Heaven's My Destination, page 1
Epigraph
George Brush is my name;
America’s my nation;
Ludington’s my dwelling-place
And Heaven’s my destination.
(Doggerel verse which children of the Middle West were accustomed to write in their schoolbooks)
Of all the forms of genius,
goodness has the longest awkward age.
—THE WOMAN OF ANDROS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Foreword by J. D. McClatchy
Chapter 1: George Brush tries to save some souls in Texas and Oklahoma. Doremus Blodgett and Margie McCoy. Thoughts on arriving at the age of twenty-three. Brush draws his savings from the bank. His criminal record: Incarceration No. 2.
Chapter 2: Oklahoma City. Chiefly conversation. The adventure in the barn. Margie McCoy gives some advice.
Chapter 3: Good times at Camp Morgan. Dick Roberts’ nightmares. Dinner with Mississippi Corey.
Chapter 4: Further good times at Camp Morgan. Important conversation with a girl named Jessie Mayhew. Dick Roberts’ nightmares concluded. George Brush refuses some money.
Chapter 5: Kansas City. Queenie’s boarding-house. First word of Father Pasziewski. George Brush drunk and disorderly.
Chapter 6: Kansas City. Sunday dinner at Ma Crofut’s. More news of Father Pasziewski. A moment of dejection in a Kansas City hospital.
Chapter 7: Three adventures of varying educational importance: the evangelist; the medium; first steps in ahimsa.
Chapter 8: Kansas City. The courting of Roberta Weyerhauser. Herb’s legacies.
Chapter 9: Ozarksville, Missouri. Rhoda May Gruber. Mrs. Efrim’s hold-up man. George Brush’s criminal record: Incarceration No. 3.
Chapter 10: Ozarksville, Missouri. George Brush meets a great man and learns something of importance about himself. The trial.
Chapter 11: A road in Missouri. Chiefly conversation, including the account of a religious conversion. George Brush again sins against ahimsa.
Chapter 12: Kansas City. Serious conversation in a park. A wedding. Practically an American home.
Chapter 13: George Brush loses something. Last news of Father Pasziewski. Thoughts on arriving at the age of twenty-four.
A Nephew’s Note to a New Edition
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Thornton Wilder
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
When Sigmund Freud first read Heaven’s My Destination, he threw the book across the room. Wilder had visited Freud at his villa outside Vienna in the fall of 1935 and had given him a copy of the novel, which had been published earlier that year. Freud would have none of it. “I come from an unbroken line of infidel Jews,” the doctor explained; as a boy he had been lectured at by his father that “there is no way that we could know there was a God; that it didn’t do any good to trouble one’s head about such; but to live and do one’s duty among one’s fellow men.” But what had actually annoyed Freud about the book was, he said, the fun it made of religion. “Why should you treat of an American fanatic?” the old doctor asked. “That cannot be treated poetically.”
Or so Wilder records the meeting in his journal. Of course, Freud wasn’t the only reader to have been upset. Some thought it filled with an austere religious fervor, others thought it a broad satire of American Protestantism. Wilder himself, speaking with an interviewer many years later, recalled some of the public reaction to his hero, George Brush:
George, the hero of a novel of mine which I wrote when I was nearly forty, is an earnest, humorless, moralizing, preachifying, interfering product of Bible-belt evangelism. I received many letters from writers of the George Brush mentality angrily denouncing me for making fun of sacred things, and a letter from the Mother Superior of a convent in Ohio saying that she regarded the book as an allegory of the stages in the spiritual life.
In fact, the book’s first reviewers were puzzled because it could be read either way, because Wilder seemed such a dispassionate narrator, because the moral scales weren’t tipped to one side or the other. Again, Wilder explained that Heaven’s My Destination
was written as objectively as it could be done and the result has been that people tell me that it has meant to them things as diverse as a Pilgrim’s Progress of the religious life and an extreme sneering at sacred things, a portrait of a saint on the one hand and a ridiculous fool jeered at by the author on the other. For a while I felt that I had erred and that it was an artistic mistake to expose oneself to such misinterpretations. But more and more in harmony with the doctrine that the writer during the work should not hear in a second level of consciousness the possible comments of audiences, I feel that for good or for ill you should talk to yourself in your own private language and be willing to sink or swim on the hope that your private language has nevertheless sufficient correspondence with that of persons of some reading and some experience.
