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.

The Story.

Rod Serling (v.o.): "You're traveling through another dimension.  A dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind.  A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of Imagination.  You're next stop...The Twilight Zone (web)".

Serling: (v.o. cont.) "Portrait of an outmoded form of transportation.  A random piece of obsolescence preserved in a moment of time.  This is a Pullman Carriage Sleeping Car; a modern marvel of the now bygone 19th century Industrial Age with all of the modern amenities that anyone on the cusp of the the new age might hope to afford; on a night run from the West Coast to the East; and the journey that the passengers of this coach are about to undertake, could be our own".

INT: Pullman Car, Night.

"This is the plan of a Pullman car. Its name is Hiawatha and on December twenty-first it is on its way from New York to Chicago. Here at your left are three compartments. Here is the aisle and five lowers. The berths are all full, uppers and lowers, but for the purposes of this play we are limiting our interest to the people in the lower berths on the further side only.

"The berths are already made up. It is half-past nine. Most of the passengers are in bed behind the green curtains. They are dropping their shoes on the floor, or wrestling with their trousers, or wondering whether they dare hide their valuables in the pillow-slips during the night (93)".

The passenger manifest of this car goes as follows:

"Compartment Three: An insane woman with a male attendant and a trained nurse. Compartment Two: Philip and Compartment One: Harriet, his young wife. Lower One: A maiden lady. Lower Three: A middle-aged doctor. Lower Five: A stout, amiable woman of fifty. Lower Seven: An engineer going to California. Lower Nine: Another engineer (ibid)".

INT: Pullman Car, Night.

It's at or near nightfall, the witching hour dead ahead.  All of the passengers are busy getting ready to turn in for the night.  They shuffle and fumble in their berths or compartments as a Porter makes his way through on his rounds.

"Lower One. Porter, be sure and wake me up at quarter of six. 

"Porter. Yes, mam. 

"Lower One. I know I shan't sleep a wink, but I want to be told when it's quarter of six. 

"Porter. Yes, mam. 

"Lower Seven (putting his head through the curtains). Hsst! Porter! Hsst! How the hell do you turn on this other light? 

"Porter (fussing with it). I'm afraid it's outa order, sir. You'll have to use the other end.

Random Woman in an Upper Berth: Porter? "May I ask if some one in this car will be kind enough to lend me some aspirin?

"Porter, (rushing about). Yes, mam.

"Lower Nine (one of these engineers, descending the aisle and falling into Lower Five). Sorry, lady, sorry. Made a mistake.

"Lower Five (grumbling). Never in all my born days! 

"Lower One (in a shrill whisper). Porter...Porter!

"Porter. Yes, mam. 

"Lower One. My hot water bag's leaking. I guess you'll have to take it away. I'll have to do without it tonight. How awful! 

Lower Five (sharply to the passenger above her). Young man, you mind your own business, or I'll report you to the conductor.

Upper Five: "Sorry, mam, I didn't mean to upset you. My suspenders fell down and I was trying to catch them.

"Lower Five. Well, here they are. Now go to sleep. Everybody seems to be rushing into my berth tonight.

"She puts her head out.

"Porter! Porter! Be a good soul and bring me a glass of water, will you? I'm parched.

"Lower Nine. Bill!

"No answer.

"Bill!

"Lower Seven. Ye'? Wha' d'y'a want? 

"Lower Nine. Slip me one of those magazines, willya? 

"Lower Seven. Which one d'y'a want? 

"Lower Nine. Either one. "Detective Stories." Either one.

"Lower Seven. Aw, Fred. Fm just in the middle of one of'm in "Detective Stories." 

"Lower Nine. That's all right.  I'll take the "Western."—Thanks.

"The Stage Manager (to the actors). All right!-Sh! Sh! Sh!-.

"To the audience.

"Now I want you to hear them thinking.

"There is a pause and then they all begin a murmuring-swishing noise, very soft. In turn each one of them can be heard above the others.

"Lower Five (the lady of fifty). Let's see: I've got the doll for the baby. And the slip-on for Marietta. And the fountain pen for Herbert. And the subscription to Time for George. . . .

"Lower Seven (Bill). God! Lillian, if you don't turn out to be what I think you are, I don't know what FU do.—I guess it's bad politics to let a woman know that you're going all the way to California to see her. FU think up a song-and-dance about a business trip or something. Was I ever as hot and bothered about anyone like this before? Well, there was Martha. But that was different. I'd better try and read or I'll go coo-koo. "How did you know it was ten o'clock when the visitor left the house?" asked the detective. "Because at ten o'clock," answered the girl, "I always turn out the lights in the conservatory and in the back hall. As I was coming down the stairs I heard the master talking to someone at the front door. I heard him say, 'Well, good night . . ."—Gee, I don't feel like reading; I'll just think about Lillian. That yellow hair. Them eyes! . . .

"Lower Three (the doctor reads aloud to him self from a medical journal the most hair-raising material, every now and then punctuating his reading with an interrogative ''So?").

"Lower One (the maiden lady). I know I'll be awake all night. I might just as well make up my mind to it now. I can't imagine what got hold of that hot water bag to leak on the train of all places. Well now, I'll lie on my right side and breathe deeply and think of beautiful things, and perhaps I can doze off a bit.

"And lastly:

"Lower Nine (Fred). That was the craziest thing I ever did. It's set me back three whole years. I could have saved up thirty thousand dollars by now, if I'd only stayed over here. What business had I got to fool with contracts...Hell, I thought it would be interesting. Interesting, what-the-hell! It's set me back three whole years. I don't even know if the company'11 take me back. I'm green, that's all. I just don't grow up.

"The Stage Manager strides toward them with lifted hand crying ''Hush' and their whispering ceases.

"The Stage Manager. That'll do!—Just one minute. Porter!

"The Porter (appearing at the left). Yes sir.

"The Stage Manager. It's your turn to think. 

"The Porter (is very embarrassed). 

"The Stage Manager. Don't you want to? You . . have a right to. 

"The Porter (torn between the desire to release his thoughts and his shyness). Ah . . . ah . . . I'm only thinkin' about my home in Chicago and and my life insurance. 

"The Stage Manager. That's right. 

"The Porter. . . . well, thank you. . . . Thank you.

"He slips away, blushing violently, in an agony of self-consciousness and pleasure.

"The Stage Manager...To the actors again. Now the compartments, please!

"The berths fall into shadow. Philip is standing at the door connecting his compartment with his wife's.

"Philip. Are you all right, angel? 

"Harriet. Yes. I don't know what was the matter with me during dinner. 

"Philip. Shall I close the door? 

"Harriet. Do see whether you can't put a chair against it that will hold it half open without banging.

"Philip. There.—Good night, angel. If you can't sleep, call me and we'll sit up and play Russian Bank.

"Harriet. You're thinking of that awful time when we sat up every night for a week. . . . But at least I know I shall sleep tonight. The noise of the wheels has become sort of nice and homely. What state are we in?

"Philip. We're tearing through Ohio. We'll be in Indiana soon. 

"Harriet. I know those little towns full of horse blocks. 

"Philip. Well, we'll reach Chicago very early. I'll call you. Sleep tight. 

"Harriet. Sleep tight, darling.

"He returns to his own compartment. In Compartment Three, the male attendant tips his chair back against the wall and smokes a cigar. The trained nurse knits a stocking. The insane woman leans her forehead against the windowpane, that is: stares into the audience.

