Wilder, Thornton
(Madison, Wisc. 1897-1975 Hamden, Conn.) : Schriftsteller, Dramatiker
Name Alternative(s)
Wilder, Thornton Niven
Subjects
Index of Names : Occident
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Literature : Occident : United States of America
Chronology Entries (29)
| # | Year | Text | Linked Data |
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| 1 | 1906 | Thornton Wilder lebt 7. Mai-30. Oktober 1906 mit seiner Familie in Hong Kong. |
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| 2 | 1906 | Thornton Wilder liest Hazelton, George C. ; Benrimo, J. Harry. The yellow jacket [ID D30346], ein Stück das seine spätere dichterische Tätigkeit beeinflussen sollte. |
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| 3 | 1910-1975 |
Wilder, Thornton. The selected letters of Thornton Wilder [ID D30360]. 1910 Letter to Amos P. Wilder ; [Berkeley, Calif. mid-Dec. 1910]. Tonight I am going to Rev. Browns Church to hear Handel's great Oratorio 'The Messiah', sung. Do they ever have anything like that in China ? 1911 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [C.I.M. Schools, Chefoo, early May ? 1911]. And about Mother's picture it has been blown around the room by the Chefoo monsoons (Janet's too) until the 'fall of the house of Wilder' is complete. Now a roommate has lent me a frame of his and the swings on the wall. 1913 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, Thacher School, Dec. 13 ? [Jan. 13, 1913 ?]. None of the Thacher boys are original. They are all of the same whereas at Chefoo each boy was to any other as blue to red. 1913 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkely, Calif., Sept. 1913]. The beauty of the school is that so far it has left me entirely alone. I confess that I never expected that. I got a little of that at Chefoo, but never a drop at Thacher… Kwong Ling goes to church with us every Sunday, but we let him out, after childrens sermon. The poor boy doesn’t understand a work, I myself taught him for a while. I cant imagine what he does when the teacher asks him to read the Heading to the Paragraph or the Title of this Poem (registered in K. Lings vocabulary as song). I suppose he just gollops for a while and then says to himself in Chinese that four times three are twelve and three times – Oh well you know what hes like. [Kwong Ling (1896-1979) : Chinese orphan 'adopted' by Thornton Wilder's father in Shanghai. He was sent in 1913 to live in Berkeley with the family and attend school there. He became a minister, Reverend John K.L. Yong]. 1913 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, Berkeley, Calif. Sept. 21 [19]13. What a lot of your best friends are away from Shanghai just now. Mrs. DeGray, Mr. Hinckley, (from Kwong Ling I heard bad reports of him), Malpus, Stedmans, Kwong Ling, and Ravens. 1915 Letter to Elizabeth Lewis Niven, [Berkeley, Calif.], Jan. 7 [19]13. I guess when the fog has lifted over the 'wortwechsel' which is now on – it will be decided that I go to Oberlin next year. There is a family there, the boys of which were my room mates at the Chefoo boarding-school, and by coincidence called 'Wilder' – that will probably take me in as a boarder. 1915 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkeley, Calif., May ?, 1915]. Rowley Evans, of Shanghai, is a commissioned officer – according to Theodore Wilder and will soon be at the front. 1915 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkeley, Calif.], Tues. May 25 [1915]. We graduate next Friday night. I do not feel it as a solemn occasion. I don't think even mother can go and here it, because that will leave Isabel alone with the baby and possibly Kwong Ling… 1915 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, [Berkeley, Calif.], June 20 [19]15. Cesar-Nepos (failed when taken at Thacher ; never had him in class work because of jumping him at Chefoo !)… Sometimes I wish I were a Japanese or a Chinese in America ; it almost seems like being physically disembodied and holds humilitations of a kind I wouldn't mind so much. 1916 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, Sunday Morning July 16 [1916], Mt. Hermon School. My friend Sibley from Chefoo, a fine boy, hopes to go to China soon, is in this graduating class of eighty boys. I forgot to mention altho you probably guessed it that this is a reunion of Ford cars as well. The banquet – workers invited too – is Monday evening – do but picture the enthusiasm ! – I see the toastmaster is a Wilfred Fry of Philadelphia. Isn't there a famous Chinese art-connaiseur of Philad. named Fry, too ? 1916 Letter toIsabella N. Wilder, [Oberlin, Ohio], Nov. 23, [19]16. One of these is a cuous mystico-religious fantasy, the other, called 'Stones of Nell Gwyn' is a defense of Nell and Catullus and Earnest Dowson and Villon etc – that kind of person ! The play is for the Washington Square Players and is uni8que. It is about the China coast. 1917 Letter to Isabel Wilder, Men' Building Oberlin O Jan 11 [19]17. I want to put it to some use if I can and prevent such awful mistakes as Amos going to see 'Hush' when there were such stunning thing as 'Pierrot the Prodigal' and 'The Yellow Jacket' [by Hazelton and Benrimo ID D30346] in town. 1920 Letter to Amos P. Wilder, American Express Co. Paris, June 27, 1920, Sunday. I remember against the wall, too, long envelopes burstin with matter that I have always supposed to be your notes on the years in China. 1933 Letter to Edward Sheldon, The University [of Chicago], Aug 7, 1933. I enjoy the Fair, great silly American thing that it is ; and I enjoy the visitors. Scarcely a day goes by without a letter or phone call to the effect that some old friend of mine (or my father's, brother's, sisters') from China, California, Oberlin, Princeton, Lawrenceville, Yale, etc. is in town. 1937 Letter to Isabella N. Wilder and Isabel Wilder, Hotel Buckingham [Paris], July 20, 1937. Delightful time at our end of the table at lunch today : M. Prescu, Prof of history of art at Bukharest ; Paul Hazard of the Collège de France (a charmer), Dr. Yu Ying, of the Univ. of Peking, and a Signor Pavolini, president of the Fascist Confederati8on of Artists and Writers… 1961 Letter to Martha Niemoeller, Wisconsin, July 25, 1961. Late in life I have taken a great interest in the Noh plays – first through Fenollosa and Pound. A Japanese translator (of my work) sent me as a present a most satisfying selection with a rich annotation. It's a very great manifestation of theatre. And I wish I had known it earlier in my life. My plays may seem to reflect some elements of Chinese and Japanese theatre but – in spite of the years I spent in the Orient as a boy – I have not been aware of any influence prior to the '40s that could derive from the East. My use of a 'free' stage has other sources. (To this day I have never seen a Noh or Kabuki performance – and no Chinese theatre except that program of 'selections' which Mei Lan Fang gave in New York in the 30s). 1962 Letter to Glenway Wescott, S.S. Bremen approaching New York, March 30, 1962. The older I get the more things I find funny. I really ought to grow a pot-belly and resemble those ribald drunken old poets that are pictured sitting under cliffs and waterfalls on Chinese wall-hangings. 1962 Letter to Amos Tappan Wilder, 12th St. Douglas Arizona, Dec 19, 1962. Morning after morning I'd get up at dawn, or before, and walk to the Battery, each day by a different route – through Chinatown, Polish Town, Italian Greenwich Village, the Jewish acres around Grand Street. 1966 Letter to Cheryil Crawford, St. Augustine Fla, Maundy Thursday, [April 7], 1966. The theme of your play [musical Chu-Chem] makes me nervous. Milieu, however exotic, cannot pull us into a theatre by itself. Jews in China, Mormons in Uruguay, Yankees at King Arthur's Court. 1968 Letter to William A. Swanberg, Columbia, July 25, 1968. About 10 years ago Harry [Luce] invited me to a meeting at the Chinese Inst[it]ute (if I remember the name of the institute correctly) to honor the recently dead Dr. Hu Shih [Hu Shi]. He gave me no intimation that I was to be called on to speak. I went to this meeting in New York merely to express my regard for Harry. (I have never been sympathetic to the non-recognition of the People's Republic of China). To my surprise I discovered that I had been assigned the role of concluding speaker on the program. I heard Harry introduce me as an old friend of Dr. Huh Shi, I spoke – to the best of my knowledge – of Dr. Huh Shih's work as a scholar and reformer of the Chinese language. I did not tell the audience (nor Harry until the close of the meeting) that I had never met Dr. Huh Shi. I liked and admired much in Harry. I believe (with Charles Lamb) that 'one should keep one's friendships in repair' ; but that takes two. I shall be here a number of weeks under house arrest. If you wish to mail me the photo from the China Inland Boys' School I shall endeavor to identify Harry ; but I am still too tired to receive any callers except relatives and old friends. 1975 Letter to Dalma H. Brunauer, Hamden, Conn, November 11, 1975. I have often been reproached for not having made a more explicit declaration of commitment to the Christian faith… But I was a Protestant and I was thoroughly formed in the Protestant beliefs – my father's, my school's in China ; Oberlin !... |