From the very beginning of his career, Wilder had been speaking his own “private language,” however it may have been schooled by the example of older stylistic masters. The baroque suavities of The Cabala, the vividly poised moralizing of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the chaste decorum of The Woman of Andros, had all earned for their author a reputation as a writer of chiseled refinement. And because each novel was so different from what had preceded it, the range of his imagination was also lavishly praised. Early and easy success, however, invariably pushes one’s detractors front and center, and in 1930 Wilder was confronted by an especially vicious attack on both his achievement and his sensibility. Writing in The New Republic, critic Michael Gold ignited a controversy that we must believe singed Wilder and without a doubt inflamed the magazine’s letters column for weeks to come. Gold, whose ardent Communist views made Wilder the convenient embodiment of “a small sophisticated class that has recently risen in America—our genteel bourgeoisie,” dismissed the novels as “chambermaid literature” and accused Wilder’s writing of “the shallow clarity and tight little good taste that remind one of nothing so much as the conversation and practice of a veteran cocotte.” It was a vulgar, snide, tendentious piece, and it went on to hammer at Wilder’s lack of “nativism.” Why had he taken refuge in a “rootless cosmopolitanism”? Italy, Peru, Greece—remote cultures and effete characters—glossy high finish and etiolated aristocratic emotions. Why, in other words, wasn’t Wilder a Tolstoy, or at least a Sinclair Lewis? Instead, his serenity is that of a corpse: “Prick it, and it will bleed violet ink and apéritif.” Why won’t Wilder plunge into the burly realities of American life, the world of stockbroker suicides and labor racketeers, steel mills and back streets, prairies and mesas? “Let Mr. Wilder write a book about modern America,” Gold concluded. “We predict it will reveal all his fundamental silliness and superficiality.”
Despite the fact his defenders rushed into print, Wilder—who never publically commented on Gold’s attack—was said privately to be hurt. Though I doubt Gold’s article was a direct cause, it may have started a train of thought, one that gathered considerable baggage in the years directly following, when Wilder had moved on to a lively part-time teaching base at the University of Chicago and was also crisscrossing the country on the lecture circuit. He hadn’t written about America before because, as he once explained, “I didn’t know enough about it.” He had plucked his characters from books. Now he learned firsthand the scenery and sounds of America and was ready to take advantage of them. In any case, his very next novel was distinctly “American.” It set itself down in the Mississippi Valley and points west during the Depression, offered an array of social types, analyzed their living conditions and legal system, and probed both the country’s beliefs and its true religion, business. It was enough to warm any Marxist’s heart. In a letter to John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson wrote: “Thornton Wilder has taken up the challenge flung down by Mike Gold and written the best book of his life. I wish you would overcome your prejudice against him and read it.”
It would be inaccurate to claim that Wilder had deliberately remade himself as a novelist—had, as it were, gone native. (Though Our Town arrives just three years later.) The settings and characters of Heaven’s My Destination bear subtle affinities with Wilder’s fiction, both earlier and later. And its hero, George Brush, shares the ardent loneliness of all of Wilder’s protagonists. But it is fair to say that Wilder did turn from the exquisite cadences and lambent, layered textures of his first three novels. His style here is drier, flatter, jumpier. It’s the effort to create an “American speech” for his book, to give its narrative the clipped, moral tone of its cast and culture. It’s what might be called a Grant Wood style. Of course Wilder was not writing a satire, though he’s content to skewer pretensions and injustices. Instead, he’d set out to write a comedy, and he needed a light touch to capture the incongruities of American life, at once innocent and egotistical. It is a comedy in the highest sense, and moves easily from hayseed farce to superstitious magic (Father Pasziewski’s spoon) to moral argument (the concluding courtroom scene is the book’s masterstroke).
