The Woman of Andros and The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder Page B
Authors: Thornton Wilder
Ads: Link
some kind of limited edition.’ Wilder was not blind to the marketplace risks involved. As early as April 1926 he had put the matter this way to Boni’s secretary-treasurer Lewis Baer:
My thought was that they [the playlets] were so frail that even if you did bring them out during the next two years it would probably be bad for ‘my booksellers’ and even, perhaps for most of ‘my readers.’ And yet I should love to get those little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably.
Thanks to the leverage provided by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, there was nothing quiet or unprofitable about The Angel in print. The dust jacket language nails to the mast the relationship between the two books: ‘[These playlets] should prove of exceptional interest as showing the development of a talent that has astonished the critical world.’ The volume was widely and thoughtfully reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, although a number of critics were puzzled by its purpose and wondered whether it was really necessary to read Wilder’s juvenilia. The Angel also earned some gold, returning royalties to the author of more than $5,000 over two years, a modest sum compared to that moneymaker, The Bridge, which garnered more than $100,000 for Wilder in its first two years of shelf life.
In addition to a pointed reminder that Thornton Wilder cared so deeply about drama that he was willing to take a creative risk with his public, it is helpful to see The Woman of Andros as a novelistic form of The Angel That Troubled the Waters. Besides its brevity – at 23,000 words, Andros barely qualifies as even a short novel – there are kindred themes. The four playlets added after 1926 show Wilder wrestling with similar and sober questions of morality and religion. The title playlet, for example, written in June 1928 as he was beginning to write the novel, has an angel informing a Chrysis-like figure that his time for healing at the sacred waters has not yet arrived. ‘In love’s service,’ the angel says, ‘only the wounded soldiers can serve.’ We know from later interviews that one of Wilder’s first three novels began as a play. Surely it is The Woman of Andros.
In addition to attracting significant attention to his curious little playlets, The Bridge also provided Wilder with the money to write as he felt most comfortable writing, and would do so the rest of his career. His pattern was to sequester himself for short-term stays of a few days or a few weeks in the United States or abroad in hotels, pensions, or apartments. His notations on the manuscript of The Woman of Andros open the door on the creative process of a writer on the move:
The Woman of Andros. Idea first came spring of 1928. First two conversations written at Axeland House, Horley, Surrey; and much of the later parts clearly planned during church attendances at Red Hill, Outwood, etc. The copying out of already completed portions begun into this book Oct 11, 1928. Pension Saramartel, Juan-les-Pins. A lot (Towards Chrysis monologue in the cove) done in The Law Dorm’s 76 Wall St New Haven April 1929. Then Sept-Oct Oxford-Paris-Munich.
The notation includes two locations where he had in fact worked earlier on The Bridge – the pension in Juan-les-Pins, and a short-term rental in a Yale Law School dormitory. But his list is incomplete. We know from letters and records that Wilder also did considerable work on the manuscript in London’s Hotel Savoy, and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He also discovered that he worked well on ships crossing the Atlantic. (‘Baby does best on boats,’ he was later fond of saying.) As a result, the Adriatic, the Lapland, and the Cedric are part of the making of Andros. The manuscript’s peripatetic journey ended at the famed Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, for it was here, on or about January 4, 1930, only six weeks before publication, that Wilder completed the last lines of his third novel.
These excerpts
My thought was that they [the playlets] were so frail that even if you did bring them out during the next two years it would probably be bad for ‘my booksellers’ and even, perhaps for most of ‘my readers.’ And yet I should love to get those little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably.
Thanks to the leverage provided by The Bridge of San Luis Rey, there was nothing quiet or unprofitable about The Angel in print. The dust jacket language nails to the mast the relationship between the two books: ‘[These playlets] should prove of exceptional interest as showing the development of a talent that has astonished the critical world.’ The volume was widely and thoughtfully reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic, although a number of critics were puzzled by its purpose and wondered whether it was really necessary to read Wilder’s juvenilia. The Angel also earned some gold, returning royalties to the author of more than $5,000 over two years, a modest sum compared to that moneymaker, The Bridge, which garnered more than $100,000 for Wilder in its first two years of shelf life.
In addition to a pointed reminder that Thornton Wilder cared so deeply about drama that he was willing to take a creative risk with his public, it is helpful to see The Woman of Andros as a novelistic form of The Angel That Troubled the Waters. Besides its brevity – at 23,000 words, Andros barely qualifies as even a short novel – there are kindred themes. The four playlets added after 1926 show Wilder wrestling with similar and sober questions of morality and religion. The title playlet, for example, written in June 1928 as he was beginning to write the novel, has an angel informing a Chrysis-like figure that his time for healing at the sacred waters has not yet arrived. ‘In love’s service,’ the angel says, ‘only the wounded soldiers can serve.’ We know from later interviews that one of Wilder’s first three novels began as a play. Surely it is The Woman of Andros.
In addition to attracting significant attention to his curious little playlets, The Bridge also provided Wilder with the money to write as he felt most comfortable writing, and would do so the rest of his career. His pattern was to sequester himself for short-term stays of a few days or a few weeks in the United States or abroad in hotels, pensions, or apartments. His notations on the manuscript of The Woman of Andros open the door on the creative process of a writer on the move:
The Woman of Andros. Idea first came spring of 1928. First two conversations written at Axeland House, Horley, Surrey; and much of the later parts clearly planned during church attendances at Red Hill, Outwood, etc. The copying out of already completed portions begun into this book Oct 11, 1928. Pension Saramartel, Juan-les-Pins. A lot (Towards Chrysis monologue in the cove) done in The Law Dorm’s 76 Wall St New Haven April 1929. Then Sept-Oct Oxford-Paris-Munich.
The notation includes two locations where he had in fact worked earlier on The Bridge – the pension in Juan-les-Pins, and a short-term rental in a Yale Law School dormitory. But his list is incomplete. We know from letters and records that Wilder also did considerable work on the manuscript in London’s Hotel Savoy, and at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He also discovered that he worked well on ships crossing the Atlantic. (‘Baby does best on boats,’ he was later fond of saying.) As a result, the Adriatic, the Lapland, and the Cedric are part of the making of Andros. The manuscript’s peripatetic journey ended at the famed Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, for it was here, on or about January 4, 1930, only six weeks before publication, that Wilder completed the last lines of his third novel.
These excerpts
Similar Books