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| 4 | 1911-1912 | Thornton Wilder besucht kurze Zeit eine deutsche Schul in Shanghai, dann die China Inland Mission School in Chefoo [Yantai, Shandong]. (Frühling 1911-Aug. 1912). |
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| 5 | 1911-1912 |
Wilder, Thornton. Chefoo, China. [Yantai, Shandong]. [ID D30356]. It used to be said that to have lived in China during those years between the Boxer Rebellion and the 1911 Revolution was to have enjoyed a foretaste of Heaven. Skilled and tireless servants could be engaged for six to ten dollars a month. There were superb cooks and inspired gardeners; there were tailors able to copy faithfully the fashion plates from Paris and London. International trade and diplomatic relations were expanded. Chinese officials had been rendered tractable by the "foreign devils". In fact the Empress Dowager had finally deigned to accord ambassadorial rank to representatives from those late-appearing, those barely civilized powers of Europe and America. Vast new markets had been opened; money could be made easily. Clerks and accountants could be taught the methods of the western world, though the beads of the abacus continued to be heard clicking in the back rooms of offices. In the Imperial City and in the treaty ports the privileged were borne from place to place in the two most soothing conveyances obtainable since the womb: first, the sedan chair suspended from men’s shoulders; then—after the introduction of rubber tires—the jinrickisha. There was leisure for talk at the clubs on the Bunds, at the eternal tiffins, and teas, and dinners. There were numerous celebrations in the international compounds: Independence Day, Bastille Day, royal birthdays. There were boating parties, polo matches, and picnics "in the hills." Even in the missionary compounds there were cricket games on St. George's Day among the Anglicans and Kaffeeklatsches with the Lutherans and open-house concerts at the orphanages and institutions for the blind. "Old China hands" still refer to those days as sheer Heaven. "You didn't have to raise a hand." My own father—a rugged individualist from the state of Maine—returning to America after fifteen years was unable to tie his own shoes without a spasm of annoyance. And yet: There was another saying often heard up and down the China Coast: "Living ten years in China either makes or breaks a man." My father as Consul-General had to ship home scores of "broken men," alive or dead, or to bury them in some potter's field. Any head-shaking tongue-clicking moralist (that is to say, any American) can see why living in this earthly paradise might lead a man to lose a grip on himself. But there were other elements in the China scene that contributed to breaking a man. There was the spectacle of omnipresent misery,—untended, ignored, and uncomplainingly endured. To consider the second of these first: A Scandinavian diplomat’s wife wrote her sister: "We live a charmed life in the international city. There is no need for us to leave its enclosure. The tailors, the jewelers, the dealers in works of art bring their wares to our homes. Even when we drive out into the country we pass along a wide avenue shaded by great trees. Many of us have been here for years without advancing more than a few yards into the native city. Our husbands forbid us to enter it . . . Finally Lady B. and I rebelled. We made expeditions every Thursday morning. We selected certain trusted houseboys as guides and unnecessary guards . . . Oh, Marie! What shall I say? On one day we seemed to see mostly goitres and tumors; on another only leprosy and scrofula; and on another the children; and always emaciation, skeletal arms and legs, blindness—flies swarming upon the poor sufferers' eyes." Another testimony: a missionary's wife told my mother that when she arrived many years before in one of the treaty ports her life was made miserable by the sight of a group of old people and young women with babies who camped, night and day, before the barred gate of the compound where she lived. One evening, during her husband's absence and to the loud consternation of her servants, she directed that a dozen cups of condensed milk and a large platter of rice and dried fish be carried out to them. Within an hour a howling mob of hundreds had gathered before the gate. In the end the treaty port’s police had to drive them away with bamboo poles. In the larger missionary compounds there were rice-kitchens, but doles were arranged under complicated systems. "Some of us have been destined to starve, some to eat." Even the bright young men sent out from Europe and America to work in the banks, import-export offices, and law firms—even the attractive young brides who came out in due time to Chefoo, join them—could not long remain entirely unaware of the ocean of suffering around them. A slow creeping apprehension is more disintegrating than a brutal confrontation. Consider then the human multitude in China. Years later, in Algiers, during the Second World War, we found ourselves in a plague of locusts. We were cloaked and bonneted and shod in locusts; our jeeps careened from side to side in haystacks and puddings of locusts. We were filled with wonder at nature’s fecundity. Yet what is many, what is few? What is large, what is small? We have been told that there are more stars in the firmament than all the men and women born into the world since its creation; more than all the locusts. Heraclitus said, "Man is the measure of all things." It is frightening to contemplate another measure; perhaps a star or an atom can be better said to be the measure of all things: it obscurely undermines a man’s self-esteem. This multitude was another confrontation that tended to make or break men in China. New York or London was a larger city than Nanking or Foochow (not to consider Peking, where no reliable census has ever been or could ever be taken) but the Chinese population lives in the street, spills into the street. Even in the coldest weather it surges about you, it encumbers you, it is underfoot . . . But that's not all. All those hundreds of thousands of eyes rest on you for a moment, really see you (you are the "foreign devil") and in those two glances is neither antagonism nor admiration nor even indifference,—there is a touch of curiosity and some amusement. There is something that is more chilling for an occidental. The Chinese have lived in this density of population for tens of centuries (even the villages convey a shoulder-to-shoulder density); their customs are fashioned by it; their religion has been moulded by it. Those glances reflect also the reason for the omnipresent untended misery: they devaluate the importance of any one individual life. Associated with my father's work in Shanghai was a delightful and thoughtful American, Judge Thayer of the International Court. Someone once asked him his opinion of that often quoted phrase about life in China either making or breaking a man. "Well," said the Judge, turning his level quizzical gaze on the questioner, "living thirty-three years anywhere on the earth either makes or breaks a man, doesn't it? Maybe China merely accelerates it." Even small boys are affected by these confrontations. In 1906 my father—through connections he had made at Yale College—was appointed American Consul-General in Hongkong, China. At the time of this appointment he was editor and owner of a newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin, which he had bought with borrowed money, a loan which he was still struggling to repay many years later. He took his wife and four children—another child was to be born four years later—across the Pacific Ocean on what was then a month's journey. Mrs. Wilder and the children were to enjoy the "sheer heaven" I have described for only six months. The educational opportunities in Hongkong appeared to my father to be unsatisfactory and he sent his family back to Berkeley, California. When he was transferred to Shanghai three years later some of us rejoined him. Thereafter like a chess-player he moved his wife and five children about the world, sending some to Europe, some to America, and some to north China—always in the interest of the young people's education. My sister Charlotte and I were sent to the China Inland Mission Boys' and Girls' Schools at Chefoo in Shantung Province, on the coast some 450 miles north of Shanghai. All our fellow students were missionaries' children. Missionaries hated the consuls; consuls hated the missionaries. My father was the only American (or even European) consul within memory who admired, who venerated missionaries. The duties of a consul (apart from salvaging or burying human derelicts) were largely given over to ratifying contracts and facilitating