The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March (41 page)

During overseas duty in World War II, Wilder served as a staff officer in the strategic planning section of Army Air Force Intelligence, based first in Tunisia and later, for nearly a year, in Caserta in southern Italy. His wartime duties did not include teaching, lecturing, or writing; instead, he was assigned duties in a vast enterprise that included the invasion plans for Sicily, where actions had direct, immediate, life-altering consequences.

During a week’s leave in Rome in September 1944, Wilder began to think deeply again about his Caesar story. It is not surprising that his thoughts returned to another warrior in another time of war. During a State Department – sponsored goodwill tour of four Latin American countries in 1941, Wilder had enjoyed an unforgettable literary encounter with the letters of the revolutionary soldier Simon Bolívar (1783 – 1830). Later, in a 1948 interview, Wilder noted that ‘Bolívar’s mind worked something like Caesar’s’ and observed that his disillusionment, too, ‘was without cynicism.’ Wilder reflected that these comparisons between Caesar and Bolívar ‘took more definite form’ in his conversations with Gertrude Stein about the ‘nature of creativity in men of action as opposed to men of reflection.’

Wilder deliberately chose never to write about the war directly, ‘but god forbid,’ he wrote in his private journal in this period ‘that nothing I write will ever fail to contain what I experienced there.’ And what he did experience – his own direct involvement for the first time with death and destruction – elevated with new urgency the familiar question he poses in all his work: What resources do we have to live by in the face of the worst that the world can do to us?

After the war Thornton Wilder plunged with wild abandon into the new existentialist thinking making its way across the Atlantic in journal articles, pamphlets, plays, and books; materials that he all but assaulted in bookstores and the periodical room of the Yale Library. He was hardly alone in this enthusiasm for the chief progenitors and subsequent architects of existentialist expression in the postwar period. But Wilder’s encounter was notable for the depth of its impact. It can be measured in part by his numerous notations in volumes of philosophical discourse and by his personal friendship with Walter Lowrie, the Kierkegaard scholar, and with Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom he translated
Morts sans sépulture,
produced off-Broadway in 1948 as
The Victors.

Wilder’s letters in this period are full of excitement. For example, after meeting Sartre for the first time in February 1946, Wilder wrote his brother, Amos, a New Testament scholar, poet, and literary critic also deeply engaged in studying the intellectual currents flowing from Europe:

Dammit – had a 5-hour field day with Sartre. Tough and gay. Yes – we now
Cher Maître
one another. . . . Yes – liberty is ours precisely by virtue of our limitation and
misère;
the fact that we die and know we are to gives the transcendence; sin is the refusal of freedom and freedom is attained by engagement in the world, by the chaining ourselves with responsibility.

And to his friend Dr. Joe Still in a letter written a month later about Sartre’s existential ideas:

Baby, you’ll sit up. There is no God; there is the concession of the absurdity of man’s reason in a universe which can never be explained by reason; yet there is freedom of the will defended for the first time on non-religious grounds, and how.

His intellectual encounter with Kierkegaard and Sartre provided Wilder with the philosophical framework for
The Ides of March.
He was particularly drawn to Kierkegaard – and had been even before the war – because of that thinker’s moral and ethical world view, and it was this position that informs the way he depicts Caesar. In an interview published in
Cosmopolitan
in April 1948, Wilder usefully summarised his intellectual voyage in this period, depicting it partly as a family affair:

On returning [from the war] I took up a theme which I had already partially developed before the war. I spent almost a year on it, only to find that my basic ideas about the human situation had undergone a drastic change. I was not able to define the change myself until the writings of Kierkegaard were called to my attention by my theologian brother. All my life I have passed from enthusiasm to enthusiasm and gratitude to gratitude.
The Ides of March,
my new novel, can be said to be written under the sign of Kierkegaard.

And what exactly was Thornton Wilder getting at in
Ides?
In a talk about the book’s publication reported in the
Boston Herald
in March 1948, he put it this way:

Modern man has taken such pride in the exploration of his mind that he has forgotten there must be some laws governing that exploration. Whether it comes under religion or ethics or mere judgment such laws must be found and respected. Otherwise the mind leads him straight to self-destruction. So my book is Caesar’s groping in the open seas of his unlimited power for the first principles which should guide him.

The book’s epigraph (or ‘motto,’ as Wilder called it) seems more like Kierkegaard but is actually Wilder’s gloss on lines from Goethe’s
Faust.
They might also be considered a more literary way of characterising Caesar and his circle: ‘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.’ In an interview in June 1948 for the
Berkshire
[Mass.]
Eagle
(with
Ides
on the bestseller list), Wilder explained in more popular language an implication of his ‘motto’ as it pertained to Caesar’s leadership:

Julius Caesar is the archetype of the genius ruler. He made so many good laws that he bored the Romans. The world was in his hand. But he was so free himself that he forgot to allow the exercise in freedom to others. Liberty is an accumulating discipline. People must be given practice in choice.

The two men to whom
Ides
is dedicated represented for Wilder two different models of individuals who courageously made choices against all odds and thus exercised their freedom to
be.
Both were personal friends. Wilder first met the poet Lauro de Bosis (1901– 1931) when he was at the American Academy in Rome in 1920. Later de Bosis served as the Italian translator for
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.
To protest against Mussolini and fascism he learned to fly, purchased a plane, and on October 4, 1931 scattered 400,000 anti-Fascist leaflets from his plane over Rome – and vanished forever, heading out to sea. (Wilder has the aircraft pursued by those of the Duce; this is not accurate – his plane simply disappeared.) Edward Sheldon (1886 – 1946) was the other person to whom
Ides
is dedicated. In his twenty-ninth year, this highly successful playwright began progressively to lose his sight and voice and become hideously more and more crippled by a disease now suspected of being ankylosing spondylitis. Despite his physical condition he remained to his death an effective and beloved friend, critic, and mentor to writers and actors, among them Thornton Wilder. Tributes to both appear as characteristics of
dramatis personae
in
Ides:
de Bosis in the figure of Catullus (and the broadsides against Caesar), and Sheldon in the figure of Lucius Mamilius Turrinus, the badly maimed solider living on Capri.

