Pullman Car Hiawatha (1931).

I've talked about him once before, yet more as a jumping off point, rather than as an artist in his own right.  Not too far back, last year, I did an article on a book called The Bridge of San Luis Rey.  I might have done at least some kind of decent enough job in covering the story and themes of that novel.  However, if you go back and take a look at that article it becomes pretty clear real soon that all I did was use that novel as a means to an end.  I used the The Bridge of San Luis more as a jumping off point to discuss one of the overarching themes in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.  I blame the creator of the fictional realm known as Castle Rock, Maine, for that choice of focus entirely.  As I also made clear in my Bridge review, it was King himself who set me on a trek through that book by his choosing to highlight that it was a keystone text when it came to the author's obsession with questions of Fate and Free Will, or Ka as he chooses to label it in the pages of his Mid-World saga.  As a result, while I was able to give the this now obscure work of Modernist literature its due day in the spotlight, it's also a fact that my main focus in explicating its meaning was by and large in relation to King's fiction.  I never even bothered to spend much time focusing on the author of The Bridge.  Neither in terms of who he was, or whether he was the kind of talent that deserves to be remembered for anything, except as part of King's writer's toolbox.  I'd like to see if I can remedy that, at least somewhat, with this review today.  

The key challenge here will lie in seeing just how far Thornton Wilder stands on his own, as much as how he relates to King's work.  The best place to start is with a formal introduction to the life of the artist, and for that I've been lucky enough to stumble upon a very helpful summary provided by Mildred Kuner.  In the very first chapter of her study, Thornton Wilder: The Bright and the Dark, she has given as good a summarization of the facts of the writer's life as I am able to find or offer anywhere.  So with that in mind, I'll let her make First Introductions.  In describing her subject, Kuner, writes: "Regardless of what he writes, he generally celebrates the music of the spheres and, simultaneously, what he regards as its inevitable counterpoint - the rattle of the dishes.  Thornton Niven Wilder was born in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 17, 1897.  His father, Amos P. Wilder, son of a clergyman and a devout member of the Congregational Church, was a Yale graduate who had become a newspaperman and who eventually entered the diplomatic service during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.  His mother, Isabella Thornton Niven, was a woman equally dedicated to...intellectual pursuits.  

His elder brother by two years, Amos Niven Wilder, became a professor of theology and the author of several books dealing with the influence of religion on contemporary poetry; a sister, Janet, became a zoologist; another sister, Isabel, became an author (she has written three novels and also has coauthored several articles in collaboration with her brother Thornton) and in later years has generally served as th buffer between him and the world whenever his engaged in one of his literary projects. Significantly, he dedicated his sixth novel, The Eighth Day, to her, for when he retired to the Arizona desert for twenty months, determined to communicate with no one until he finished his work, it was she who looked after his interests in his absence.  In her he has found a spiritual twin to compensate for the loss of his actual twin who died at birth.

"In 1906 Amos P. Wilder took his family to Hong Kong, where he served as an American consul general until 1909.  For a short period young Thornton attended school there - a strict, German-language school - so that at the age that at the age of nine he had already been exposed to both the world of the Orient and the culture of Europe, equally alien to all he had previously known.  (One wonders how much this early experience contributed to his later artistic interest in exotic settings.)  After six months his father sent the family back to the United States, not to Wisconsin, but to Berkeley, California, where Thornton attended the public school.  By 1911, when Amos Wilder was serving in Shanghai, the family had returned to China, where Thornton was enrolled first in another German-language school, then at the English Mission School in Chefoo, until 1913.  At that time the family came back permanently to California, where Thornton attended the Thacher School in Ojai, graduating from the high school in Berkeley in 1915.  At the age of eighteen he had seen more of the world than many people do at forty-eight and he had learned early that a home is based not on a physical location but on human relationships.  Not surprisingly, his books have no strong sense of property or of material things; everything he writes is permeated by a vivid feeling for family ties (1-3)"  Kuner sort of walks right past the real crux of Wilder's fiction here, while at the same time catching a fleeting glimpse at its.

There'll be plenty more to say about how the author treats the subject of families when it comes to a proper discussion of the play at the center of this review.  For the time being, it will be enough to note that trying to separate the themes of Wilder's fiction from that of Steve King is going to be perhaps harder than I expected.  That's because there is one shared element between both artists that unites them on a certain fundamental level, and it impacts the ways in which each writer tackles the subject of familial and social ties.  For the moment, lets continue on with getting to know a bit more about one of King's lesser known Inspirations.

