, worship, each one joining in—the all still and quiet—Papa’s few moments alone under the stars, with the wind murmuring through the forest in the rear—the restful sleep—those were the precious years.⁵⁸

Did you have a happy childhood? an interviewer asked Thornton Wilder in 1957 when he was famous around the world.

I think I did, but I also think that that’s a thing about which people tend to deceive themselves . . . , he replied. Yet I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts. Perhaps I should have been a better man if I had had an unequivocally unhappy childhood.⁵⁹

2

A FORETASTE OF HEAVEN

It used to be said that to have lived in China during those years between the Boxer Rebellion and the 1911 Revolution was to have enjoyed a foretaste of Heaven.

—THORNTON WILDER,

Chefoo, China, unpublished manuscript

China and California (1906–1909)

Just ten days before his ninth birthday, Thornton Niven Wilder set out on one of the greatest adventures of his life. His ambitious father and his harried mother had decided to move their family from the tranquil streets of Madison, Wisconsin, to the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, China, where Amos Parker Wilder would become U.S. consul general. He was appointed to the post in 1906 by President Theodore Roosevelt after months of political wrangling.

At the time Dr. Wilder, father of four, editor and owner of the State Journal, and president of the State Journal Printing Company in Madison, Wisconsin, was still trying to repay the loans that had made it possible for him to buy a half interest and then the full interest in the paper. His coaching of talented young reporters and his editorials became quasi-legendary, and stories abounded about his unconventional assignments and irascible fiats in the editor’s sanctum, his son Amos remembered, noting that his father took pride in the fact that his was the first daily paper which refused to accept liquor advertisements.¹

His newspaper was a visible podium, and Dr. Wilder used it aggressively. While he had earlier supported Governor Robert La Follette’s progressive political movement, he grew wary of La Follette’s increasing power, and by 1904 had turned his support to the Stalwart branch of the Republican Party—the older, wealthier, conservative movement represented by Senator John Coit Spooner. Year by year Dr. Wilder took an increasingly confident, independent stance in his editorials and in his speeches. He frequently gave rousing motivational speeches. A perennially popular Chautauqua lecturer and speaker to civic and cultural groups throughout the United States, he often relied on humor to capture and hold an audience’s attention. At a dinner meeting of the National Municipal League in New York in April 1905, for instance, he had the audience roaring with laughter, the New York Times reported.² Wilder was praised for his brilliant style and his independent opinions, and hailed as one of the country’s greatest authorities on the issue of better municipal governance.³

By the spring of 1905 he had begun to consider other career options, tentatively exploring the possibility of foreign service and actively lobbying for a diplomatic appointment. He solicited the help of Secretary of War William Howard Taft, whom he had known at Yale. I know the President is anxious to do something, but that is indefinite. [Senator] Spooner, too, is anxious, but the question is ‘How,’ Taft wrote April 14, 1905, in response to Wilder’s persistent inquiries. In 1905 there were rumors in the press that he was going to receive a diplomatic appointment to Venezuela, but instead he was offered the position of American consul general in Hong Kong.⁴ He traveled to Washington on January 24, 1906, to take the State Department examinations to qualify. The Racine Daily Journal reported that Amos P. Wilder had recently been appointed United States consul general to Hongkong, China, one of the most important diplomatic posts at Uncle Sam’s disposal, but that La Follette, newly elected to the senate from Wisconsin, had opposed his confirmation, and the final result is still in doubt.⁵

Thus far the principal senatorial service of Robert Marion La Follette has been to hold up the consular appointment of his distinguished fellow townsman, Amos Parker Wilder, of the Madison State Journal, the New York World reported, adding that Wilder was a friend of Wisconsin senator Spooner, who supported the diplomatic appointment that La Follette sought to block. The World noted that some people think the United States government lucky to get men like Mr. Wilder to accept consular appointments.⁶ Senator La Follette, with whom Wilder had clashed politically since the 1902 election in Wisconsin, opposed the appointment on the grounds that Amos Parker Wilder was personally offensive to him, but Wilder’s supporters prevailed and, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s blessing, Wilder set out in March of 1906 to assume one of the top consular positions at that time.⁷

It meant uprooting his wife and children from their comfortable life in Madison and transplanting them to the Far East, but he believed he could make money and an international reputation in China. In March 1906 Parker and Isabella and their four children traveled by train from Wisconsin to California, where on April 7, 1906—just ten days before Thornton’s birthday, and eleven days before the devastation of the April 18 earthquake—they boarded the SS Siberia for the monthlong voyage from San Francisco to Hong Kong.⁸

The journey was the most exciting adventure that had ever befallen the Wilder children—Amos, now ten and a half; Thornton, almost nine; Charlotte Elizabeth, seven and a half; and Isabel, recently turned six. First there was the thrilling experience of riding the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe train through the vast American landscape, from Madison to San Francisco. The children roamed the train by day, and at night, knelt obediently by their Pullman car berths as their father led them through the hymn singing, scripture reading, and prayers that made up their bedtime ritual at home.