The Ides of March
was published on January 16, 1948, by Harper & Brothers’. At the last minute Wilder allowed his publisher to submit it for consideration by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which surprised him by accepting it as their March 1948 selection. (With the New York intelligentsia in mind, Wilder was always uneasy about the midcult shadow that a BOMC selection could throw across a book.)

And what did reviewers say about his fifth novel, and first in fourteen years? Where the documentary form of the book was concerned, he was hailed repeatedly for writing a ‘tour de force’ (a much-employed phrase) or for the book’s ‘sheer wizardry.’ Beyond form – and much space was taken up rehashing Wilder’s explanation of his intentions and chronology as he laid them out in the book’s untitled preface – favourable reviewers made many positive points about his use of a historical setting to explore timeless ethical and deeply philosophical questions about power and corruption, art and life. There was also much positive comment about how Wilder had avoided the pedantic, despite his obvious erudition. Edward Weeks in the
Atlantic Monthly
spoke for many when he said that
Ides
was ‘incomparably the richest reading experience I have enjoyed this winter.’ Clifton Fadiman in the Book-of-the-Month Club
News
called the book ‘civilised,’ and another critic pointed out that it provided ‘a lesson in how to write an historical novel’ that ‘does not exhume the past’ but ‘evokes it.’

Negative reviews (in the minority) typically granted many points about the book’s virtuosity, but found
Ides
‘cold,’ ‘cerebral,’ ‘pedagogical,’ and ‘contrived.’ Orville Prescott’s
New York Times
daily review found much to admire, but concluded: ‘Like a Roman portrait bust, it is cold, precise, artful and quite lacking in the divine fire that glows about a major work of art.’ Inevitably, there were the learned who nitpicked: the incorrect way Wilder treated Roman cognomens and the liberties he had taken with his translation of the lines from Goethe are two examples. Notwithstanding Wilder’s clear message in his preface that historical reconstruction was not his primary aim – a kind of authorial truth-in-advertising statement – some reviewers faulted him for playing games with the historical record. ‘Why be so preposterously, pretentiously, and aimlessly wrong?’ wrote a Canadian reviewer in Toronto’s
Saturday Night.
The London reviewer Phillip Toynbee in the
World Review
won a ‘damning with faint praise award’ when he wrote: ‘an interesting, a sympathetic, a rather weary book: the pleasing tour de force of a serious writer resting on his oars.’

What did Wilder think of his reviews? A month after publication he wrote his close friend Lady Sibyl Colefax that the reviews were ‘almost uniformly bad – tepid to bad,’ although a month later he reported to her that some reviews were ‘all but a spoiled boy could ask for.’ Wilder did not brood over failures or crow over success, but it is clear that he was disappointed by the quality of attention given a book he was unusually proud of, one he had told his attorney in April 1946 was
‘like
nothing else’ and would spit up a ‘considerable shindy.’ In his heart of hearts, did Wilder hope that the
Ides
as a story and as a study in form would cause the same kind of ruckus that the experimental
Our Town
and
The Skin of Our Teeth
had caused? For example, would it ignite a lively debate about the use of history for fiction (art)? Probably. But that did not happen. In 1948, the ruckus was reserved for Norman Mailer’s first novel,
The Naked and the Dead.
But even Mailer’s novel could not top the number-one choice of the reading public, a book that upset nobody: the fabulously comfortable historical novel
The Big Fisherman
by Lloyd C. Douglas.

Whatever the critics said,
Ides
was widely read in 1948 and remained on bestseller lists for many weeks, although it was not among the top ten at the end of the year, as his last three novels had been. Until it drifted out of print in the 1990s,
Ides
had sold more than 450,000 copies in hardback and four paperback editions, the last of which was the Harper & Row Perennial Library edition published in 1987. Wilder was always particularly proud that it was popular with Latin teachers.

As a firm rule, Wilder was opposed to the live dramatisation of his fiction. But because
The Ides of March
was so deeply anchored to a theatrical sensibility, he broke his pledge and asked the actor and playwright Jerome Kilty to adapt it for the stage in 1962. (Wilder had known Kilty as a student and greatly admired his successful 1960 Broadway hit
Dear Liar.)
Despite some success in Berlin with a distinguished German cast in 1962, the play failed in London in 1963 with John Gielgud as Caesar and Irene Worth as Clodia.

The most important chapter of the novel’s history in the past half century has been its success abroad. In all,
The Ides of March
has been translated into at least twenty-three languages (second only to
The Bridge of San Luis Rey’
s more than thirty translations), and it has long been viewed by critics and scholars abroad as perhaps his most important novel, a view shared by many of their colleagues in the United States

Over the years, many foreign editions, of course, have gone out of print. But it is interesting to note that since 1990 new editions have appeared in Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, and Spain, as well as in Germany, where the novel has not been out of print since 1948 and where a complete radio version broadcast in 1957 was rebroadcast and then released on CD in 1998. It would appear that Wilder’s take on a figure who stands mythically and timelessly at the crossroad between power and ethics may have a special resonance in countries where memories of hard times endure.

Tappan Wilder

Literary Executor