international commerce. Consuls were selected "at home" for astute business sense, for an unsentimental attitude toward drifters and wastrels, and for representing their native lands’ character as congenial and even convivial good fellows. Consuls hated the missionaries for their clamorous demands (missionaries could not see why the consuls should not personally relieve all China's sufferers from drought, flood, and famine), for their pride in their calling (it appeared to be arrogance), for their stern disapproval of consular ways (that is, smoking, drinking, card-playing, absenting themselves from church attendance, and otherwise misrepresenting before the Chinese people the great countries from which they came), and for their passion for martyrdom,—in troubled times they had to be rescued by river gunboats, literally dragged from their besieged churches and compounds. The missionaries hated the consuls. When it became known up and down the Yangtse Kiang River that Dr. Wilder at Shanghai fell over himself in order to be serviceable in any possible way to those "noble Christian men and women," there was great rejoicing. It was assuredly this reputation for serviceability that enabled him to have us enrolled in those schools. I suspect my father selected Charlotte and myself as the two of his children most in need of the edifying influences we would find there. Besides, the board and tuition was very cheap. It was a good school. All the teachers and administrators were English or Scottish. Of the one hundred and twenty students in the Boys' School one hundred were English, about a dozen were American; there were a few Scandinavians. Much attention was given to religion, but there was none of the "hell-fire" evangelism that I was later to encounter occasionally at Oberlin College and even at Yale. The background was not primarily of the Anglican Church but of those denominations they called "chapel,"—Methodist, Congregational, Presbyterian, and so on; hence there was little class-consciousness. In a history recently published dealing with Henry Luce and his publications the writer quotes from Luce's letters telling of floggings and of that tyrannizing of older over younger boys that was called "fagging". Harry was at the school longer than I was. I heard of only one flogging, before my time; a boy had stolen a watch. In the classes we were often given short written tests; the three students who received the lowest grades were thwacked smartly over the palm of the hand with a ruler. I had many occasions to compare my rising welts with those of my fellow-students. It was a very English school, modeled on those "at home". Games—cricket and soccer—were compulsory. Latin phrases abounded: permissions to leave the grounds were accorded us on exeat days. We were addressed by our last names; if a number of students bore the same family name they were known as Smith Major, Smith Minor, Smith Tertius . . . Quartus . . . Quintus . . . and so on, to Smith Minimus. The sons of an eminent medical missionary in Peking, Dr. George Wilder, arrived at the school before and after me. I was Wilder Minor. Wilder Major and Wilder Tertius were to be my best friends among my fellow students, as well as five years later at Oberlin College. All the students (and teachers) had nicknames. I was called "Towser", though the nickname at home had been Todger. Every Sunday the students of both schools marched into the great city of Chefoo,—two by two, in long "crocodiles", as the English say—to attend the Church of England services there. Sunday is not a day of rest for the Chinese. The long procession was often held up in the narrow streets by a blockage of one kind or another. There we saw on either side: the goitres, the tumors, the abscesses, the flaking white stumps of a leper's arms and legs, the blind, the skeletal children . . . The life of a missionary in China is a difficult one. The missionary must be an exemplary Christian, an exemplary representative of the nation from which he came, an exemplary representative of that triumph of human development western civilization. In addition—following the steps of St. Paul—he should be an inspired orator in an appallingly difficult language, and a profound student of the Chinese thought-world, the Chinese ethos. Many missionaries labored for years without making a single convert other than those unhappy adherents they had rescued from destitution and who were universally called "bowl-of-rice converts". The missionary was fortified throughout these disappointments by his sense of his mission. He had received a "call" to preach to those who walk in darkness. Now there is no doubt that there is much that the great Chinese people can learn from the Christian dispensation,—but how? Occasionally there appeared a missionary, a joyous man, who learned and reveled in the language, who had slowly and wonderingly entered into that subtle, disciplined, tradition-buttressed world: the Chinese mind. I have known some of these men and their families; I have attended their churches. The majority of the American missionaries came from small colleges and seminaries in our middle southern states. Their religion turned largely upon sin. The early translators of the Bible into Chinese found difficulty in translating that word. The Chinese knew all about wickedness and injustice, but when these "foreign devils" harangued them from street corners, beseeching them to confess their sins to God and be saved, they could only listen with blank wonder. The Chinese are not introspective. They had not diverted irrigation canals; they had not "stripped" copper coins; they had not stolen their neighbor’s piglets. My father was once rendered very angry by a chance remark of a fellow-consul who held that "the missionaries had introduced sin into China". Only an occasional missionary was able to render Christianity attractive to his native listeners, to himself, or to his family. I was assigned to Room 7, North Corridor. The room was on the second floor; its large window looked on the school's paved quadrangle; it contained four beds,—all for Americans. I settled in easily, for novelty quickens rather than intimidates me. In class work Americans were at a disadvantage. English students begin the study of Greek, Latin, algebra and geometry several years before Americans do; moreover they were well advanced in those basic studies, the history and geography of Great Britain and its empire. We were frequently rebuked and derided for speaking the English language incorrectly. We gave the impression of being stupid, ill-educated, and uncouth. There was little possibility of our ever, ever growing up to be gentlemen. I was introduced to two of my roommates, a third arrived a week later. Wilkins was a fat boy, easily excited by anything unusual, given alternately to giggling and bursting into tears. Like many of the smaller boys he was often poignantly homesick. They missed those compounds in remote stations, those parents who had received so awe-inspiriting a Call, those amahs of boundless understanding, devotion, and noble firmness. Smith Sextus was gloomy, bilious, and very religious. Fortunately for me, they were loquacious; they introduced me to all the customs, taboos, written and unwritten laws of the community. They put me in possession of the idiosyncrasies of our overseers,—the masters, the prefects. Two weeks later, delayed by the mumps, our fourth member arrived,—Dawson Minor, like myself a "new boy". His older brother was seventeen and had been in the school for five years. He was in the sixth form, a prefect and a pillar of the school, a captain in soccer and even in cricket. He took his turn in conducting prayer meetings, impressively. He would have been Head Boy, if he had been a little better in his studies and if he had spoken the English language more intelligibly, for the Dawson brothers were of Tennessee stock and their speech was difficult for any of us. They were tall and knotty. Dawson Major was a model boy; Dawson Minor, fifteen, was of a very different sort. He had a square, uncheering face. His eyes weighed appraisingly, even distrustfully, everything that was said to him. There was an insolence and a suggestion of violence under his control. After lunch the students were granted a twenty-five minute break in the day's routine during which we were permitted to return to our rooms. We entered Room 7 to discover Dawson Minor standing in tense fury before our house mother, Miss Cunningham, who was unpacking his suitcase. He had not foreseen this procedure. Most boys have secrets—secret treasures —that are not to be revealed to the prying adult: fossil shells, a faded admission card to the St. Louis World’s Fair, pages torn from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue displaying unobtainable delights in shotguns or Brownie cameras, a dog-eared copy of My Forty Years as a Wild Animal Trainer—fetishes for comfort in a dark hour. "Dawson Minor, these are your roommates. This is Smith Sextus and this is Wilkins. We all wish they were better students, don't we? But they seem to teach things differently in America. I suppose that's because it's a new country. And this is Wilder Minor. He's only been here a fortnight and we hope he'll learn our ways.