Then there was the fascination—sometimes terrifying, sometimes enchanting—of eating, sleeping, and living aboard the huge steamship, a world of its own, traversing the immense open sea. Our trip was delightful—no sea sickness—on many days there were not even white-caps on the water, Dr. Wilder wrote to his mother. He and Isabella were seated at the captain’s table. Father and children mingled with the passengers, including a group of missionaries en route to China, while Isabella rested from the exhaustion of the move and her anxiety about its outcome. After a few days at sea, however, she resumed her health, her husband reported, and then of course made friends with all.⁹ The ship stopped in Hawaii for a few days, and put in for two days at a time at three Japanese ports, opening exotic new vistas to the Wilder children.¹⁰ Thornton had looked forward to celebrating his birthday—April 17—on the voyage, unaware that when the ship crossed the international date line on April 16, the seventeenth would disappear entirely, but it was celebrated anyway.¹¹

He was a thin, effervescent boy, with shaggy dark hair and vivid blue eyes alight with curiosity. He could be shy with other children, and gregarious with adults. One of his shipboard friends kept a diary—lined pages bound in green leather, with a gold-colored metal lock and key. Thornton was so impressed that he began his own makeshift journal on the blank side of the heavy paper on which dinner menus were printed each evening. Yung Kwai, the head steward of the children’s table, handed out the leftover menus as souvenirs, and Thornton put them to immediate use, filling them with words, and then, with the steward’s help, hiding the pages under the cover of an empty table in the corner of the dining salon. At the end of the voyage Thornton and his little sister, Isabel, went to collect the hidden journal pages, only to find that they had disappeared.¹² Sadly, Thornton’s first journal, begun in April 1906, did not survive his first ocean voyage, but there would be journals, letters, and manuscript pages in the future, many of them composed at sea.

THE WILDERS arrived in Hong Kong May 7, 1906, and temporarily moved into the King Edward Hotel, one of the two largest in the city. At night, from the veranda of their rooms, they looked out at a city sparkling with lights like a fairy-land.¹³ Because there was no permanent residence for the consul general in Hong Kong, Dr. Wilder was expected to pay rent for appropriate quarters from his salary of $8,000 per year. Beginning on June 1, he leased a large furnished house for $112.50 in gold per month. The house was located on Victoria Peak, known as the Peak, a mountain overlooking the city and harbor. It is a fitting place for a great man, Dr. Wilder teased in a letter to his mother.¹⁴

Colonial officials sought residences on the Peak not so much for the views as for escape from the oppressive humidity of the city. The Wilders’ rented house and sprawling lawns had previously been occupied by a succession of high-ranking Western officials and their families, and came equipped with Chinese servants. Thus the Wilders inherited Wong, the number one boy, who had worked for American consuls for many years, and so spoke fluent English. For a salary of ten dollars a month, Wong ran the household, hiring and supervising a staff composed, Dr. Wilder reported, of a cook, a cook’s helper, a house coolie, a gardener among others, including a tailor, a laundryman, and, for nine dollars a month, an amah for the children—an oldish woman who was kind but, like most amahs, did not have any control over children.¹⁵ The house was reached by a steam tram pulled by a wire rope which runs up 1400 feet like this, Dr. Wilder wrote, adding, it is the steepest thing in the world.¹⁶

Such were the wonders of the new city surrounding Thornton and his siblings. In addition to thrilling rides up and down the Peak, they rode about the city in the standard conveyance—sedan chairs, each carried by at least two coolies, garbed only in breechcloths. Their father took the children on the streetcar line that ran for about four miles along the shore. Their amah took them for walks and watched over them while their mother was busy with her official duties—teas, tiffins (luncheons), and afternoon social calls. They tasted strange new foods, and, carefully supervised by their elders, went on swimming parties and explored the city, transfixed by the constant swirl of people and traffic. They attended the German school their parents had deemed the best option for their education in Hong Kong, riding in sedan chairs for tutoring every day after tea. They went to church weekly to hear the grim language of the ministers—English and Scotchmen [who] quite outdo even me in theology, their father observed.¹⁷

The Wilders settled into a comfortable domestic routine at the Peak, surrounded by servants to see to their every need. The family ate breakfast and lunch together, but the children had an earlier dinner than their parents—a jolly meal together with Wong, our ‘No 1 Boy’ and generalissimo in charge of house, and his assistant ‘Ah Fie’—a boy of 17—to wait on them, their father wrote. But, of course, I skirt about and quiet their quarrels. After their meal, they romp on the croquet ground, perhaps playing tag with Wong; and then they undress—and then we read all except the baby from little copies of Luke—each child taking turns.¹⁸ He predicted that he and his wife and children would be content in Hong Kong for a period of years.¹⁹