"The Insane Woman (her words have a dragging, complaining sound, but lack any conviction). Don't take me there. Don't take me there. 

"The Female Attendant. Wouldn't you like to lie down, dearie? 

"The Insane Woman. I want to get off the train. I want to go back to New York. 

"The Female Attendant. Wouldn't you like me to brush your hair again? It's such a nice feeling. 

"The Insane Woman. (going to the door). I want to get off the train. I want to open the door.

"The Female Attendant (taking one of her hands) Such a noise! You'll wake up all the nice people. Come and I'll tell you a story about the place we're going to.

"The Insane Woman. I don't want to go to that white . . . place. 

"The Female Attendant. Oh, it's lovely! There are lawns and gardens everywhere. I never saw such a lovely place. Just lovely. 

"The Insane Woman (lies down on the bed). Are there roses? 

:The Female Attendant. Roses! Red, yellow, just everywhere. 

"The Male Attendant (after a pause). That musta been Cleveland. 

"The Female Attendant. I had a case in Cleveland once. Diabetes. 

"The Male Attendant (after another pause). I wisht I had a radio here. Radios are good for them. I had a patient once that had to have the radio going every minute. 

"The Female Attendant. Radios are lovely. My married niece has one. It's always going. It's wonderful. 

"The Insane Woman (half rising). I'm not beautiful. I'm not beautiful as she was.

"The Insane Woman (half rising). I'm not beautiful. I'm not beautiful as she was. 

"The Female Attendant. Oh, I think you're beautiful! Beautiful.—Mr. Morgan, don't you think Mrs. Churchill is beautiful? 

"The Male Attendant. Oh, fine lookin'! Regular movie star, Mrs. Churchill.

"She looks inquiringly at them and subsides. Harriet groans slightly. Smothers a cough. She gropes about with her hand and finds the bell. The Porter knocks at her door.

"Harriet (whispering). Come in. First, please close the door into my husband's room. Softly. Softly. 

"Porter (a plaintive porter). Yes, mam. 

"Harriet. Porter, I'm not well. I'm sick. I must see a doctor. 

"Porter. Why, mam, they ain't no doctor . . . 

"Harriet. Yes, when I was coming out from dinner I saw a man in one of the seats on that side, reading medical papers. Go and wake him up. 

Porter (flabbergasted). Mam, I can't wake anybody up.

 Harriet. Yes, you can. Porter. Now don't argue with me. I'm very sick. It's my heart. Wake him up. Tell him it's my heart. 

Porter. Yes, mam.

"He goes into the aisle and starts pulling the shoulder of the man in Lower Three.

"Lower Three. Hello. Hello. What is it? Are we there? 

"The Porter mumbles to him. 

"I'll be right there,—Porter, is it a young woman or an old one? 

"Porter. I don't know, sir. I guess she's kinda old, sir, but not so very old.

"Lower Three. Tell her I'll be there in a minute and to lie quietly. 

"The Porter enters Harriet's compartment. She has turned her head away. 

"Porter. He'll be here in a minute, mam. He says for you to lie quiet. 

"Lower Three stumbles along the aisle muttering: "Damn these shoes!" 

"Someone's Voice. Can't we have a little quiet in this car, please? 

"Lower Nine (Fred). Oh, shut up! 

"The Doctor passes the Porter and enters Harriet's compartment. He leans over her, concealing her by his stooping figure. 

"Lower Three. She's dead, porter. Is there any one on the train traveling with her? 

"Porter. Yes sir. That's her husband in there. 

"Lower Three. Idiot! Why didn't you call him? I'll go in and speak to him. 

"The Stage Manager comes forward.

"The Stage Manager. All right. So much for the inside of the car. That'll be enough of that for the present. Now for its position geographically, meteorologically, astronomically, theologically considered.

Rod Serling (v.o.) "Pullman Car Hiawatha, ten minutes of ten. December twenty-first, 1930. All ready", and making it's way through the night toward another destination.  Along the way, however, this train and the passengers in this particular carriage will all be taken on a detour...through The Twilight Zone (94-100)".

Wilder's Rough Draft Play, It's Inspirations, and Elements.

I knew I'd have to frame the content of Wilder's play in terms of the trappings and atmosphere of Rod Serling's classic television show as soon as I started reading it.  That's because a close read-through of the author's words meant that it was the only frame of reference a modern audience would be able to use or fall back on in order to both understand and get any kind of grasp on the material that's being delivered here.  One of the first things that jumps out at you about this play, even if you're just reading it off the page, is that the author displays an easy disregard for the trappings of normalcy.  Just like any half-way decent episode of the Zone, we start out with a cast of characters and a stage in what appears at first like a normal setup.  Then at some point we round a corner to find reality has been, or perhaps always was, tilted clear on its side at a canter.  That's how I'd have to describe the overall effect of this play.  It's like walking down any normal looking street, then coming to the next turn and discovering that whatever remains of the entire world in that direction exists at a slanted, diagonal angle to the seemingly right-side-up existence you knew.  It's the kind of aesthetic response that only guys like Serling and his team of writers knew how to deliver with the Zone, and here we see Wilder giving us what amounts to an early version of the same artistic technique and setup.  It makes for an interest read, yet it also leaves us asking what does it mean?  I think the answers comes in multiple parts, so we'll have to do some unpacking here.

The first place to start figuring out what Wilder is up to with this three-minute short play is to start at the obvious level, that of the actual story.  The first thing that probably jumps out at most readers today is the way that the whole thing seems almost structured like a miniature Zone episode.  We start out on a normal seeming location, a passenger train barreling its way through the middle of the American landscape, and treated to a series of slice-of-life moments with the passengers in one particular car.  So far, so normal.  At the same time, it sounds like at least the start of a good setup on paper.  That's because some of the best Fantastic stories out there have all their dramatic promise built into them by the simple expedient of taking a small handful of characters, confining them to an isolated enclosed space, and then introduce a problem or threat of some kind into this hermetic environment.  What makes this such a durable setup in the realm of Fantasy, Sci-Fi, or Horror is that so long as some form of talent is involved, then no matter how familiar the basic premise is, the tension can sometimes ratchet itself up in terms of holding the audience's engagement.  When that happens (again, assuming talent is involved here) then that's how you get your Night of the Living and Dawn of the Dead.  It's the formula John Carpenter relied on for The Thing.  Hell, even Rod Serling got in on this act when he he adapted a Richard Matheson short story into the now classic Zone episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

Wilder is up to something somewhat similar here, yet he finds some interesting directions to take things.  The good news is none of its is bad, and the interesting news is that it also works as a precursor to one of the author's most famous plays.  Before we get to that however, there's still the plot to contend with.  Wilder has given us a classic setup, to start out.  All we're dealing with is a normal night in a mode of public transportation that hasn't seen a heyday since the end of WWII.  We're shown the passengers as they settle in for the night, and while everything seems normal, it's clear that at least of part of Wilder's strategy with this situation acts as a precursor to the kind of starting wind-ups that Rod would one day become famous for.  As we watch the coach's temporary inhabitants go about their own affairs the reader does get the sense that either something isn't quite right with the setup, or else that something is going to go wrong in the near future.  An uncomfortable situation on a train in the middle of nowhere is something that writers like Agatha Christie were able to elevate into works of Art.  Even novices should be able to pick up that something about this arrangement is meant to turn everything upside down, sooner or later.  Something of that very definite nature happens in short order, and like any good yarn, Wilder is sure to telegraph early how things will go by the inclusion of one specific character into the mix.  This would be the peculiar figure known simply as the Stage Manager.

