Heaven's My Destination, page 21
THE FACT of first importance for the many thousands of readers of Thornton Wilder’s books is that each novel has been an unexpected and original treatment of themes deeply embedded in human emotions and experiences of all of us. This new novel is no exception. The element of surprise will take the reader’s breath away for its sheer novelty, but will not diminish the shock of the electric charge. . . .
Wilder’s readers did not desert him. The good news began with an unexpected double salute when both major book clubs in the United States and Great Britain chose Heaven’s My Destination as their main selection. Over the months that followed domestic sales held up well enough to earn it seventh place on the 1935 list of ten best-selling novels. So fast did books fly out of the door when it appeared in January that the author heard on the grapevine that Harper had to borrow ten thousand copies from the Book-of-the-Month Club to meet demand. Altogether, in 1935, for telling the story of George Brush, Wilder earned $27,000 or some $500,000 in today’s money. After Heaven’s success with the English Book Society, Wilder’s British publisher, Longmans, Green & Co. moved the novel quickly into its humor series.
Royalties from Heaven’s My Destination not only restored Thornton Wilder’s finances, but also made it possible for him to begin to break free from teaching and lecturing to devote himself entirely to what he was now desperate to do: write plays. Wilder’s path to fame on the stage during this period has its twists and turns, but there is much truth in the statement that the most famous George in all his works, George Gibbs in Our Town, owes a significant debt of gratitude for his birth to his older cousin, George Brush.
It is no surprise that the outstanding sales of Heaven’s My Destination in 1935, a Great Depression year, were bolstered by strong and favorable critical reception on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in England where its humor and its portrait of an American type were enthusiastically received. William Plomer, in The Spectator, spoke for many when he hailed it “an uncommonly skillful and good-natured entertainment.” The London Mercury’s V.M.L. Scott saw humor in the novel but also posed a big question: “Are we not to believe that Mr. Brush’s goodness will one day be directed by intelligence; that it is America in the end who will save the civilization of the West?”
Predictably, positive comment was often joined with collective surprise at how different Heaven was from Wilder’s earlier fiction, leading reviewers to be “puzzled” by what Wilder was getting at. Had he written a satire, a comedy, a farce, a religious tract—what? Ted Robinson, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer thought he knew, calling the novel an “uproarious farce” and predicting, “In a week or so everyone in the country will be reading it.” More typical was John Chamberlain’s view in the New York Herald Tribune. He found the book “unusual and entertaining” but asked, “What is [Wilder’s] intention?” Donald Adams in the all-important New York Times review summed up the issue beautifully. He said Heaven “will be read for its forthright entertainment; it will be discussed for its ambiguity.” Also predictably, a number of reviewers would compare the book—fortunately not unfavorably—with his blockbuster, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, noting that philosophical and moral themes appear in both works, despite the striking differences in setting, character, and style. No reviewer knotted the two books together tighter than one of Wilder’s former Yale College professors, Henry Seidel Canby, who sagely observed in the widely read Book-of-the-Month Club, “The truth of the matter is that Heaven’s My Destination is just The Bridge of San Luis Rey written over and again in homely humorous Americanese. It is the same unworldliness marveling at the world and its inexplicable complications when it is so simple to the good.”
If in the minority, Heaven’s My Destination also had its critics. As a general comment, they found George Brush’s story lacking in import and realism, charges soon to be leveled against Our Town. Herschel Brickell wrote in the North American Review that Heaven lacked “blood and bones” and was “not of any particular importance.” The distinguished critic R. P. Blackmur, writing in The Nation, found that Wilder’s treatment of the theme of goodness lacked “authority.” And we know (see here) that Sigmund Freud threw it across the room.
No overview of the novel’s sources and initial critical positioning would be complete without mention of Marxist-Communist critic Michael Gold’s 2,300-word assault on Wilder’s previously published works (three novels and one book of short plays). In the October 22, 1930, issue of the New Republic, two years before Wilder began work on Heaven’s My Destination, in brutal language, Gold painted Wilder as a poster boy for a “genteel bourgeoisie” literary tradition devoted to hiding from real “problems and subjects. Where are the modern streets of New York, Chicago and New Orleans?” Gold asked of Wilder whose work he summarized as a “synthesis of all the chambermaid literature, Sunday-school tracts and boulevard piety there ever was.” He concluded his diatribe with a challenge: “Let Mr. Wilder write a book about modern America. We predict it will reveal all his fundamental silliness and superficiality, now hidden under a Greek chlamys.” The challenge was met by an outpouring of letters, of which twenty-seven were published—the majority defending Wilder—in six of the next seven issues of the the New Republic, until December 17, 1930, when the editors ended the Gold-Wilder controversy and called it “an account of darkness.”