AMONG HIS papers Thornton Wilder left a twenty-page manuscript of semiautobiographical reflections titled Chefoo, China—as noted earlier, a fusion of memory, imagination, fact, and fiction, written in the late 1960s and embroidered here and there with strands of drama. Decades after his time in China, with an accuracy of detail confirmed in his father’s letters of the period, Wilder described the luxurious life afforded to foreign devils, such as his own family, who came to China from the barely civilized powers of Europe and America. In his view diplomats, businessmen, and even missionaries enjoyed a lifestyle that many of them could never have afforded at home. It used to be said that to have lived in China during those years between the Boxer Rebellion and the 1911 Revolution was to have enjoyed a foretaste of Heaven, Wilder wrote in his manuscript draft. He recalled the skilled and tireless servants who worked for a six-to-ten dollar monthly wage; the superb cooks and spirited gardeners; the tailors who could reproduce the latest styles from Paris and London; the traveling from place to place in sedan chairs borne on men’s shoulders, and the more modern rickshaw once rubber tires were available in China.²⁰

Wilder remembered more than sixty years later that ‘Old China hands’ still referred to those days as sheer Heaven, despite the fact that Americans and Europeans in China were surrounded by the social and economic problems facing the Chinese people.²¹

And, he wrote, perhaps with some dramatic license, My own father—a rugged individualist from the state of Maine—returning to America after fifteen years was unable to tie his own shoes without a spasm of annoyance.²²

IN THE summer of 1906 Consul General Wilder was enjoying his new life and his new salary—especially after 12 years of nose on the grindstone.²³ By July 15 he had sent home a thousand dollars to apply to his debts. He confided in his mother that after years of standing off creditors, you cannot imagine the sweetness of wiping out these obligations beginning with the small ones.²⁴

He was completely caught up in his official duties, ratifying contracts and facilitating international commerce and representing his native land’s character as a congenial and even convivial good fellow.²⁵ The Hong Kong consul general carried heavy commercial and social responsibilities, although politically and industrially the post was not as important as other missions in China, especially in Shanghai and Peking. But Hong Kong—the gate way of South China—was one of the world’s busiest ports, especially for United States business interests.²⁶ Hong Kong was essentially a freight transit point but the consul general was expected to be on the lookout for trade opportunities and to report on trade and industrial issues from his gateway perspective. While the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong was not heavily involved with Chinese officials and the keeping of public order, as was the case in Peking and Shanghai, Hong Kong was a strategic port city always on the lookout for international unrest.

Socially Dr. Wilder was directed to take his place in the official life of the Colony with dignity, and if he be congenial to the prominent families outside the strictly official circle, mainly military and naval in a British Colony, it facilitates business at the consulate, and enhances American prestige.²⁷ Consul General Wilder and his wife and family were expected to do their part to support this mission.²⁸ In their rented house atop the Peak, the Wilders entertained often—on special holidays, on the occasion of visits from special guests, and at a weekly open house, among other times.²⁹ According to official reports, the Wilders were very popular in Hong Kong, performing their social duties with grace and social tact. Furthermore, one government report noted, Isabella and the children certainly contributed to Amos Parker Wilder’s official and social success in Hong Kong.³⁰

But behind the scenes there were growing headaches. Isabella (whom her husband usually called Isabel) was increasingly exhausted by the daily social demands and the daily care of four rambunctious children, even though there were servants to help. Both parents worried over the limited opportunities for educating their bright youngsters. Dr. Wilder was continually appalled at the cost of living in Hong Kong. What had seemed like a comfortable salary was instead becoming sorely strained to pay the high costs of rent, food, entertaining, clothing, and dues for the clubs he was expected to join, as well as the personal costs of helping stranded Americans, hosting American tourists, and giving to charities to help the poor. Furthermore, back home, debts for the newspaper still had to be paid, along with the rent on their Madison apartment. The financial strain was wearing for Amos and Isabella, and stresses in their marriage intensified accordingly.

Both parents began to worry about how life in Hong Kong affected their children. At an early age most Western boys were sent back to their home countries for schooling, and girls were sent back to boarding schools in their early or midteens. In Hong Kong at that time there was only one reputable school for foreign children, and it was run by the local German Lutheran church, staffed by two German women, with no English spoken. Dr. Wilder hired a German tutor to work with Amos, Thornton, Charlotte, and Isabel after school, for none of the children knew a word of German. This was unsatisfactory even as a short-term arrangement for educating their brood—especially since Dr. Wilder was already thinking of preparing his sons to go to Yale and his daughters to go to Mount Holyoke.³¹

Isabella did not settle happily into life in Hong Kong, although she was recognized as a gracious hostess, especially at her weekly afternoon at homes and her dinner parties. Before their first dinner party, Isabella and her husband wrestled over the protocol of the awful wine question, as he termed it—and he eventually won.³² He was irrevocably a teetotaler; he had sworn that pledge as a boy, after all, and it was a matter of deep moral conviction. Furthermore, his own brother, Julian, was an alcoholic, so he had witnessed firsthand the harm excessive