—You may sit down, you other boys. —Now let's see what your dear mother has sent. I hope she read carefully the list of recommendations . . . American mothers seem to have their own ideas. I don't know why that is. Oh, dear me, I find only five undergarments; and I see only five pairs of stockings . . . There's been a good deal of mending here, hasn't there? . . . I hope they hold together in the laundry. . . . Collars, yes. Shorts for games. Singlets.—Bless my soul, what are these? Look, boys,—beads ! Really, Dawson Minor, at the Boys' School we don't play with beads. Beads! I think you’ll outgrow them soon. Ha-ha-ha-ha!" Miss Cunningham had managed in a very short time to disparage his mother and his native land, to expose his poverty, to cast doubt on his manliness and to violate a sanctuary in his heart. The prayer beads were a gift from his amah at a leave-taking of all but unbearable pain. "Why, they're Chinese! Are you sure they're clean? One can never be too careful. You must know that we have very little to do with the Chinese at this school, Dawson Minor. All of us—and all of your parents, except Wilder Minor's—are here to help the Chinese, to show them the Truth and the Way, but . . ." And so on. Many boys and girls of that age, all over the world, go through hell a part of the time in their relations with adults, another part of the time in their relation with their coevals. Hell. The moment after Miss Cunningham left the room Dawson Minor went to the window, overlooking the large square that served for recreation between classes. It was enclosed on three sides by the main building of the school,—classrooms, assembly hall, dining room and kitchen on the first floor; dormitories, linen rooms, and so on, on the second. Opposite our window the square was bounded by a high white-washed stone-and-rubble wall; beyond the wall the ground rose toward the Girls' School and the mountains. Standing at the window Dawson Minor could see at his right the great entrance gate. Without turning his head he asked, "Is that big door locked at night?" "Yes." "Did any of you ever get over the wall?" None of us answered. "Is there some other door you can get out of at night?" Wilkins asked, "Where would you go?" "To town." "Even in the day you're not allowed to go to town. Even on exeat days you're not allowed to go farther than the playing fields." "You don't know anybody that ever went to town at night?" The idea was so preposterous that we didn't even shake our heads. He continued addressing Wilkins. "How long have you been at this school?" "Three years." "You don't know anybody who got out at night?" Wilkins was so intimidated that his voice cracked. "My first year a boy was caned for even going downstairs at night. In front of the whole school. " "How caned?" Wilkins leaned over and made a gesture of lowering his trousers. "What was he doing downstairs?" "He tried to get in the kitchen." "Don't you get enough to eat here? " We all nodded slowly and gravely. Again Wilkins piped up. "He said he had to have a lot of treacle and sulphur. He had worms." Dawson Minor's eyes kept examining the room. "What time do they turn the lights out?" "Nine-thirty." "Do the masters walk up and down at night and look in the rooms?" "There's a master on duty; he sleeps in the room down there. They change every week. Some masters try to catch you. You get a demerit even if you whisper." Again Dawson Minor strolled to the window, his hands in his pockets, whistling. (Students received two demerits for whistling indoors, four for putting their hands in their pockets.) He said slowly and chillingly: "Did you ever hear of people that walk in their sleep? I walk in my sleep. When I was at the Kuling School I walked in my sleep a lot." Smith Sextus who had listened to this talk with growing resentment declared belligerently, "You didn't go to the Kuling School." "Yes, I did. A business man in Nanking had a kid who had fits. He paid my father to send me to the Kuling School with him to watch him when he was sick. I went there two years." The school for boys at Kuling was a very different institution from ours at Chefoo. It was situated at a fashionable summer resort in the hills far from the coast. The cost of board and tuition was said to be ten times higher than ours. The majority of the students were American, drawn from the homes of diplomats, oil men, and import-export men. Most of the students were being prepared for entrance into American universities. Religious exercises were limited to one hour on Sunday. Athletic games were properly coached to resemble struggles to the death. Very little was known about it at Chefoo. It was thought to be worldly, godless, and invested with glamour. Smith Sextus returned to the attack with one more sneer. "Why would you want to go into the city at night?" Dawson Minor was at his best under challenge. A great actor. He turned, took his time, and replied coolly, "Why, to make money, of course". A Tennessee wildcat. All the boys—to a varying extent—waged an unremitting war against the masters, and vice versa. Because we were all, in both camps, of English or Scottish stock, the contest turned on the burning issues of FAIR PLAY,—the gift to civilization of our race. But fair play is not as self-evident a code of behavior as it is generally believed to be. Justice, Honor, and Conscience may be implanted by God in every human being, but they are certainly interpreted, shaped and trimmed differently by environment, social class, private interest, and individual condition. Adolescents develop a fanatical idea of what is "fair". Adults, whom experience has taught that this ideal is at best an exhausting accommodation, have the authority to impose their convenient interpretations on the young. In short ALL ADULTS CHEAT. The result is that all adolescents brood over their wrongs, arm themselves for resistance, and seize every opportunity for retaliatory "foul play". Foul play is permissible to victims of foul play. Most boys are able to estimate quickly how far another boy has progressed in his accommodation to the unfairness of adults—including one’s parents. It was soon obvious to us that Dawson Minor was a seasoned veteran in that unremitting war. In the limited time that was accorded us for desultory conversation the American boys tended to associate together. Dawson Minor let the conversation flow about him unheeding. We Americans were deeply engaged in the matter as to where we were to go to college "in the states". It was all settled that Wilder Major and Wilder Tertius were to go to Oberlin College; others were to go to Berea, to Claremont; Dawson Major was to attend the college and divinity school from which his father had graduated; Harry Luce and I were to go to Yale. For several weeks Dawson Minor behaved with the circumspection proper in a new boy. Because of those deficiencies I have mentioned he was put back into the lowest forms in certain subjects. He was brilliant in English composition and spelling, in "Bible", and "athletics", in arithmetic (he even mastered quickly those tormenting problems in pounds, shillings, and pence); yet he calculated to a nicety the degree of dullness that became his situation. He avoided association with his important older brother. He made a favorable impression. He afforded happy opportunities for the masters to score off him. In Room 7 he proved to be a fairly companionable roommate. He took no undue advantage of his seniority. During the limited free time accorded to us we generally found him lying on his bed studying ("boning up on") Latin and Greek. He took little part in our excited talk about games or food or the unfairness of masters or the cost and quality of the products at the school's candy store or "tuck shop". We were puppies; he was a huge, indifferent, unsmiling mastiff. We were never able to forget for long, however, that first alarming conversation. From time to time, with apparent casualness, he asked us about our homes, our proficiency in Chinese, what we planned to do when we left Chefoo. We knew well that everything he said and did was related to some plan, some Grand Plan. For several weeks I was the only one in the room who was aware that he prowled at night. Later I learned, from him, the stages in his campaign. He studied the behavior and habits of the successive masters on night duty. He satisfied himself that none of them ever turned a flashlight on the sleeping students after ten-thirty. He went downstairs several nights a week as practice runs. The next problem that faced him was that of external doors and windows. The masters and all who had charge of us had tea—that unalterable, sacred institution—at four-thirty. We had supper at six-thirty. We came in from games or recreation at five-thirty. Dawson Minor found ways of returning to the main building at five. It was then that, ever