In some ways, he's the most difficult player to talk about in the whole performance.  Even on paper, the reader gets the sense that we're dealing with the kind of character who is best described as "being of some level of importance", yet it's very difficult to know how to describe it.  It also means I'm unsure not just of who, but what this guy may be.  I have theories, yet I'll just stick with the motions this character goes through, and try to deduce the meaning from there.  He's the first individual we meet, right at the very start of the play.  This doesn't seem to make him the protagonist, however.  If anything, that role seems meant to be filled by the passenger known as Harriet.  She's the one who goes through the most changes as the story progresses, and some of it is taken to what might be termed Ultimate extremes.  Before that happens, though, we're left alone in a blank space with just the Manager.  We then watch along as he proceeds to set the stage and introduce the story's main cast.  He then does and doesn't take a step back and lets the action unfold.  We're left with the impression that he's not this sort of puppet master, or anything like that.  He doesn't seem to control the wills of the others, yet he seems able to peer into and read their minds, offering the reader something of an over-the-shoulder peak into the thoughts of the cast.  It raises all sorts of question as to just who the Manager is, and the playwright is never really forthcoming for us.  He also doesn't seem to be the real focus of the plot's main action.

That gets kicked off when one of the passenger's, Harriet, passes away in the middle of the night.  From here on, it's as if a curtain we didn't even realize was there gets pulled back.  The reader is taken on what I can only describe as an early draft version of Patrick Swayze's Ghost, just scaled down all the way to the budget of a community theater production.  Also the runtime is a hell of a lot shorter, and things are still somehow weirder than the contents of the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle.  Part of the way Wilder accomplishes this task is by drawing on what I can only describe as the tropes and theatrical methods of the Renaissance dramaturgy that the writer learned in places like Oberlin college.  All of which begs the question just what all that knowledge under the hood is placed in service of?  What does this odd little celestial railroad journey mean, anyway?  According to critic Troy Coleman, Wilder "captured the nuances of American life as well as its growing detachment in response to a national economic crisis—the Great Depression. Theatrical elements such as The Stage Manager and a minimalist set indicate the playwright’s interest in portraying the American experience in a different way. The characters in Pullman Car Hiawatha, with the exception of two of the women in their respective compartments, are referred to by their locations or occupations, such as Lower Five or The Porter.

"Wilder further illustrates the disassociation among the passengers by revealing their inner thoughts. The implied lavish furnishings of the Pullman car provide a psychological solace for its passengers that seems a sufficient substitute for reliance upon human connections. Only select passengers engage in social interaction, while the others show little interest. Among those aboard the Pullman car, only the insane and recently deceased are allowed an interiority that demonstrates interest, albeit futile, in humanity. Wilder’s dramatization of luxury transportation shows American society’s growing interest in modern convenience and comfort to relieve emotional distress, often at the expense of human connection. This preference for detachment through luxury displays a self-isolation that is visible today through new technology. On an almost empty stage, the impact of the passengers’ inability to make more than a passing acknowledgment of one another is more apparent. The passengers on the Hiawatha show humanity’s diminishing capacity for connections. At the same time, they develop a new self-interest, enabled by the privacy and emotional boost of luxury and an inability to appreciate the world around them (200-201)".  Coleman's words make for a good jumping off point, yet that's about all.

My reason for saying this is that while I think he's right about how the cost of social isolation has to be counted as perhaps the play's main theme, Coleman also seems to take things in a direction that sort of misses the actual trajectory of Wilder's efforts.  For one thing, he makes an astute observation that this is a play with close ties to the field of literary Modernism.  That sounds like a thesis with a great deal of validity to it, yet the critic never gets a full enough picture of just how un-modern Modernism is at it's core, or how it's this second-hand used quality to the practices of otherwise ground-breaking poems like The Waste Land that are also present in this simple one-act satire.  Coleman also claims that Wilder is prone to an "idealization" of the sort of Middle American landscape of which was he was the product.  The trouble with this line of thinking is that the critic can't quite tell either the forest from the trees, or even the exact nature of the setup that surrounds both him and the play's main action.  The thing about writers like Thornton Wilder is that they fit the Modernist mold in a very ironic way.  He is an example of an Individual Talent whose more or less self-aware artistry takes place within and utilizes a great deal of the Literary Tropes and Traditions of the past.  What this means is that I think you should have to go further back in the history of not just stage dramaturgy, but also of plain written literature in order to get a clearer idea of the kind of story that Wilder is trying to tell here.  It's advice that Coleman ignores.

Whereas he chooses to zero in on whatever possible debt the playwright might owe to Absurdists like Bertolt Brecht, a more useful and informative answer might have been provided if you'd looked further down the timeline to a number of older authors, and then further ahead into our own years to see what kind of legacy a play like this casts on the work of artistic heirs like Stephen King.  The trick with Thornton Wilder is that it just makes sense to see him as an inheritor, or sorts.  This is a play and a writer whose efforts owe a great deal to the work of writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.  Like the author of The Scarlet Letter, Wilder was the product of a Puritan American household.  Which means he was an inheritor of the same historical emotional baggage that characters like "Young Goodman Brown" had to put up with.  Like Mark Twain, Wilder seems to have recognized that he grew up with a fundamentally bad inheritance.  It was a raw deal he never asked for, and most important of all, he saw the effects it had on his family life.  So the first chance he got, he more or less split the scene, and dedicated the rest of his life to making a clean break from all of the burdens of a guilty past.  Also like both Twain and Hawthorne, a lot of his writings became something of a satirical excavation of the faults of this Puritanical legacy or strand of thought, and the damage it wrought on American life.

Perhaps a good metaphor would help to make things clearer here.  It's best to imagine Wilder as sharing the same high-rise editorial office space with Twain and Hawthorne.  Each writer has his own work desk, complete with pen, paper, and/or typewriter as the dictates of their respective periods permitted.  They not only work in the same space, they also ply away their trade on the same set of satirical materials.  They each hold American history up to a microscope in an effort to see where things have gone wrong, and how they might be set right.  In way, you could make the case that Wilder is in a hurry to go as further up and in on this endeavor than either of his previous teachers were able to.  Hence you get the eyebrow raising claim of the Stage Manage to examine the nature of the play's scene and action all the way up to the astronomical level.  The funny thing is that even here it's possible to see what the playwright is up to, and a lot of it goes back to Coleman's single, accurate enough observation of the Pullman story as an example of early 20th century Modernist art.  Here's the way it all seems to work, based on what I've seen and studied for the last several years.  As far back as I can remember,  all that the most successful authors, filmmakers, and artists are good at is being able to take a Myth, and then make it new.  To try and fashion an old Epic, Legend, or Ode into a form modern audiences understand.

There's been a lot of efforts out there to try and be "original" in various senses of that term.  If I had to describe what people mean when they use that phrase, it all amounts to just "whatever the hell you want".  The trouble with being original in my experience is that it tends to come up against just two problems.  The first is that the final product of anyone trying to live up to that word can come off as vapid and empty.  The second issue is that even then, all it amounts to is the use of something borrowed from somewhere else that's come before.  It's like you can never entirely escape the use of previous materials in the construction of any well wrought story.  Of all the narrative content that's found a constant store of recyclability, the one that's remained constant, even up to the present moment, is the world of mythology, folklore, and fairy tales.  The best catch-all phrase I've got for that stuff also remains the same.  It all belongs to the field of Romanticism.  It's what happens whenever the next artist to come along and manages to find a bit of genuine Inspiration from the kind of things that scholars like Joseph Campbell used to write about.  We may have let his actual words fall into a kind of cheap, second-hand information that doesn't do the meaning of his actual thought full justice, yet we still remember his basic idea, even if time has made us forget the full measure of its layers and import.