It’s said there are only two stories, two basic situations which all novels weave variations on. In one, our hero leaves home and is beset by adventures. In the other, a stranger comes to town and occasions adventures. Heaven’s My Destination combines the two patterns. Its premise is an old joke—did you hear the one about the travel
Heaven’s My Destination was written in the midst of the Great Depression, a time when all Americans were called on to redefine themselves. The national upheaval was a time of private soul-searching as well as of government programs. It was Wilder’s genius to have made George’s idealism seem like a solution that solves nothing. So cannily has Wilder drawn his portrait that his picaresque hero, in adventure after adventure, erodes the very sympathy he builds in us. George is annoying in part because we live—now as then—in a culture of Meddlers and Experts, a culture of tireless self-improvement, in which, from television spot or bumper sticker, we are constantly urged to get right with God, lose fifty pounds, quit smoking, discover the ultimate stain remover, and accept Jesus as our personal savior. No one wants to be goaded into goodness or exasperated to salvation. Above all, we loathe logic, and George Brush is not a romantic but a logician. Creatures of satisfying habits, we resent change, resent thinking about our comforts; we prefer the bromides and slogans, the sheer unselfconsciousness of animal life. “You’ll learn in time,” George is told. “I guess you’ll find your place in time, see? Only don’t come around us any more. We got our own ideas and our own lives all arranged, see? and we don’t like to be interrupted.”
But George is also annoying because he is a saint. “Isn’t the principle of a thing more important than the people that live under the principle?” he asks, and wonders why his marriage collapses. “It’s not important if Roberta and I are different, as she calls it. It’s not important if we don’t get on like some couples do. We’re married, and it’s for the good of society and morals that we stay together until we die.” This is his devastating innocence. It causes him to despair, and only a miracle can save him. The brilliance of Wilder’s technique in this novel is to reenact in the reader the same drama that the characters who encounter George face. We are asked to think, to see the light—and then watch the realistic shadows fall.
Wilder’s brother Amos, in his 1980 book Thornton Wilder and His Public, tried to trace the lineage of George Brush, and he put it most accurately when he noted that Brush’s ancestor is less a specific literary character than a mythological type: “the American Adam.” This is a figure central both to our literature and to our imaginings of ourselves. Thoreau and Whitman, Hemingway and Fitzgerald—our writers have tried continually to embody this innocent, vital ideal. Wilder was fond of Thoreau, whose own annoyingly soulful self-righteousness could have been a model for Brush’s. But in fact, it was Emerson (who couldn’t see the poison snake in the grass, in Wilder’s skeptical reckoning) who, in his clarion 1837 oration “The American Scholar,” most notably defined the American Adam, whom he calls “the scholar”:
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances. . . . He must accept . . . the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the highest function of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thought. . . . Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions—these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day,—this he shall hear and promulgate.
This moves to the heart of what has been called the American Religion as both our greatest prophet, Emerson, and our subtlest analyst, William James, have seen it. George Brush is less a Baptist than a believer in this hybrid religion that doesn’t much resemble historical Christianity. The Christian asks, “Who will save me?” The American asks, “What will make me free?” And because the American strives for individuality and the pragmatism of feelings and experiences (rather than desires and memories), he lives as a solitary, his inner loneliness at home in an outer loneliness of wilderness or urban enormity. Salvation for the American comes not through the congregation or community but is a singular confrontation, an exclusive reliance on the empowered self. The American is known not by his pious submission but by his radical innocence. Here again is Emerson, with his scholar:
In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time—happy enough, if he can satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds.
In 1930, two years before he started working on Heaven’s My Destination, Wilder wrote to a friend about his earlier three novels, and saw in them a common theme. “It seems to me that my books are about: What is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose to it?” The best of those novels, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, asked whether “the intuitions that lie behind love are enough to justify the desperation of living.” There is, finally, a shimmering ambivalence in Wilder’s answer. In Heaven’s My Destination he asks if the honest man’s pursuit of truth is enough to sustain him in a deceitful world. I’m not entirely convinced Wilder could answer his own question, and neither was he. The ending of the novel seems rushed, substituting a crisis for a conclusion. Wilder admitted as much, both in his journal and in letters to friends. “Sure, I made a lot of mistakes,” he wrote to one. “As you say, at the close especially.” Twenty years later, he blamed it on a sense of “procrastination, the inability to call my wits together for a deep concentration” that forced him to rush toward the last page.