so casually, he examined the windows and shutters in the long assembly room, in the classrooms, in the piano practice room, in the tuck shop. The building was old and aged by extreme alternations of humid heat and bitter cold. It has been often said that to the impassioned will nothing is impossible. It stimulates the imagination, nourishes both audacity and patience, and sustains endurance. In the gardener'’ and caretakers' shed (tents and chairs for prize-giving day, wheelchairs for invalids, old cricket bats and wickets) he found a screw-driver. He found a strong wrench that could twist eroded latches. He strolled into forbidden territory, into the Headmaster's office, the faculty’s cloakroom, the ladies' sittingroom: windows, shutters, latches, and locks. By October 15 he had found—or rendered practicable—three avenues of egress and ingress. One night in early November he spent three hours in the native city of Chefoo. He repeated the visit a week later. Thoughtfully considered, these were notable achievements. The next step was to make money; but, first there was something else he must do. He must tell someone about it. Men do not climb the Himalayas or discover the source of the Nile for their own private pleasure or even for the benefit of mankind. In human life the reward conferred upon feats of daring and ingenuity is the admiration of their fellow men: its name is Glory. Dawson Minor felt a great need for an audience of at least one. His eyes rested speculatively on his roommates. We were a sorry lot. We were anxiously law-abiding, meek, and indubitably "good". No adventurer would dream of confiding in Wilkins. Nor in Smith Sextus, who detested Dawson Minor. There remained Wilder Minor, but Wilder Minor was light-minded; he enjoyed everything; he thought everything was funny. There was the danger that Wilder Minor might not be impressed. In the meantime I had contrived too—though less ambitiously—to leave the bounds of our compound and to "go to China". On several afternoons a week we were all required to take part in compulsory athletics, cricket or soccer; on Wednesday afternoons, however, we were permitted to engage in some exercise of our choosing, tennis, running, jumping, swimming in season, or "rounders". I put in a request to pursue cross-country running. This privilege was open only to older boys of proven reliability, but it was accorded to me, probably because of my father’s position. I gave my solemn promise not to linger in the villages, not to fall into conversation with the "natives", not to touch the offerings on the graves,—simply to complete the three-mile course and return to the school. This was delightful. On leaving the great gate of our quadrangle one turned left, ascended the slope, passed the tennis courts, passed the high walls surrounding the Girls' School, and reached the country road that ran level under the mountain. It ran through intensively cultivated fields and past farmhouses—every farmhouse is a family village; above all, it ran among many graves. These were upright inscribed slabs, graceful stelae. At the base of many of them were small altars or thrones, some of them in the shape of primitive houses surrounded by offerings in bright colored paper and festooned with streamers invoking the dead. The seacoast of Shantung is almost treeless, but at the mile-and-a-half turn-around point of my course was a fine grove of sycamores and gingko trees enclosing a semicircle of noble tombs. This I called the Grove of the Ancestors. Long distance running has little resemblance to the shorter heats; it is solitary and ruminative. Already at that age I had the notion that I would be a writer. It is well known that writers require long stretches of time alone,—to think. I thought throughout the entire course, but I thought best in the Grove. One afternoon I was resting there, sitting on the ground with my back against a tree. I was not even thinking, for I had fallen asleep. I woke abruptly to find Dawson Minor sitting opposite me. "Oh!—Hello!!" I said. "Hello!" "Did you get permission for cross-country?" "I’m supposed to be at hurdles." This was the first of many conversations in the Grove and it was there that I first became aware of Dawson Minor's grin. In the School he seldom smiled and then only in a superior removed way. Here—particularly when he had something outrageous to say or when, as on this occasion, he knew that he was not wanted—he resorted to a broad grimace. At first it seemed to have nothing behind it except brazen impertinence. I wrote in my journal that it was like the reflection of a winter sun on a sheet of polished tin. I was to understand later that it was a mask to conceal despair. We had no liking for one another but each saw in the other someone to contend with, to explore,—like dogs of different breeds. We sat in silence. Presently an elderly man entered the Grove. He bowed to us gravely, his hands clasped within the sleeves of his jacket. Dawson Minor rose—as any Chinese boy would do in the presence of a senior—and saluted him with great propriety. They held a long conversation. The old man seemed to be explaining the inscription on the central monument. When he had finished, Dawson Minor folded his hands; lowered his head several times, then, raising it, declaimed in a high singsong nasal voice what must surely have been a prayer. The old man took formal leave of us and returned to his village. "What was that, Pepper?" (By this time we had acquired nicknames. Dawson Minor had introduced from American slang the word "pep", which led to his being called "Pepper". I was called Towser.) "Whenever any 'foreign devils' come here, the village sends someone to keep an eye on them. A few years ago some boys from the School kicked up an awful mess here. " "Was that a prayer you said?" "Sort of." "Who taught it to you?" "My amah." Silence. The grimace. "The same amah that gave you the beads?" "Yes." "What was her name?" "Go Po." "Do you . . . do you believe in it?" He shrugged his shoulders, looked about a moment and then said to me with the greatest directness, "Everything Chinese is good; everything American and English is sickening." I rose, grunted something, shook my feet preparatory to running, and started toward the road. "What did you say?" he asked sharply. "Think what you like. Say what you like, Pepper. But remember this: I'm not eight years old. Don't talk to me like I was.—It's late. You'd better run back the short way by the bathhouse." looked back at him. The grin had disappeared from his face. He was staring at me with a sort of fierceness, struggling with himself. Finally he said, with a stammer in his excitement, "Last . . . last night I was three hours in the city . . . and that was the third time." “Dawson, you’re crazy as a coot. Why do you do it? You'll get caught and sent home." The joyless grin returned in strength and he dashed past me down the hill. We exchanged few words in Room 7. Wilkins and Smith Sextus were a roomful in themselves. One morning at the washstands Wilkins whispered to me, "I think Dawson has been walking in his sleep a lot." "Well, if I were you, I'd keep it under my hat, Beanie. If any trouble comes, you don't want to be a part of it. The less you say about it, the better off you'll be." Fortunately, Smith Sextus slept and snored through everything. The following Wednesday Dawson Minor was sitting in the Grove of the Ancestors when I arrived. "Have you been making any money, Pepper?" No answer. "What is it,—opium? . . . Gambling? . . . Fortune-telling? . . . I know what it is! It's snake-oil medicine. You're going to get found out and sent home. I don't know about your father and mother, but most fathers and mothers would just about die. And we up in our room are going to get into a mess of trouble too. 'Trees' [our Headmaster Dr. MacCartney] will call us into his office and ask us a thousand questions. Maybe I'll be sent home because I didn't run and tell him that you walked in your sleep. I don't want to know anything. I don't want to tell a pack of lies." My tirade made Pepper very happy. To him this was the first whiff of glory. "What are you so crazy about money for?" "If you have money, you can do anything." I rose and shook my shoes. "Like what?" I asked. "Like going to Harvard," he said passionately. "Like curing leprosy. Like . . . like preventing those floods. What's the matter with you? Can't you see that money can do anything?" "You're crazy," I said. "You're crazy as a mad dog." I started down the hill. |
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| 6 | 1926 |
Wilder, Thornton. The cabala. (New York, N.Y. : A. & C. Boni, 1926). When Samuele discusses this mission with Cardinal Vaini, a former missionary to China and now an influential, scholarly churchman, Samuele is astonished to learn that the Cardinal agrees that the goal of moral reform is short-term only… The Cardinal decides to return to China, but dies on shipboard en route. Samuele decides to leave Rome for America… |
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| 7 | 1927 |