The point is that Myth is the single most important well-pool of Inspiration that most of us just keep having to come back to in various forms, and the interesting thing about that is I still see no proof we've gotten tired of that stuff.  Not even me, if I'm being honest.  Even a poem like The Waste Land makes ample use of both Mythic and Early Modern material.  Indeed, thanks to the efforts of scholars like Steven Matthews, it now becomes possible to not only construct a catalogue of the plays and poems from the Renaissance that Eliot was familiar with.  We can now also begin to track the ways in which these Elizabethan resources made their way into the vast majority of his own poetry.  As best I can tell, then, Coleman is right when he says that Wilder's efforts here count as an example of early 20th Century Modernism.  Where he goes wrong is in not being aware of the full Romantic scope of the techniques being deployed in this play, and how it all ties back to the world of Myth.  It's what allows Wilder to have fun playing around with materials that wouldn't been out of place in a work by Shakespeare, a Medieval morality play, or a piece of Classical Greco-Roman Theater.  In keeping with the Humanism that he learned in Oberlin, and much like Eliot, Wilder seems to have found a use for these old tropes.

Here we see a modern writer making use of the kind of personified abstract concepts that guys like Geoffrey Chaucer or Sir Thomas Malory would have been familiar with growing up.  All the playwright has to do here is to take those same shopworn stage tricks, and give them a modern dress and colloquialism, and just like that, he's given the allegorical methods of writers like Chaucer or Spenser a new home.  The narrative uses that Wilder puts these refurbished tropes to is also something that harkens back all the way to the Classical era.  He utilizes figures like the Stage Manager as a device that allows the writer the ability to collapse and remold the normal sense of time and space on the stage so as to create a suggestion of all times and places comingling together to create an idea of All Times and Places at Once.  It's from this vaunted, one might even say Olympian perspective that Wilder uses his stage to form a critique of the American Way of Life as he knew it at the start of the 20th Century.  Maybe a helpful way to understand what he's doing with the Pullman Car is to think of it in terms of King's fiction.  This is what the Microcosm of Man looks like from the perspective of, say, the Dark Tower or whatever force might be said to be behind it, for lack of a better term.  Either way it comes to the same thing.  It's the author trying to find or create the proper distanced perspective to get a better view of his fellow man.  Like Mark Twain, Wilder finds a lot to be unimpressed with.  Like Chaucer, however, he also can't seem to bring himself to just throw in the towel and turn his back on others.

The portrait of American Life that Wilder draws up for his audience is one that shares a lot in common with T.S. Eliot.  It's a scene of pervasive, sometimes even profound alienation.  Yet at the same time, there is that constant sense of longing for some lost form of connection.  Most of the passengers in the Pullman car sequester themselves away from each other, yet a handful such as the star-crossed married couple, the Mad Woman, and the Porter all seem to be one of the handful of characters who carry around this sense of something missing in their lives.  Indeed, what makes a character like the Porter interesting is that he is the one character who is brought front and center in order to have his voice heard by the audience.  He might stammer and be unsure of himself when it happens, and yet the cleverness of that moment is that Wilder seems to be using it to hint of the social, and specifically the racial barriers that would try and stifle the voices of men like him.  It doesn't hurt the satire of the play here to note that the Porter is the single non-white character in the entire story.  The critic Oliver Gerland has even gone so far as to suggest that this might be Wilder's method of highlighting how prejudice has been a major contributing factor to the Modernist Malaise of Disenchantment that envelopes human beings both on and off the stage.  All that can be said about this idea is that one certainly hopes it's true.  What can't be denied is that Pullman Car Hiawatha counts as a form of Satirical Fantasy, the kind that authors like Rod Serling would have been familiar with.  So where could Wilder have had the idea for all this?

Well, strange as it may sound, it's the sort of thing anyone can find out about if you ever decide to stop and pay attention to the workplace and toolshed of just some random guy named Bill, from Stratford, England.  We often hear the phrase touted how Shakespeare still remains the best writer of all time.  It's a title I'm not here to dispute, I just want to point out an interesting part of the reason for why that is.  I can't say I know what kind of idea most people have about the creator of figures like Juliet, Romeo, Macbeth, Prince Hamlet, or Caesar and his Assassins.  The best I can tell, most folks come away with one of two reactions to works from the Bard of Avon.  The first class of audience reception is to claim that this guy is boring and pretentious, and it's not helped by the fact that he writes so damn weird.  The second class is a lot more positive, willing to grant him a surprising amount of benefit of the doubt.  The consensus of this second segment of the audience goes more or less as follows.  "Yeah, you know what, this guy really is one hell of a writer.  I just wonder how come he writes so funny".  The only excuse anyone will ever have for Shakespeare's style is that this was, in fact, the standard format for fictional storytelling.  In an era before the advent of the novel, there was no such thing a distinction between poetry and prose.  They didn't even seem to have an idea that dialogue itself could be naturalistic.

The result is a series of masterworks in set in a world in which everyone speaks in a semi-poetic style known as Renaissance Blank Verse, and no one has ever uttered a single line of recognizable prose.  Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he's been able to hold onto his reputation despite the only writing format he ever knew having long since gone out of style.  That's got to be one of the best testaments to talent, if anything.  This is about as far as most of the faces in the aisle have to go on when it comes to Shakespeare's artistry, yet the  major drawback to this basic ground-floor level understanding for the author of A Winter's Tale is that it can only tell half the story.  It still doesn't take us anywhere near the entire panoramic storehouse of Elizabethan Literary Tradition that the Bard used as his Inspiration.  This encompasses not just the same realm of Myths and Epics (both "historic" and fanciful) that Wilder drew upon, but also of the specific form of narrative techniques that the American writer and his British predecessor both relied on to carry off any number of their respective yet related set pieces.  There comes a moment in Pullman Car Hiawatha where Wilder decides enlarge the scope of his stage in such a way that it comes to resemble the kind Renaissance Prosceniums that were a staple not just of Shakespeare's playhouses, but also of theater in general from the Greco-Roman age on up.

In that moment, it's clear to me, at least, that Wilder knows at least something of what he's doing with all his material.  He seems to possess just enough of an awareness of the often quirky techniques that guys like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson utilized to tell their own respective dramas.  The key thing to note about this older, Renaissance form of dramatic stylization is that none of it ever fits our current definition of dramatic realism.  In other words, even if Shakespeare wants to tackle an ostensibly historic situation, such as the Death of Caesar and its political fallout, the method of presentation remains distinct from, say, the way Ridley Scott brought the Age of Rome to life in Gladiator.  That's a film as steeped in the naturalistic format as possible (which somehow still doesn't preclude him taking liberties with history, here and there).  This dedication in trying to capture historical detail with complete accuracy is an artistic choice that Shakespeare never had.  His Rome was nothing more than an empty space in which various actors would go about their performances in the sort of costumes that wouldn't even pass muster in terms of, say, how an actual Roman senator or general would have dressed in real life.  We only ever became concerned with presenting accuracy on the stage with the passing of time, plus the addition of higher production budgets.  Big Bill had to keep it all simple in a day and age before anyone could even begin to think of our current Digital Revolution.