"When it came time to enroll in college, Thornton chose his father's university, Yale, but Amos Wilder, finding his alma mater too worldly for his son, insisted on Oberlin, a small Ohio college known for its splendid music department and its religious character.  At Oberlin young Wilder began writing seriously; in his two years there he contributed several pieces to the literary magazine.  In addition, he was fortunate enough to study with Charles Wager, a teacher with a passion for literature who kindled the imagination of his students.  Wager's interests, which, unlike those of some academic minds, were not narrowly confined to a minute area of specialization, struck a responsive chord in Wilder, for Wager's learning ranged over many countries and epochs.  It was probably from him that Wilder developed his own intuitive appreciation for writings of the past, for tradition, for history, for legend.  And Wilder's natural inclination in this direction was supported by precedent: both Shakespeare, who represented the end of an era, and George Bernard Shaw, who represented the beginning of one, deliberately selected for their material subject and characters that had already been exposed by artists before them.  Perhaps what most impressed Wilder was the discover that genuine masterpieces are timeless: in the words of ager, "Every great work was written this morning," or, in the modern parlance, is relevant.

"At Oberlin, too, Wilder first came into contact with that school of criticism known as...humanism.  A number of American critics...had grown contemptuous of that parochial kind of naturalism characteristic of American literature.  Such writers, for example, as Theodore Dreiser, who appeared to scrutinize only the petty, sordid, materialistic details of everyday life, seemed to the humanists to be abandoning all that was best and intelligent in man, to be concentrating on the gutter instead of the stars.  They felt that...the great classics provided the answer to literature and to life; books that stressed despair and deprivation could contribute nothing of lasting value.  This was a view that the young Wilder found very easy to accept (3-5)", yet I think it's best to pause here and add a qualification born of hindsight right here.  Everything I've learned about this guys leads me to believe that he qualifies as something of an American Renaissance Man.  The fiction of Wilder displays a very careful understanding of the Classics that Kuner talks about.  At the same time, a closer examination of the writer's output reveals a gap in her knowledge about his themes and meanings.  For one thing, Wilder seemed to know that even the gutter has its place, and that sometimes it can even send up flares or messages that people like the academe of places like Oberlin would do wrong to take for granted.  That's a mistake that Wilder never seems to have made.  In fact, there are elements in the play to be reviewed in a moment that tell otherwise.

Rather than revealing himself to be the Ivory Tower snob that Kuner seems to mistake him for, Wilder once more proves how he could have served as the Inspiration for a working class author like King.  The way he does this can be demonstrated if you go and take a look at an old 1943 film called Shadow of a Doubt.  Wilder wrote the screenplay for that film, and it was directed by some guy called Alfred Hitchcock.  The best way to describe that movie is this.  To look at it, to place the whole picture under a microscope is to get a fair enough idea of where a lot of the themes and plot points in the cinema of David Lynch originally stemmed from.  It's also the kind of film that might have left an impact on a young Steve King.  Shadow of a Doubt is a film that shares a great deal of thematic overlap in common with a movie like Blue Velvet, or a novel such as Salem's Lot.  Each vehicle takes a somewhat jaundiced view of small town Americana.  It's an idea that Wilder shares in common with the creators of Twin Peaks and Castle Rock.  There's the same sense of easy familiarity with the frailties, hypocrisy, cruelty, and sometimes even flat-out danger associated with living in a small town.  In the case of the Hitchcock film, Wilder treats his audience to the story of what happens when a serial killer played by Joseph Cotton returns to his idyllic seeming small town in an attempt to hide from the police on his trail.

Even the basic nature of that plot summary, stripped down to its essence, is enough to telegraph to veteran Horror fans the kind of tale we've got on our hands.  What it boils down to is that an outside evil descends upon the inhabitants of Anytown, USA, and in doing so proceeds to draw back the curtain on the dark side of American life.  It's something that artists like King and Lynch have in common with Wilder, and it's a trait he shares in turn with artists like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, and above all, Mark Twain.  I'll have to admit that last name signals an aspect of Wilder's fiction that I don't recall anyone ever bothering to take notice of.  It's a bit concerning, because something tells me that if we could single out just what (if any) influence the author of Huck Finn had on the creator of Our Town, then we could go a long way toward figuring out what made Wilder tick.  All of which is to say that this artist's exposure to the ethos of Liberal Humanism seems to have had a way different effect than the one Kuner believed it to be.  Rather than making him into some disconnected, ivied academic, the writer turned out to share a certain kinship with the likes of Tom Sawyer.  Like Mark Twain, he "knew the average all around".  Unlike Sam Clemens, Wilder remained a lot more open-ended about human nature.  Twain once held that "The average man is a coward".  Wilder knew that cowardice is something any of us are capable of.  He was also willing to place his bets on this not being the whole story, either.