Wilder, Thornton. The bridge of San Luis Rey. (New York, N.Y. : Grosset & Dunlap, 1927). http://ajaytao2010.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-bridge-of-san-luis-rey-thornton-wilder.pdf. Last night he [Captain Alvarado] described to me some of his voyages. Imagine him pushing his prow through a sea of weeds, stirring up a cloud of fish like grasshoppers in June ; or sailing between islands of ice. Oh, he has been to China and up the rivers of Africa… A Chinese junk had been blown from Canton to America ; he dragged up the beach the bales of deep-red porcelain and sold the bowls to the collectors of virtú… |
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| 8 | 1928-1930 | Thornton Wilder trifft bei seiner Theaterforschung auf seiner Europareise Alfred Döblin, Klabund und Richard Wilhelm in Berlin und Wien. |
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| 9 | 1929 |
Pember, John E. Thornton Wilder no slave to his works ; drops everything and takes a rest whenever he feels like it. In : Boston Hewrald ; 31 March 1929. "You know my education was rather broken up. My father took me to China and since returning I have lived at several places." |
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| 10 | 1929 |
Wilder, Thornton. Sir Philip Sassoon's 'The third route'. (1929). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361]. I am driven to thinking of an even remoter future : of a time when the English and Chinese languages will be mixed, as oil and water mix ; when scholars will deny that Lear and Twelfth Night are by the same hand… |
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| 11 | 1930 |
Thornton Wilder : http://brbl-archive.library.yale.edu/exhibitions/orient/mod9.htm. Thornton Wilder was inspired in 1930 by a New York performance by Mei Lan-fang, a legendary Chinese actor to transpose the Chinese "property man" into the stage manager and stress the minimalist setting of Chinese theater in Our Town. |
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| 12 | 1935 |
Wilder, Thornton. Heaven's my destination. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Bros., 1935). http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060088897. Foreword : I came from a very strict Calvinist father, was brought up partly among the missionaries of China… |
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| 13 | 1935-1942 |
The letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder [ID D30359]. 1935 Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, American Exp[ress], Wien, 15 Oct. 1935. My mother was pious, and until 8 I was pious – but one day my father took me out for a walk in the Prater – I can remember it perfectly and explained to me that there was no way that we could no [know] there was a God ; that it didn't do any good to trouble one's head about such ; but to life and do one's duty among one's fellow-men. "But I like gods" and he pointed to handsome cases and cases full of images – Greek, Chinese, African, Egyptian – hundred of images ! 1936 Letter from Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, Paris, [postmark 9 Jan. 1936]. Lady Colefax turned up, we talked about you and about England, she is going to arrange that we see the Chinese show all by ourselves, and other things… [Exhibition of Chinese art, Royal Academy of Arts, London]. Letter from Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, Chicago, Ill., postmark 26 April 1936. … we leave on Thursday if weather and Chinaman permit, we are back to Chinamen only just now we have not got one… Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, New Haven, Conn., 27 Sept. 1936. I have been reading aloud to my mother a droll and noble and touching little book translated from the Chinese. It is an account by a small provincial magistrate of the Boxer Rebellion, of the flight of the Empress Dowager from the Forbidden City and the reestablishment. It is full of loft utterances at the point of death, of absurd anxiety over etiquette, and of long intimate conversations with the 'Old Buddha'. And yet it is a slight little book and I am afraid that even sending it to MD will put it in such a mandatory light that the bloom of its modest charm will be rubbed off, but I shall sent it just the same. [Wu, Yung. The flight of an empress. (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 1936). Letter from Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, New Haven, Conn., postmark 26 Oct. 1936. … the Chinese book came and Alice and I are both loving it, you know we always on the old empress very much and it brings her very near, and one likes her near if not too near. [Wu, Yung. The flight of an empress. (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 1936). 1937 Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Hotel Buckingham [Paris],16 July 1937. I go to a theatre every night to improve my French. And all day I sit in on the Session a the Institute where I hear Chinese French, Roumanian French, Brazilian French etc. Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Bilignin, France, Hotel Buckingham, [Paris 18? July 1937]. I feel like some brand-new Chinese convert, ardent but immature, who tears out Nanking mixing up his lessons pêle-mêle and saying that a Christian must turn his back on his family, expect the end of the world any minute, and must lose no opportunity to provoke his own martyrdom. 1937 Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Monte Verità, Ascona. 15 Oct. 1937. This hotel was founded many years ago – as its pretentious name implies – to house cults, -isms and –ologies. A Dutch baron of vast wealth, still here and eating in our dining-room. But he also built the hotel to house his picture collection, and all the public rooms and the bedrooms are full of paintings. Picasso, Delacroix, Courbet, Matisse, Marées, Dali, and a host of Chinese paintings. Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, [Zurich], 28 Oct. 1937. And for excitement's sake, guess who may act the long lanky New England Talkative Stage-Manager in it (who as in the Chinese theatre hovers about the action, picking his teeth, handing the actors their properties and commenting drily to the audience) – Sinclair Lewis. 1940 Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, New Haven, Conn., 28 Jan. 1940. Charlotte will have after many years a volume of prose ready this spring – Proust-like evocations of her childhood in Berkeley and China. [This book was never published]. 1941 Letter from Thornton Wilder to Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, [Port Washington, Wisc.], 28 July 1941. Friday night your ears burned and – as the Chinese put it – your eyelids twitched. 1942 Letter from Gertrude Stein to Thornton Wilder, Bilignin, [postmark 21 Sept. 1942]. I work quite a lot and the book To Do which has you in China in it, is out, and I hope you like it. [Publ. posthumously in Alphabets and birthdays, 1957]. |
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| 14 | 1938 |
Wilder, Thornton. Our town : a play in three acts. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1938). [Uraufführung McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey, January 22, 1938]. Wilder, Thornton. A preface for Our town. (1938). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361]. [Not published]. In the Spanish theater Lope de Vega put a rug in the middle of the scene – it was a raft in mid-ocean bearing a castaway. The Elizabethans, the Chinese used similar devices. Sekundärliteratur Y.T. Luk : Wilder uses no front curtain, no scenery, and no properties, except a few chairs and ladders ; he has a Stage Manager come out to chat with the audience and point out what they are to imagine on the stage, to move chairs, and occasionally to become a character of the performance – the soda fountain clerk as well as the minister of wedding. He learned this theatricalist mode from Peking opera, with which he was quite familiar. From the non-illusionist approach in Chinese theatre, Wilder recognized that even the important events of everyday life can be presented by actors on an open platform, reacting not to a realistic setting but to the private thoughts and personal relations of the characters in the fictive world on that platform. From this Chinese make-believe on the stage, he realized the fundamental conditions of drama – that is, that the theatre is an art which reposes upon the work of many collaborators ; it is addressed to a group mind based on a pretense, its very nature calls out a multiplication of pretenses, and its action takes place in a perpetually present time. The conventionalized performance of Chinese acting, in spite of its blatant theatricality, convinced him that convention was very important in the interaction between actors and the audience, that it was an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie to provoke collaborative activity of the spectator's imagination and raise the action from the specific to the general. Chen Xiaoming : Like Gao Xingjian's Wildman, a Chinese