It's this need for simplicity, for the compression of Epic motifs, gestures, and/or actions into a casement that would accommodate the threadbare Elizabethan Blank Theater that explains why all sorts of anachronisms exists in the Caesar play, such as a character remarking on the clock striking the hour, when it's a historical fact that mechanical time pieces didn't come along until somewhere just before or around Shakespeare's time of birth.  Hence the peculiar symbolic nature of Renaissance Drama.  It's something that was always more poetic than realistic, and the nature of this particular dramatic format was best summed up a long time ago by the Shakespearean scholar Samuel Leslie Bethell.

"In my book Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition I tried to show that the plays of Shakespeare are compounded in varying proportions of the elements of conventionalism and naturalism and that the Elizabethan audience must have reacted to them in a much more complex way than is required of the audience at a modern 'serious' play written on the principles of photographic realism.  The popular audience in a contemporary cinema or music-hall, unconcerned with theories of dramatic art, finds no difficulty in accepting the most 'impossible' conventions: unseen orchestras strike up and characters break suddenly into song; pure farce may mingle with domestic tragedy; a stage show occurring in a film may develop into a performance that no real theater could possibly contain.  If this is true of the popular audience after a century in which the tendency to naturalism or realism has been persistent, in philosophy, in painting, in the novel and in the drama itself (for the reactions of impressionism, expressionism and so forth have been limited to highbrow circles) we may well expect that in Elizabethan times the ready acceptance of conventions and the complexity of response which the acceptance entails would be natural to all who attended the theatre.  Even apart from the drama, the Elizabethans seem to have enjoyed the exercise of keeping diverse aspects of a situation in mind at the same time; hence their love of the 'conceit', in which the heterogeneous objects are brought into an intellectual union, and of allegory, in which an outer and an inner meaning must be simultaneously perceived (9-10)".  This paragraph is fascinating to unpack for a good number of interesting reasons.

Bethell's words ask us to entertain conjecture of a time when our current straightjacketed reactions to the narrative entertainments we consume were once a lot more multi-valent in terms of our ability to swallow the fictions placed before us.  To give an example of what I'm talking about, I have participated in discussions where the quality of any given movie all revolved around the question of how well the filmmakers were able to create The Perfect Shot.  It's a concept that includes such matters as the right angle, correct lighting, what was best in terms of casting and performance, and so on.  It's something like the great Totem of our times.  The belief that if a filmmaker frames and packs all of the right elements into a shot just right, then that is all that's needed.  As if an image, even if taken in isolation, were enough to explain everything.  The problem with this line of thought is that it invests style with a power that it can never quite carry off to good effect.  It's a common mistake I've seen even professional critics make, and my main problem with it is that it amounts to a worldview that can't tell the difference between form and content.  It doesn't know where surface style ends and honest content begins.  I suppose my main problem with it is that such an outlook can become so accustomed to superficial qualities that it could reach a point where it's no longer possible to tell the truth from a world of lies.

Wilder's Autobiographical Elements.

In a way, this makes the idea a perfect fit for Wilder's play, as it does form a part of the social situation in Pullman Car that the playwright zeros in on for his satirical purposes.  It's also fitting that he could very well be using the same discarded theatrical and narrative techniques that Bethell described above. to achieve both his desired dramatic effect, and the author's overall literary goals.  He just does so using same methods of writing that Shakespeare used to tell his stories.  I'm not about to suggest that Wilder is the better writer here.  I may be able to accept the necessary suspension of disbelief when it comes to make-believe, yet I'm not about to credit patent absurdities in real life.  Instead, it's more that Wilder had found a useful idiom for Shakespeare's Popular Dramatic Tradition, and if I'm being honest, I do wonder if plays like this can be of service in terms of reminding us of how we might expand our own Imaginative horizons.  As for there being any possible idea or factoid that helped generate the necessary amount of Inspiration needed to craft this proto-Twilight Zone episode, then the best answer I've got is that a lot of it comes from the author's personal experience with the problem of modern social alienation.  To be specific, it is just possible to claim that a lot of Wilder's art stems from his family.

A more precise way of stating the facts seems to be that one of the cardinal, over-arching preoccupations of Wilder's fiction, whether on the stage or the page, is the way in which the fabric of social bonds can tatter, fray, and sometimes even breaks down completely.  In turn, his stories tend to be examinations of the various levels of fallout that exist whenever such incidents of social alienation occur.  For Wilder, the loss of connection between others counts as a severe kind of failure.  One that has consequences on both the personal, microcosmic level within marriages, families, or just among siblings, friends, and even lovers.  This in turn has sometimes catastrophic repercussions that extend out into the larger Macrocosm of human society.  When left unchecked, it can climb the ladder all the way up to the level of creating an infected culture.  In this way, Wilder arrives more or less at the same point as T.S. Eliot, where the various troubles inflicted by poor human interactions can cause an entire Country to experience a Waste Land style of existence.  In terms of any specific personal experience that might have granted the author an insight into this potential pitfall of human behavior, then it seems to have fallen to biographer Penelope Niven to give us the best clue to where the stories came from.

In her book-length study of the life of the writer's mind, Niven gives a detailed description of the peripatetic home life that Wilder knew growing up.  The crux of the artist's problems all seems to stem from his father, Amos, an unreconstructed New England patriarch of Puritan stock.  He was the kind of guy for whom a lot of the old ways never truly died off, even as the world around him moved on.  What this meant in practice was that Wilder and his siblings were brought up by a man who labored under antiquated notions such as that children are best seen as adults before there time.  Rather than let them have a normal childhood, with plenty of warmth and affection, first from family, and later on with friends and neighbors in the outside world, they should instead be "put to good use".  In the case of a Puritan like Amos, it meant sending his children away to busy themselves on various errands.  The ostensible point of all this hustle was that it was meant to be an ongoing series of "character building exercises" meant to mold the Wilder children into the best possible clean-cut and responsible adults.

In actual practice (and true to the debilitating ethos of the original Puritan culture) all it did was serve to drive a wedge between the father and his children one slow building block at a time.  By the time most of the Wilder children were in their teens, the family had already been split up and living an irregular, haphazard sort of existence.  Part of it was down to the peculiarity of their father's job, as Amos Wilder saw fit to get himself elected as Consular General Ambassador to the state of Hong Kong, while the other was down to his insistence that his children never seemed to have enough "character" in their makeup.  Hence Amos saw fit to keep sending his children away to various boarding schools; some of them several continents apart.  Thornton and his sister, for instance, were both sent to separate schools in China, while Wilder's brother, Amos Jr., was sent to a college in California.  Their father gave no real logic to these decisions except for the conviction that it was "just what the children needed" in order to become real adults.  They were all finally allowed to return home, if only to be sent off yet again, Thornton and Junior to Oberlin, while one of their father's daughters was sent to live for the entire semester season with a family of friends.  Here's the part where Niven fills in the narrative gaps.

"As much as he admired Sherman Thacher and his school, Dr. Wilder decided to move his “chess pieces” once again—to send Amos to Oberlin College and to withdraw Thornton from the school the coming year. When he heard of the plans, Sherman Thacher wrote Consul General Wilder a stern reprimand. He demonstrated “peculiar vacillations” with his sons, Thacher charged, moving them every few months. He told Dr. Wilder that he had received a letter from Mrs. Wilder saying that the only point on which she and her husband agreed in the children’s education was that it was best for Thornton to return to Thacher. Furthermore, Thacher told Wilder, Amos was disappointed to be heading for Oberlin rather than Yale, although he accepted the decision “loyally and bravely.” It was hard for Amos to see his friends go off to great universities while he “for some reason he can hardly appreciate is sent to a college that is hardly heard of far from its own locality and special friends.”