Instead, just like the Renaissance Humanists who Kuner identifies as his main Inspiration, Wilder tended to see people as any number of possibilities (some good, others bad) waiting to be realized.  His idea of the "average all around" encompassed the notion that people make or break themselves upon the wheel of life.  You can scale all the way up to the very roof peak of the stars themselves, and you can just as easily fall to a level beneath the beasts that perish.  That was always a question of mere human choice.  The one thing that Wilder seemed to have the most impatience with were those human failures that tried to blame fate for their own self-imposed predicaments.  Like I said, it's proving to be more difficult to separate the nature of Wilder's fiction from that of King.  From here, Kuner continues:

"In 1917 Wilder transferred to Yale, a move that was not entirely to his father's satisfaction; about the same time, the latter resigned from the consular service and with his family took up permanent residence in New Haven.  At Yale Wilder interrupted his education for eight months in order to serve with the First Coast Artillery at Fort Adams, Rhode Island; though he did not see overseas duty during World War I, he at least participated in his country's involvement with it, as he was again to do later, in World War II.  Leaving the service as a corporal, he returned to Yale in 1919 and, the following year, earned his Bachelor of Arts degree (5)". In all, it's possible to list at least two major influential moments in the author's life.  The first stemmed from the way both Wilder and his siblings were treated as a family by their father; more of which anon, as we get into the review proper.  The second counts as the most unremarked upon aspect in the development of the artist's mind.  However I'm convinced that, like King and Twain, the second major shaping factor in Wilder's talent was his growing awareness of how a lot of what was awry in his own household found its reflection in the troubles plaguing the larger microcosm of his original New England society.  Both of these influences count as negative impacts.

It was the third one, however, which Kuner talks about next, which seems to have acted as an organizing principle, of sorts.  Something that helped the writer give shape and form to a lot of what he witnessed, and that maybe helped him to gain some kind of perspective on it all.  It seems to have chimed with the writer's introduction to the content and toolbox of Classical Humanism that he imbibed in college, and hence acted as something in the way of a kick off point for Wilder's artistry.  "In 1920 Wilder went to Europe on a fellowship and studied at the American Academy in Rome.  It was there, he tells us, that one of the most memorable experiences of his life came to him: as a member of an archaeological team he helped excavate an Etruscan street, buried centuries ago.  And suddenly his awareness of this lost civilization, which had existed even before the Romans, had collided with his own moment in time clarified and confirmed all his previous thought processes: there was no past, present, or future to be considered separately; no geographical limitations could be taken seriously when an ancient culture could be laid bare by a modern American shovel.  As he was later to explain it in The Eighth Day: "It is only in appearance that time is a river.  It is a vast landscape, and it is the eye of the beholder that moves (5-6)".  It's not much to go on, yet it might be enough to start out with, at first.

So to recap, here we've got this simple New England kid who grows up with something of an outsized Imagination, and he's lucky enough to be born into one of those households that tend to have a healthy enough dedication to artistic pursuits.  This positive influence is offset by the fact that Wilder seems to have experienced his own version of the stifling and corrosive Puritanical atmosphere that Stephen King discovered for himself growing up on the streets of Durham, Maine.  Mark Twain experienced his own version of the same social maladies coming of age in the American South.  All of these negative impacts are once more off-set by a number of other factors.  The first is that his stint as an exchange student in China left Wilder with an inescapable experience of the vastness of the world, and the differing cultures that we as humans have been able to construct for ourselves.  It was this exposure to other societies (the Asian-Pacific, in his case) that allowed Wilder the chance to avoid the kind of limited provincialism that Mark Twain struggled with all his life, even when he knew he was just a small fish in a large ocean.  This was a form of knowledge that was brought home to Wilder in a greater fashion as he made friends with those on the lowest wrung of Chinese society.  It was this exposure to ways of living that were outside the box of his time that was then added onto by his exposure to Classical Literature in college.  This broad-minded approach to things seems to have struck home when he dug up a piece of the past.

When you put all of that together, what you seem to get is the kind of literary career that has gone on to have one of the quietest, yet impactful legacies in the history of American Letters.  It resulted in the kind of work that would later find echoes in the writings of J.D. Salinger as much as it could the Fantasies of Ray Bradbury.  It's a combination of literary realism that wouldn't have been out of place in a play by someone like Arthur Miller or Reginald Rose.  There are also moments where you have to wonder just how much this guy might have influence Magical Realists like Jorge Luis Borges, as well as Gothic Pastoralists like King.  To give a sample offering of what showcases as the best introduction to this man's work, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a one act play that Wilder composed during his journeyman years.  It might not seem like much now.  Yet something tells me this piece functioned as an important stepping stone in the history of the author's career.  With that in mind, this is an examination of a work known simply as, Pullman Car Hiawatha.