play, Wilder's Our town, an 'Oriental' play, achieves an epic dimension by showing, in the first act, a flashback scene in the past - 'a day in our town', May 7, 1901 – an ordinary day that everyone of us lives. Both plays share the same timeless, episodic structure that presents a macrocosmic view of life. Both plays constantly employ the present time of the play to symbolize a larger temporal view of past, present, and future. Both plays are about much more than simply Emily and George, or an ecologist and a Wildman. Both are in some sense stories of mankind, of its historical past and contemporary reality, its struggle against time and its efforts to preserve natural life and cultural heritage. Both plays are narrated by insightful observers – the Stage Manager and the Ecologist – who convey to the audience their apprehensions over the meaning of life and their nostalgic feelings for an irreversible past. Haberman, Donald C. The plays of Thornton Wilder : a critical study. (Middletown, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, 1969). Haberman claims that Wilder demanded from the actors of Our town that 'they attempt something like Mei Lanfang's expression of a reality above the casual and a permanence beyond the brevity of each performance. Lee Sang-kyong : Wilder verzichtet bewusst auf Kulisse und grosse Requisiten, um das Drama von seinem Illusionscharacter zu befreien und der Einbildungskraft des Zuschauers freien Spielraum zu lass. So genügten ihm, entsprechend der Nô-Bühne und der Bühne des chinesischen Theaters, einige Stühle und Tische als Bühnenrequisiten, um das Wesentliche der Realität darzustellen. Lifton, Paul. Thornton Wilder's minimalist plays : mingling Eastern and Western traditions. In : Crosscurrents in the drama : East and West. Ed., Stanley Vincent Longman. (Tuscaloosa, AL : Southeastern Theatre Conference and the University of Alabama Press, 1998). (Theatre symposium (Tuscaloosa, Ala.) ; vol. 6, 1998). http://books.google.ch/books?id=UT8yEd2CVssC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=thornton+wilder +chinese&source=bl&ots=oZwJuSBxi&sig=rK6z_WTq8khEVMZPfh9F49U8zgM&hl=de&sa= X&ei=jMgRUrqOCImIhQfYroCQDQ&ved=0CFUQ6AEwBTgU#v=onepage&q=thornton%20 wilder%20chinese&f=false. Paul Lifton : While he was working on Our town, Thornton Wilder describes the play in a 1937 postcard to a friend as utilizing 'the technique of Chinese drama', and the 'Chinese' features of the piece did not escape the the notice of reviewers of the original production. Several of them compared it to The yellow jacket. Many other critics also identified the Stage Manager as a variant of the Chinese property man and other features of the pantomime, as 'Chinese' or quasi-Chinese as well. Wilder's interest in pantomime was apparently sparked by a performance by Mei Lanfang. Several of Wilder's shorter play in the minimalist vein also reflect Mei Lanfang's influence and exhibit parallels, too, with other Asian traditional theatres besides the Chinese. On the other hand, he appears to have been uninterested in or unaware of many nonminimalist aspects of Asian theatre. His borrowing was always highly selective. Certainly the lavish, symbolic, and highly theatrical costumes and makeup or masks, the extraordinary and specialized vocal techniques, the exaggerated or symbolic gestures, and the acrobatic or the unnaturally restrained movements of the nô, kabuki, and Chinese opera find no counterparts in his dramatic universe. |
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| 15 | 1938 |
Parmenter, Ross. Novelist into playwright. [Thornton Wilder]. In : Saturday review of literature ; vol. 18, 11 June (1938). As we shook hands at parting, he asked me please to leave in his "perhapses" and "it may bes" because he felt their tentativeness was very much part of him. I felt, on the other hand, that his request was largely shyness, that the man who passed his adolescence as a stranger in China and his young manhood as a retired master at a boy's school had outgrown that tentativeness more than he knew. |
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| 16 | 1941 |
Wilder, Thornton. Some thoughts on playwriting. (1941) In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1979). The modern world is inclined to laugh condescendingly at the fact that in the plays of Racine and Corneille the gods and heroes of antiquity were dressed like the courtiers under Louis XIV ; that in the Elizabethan Age scenery was replaced by placards notifying the audience of the location ; and that a whip in the hand and a jogging motion of the body indicated that a man was on horseback in the Chinese theater, these devices did not spring from naïveté, however, but from the vitality of the public imagination in those days and from an instinctive feeling as to where the essential and where the inessential lay in drama. |
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| 17 | 1942 |
Wilder, Thornton. The skin of our teeth. (New York, N.Y. : Harper, 1942). [Uraufführung Shubert Theatre, New Haven, Conn., October 15, 1942]. http://www.harpercollins.com/browseinside/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060088934. S. 146. A whip in the hand and a jogging motion of the body indicated that a man was on horseback in the Chinese theater… |
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| 18 | 1949 |
Wilder, Thornton. Goethe and world literature. (1949). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361]. On this Wednesday Goethe was talking about a Chinese novel he had been reading… [Goethe] :The epoch of world literature is at hand and everyone must now get to work to hasten the advent of that epoch. However, while extending this high appreciation to foreign works we should not bind ourselves to any particular one and regard it as the final model – whether it be the Chinese or the Serbian or Calderón or the Niebelungenlied… The Cantos of Ezra Pound require our familiarity with the civilizations which Frobenius claims to have distinguished in African pre-history, as well as a close knowledge of Chinese history, the Italian Renaissance, and the economic problems of the American Revolution. |
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| 19 | 1952 |
Wilder, Thornton. Toward an American language. (1952). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361]. In France life and conversation and love itself seem to us to be overruled by a network of conventions as intricate as a ballet or a game ; just so the Chinese built walls of ceremonial behind which they could hide from the piercing intelligence of their neighbors. |
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| 20 | 1952 |
Wilder, Thornton. The American loneliness. (1952). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361]. The doctrine of moderation and the golden mean may have flourished in Rome and in China (overcrowded and overgoverned countries), but they do not flourish here, save as counsels of despair. |
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| 21 | 1955 |
Wilder, Thornton. John Marin 1870-1953. In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays [ID D30361]. The great artist teaches us a new entrance into the visible world, a new homage, and a new knowledge. Each of the master landscapists has informed our eyes… the geography, the geology, the history of the earth that lies behind the surface of city and valley ; the Chinese masters, the landscape as background for a philosopher's meditation… |
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| 22 | 1957 |
Wilder, Thornton. Preface to three plays : Our town, The skin of our teeth, The matchmaker. (1957). In : Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1979). In Chinese drama a character, by straddling a stick, conveys to us that he is on horseback. In almost every No play of the Japanese an actor makes a tour of the stage and we know that he is making a long journey. |
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| 23 | 1957 |
Goldstone, Richard H. The art of fiction XVI : Thornton Wilder. In : Writers at work : the Paris review interviews. Ed. by Malcolm Cowley. (New York, N.Y. : Viking Press, 1958). Interviewer : Did the young Thornton Wilder resemble George Brush, and in what ways ? Wilder : Very much so. I came from a very strict Calvinistic father, was brought up partly among the missionaries of China, and went to that splendid college at Oberlin at a time when the classrooms and student life carried a good deal of the pious didacticism which would now be called narrow Protestantism. |
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| 24 | 1959 |
Wilder, Thornton. Afternoon. From 'Talk of the town'. In : New Yorker ; vol. 35, 23 May (1959). We are approaching the house – the House the Bridge Built. The Bridge of San Louis Rey, what is. I live on a heap of dirt pushed down by an icecap from the North. Look at that odd red cliff there ! I call I our Dolomite, and it has come all the way from the North on an icecap. (Bounding out of car, up winding rustic stairway, and into dark wooden house, don't ask how) Much China-iana here. My father was a consul in China. |