In his Foreword to this book, the late J. D. McClatchy mentioned this attack, to which Wilder never responded publicly, and its possible influence on the author’s next novel. What is known is that Wilder privately demised it as “wretched affair,” and appears to have let it go. By the time Heaven was published, five years after Gold challenged Wilder to write a book about “modern America,” his assault was referenced by only a handful of reviewers. A notable exception was the influential voice of Edmund Wilson, editor of the New Republic, who had been involved in the earlier controversy. Wilson not only praised Heaven, calling it “much Mr. Wilder’s best novel,” but also believed it was written specifically to answer Michael Gold’s challenge. Revisiting the matter twenty years later in his influential Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (1961), Daniel Aaron saw it differently: “Wilder, the genial lay-preacher and histrio, is closer in spirit to Cervantes (the real inspirer of his novel, not as Edmund Wilson believed, the attack of Michael Gold), and his teasing satire on human aberration implies no despair or alienation.”
What was Wilder’s view of the critics’ questions about what he was up to? He explained himself forthrightly to his friend, the actress Rosemary Ames, soon after Heaven’s My Destination appeared in print on January 2, 1935:
My book’s selling like pancakes but almost everybody misunderstands it. I should worry.
It’s no satire. The hero’s not a boob or a sap.
George Brush at his best is everybody.
—Tappan Wilder
2020
READINGS
A NEW WILDER NOVEL AVAILABLE
This 1935 postcard announcing Heaven’s My Destination highlights two selling points of compelling interest to readers: a novel by the acclaimed author of The Bridge of San Luis Rey inspired by the iconic novel Don Quixote.
The small print reads: The author of one of the most popular books of this generation offers the story of a modern Don Quixote—a novel as moving and as finely written as anything he has ever done.
A BAPTIST DON QUIXOTE
On June 27, 1930, with The Woman of Andros published and selling well—third on the 1930 best-seller list, and a free summer ahead, Wilder drew up his typically eclectic list of eight “projects to choose among.” The third under fiction, and the second of two “picaresque” ideas, is the first sighting of Heaven’s My Destination in Wilder’s records and only one of three ideas from this list to be developed into actual stories or plays. The other two are the Far Inglun idea developed into the short story “The Battleship,” published in 1936; and “The House in Concord, N.H,” found in his 1931 short play “Such Things Only Happen in Books.”
(Deepwood Drive, New Haven, June 27, 1930) Now after six months work I have free time to work again and I have the following projects to choose among:
NOVELS OR NOUVELLES
Captain Faring: (the group: the nun: the children: alcohol).
Picaresque: “Lafcadio” Spanglian Europe: diary: “I have been reading Casanova”: “Who was my mother?” “I mean to be a writer.”
Picaresque: Baptist “Don Quixote.” Selling educational textbooks through Texas. Oklahoma etc.
Far Inglun: The castaway civilization.
The Empress of Trebizond: homage à Händel
PLAYS
Capt. Faring. See Entry 71 in this book.
The Pilgrims (long talk with Jed Harris two days ago about this.) N.B.: Jed Harris was the producer-director of Our Town (1938).
The house in Concord, N.H. Criminals return to the scene of the crime. The cult of love & hate. The sentiment of all old houses—those who have died in them. The Indian mound; the 1790 builder who fell from the roof. “What will it matter in a 100 years?”
The pension on the Riviera. “See that little plump feminine widow: across the barriers of language, social background and poverty: she will addle a man.” “Nature only eager to fill as many go carts as possible.”
IN HANDWRITTEN FORM
The “4th copying of the opening” draft of the novel’s first lines, the text of which appears below, shows the epigraph taken from The Woman of Andros. Later drafts tighten the language and deepen characterization. Note that Wilder changed Brush’s middle name to Marvin, possibly because Marvin was a family name. Misspellings in the draft remain as Wilder wrote them.
4th copying of the opening
“Of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.”
Chapter One: George Brush attempts to save souls in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma. His Theory of Poverty. His Criminal Record: Incarceration Number Two.
One morning in the late summer of 1930 the proprietor and several guests of the Union Hotel at Crestcrego [in Western Texas], Texas were annoyed to discover Biblical texts freshly written across the blotter on the public writing desk. The next morning the guests at McCarty’s Inn, Usquepaw, in the same state were similarly irritated, and the manager of the Gem Theatre next door was terrified by the spectacle of a young man who tore down and trampled upon a poster advertising a motion picture being exhibited there. The same evening a young man passing the First Baptist Church and seeing the announcement that the Annual Bible Question Bee was to take place, paid his fifteen cents, took his place against the wall and won the first prize, his final triumph being his recitation of the Kings of Judah backwards. The next night several passengers on the Pullman car Quarritch bound for Saint Louis Dallas were startled to discover a man in pyjamas kneeling and saying his prayers in the aisle before his berth. His concentration was not shaken when copies of the Western Magazine and Screen Features hit him sharply in the back. The next morning a lady who had retired to the platform to enjoy a meditative cigarette after breakfast returned to her seat to discover that someone had written across her window with a piece of soap the words: “Women who smoke are unfit to be mothers.” A business card had been inserted at the corner of the pane. It read: “George Mercer Brush. Representing the Clay Educational Press, New York, Boston, Chicago. Publishers of Caulkins’ Arithmatics and Algebras, and other superior textbooks for schools and colleges.”