"Dr. Wilder would later write Thacher to thank him for his influence on Amos and Thornton. “They are more manly in consequence and I believe lovers of truth,” their father reflected. “Amos is a serious young man and introspective; without the tennis, horse back riding, the love of nature bred of the mountains, I suspect his development would have been feverish—as it is, he sadly mixes up God and Nature for which I am glad. Surely to love one is to love the other.” As for Thornton, Dr. Wilder wrote, before he went to the Thacher School: he was the last word in high browism, a delicate, girl-playing, aesthetic lad in the early teens; this kind of boy making a one-sided, often unhappy, inadaptable [sic] man is familiar. By wise contact with out-door life, wholesome farm work, physical weariness and honest country people, Thornton is really quite a man; has a fair chest, a firm hand-shake and mixes well with all classes. What was done with him can be done with many another “difficult” boy. But it requires wisdom.

"By June 1913, Thornton was eager to travel to Berkeley, where his mother and little sisters were now recovering from the long journey from Europe and settling into a rented house at Third and Townsend streets.34 He could hardly wait for the reunion, and he promised to take good care of his mother. The house creaked, she told him, and while she was happy there during the day, she was uneasy at night. He pledged that he would be her companion and protector, even her servant. “When I get there I will expect to wash dishes,” he wrote, adding that he would willingly be her slave. “We will have a lovely time this summer.” Thornton longed to spend the summer in Berkeley with his mother and sisters, and wanted “very much” to take a summer school course. He was determined to persuade his father that he should not, as Dr. Wilder wished, spend the summer working on a farm. Thornton couldn’t bear the prospect of another separation from his mother so soon after her two-year absence. Besides, he complained to her, it was his father’s “Dementia”—the idea that Thornton and Amos should spend the summer working on a Wisconsin farm. Rather than that “Wisconsin Agricultural idea,” Thornton proposed, let him work in the garden at home in Berkeley...

"Perhaps because he was outnumbered, or perhaps because he was sick and overworked, Amos Parker Wilder gave in to the family’s wishes. Thornton stayed at home, did some volunteer work with children “in a poor part of town,” he reported to his father in a letter, and found the children “as interesting as they were ragged.” He read to them and played dominoes with them. And he was gardening after all: “I have already weeded extensively in our side gardens and back,” he wrote, “with many plans for the future (73-75)".  If further proof were needed that the oddities of Thornton Wilder's father wasn't just a Chimera of the family microcosm, we also have the criticisms lobbed at him from his Government superiors.  "Meanwhile, in Shanghai, Consul General Wilder generated another summer imbroglio over the annual Independence Day reception. He decided to hold the reception at his own expense, at his home rather than at the consulate, and to serve only grape juice and water. The American community, however, “decided to relieve Mr. Wilder of embarrassment by holding its reception in the Palace Hotel.” Afterward, an official State Department report condemned the “friction” created by Dr. Wilder’s handling—or mishandling —of the 1913 celebration of the Fourth of July.

"...Alone in Shanghai, Consul General Wilder struggled under the weight of incessant official details, reports, protocol, and procedures to the point that his superiors and many American citizens in Shanghai were displeased with his performance. Consul-General-at-Large George Murphy wrote in his official 1913 report that Wilder lacked “Consular training and official energy. He is a man of most respectable and creditable life. He is an eloquent speaker. He is a strong advocate of total abstinence. He is a man of good appearance,—quiet, gentlemanly, and amiable. BUT he is not by disposition competent to well and thoroughly conduct the affairs of this office.” He noted that Dr. Wilder’s health had been bad, that he had been on extended home leave, but “He says that it is now improving.” In sum, Murphy reported that Amos Parker Wilder was a good man but a “poor consular officer.” As of June 1913 Amos Parker Wilder was officially a failure in Shanghai, as well as the focus of considerable controversy. There were calls for the State Department to replace him. He was proud, stubborn, and ambitious— but he was no longer young or vigorously healthy. Separated from his wife and children, he left the daunting disorganization of his office at night and returned to the Shanghai Club and the room where he now lived, facing his doubts and problems in solitude, no doubt wondering how long he would keep his post in Shanghai and what he would do, at his age, if he lost it (75-76)".

When you put all of these pieces together, what you're left with is the faint outlines of a somewhat troubling psych profile.  Dr. Amos Wilder was not "by disposition" competent even for handling a high profile job in politics.  He was also something of a failure at living anything like a normal human life.  The testimony of not just his children's college headmaster but also the Government itself attests to this sort of living anachronism.  A man whose mind is always in the throws of self-sabotage.  Someone whose mindset is so far lost in the past that it won't allow him to enjoy and take nourishment from all the regular forms of human interaction.  I mean think about it, here's the kind of guy who can't even allow himself one innocent enough moment to "imbibe the grape" at an official office party.  Granted, being teetotal isn't the worst choice.  If he'd left it at just that, then there'd maybe be no problem.  It's the way in which Dr. Wilder allowed his Puritan background to infect his family that really casts the major shadow over his son Thornton's life and artistry that's the tell.  His father was brought up (one might even say "groomed") to believe in the stern and distant patriarchal approach to raising his kids.  The punchline here being that this is, in fact, no way to raise anyone whatsoever.  All it amounts is a recipe for a lifetime of resentment, at best, or just plain neurosis, at worst.  Penelope Niven provides us with a very telling summation of how Dr. Wilder's mishandling of the family circle effected his kids.

"Although the Wilder children coped, each in his or her own way, with the prolonged parental absences, it was Amos who seemed to adjust most easily. He was quiet, self-effacing to the point of shyness, but popular, and his athletic prowess and academic achievement earned him the respect of teachers and fellow students. Isabel and Janet were happy and content with their mother, aunt, and grandmother. Janet knew no other way of life than to live in Europe far away from her father and brothers and sister Charlotte. The fractured family life was hardest on Thornton and Charlotte, both shy like Amos, but less stoic, more high-strung, and less equipped to acclimate to new surroundings. The family separation was a special agony for Charlotte, as the middle child, for she had been sent away from the family before—as a baby, before the birth of Isabel; and as a schoolgirl in Chefoo, allowed only an hour and a half each week to see her brother. Now she was being sent to live with total strangers in a new place—the Maynard family in Claremont. Isabella later came to believe that Charlotte’s displacements as a child caused serious problems for her as an adult.22 Now in California, Charlotte was once again the Wilders’ “sent-away” child.

"Thornton’s boyhood letters dramatically reveal the scope of his loneliness, and his longing for a normal family life. As he parted from his father and entered Thacher, not only was he homesick—for wherever home was—but he fell physically ill enough to be quarantined in the school sickroom. “This is the old situation of being sick after I leave you,” he wrote forlornly to his father in a letter head. “Thatcher[sic]. Sick room. Broken Heart. Sunday P.M.” Confined to bed and to his own company, he read and slept and played chess with himself “because no one else was allowed in the room for fear of catching appendicitis or gout (70-71)".  Let it be known that if you are a father, responsible for the welfare of a large family, then these are all the textbook building blocks for how to alienate yourself from your loved ones.  The only way in which such a course of action is possible on this grand a scale is if the supposed "father" in question is really just one of those guys who, for whatever reason, just has too many problems of his own when it comes to coping with the demands of real life.  I recall reading somewhere that the philosopher George Santayana was once attributed as saying that the whole point of Puritanism was that it was designed to cancel itself out.  Even if he never said it, the words are still true.  They have an almost fatal sounding application to the family life of Dr. Amos Wilder Sr.

