Thornton Wilder by Rex Burbank (review)

328 MODERN DRAMA December Unfortunately, Green himself is no poet, as these five plays demonstrate, and he is only a middling dramatist. But I suspect he may be an important pathfinder. ARTHUR WILLS University of Alaska THORNTON WILDER, by Rex Burbank, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1961, 156 pp. Price $3-50. In this study of Thornton Wilder's development as a writer, the author proposes "to clear away some of the critical platitudes that have obscured him, to measure his achievements against his total artistic intent, and to place him in the American tradition." Of the three aims, the first one could have been fulfilled only with firmer critical interpretations than Mr. Burbank has been able to provide. Nevertheless, one appreciates the sympathetic portrait of a mature American writer who is equally at home in the drama and the novel, whose aclIievement is limited by a tendency toward a literary and derivative aestheticism, and who is best when his irony and realism protect him from the dangers of his own sensibility and background. Burbank reviews Wilder's writing career which began with three-minutes plays in whiclI he wanted to restore, by means of unconventional teclIniques, conventional faith that stood in danger of petrification. His novels deliberately turned away from the realistic tradition then fashionable in America: their affinities are with Europe. The one-act plays, however, illustrate Wilder's conviction that real Americanism consists in the discovery of the hidden significance of commonplace events. In Pullman Car Hiawatha, for instance, the trivial reveals its cosmic dimensions. The encounter with Gertrude Stein encouraged Wilder in his ideas. She had convinced him that drama is superior to fiction as an art form because the theater audience sees "pure existing." Her distinction between Human Mind and Human Nature and her theory of the diffusion of Human Mind in America are close to Wilder's convictions; her influence may be seen in the portl"ayal of the "valley-born and hill-bounded people" in Our Town. Wilder opposed the realistic and naturalistic trend of the theater and is always intent on reminding the audience that they are experiencing "a world of pretense ." One way of objecting to the 19th century staging of plays is to make fun of it by using all the cliche stage props as Wilder did in The Matchmaker. This comedy with its stock situations and characters suggests that "a vigorous, robust spirit of humanism is the answer to materialism." On the whole, Wilder preferred to employ as few props as possible; such staging calls for the intense participation of the audience, which has to bring a great deal of imagination to his plays. Burbank puts Our Town in the center of Wilder's work. It absorbs the technical experiments of the earlier works as well as the influence of Gertrude Stein. It is the very opposite of the "Greek pastoral" of The Woman of Andros, for it is a religious festival celebrating life and offering a genuine tragic vision. The characters, by failing to grasp the significance of each moment and to act accordingly, fall short of "the moral order" of love. Neither The Skin of Our Teeth nor A Life in the Sun reaches perfection, but for different reasons. In the former, the comic elements are supposed to detract at times from the serious purpose-hardly a valid argument against the play. On the other hand, Wilder's interpretation of Euripides' Alcestis does not, according to Burbank, convincingly show Alcestis' suffering and sacrifice in 1963 BOOK REVIEWS 329 action. The American writer talks about but does not visualize Alcestis' commitment (the existentialist idea of commitment or engagement is an important factor in Burbank's analysis). Wilder's thoughts in A Life in the Sun are compared with the mystical existentialism of Nicolas Berdyaev. In his final appraisal of Wilder's achievement Burbank discovers in him a representative of the flexible philosophy of "personalism" and suggests that Whitman more than any other American writer deserves to be called his predecessor . Here Burbank might have pointed to Wilder's 1957 speech in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt where he supported his rejection of "paternalism" with a quotation from Whitman. Actually, more...