The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (12 page)

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 as one who loved all things and accepted from the gods all things, the bright and the dark. And do you likewise. Farewell.

Tappan Wilder

Literary Executor

The Ides of March

This work is dedicated
to two friends:

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

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.

F
OREWORD

C
an 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.

∗ ∗ ∗

H
istorical 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 the age of thirty; the younger Cato, a few months earlier in this very year, in Africa, resisting Caesar’s absolute power; Caesar’s aunt, widow of the great Marius, had died even before 62. Moreover by 45, Caesar’s second wife Pompeia had long been replaced by his third wife Calpurnia.

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.

All the documents in this work are from the author’s imagination with the exception of the poems of Catullus and the closing entry which is from Suetonius’s
Lives of the Caesars
.

Source material dealing with Cicero is copious; with Cleopatra, meager; with Caesar, rich but often enigmatic and distorted by political bias. This is a suppositional reconstruction provoked by the inequalities in those records.

The Master of the College of Augurs to Caius Julius Caesar, Supreme Pontiff and Dictator of the Roman People.

(Copies to the Priest of Capitoline Jupiter, etc.; to Madam President of the College of the Vestal Virgins, etc., etc.)

[
September 1
,
45
B.C]

T
o the most reverend Supreme Pontiff:

Sixth report of this date.

Readings of the noon sacrifice:

A goose: maculations of the heart and liver. Herniation of the diaphragm.

Second goose and a cock: Nothing to remark.

A pigeon: ominous condition, kidney displaced, liver enlarged and yellow in colour. Pink quartz in crop. Further detailed study has been ordered.

Second pigeon: Nothing to remark.

Observed flights: an eagle from three miles north of Mt. Soracte to limit of vision over Tivoli. The bird showed some uncertainty as to direction in its approach toward the city. Thunder: No thunder has been heard since that last reported twelve days ago.

Health and long life to the Supreme Pontiff.

Notation by Caesar, confidential, for his ecclesiastical secretary. Item I. Inform the Master of the College that it is not necessary to send me ten to fifteen of these reports a day. A single summary report of the previous day’s observations is sufficient.

Item II. Select from the reports of the last four days three signally favourable and three unfavourable auspices. I may require them in the Senate today.

Item III. Draw up and distribute a notification to the following effect:

With the establishment of the new calendar the Commemoration of the Founding of the City on the seventeenth day of each month will now be elevated to a rite of the highest civic importance.