O’Neill, Wilder, and American Drama

O'Neill, Wilder,andAmericanDrama c.W.E. Bigsby.A Critical Introduction 10TwentiethCentury American Drama: Volume One. JQ(){l-/940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.342pp. Jackson R. Bryer,ed. With introductory essays byTravisBogard. "The Theatre neWorkedFor": The Letters of Eugene O'Neill toKenneth Macgowan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.274 pp. Horst Frenzand Susan Tuck, eds. EugeneO'Neill's Critics: Voices from Ab,oad.Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.225 pp. Gilbert A. Harrison. The Enthusiast: ALifeof Thornton Wilder. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983.403pp. Linda Simon. Thornton Wilder: His World. GardenCity,N.Y.:Doubleday, 1979.298pp. Robert S. Smith Thesefive books offer a view of two major practitioners of the theater in the twentieth century, and an overview of the stir around them. The two biographies of Thornton Wilder reveal a humble man of eclectic enthusiasmsand catholic interests. The exchange of letters between Eugene O'Neill andKenneth Macgowan sheds light on the needs of a developing playwright andhistheater. The appraisals and encomia from abroad permit a reassessment ofO'Neill from a variety of fresh angles. Bigsby's critical introduction offers a unified thematic approach to the theater which is both selective and penetrating.·'The art of biography is more difficult than isgenerally supposed," comments thenarrator of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the book that won Wilder a wide audience and the first of three Pulitzer Prizes. Like Brother Juniper, a biographermay compile allof the facts and stillmissor misread the significance. LindaSimon musters a considerable scholarly apparatus, fully documenting Wilder's frequent moves and pronouncements, and those of his admirers, critics and detractors, but her subject does not fully occupy "his world." Gilbert Harrison fares better, largely because he was permitted access to Wilder's papers in Yale's Beinecke Library, and thus had the freedom to let Wilderspeak for himself. The distance closes between the polished surface of Wilder's finished work and the often troubled man who authored it. Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1986,469-476 470 Robert S.Smith Harrison's enthusiasm for "Thornton" seems to equal the enthusiast's own zeal for life.The use of private papers is a gift to any biographer and vitaltoa full appreciation of T.W.,whose written words were, as he thought, not without a trace of guilt, relatively few, and although arguably an author can be understood only from his finished work, another Thornton Wilder emerges from the tidbits of unpublished journals and notebooks that Harrison offers. Critical recognition has not followed easily from popular acclaim forWilder. In his lifetime he was accused, at differenttimes, of being precious and outof touch with the realities of American life, of being middle class and optimistic when pessimismwasthe prevailing temper, of being a plagiarist. A schoolmaster when he wrote his first two novels, a schoolmaster he remained in the public consciousness. When The Ides of March appeared in 1948, critics took him to task for writing a cold and lifeless book. During the writing he had faced the deaths of Edward Sheldon, for many years a respected listener (anda silent presence in The Ides), of his mother, always his first critic, and of Gertrude Stein, a close personal friend and an influential partner-in-craft. The reviews were a heavy blow: "I don't mind being in error as long as the errors are awfully human and involved in our humanity" (Harrison, p. 253). The charge of mere mechanical cleverness he could not countenance. Two earlier skirmishes with the critics had left their mark on him. Mike Gold labeled him "the prophet of the genteel Christ" when his third novel, The Woman of Andros, failed to measure up to the standards of social realism in the early Depression years. That book, unlike many another, outlivesits time. Only twelve years later, Campbell and Robinson accused him of plunderingJamesJoyce'sFinnegans Wake. The Skin of Our Teeth has proven its durability beyond that forgotten controversy. Thornton's reply to Gold was indirect: he wrote the picaresque Heaven '.s My Destination. He prepared a temperate reply to the other charge and filed it away. Harrison reproduces part of it. The grace and simplicity of Wilder's...