George M. Brush This moralist and sensor descended from the train at Wellington, Arkansas, and settled himself at the Wellington House where some exigency in his business required his remaining for three days. He passed the time in taking long walks, in memorizing a speech of Abraham Lincoln’s, in reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica at the Public Library and in troubling the librarian to find everything she could for him that had to do with Mahatma Ghandi. He fell into conversation with eleven people; of eleven of them he eventually asked whether they were saved. He made notations of these. . . .
TWO LETTERS
As pointed out in the Afterword, critics and readers were puzzled by what Wilder was getting at in Heaven. Was George Brush an idiot, a fool, a boob, a saint, etc.? Indeed, the whole controversial business, as it played out in the papers, became a significant selling point for the novel. The following excerpts from two of Wilder’s letters at time of publication express the author’s feelings about the character of George Marvin Brush.
“Dear Doc”
This letter was written January 3, 1935, a month after publication, to Dr. Creighton Barker, the Wilder family’s physician in New Haven. In his first three novels, of which The Woman of Andros was the third, Wilder consciously explored love, religion, memory, imagination, and other resources at an individual’s command to oppose life’s inevitable tragedies. He wonders here whether a more explicit statement about what interests him in George and his personal growth and education, might have helped readers better understand his viewpoint. Wilder never revisited the novel to “examine the point” raised in this letter.
There’s no satire in it. It’s about all of us when young. You’re not supposed to notice the humor—you’re supposed to look through it at the fellow who not only has the impulse to think out an ethic and plan a life—but actually does it.
George Brush is the continuation and externalization of all the little private illuminations that in other people wilt and die under fear and reticule or under the acquirement of our singularly inadequate world wisdom . . .
Five years from now when the testimonies pro and con have begun to subside, I’m going to examine the point as to whether I made a big lapse of artistic judgement in present[ing] the matter so objectively.
Perhaps the note [epigraph] should have been from phrases from Andros: “How do you live? What do you do first.”
“Dear Mr. Saxton”
The letter is to Eugene Saxton, editor-in-chief at Harper & Brothers. It was written on November 20, a month before publication. Wilder admits hurrying Heaven at the close, with the possible cost, he suggests gently, of a lack of clarity about George Brush’s development and growing wisdom at the end.
I would like to think that the present last chapter ties up the suspended knots however brusquely:
The family-life with Roberta is understood to have been impossible. My sister [Isabel] scolds me when I tell her that for me the important words about that lies in the parenthesis (“Their eyes never met at any time.”)
We have seen in the pipe, for example, the breaking up of all that was most rigid and dialectic in his ethical background.
His loss of faith and sickness were just what was needed to instruct him that his faith was hitherto too glib an optimism and too dogmatic a bundle of planks. His insults to the visiting Dr. Bowie show that a lot of fresh air is blowing through his fundamentalism. . . .
His disappearance in the last paragraph shows that he is still the same fellow, trying to think, always turning his experimental thoughts into acts—but after one year’s growth, doing it better, less bound, etc.
Except for considerable improvement he is still the same person as in the opening paragraph,—fundamentalist, but more flexible, earnest, but less obstinate; humorless, but wiser.
GEORGE BRUSH IN THE FAMILY
Wilder saw George Brush’s idealism as a factor in all youth and in all families, and certainly in his father, Amos Parker Wilder (1864–1936); his older brother, Amos (left) (1895–1993); and himself, all shown here in a photograph taken in 1915. Their father was determined that his boys not only survive in a world of constant danger and temptation, but also “enter into the larger world and bring knowledge from the stars.”
In order to achieve success, the elder Wilder prescribed faithful religious practice, the best possible liberal arts education, foreign travel and study, and, for good health and for understanding America and its people, manual labor on farms. His father’s dream for his boys is reflected in one of Wilder’s favorite lines from Heaven: “I didn’t put myself through college for four years and go through a difficult religious conversion in order to have the same ideas as other people have.” This photograph was taken shortly after the senior Wilder’s resignation from the consular service in China for health reasons, and the subsequent establishment of the Wilder family home outside New Haven, Connecticut. Thornton was an Oberlin College freshman and Amos a Yale College junior in 1915.
THE OLDER BROTHER AS INTERPRETER
The younger, Amos, was variously amused and troubled by the simplistic use of the term “strict Puritan” to describe his father’s religious stance and, by implication, its impact on his brother’s life and work. In this extract from Thornton Wilder and His Public (1980), he seeks to set the record straight about the character of the intellectual world in which he and his brother grew up, with an emphasis on their father and his values. Amos Niven Wilder (1895–1993) was a clergyman, biblical scholar, poet, and literary critic.
The term “Puritan” applied to our parents and to the culture in our home is . . . imprecise and misleading. It is also an exaggeration to say, as does one biographer, that my brother came of “a long line of New England divines.” On the Wilder side they are hard to find in any direct line. The kind of New England tradition represented on our mother’s side is suggested by her grandfather, Arthur Tappan, friend of William Lloyd Garrison and himself the first president of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1837). A philanthropist like his brother Lewis Tappan who financed the defense of the Spanish slaves in the Amistad slave ship case all the way up to the Supreme Court and helped fund the establishment of Oberlin College because it was the first to welcome Black as well as women students. He and his New York store were repeatedly in danger from proslavery mobs. This kind of Puritan tradition is no reproach.