Niven's biography of his playwright son reveals him to be a man who, in the end, sort of dedicated his life to running away from the real world.  It seems to have caused a lot of irreparable damage to his relation with his wife and kids.  It furthermore cemented his reputation in the artistry of his most famous offspring.  That's because Thornton Wilder's father went on to become the Inspiration behind a lot of the more dysfunctional family figures in numerous guises throughout the author's work.  He can be seen in gender-swapped form as the one, patrician matriarch who slowly drives her family away one Yuletide Holiday at a time in The Long Christmas Dinner, until the entire stage if left blank at the end, with just the mother alone all by herself with a nurse for a companion, like a transplanted New England version of Dickens's Miss Havisham.  Perhaps his greatest incarnation is as the figure of George Antrobus, the troubled and wayward father of mankind in The Skin of Our Teeth who is always on the run from an undisclosed guilty past, whether real or imagined.  It's almost safe to say that Wilder had the bad luck to be born with a Nathaniel Hawthorne character for a father.  It's an unfortunate set of circumstances which may account for his later inability to establish anything beyond professional adult relationships.

It's the cost that a negligent parent can have on their children if he isn't careful, and Wilder seems to have spent the rest of his personal and professional life grappling with all the invisible scars his father inflicted on him.  He's up to a version of this exercise with Pullman Car Hiawatha.  In this play, the author pulls the curtain back to give his audience a Macrocosmic lens through which to view the cost of human alienation.  As the action in the train car reaches its crescendo, only three of the passengers become self-aware enough in a way that allows them to address the problem of their collective situation.  These would be the Deceased Wife, the Madwoman, and the Porter.  When Harriet casts off her mortal coils she is allowed an expanded view not just of her marriage, but also of her life in general.  She reveals how "I haven't done anything with my life.  Worse than that: I was angry and sullen.  I never realized anything...But it's not possible to forgive such things.  I don't want to be forgiven so easily (105)".  While it could have been the most natural thing in the world for Wilder to write this moment with nothing but a constant note of pity and scorn, the writer instead proves himself to be different from the gloomy and caustic outlooks of Twain and Hawthorne.  Instead, the play holds out the hope for some form of reconnection between human beings.  This can be seen when Harriet reminisces about she begged her husband not to marry her, yet he gave her some happiness (106).

The Madwoman, meanwhile, is one of the few other living souls who can see and address the Stage Manager.  Perhaps its no surprise that what their interactions reveal is that while she appears off to the others around her, in reality, part of her madness comes from a recognition of the hollowed out nature that comes from living by the so-called "standards" of modern life.  As the character herself  exclaims: "A great load seems to have been taken off my mind.  But no one understands me any more.  At last I understand myself perfectly, but no one else understands a thing I say (104)".  She also delivers something of a benediction on the rest of the characters around her, and her words seem to imply that Wilder is talking about the Microcosm of his entire American society.  "I'll do whatever is best; but everyone is so childish, so absurd.  They have no logic.  These people are all so mad...These people are like children; they have never suffered (105)".  Of the three ostensible main leads who arrive at some level of self-awareness, it is the Porter of the train who comes away seeming to have realized how to gain some measure of authority over his own life.  It's a fascinating aspect of the play that modern audiences might fail to notice.  This often overlooked aspect of the action seems to tie in well with Gerland's thesis that Wilder might have used the play as a commentary on the racism of his times.

The idea that a Person of Color and a woman who may only be seen as mental just because others say she's mad when she might be sane is not the sort of commentary you expect to find in an offering from this period of history.  The fact that it's possible to make a case that this is part of the intent of Wilder's narrative does appear to say something for the benefits of a Classical Education.  It seems as if here we've got a case where steeping yourself in a crash course of Liberal Humanism seems to have paid off in dividends.  The shame is that time and tide have sort of swept this early effort under the rug of history.  Perhaps that's a shame on multiple levels.  For one thing, it's caused audiences to forget that what we've got on our hands here is a rather interesting precursor with an artistic legacy that looks both back and forward in history.  This element is rather fitting for a story which is concerned with the nature of time in its relation to human life.  While the the author has chosen elements and props from the Renaissance stage to tell his story, the final form in which they are presented work on two interrelated levels.  In the first place, Wilder has taken the dramaturgy of Shakespeare's era, and utilized its most outlandish seeming elements to craft what has to be described as one of the earliest examples of 20th century Urban Fantasy.  He's not the first writer to try his hand at this type of popular fiction.  

Works like L. Frank Baum's Oz series, and even before then, Mark Twain's mash up of medievalism and industrialism with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, combined with the fairy tales of Frank R. Stockton all beat Wilder to the punch.  At the same time, the tale of one wild night in a Pullman Car hurtling through the American wilderness seems to mark a necessary step forward in the process of brining these components of the Victorian Age up to date for the First Wireless Era, when the contours of what we now still recognize as modern life was just beginning to assemble itself.  This theatrical renovation of Victorian Fantasy is what allows Pullman Car to signal the first hints of a particular variety of genre storytelling that would go on to find its footing first with plays of a similar surreal and phantasmagoric nature in the Time Series of J.B. Priestley, and from there the work of authors like Ray Bradbury and Richard Matheson would build upon all of this pre-history to give us TV shows like the Zone.  This is the legacy that Wilder was able to inaugurate with the first entry in what he later described as his Cosmic Cycle.  It's a series of efforts that share more or less the same dramatic techniques, and in one case, even a continuing character.  The figure of the Stage Manager has made at least two other appearances in Wilder's canon.  The most famous of these is in the play of Our Town.

Conclusion: A Good Starter Text for the Author and his Concerns.

It's the one bit of writing that Wilder perhaps remains the most famous for.  This is helped in no small part due to the fact that it is one of the easiest plays to perform, with next to no stage setting, a minimalist cast, and a runtime that almost comes off as an unintentional blessing in an era devoted to three-hour plus tentpole blockbusters.  What Wilder's best biographer, Penelope Niven highlights is the way in which the author's most celebrated play grew out of a long process of experimentation, one that began with the construction of a series of single-act theater dramas.  Niven also highlights how Wilder's Inspiration for this period of experimentation takes us all the way right back to the beginning, when Mildred Kuner spoke of the impact that was left on the young author's mind by the discovery of Ancient Roman ruins and relics:

"With his one-act plays in The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act, and his novel Heaven's My Destination, Wilder had moved deep into an American odyssey — an exploration of American landscapes, characters, and spirit. However, no matter the literal settings of his plays and novels, he habitually worked with a universal palette. In the one-act plays he launched in 1931, Wilder had in effect practiced for the unique staging and substance of Our Town. Some of these plays can be viewed as prototypes, even dress rehearsals for Our Town — employing stage managers, taking liberties with time and space, stripping scenery and plots to a minimum. On the bare stage welcoming curious theatergoers to Our Town in 1937 and 1938 and afterward, Wilder experimented with deceptively simple subjects and themes. The family had become a powerful symbol in his plays and novels — not only the individual family unit but the vast human family interconnected in their local yet universal "villages." He peopled the stage with American families whose seemingly ordinary lives at once reflected and transcended the place and the era in which they lived. Simultaneously he contemplated the perennial dramas of ordinary life as they played out again and again on a cosmic stage, one person at a time, one place at a time, throughout the ages.  

"He would recapitulate this theme in 1957 in a preface to his major plays: 'Every action which has ever taken place — every thought, every emotion — has taken place only once, at one moment in time and place. "I love you," "I rejoice," "I suffer," have been said and felt many billions of times, and never twice the same. Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions. Yet the more one is aware of this individuality in experience (innumerable! innumerable!) the more one becomes attentive to what these disparate moments have in common, to repetitive patterns'.

"His fascination with the patterns in "many billions" of individual lives had, as noted, been born that autumn day in 1920 when, as a student in Rome, he saw a freshly excavated first-century tomb. By candlelight he and his fellow students had examined the "faded paintings" of the Aurelius family and other remnants of their lives that, after nearly two thousand years, were frozen in time under a busy street in the center of modern Rome, with streetcars clattering overhead. Wilder realized in that moment that two thousand centuries later, his own era could be the subject of such curiosity and speculation — the quest to recapture and understand the very "loves and pieties and habits" that he himself had lived and witnessed in his lifetime.

"For a while in Rome I lived among archeologists, and ever since I find myself occasionally looking at the things about me as an archeologist will look at them a thousand years hence," he wrote in a preface to Our Town in 1938. "An archeologist's eyes combine the view of the telescope with the view of the microscope. He reconstructs the very distant with the help of the very small." In his play Wilder was groping, he said, to reconstruct "the life of a village against the life of the stars." This was his creative compass: the juxtaposition of the village and the stars — one town and the cosmos, one person and the galaxy.

"In his fiction and his plays Wilder continually excavated and resurrected universal, time-defying human dramas, and probed the enduring questions: How do we live — survive, surmount, even transcend the struggles implicit in the human condition? And why? As he worked on Our Town he reiterated that the fundamental concepts in the play had been forged in large part during those student days in Rome as he hovered on the edges of archaeological excavations in the ancient city, studying the water systems, the pathways, the architecture, and even the stage designs of the ancient Romans — and the repeating patterns of human existence despite differences in cultures, civilizations, and eras. In the twenties, after his discoveries in Rome, Wilder wrote in a manuscript fragment: 'We bend with pitying condescension over past civilizations, over Thebes, Ur and Babylon, and there floats up to us a murmur made up of cries of war, cruelty, pleasure and religious terror. Even as our civilization will some day exhale to its observers the same cries of soldiers, slaves, revelers and suppliants'.

"These exhalations, at once ephemeral and eternal, empowered his work. This fragment also foreshadows the words the Stage Manager speaks in the first act of Our Town: Y'know — Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about 'em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts ... and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney — same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real lives of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then. With these reflections the Stage Manager confirms the crux of Wilder's play — and at the same time affirms the historic importance of the theater as a mirror of life in any given time.

"In the 1930s Wilder created twentieth-century incarnations of the Aurelius family in the American family — the Bayards in The Long Christmas Dinner; and then the Harrisons in Pullman Car Hiawatha; and then the Kirbys in The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. Late in the decade Wilder pulled his audience into the theater again to witness, with the help of the Stage Manager, the growing up, marrying, living, and dying of members of the Webb and the Gibbs families in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, their mythical American yet thoroughly universal hometown. In a handwritten note, most likely dating from the sixties, Wilder further explained himself as a dramatist as he defined Emily's discovery in the last act of Our Town: 'She learns that each life — though it appears to be a repetition among millions — can be felt to be inestimably precious. Though the realization of it is present to us seldom, briefly, and incommunicably. At the moment there are no walls, no chairs, no tables: all is inward. Our true life is in the imagination and in the memory (web)".  This appears to be the same lesson that Harriet ends up learning in her last journey on the Celestial Railroad.  The final results make for an interesting mixture of familiar looking component parts in a setting that looks and feels unfamiliar, except for all of those others times when it doesn't, and you're able to recall where you saw this face, or that plot element before.  That's because Wilder's fiction acted as a forgotten seed bed for a host of later artists.

In terms of atmosphere and tone, the play looks forward to the kind of theatrics that Rod Serling would go on to turn into a lifetime of pop culture memories on the Zone.  When it comes to the play's own merits, it's funny because the ability to trace its after-effects as they wend their way into the genetic makeup of later, more famous projects down the line means it's difficult to know what is the right objective way to describe a story like this.  I suppose a good way to talk about it is to imagine if a classic Hollywood director like Frank Capra ever made an adaptation of any of Wilder's works.  Because that's what it seems like, in part, at least, on a first read through.  At the same time, there is the story's familiar Serlingesque quality that's already been discussed at length.  Then there is the sense of Wilder's efforts as an inheritance from the likes Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain, plus there's the use Stephen King would make of all this inheritance several years down the line, when it came to the construction of small towns of a similar nature to Wilder's Grover's Corners.  The picture that you're left with when all of these puzzle pieces are assembled together tells of an artist and a story with a lot of similarities to the fiction of Twain, yet at the same time, there is a greater sense of Humanism and empathy about the play in a vein very similar to Frank Capra.  There is an easier balance here between skepticism and hope.

At the same time, I get impression that Wilder is taking things into a greater, expansive trajectory than Capra ever did.  People like to claim that what unites a filmmaker like Capra with a playwright such as Wilder is that both participate in a kind of nostalgia for the bygone days.  In Wilder's case, however, that really isn't the truth.  He presents plenty of Capraesque moments in his work, yet it's never presented in such simple and straightforward terms such as that seen in the journeys of John Smith and George Bailey.  Wilder is capable of being detached, sarcastic, and satirical where Capra remains heartfelt.  At the same time, he is warm and sympathetic where Twain would be caustic and bitter.  Instead, his fiction seems to navigate a thematic and tonal tightrope between the two poles posited by the American Humorist and the Hollywood Director.  It's a balancing act Wilder seems to have maintained throughout his career.  He can acknowledge whatever strengths there are to be had in this Country, yet he never lets it stop him from pointing out all of the flaws in a manner that both Serling and King would later go on to take and run with in their own shared idioms.  At the same time, Wilder seems to operate under a realization that the blemishes aren't all there is to the picture of whatever this thing we call life is.  If he has plenty of caustic moments, then it's always in the service of trying to elevate the humanity of his audience.

The ultimate point of Pullman Car Hiawatha is that it's a plea for the faces in the aisles to, as Edward R. Morrow once said, "Not walk in fear of one another".  To understand that whatever sorrows some of us are compelled by an incomplete mind to inflict on one another, it's still not the whole story.  Nor is cowardice in the face of another's failings anything in the way of a real, valid policy for how to confront such problems, or how to move on from them.  Instead, with the final trip of Harriet Harrison, Wilder seems to be pointing out how alienation amounts to a personal flaw that can have disastrous consequences if it gets too out of hand.  At the same time, he intimates that this doesn't have to be the way of things.  It's a play that acknowledges the presence of Eliot's Waste Land.  It also tries to hint that it isn't the fundamental nature or order of things.  Part of the trick to being human, Wilder seems to be saying, lies in learning how to keep talking.  A lesson well worth learning...in The Twilight Zone.  It's for this somehow simple, yet genuine reason that I'm able to say Pullam Car Hiawatha is one of those hidden gems worth checking out.