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| 25 | 1967 |
Wilder, Thornton. The eight day. (New York, N.Y. ; London : Longmans : Harper, 1967). "In Callao, Ashley got work in a Chinese importing firm. His employers had seldom encountered honesty outside their own race." "Mr. Joch said that Peking in China was eight times as big as Chicago." "I think I may be able to make clear what I mean by telling you a story. A story. A number of years ago in one of the southern provinces of China there was a wave of hatred against all foreigners. A considerable number were killed. All the members of one of our missions were taken prisoner – a bishop, four priests, six sisters, and two Chinese servants. All but the servants were German. Each was placed in a small cell in a long low building made of clay and pebbles. They were allowed no communication with one another. From time to time one or another of them would be led out to be tortured. They expected that at any moment they would be beheaded. However, their execution was delayed and after a few years they were released." "A great-great-grandmother of John Ashley was the daughter of Loris Vanderloo, the Dutch seaman whose Voyages to China and Japan (1770) were widely read." "GEORGE to his mother (San Francisco, June 4, 11, 18, 25, and so on into July and August) : Everything's fine… I'm working… I've got a room way out by what they call the Seal Rocks. The seals bark all night… I bought a new suit… I've twice to the Chinese theatre. I go with a Chinese friend and he explains it to me…" "GEORGE to Félicité (November 11) : You won't hear from me for a while. I think I'm going to China soon and from China to Russia. So don't be an idiot and come trying to find me in California because I won't be there." |
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| 26 | 1973 |
Wilder, Thornton. Theophilus North. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1973). [Seitenangaben aus The Library of America (2011)]. "The FIRST, the earliest, made its appearance during my twelfth to my fourteenth years. I record it with shame. I resolved to become a saint. I saw myself as a missionary among primitive peoples. I had never met a saint but I had read and heard a great deal about them. I was attending a school in North China and the parents of all my fellow-students (and my teachers in their way) were missionaries. My fist shock came when I became aware that (perhaps covertly) they regarded the Chinese as a primitive people. I knew better than that..." "Mr. Wyckoff used to be away six and eight months at a time. He was a collector. What was it, Mrs. Cranston – sharks' teeth ? Shells and Chinese things, Chief. He left them to that big museum in New York." "I went to German schools in China when I was a boy and have kept up my interest in it ever since." "There was a row of china cupboards, faced with glass and lined with silk." "They'll order a van and get out of there Saturday morning or I'm a Chinaman." "Yes… and I tell them the things you've told me. About the school you went to in China." "I had noticed that bamboo chairs with wide armrests, such as I had known in China as a boy, were placed, two by two, at intervals on the lawn." "Mr. Noth, tell us some more about China !" "Now I am going to talk to you in Chinese for a moment. You remember that I was brought up in China. I shall give you the translation too. 'Ee er san' – with a downward, then upward glide - 'see. Gee-den-gaw' – with a rising inflection. 'Hu' (a descending note) 'li too bay. Nu chi fo n' yu' and so on. The first seven words are all the Chinese I know. They mean : 'one, two, three, four, chicken – egg - cake'." "I spared them nothing – Wisconsin, China, California, Oberlin College, Yale, the American Academy in Rome, the school in New Jersey, then Newport." "I had spent a part of my childhood in China and was no stranger to the unfathomable misery in the world." "You will see sights and smell smells that will distress you, but you have told us of your experiences in China and you are prepared for such things." "I try to live with as few possessions as possible. Like the Chinese a bowl of rice… like the ancient Greeks a few figs and olives." |
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| 27 | 1974 |
McCoy, Bob. Thornton Wilder in 'Our town'. In : San Juan star ; 2 Jan. (1974). "Some people have said that my boyhood in China had an influence on my theater style, of not using scenery, since this is also the style in Chinese theater. When a man goes on a journey, he puts a broomstick between his legs to represent a horse and you believe it. But I couldn't possibly have been influenced by Chinese theater because I never saw a play there. My influence came from the world theater, from the Greek drama, Shakespeare. These were works that call for the same sort of imagination." |
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| 28 | 1987 |
Aufführung von Xiao zhen feng qing = Our town von Thornton Wilder durch das Beijing Experimental Theater unter der Regie von Lois Wheeler Snow. Chen Xiaomei : Only a stage photo of Emily and George's wedding with a brief description of the play was printed in Xi ju bao : "This play describes the ordinary daily events – through which one experiences the boundless universe – in a small town in America at the turn of the century." Our town arrived at the wrong time in the wrong place, when things 'Chinese' had been overtaken by numerous things 'Western'. |
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| 29 | 1989 | Aufführung von The matchmaker von Thornton Wilder unter der Regie von Chen Yinying = Joanna Chan im Xianggang hua ju tuan = Hong Kong Repertory Theatre. |
Bibliography (15)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1937 |
[Wilder, Thornton]. Sheng Luyi zhi qiao. Wang'erda zhu ; Sun Weifo yi. (Shanghai : Qi ming shu ju, 1937). (Shi jie wen xue ming zhu). Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. The bridge of San Luis Rey. Illustrated by Amy Drevenstedt. (New York, N.Y. : A. & C. Boni ; Grosset & Dunlap, 1927). 聖路易之橋 |
Publication / Wild2 |
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| 2 | 1949 |
[Wilder, Thornton]. Da di de tan xi. Wei'erte yuan zhu ; Huang Jiayin yi. (Shanghai : Xi feng she, 1949). (Xi feng cong shu ; 3). Wilder, Thornton. The woman of Andros. (New York, N.Y. : A. & C. Boni, 1930). 大地的嘆息 |
Publication / Wild5 | |
| 3 | 1961 |
[Wilder, Thornton]. Xiao cheng feng guang : san mu ju. Liu Wenhan yi. (Xianggang : Jin ri shi jie she, 1961). (Meiguo ming ju xuan ; 2). Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. Our town. Wilder, Thornton. Our town : a play in three acts. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1938). [Uraufführung McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey, January 22, 1938]. 小城風光 : 三幕劇 |
Publication / Wild10 | |
| 4 | 1965 |
[Wilder, Thornton]. Huai'erde xi ju xuan : Xiao cheng feng guang, Jiu si yi sheng, Yuan yang pei. Huai'erde zhu ; Tang Xinmei, Liu Wenhan he yi. (Xianggang : Jin ri shi jie she, 1965). Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. Our town. Wilder, Thornton. Our town : a play in three acts. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1938). [Uraufführung McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey, January 22, 1938]. Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. The skin of our teeth. (New York, N.Y. : Harper, 1942). [Uraufführung Shubert Theatre, New Haven, Conn., October 15, 1942]. Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. The matchmaker : a farce in four acts. Ed. by F.Y. Thompson. (London ; New York, N.Y. : Longmans, 1938). (Heritage of literature series ; sec. B, no 31). [Uraufführung Edinburgh Festival, Theatre Royal Drury Lane London 1954]. 懷爾德戲劇選 : 小城風光, 九死一生, 鴛鴦配 |
Publication / Wild6 | |
| 5 | 1967 | Wilder, Thornton. The eight day. (New York, N.Y. ; London : Longmans : Harper, 1967). | Publication / Wild13 |
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| 6 | 1970 |
[Wilder, Thornton]. Wei'erde xi ju xuan ji. Xue Lili, Si Tu, Zhiping tong yi. (Taibei : Jing sheng, 1970). (Jing sheng bian yi wen ku. Dan jiang xi yang xian dai xi ju yi cong). 韋爾德戲劇選集 1 : Xiao zhen. Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. Our town. Wilder, Thornton. Our town : a play in three acts. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1938). [Uraufführung McCarter Theater, Princeton, New Jersey, January 22, 1938]. 2. Chu sheng ru si. Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. The skin of our teeth. . (New York, N.Y. : Harper, 1942). [Uraufführung Shubert Theatre, New Haven, Conn., October 15, 1942]. |
Publication / Wild9 | |
| 7 | 1973 | Wilder, Thornton. Theophilus North. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1973). | Publication / Wild14 |
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| 8 | 1978 |
[Wilder, Thornton]. Sheng Luyi wang qiao. Wei'erde zhu ; Li Mubai [Paul M. Lee] yi. (Taibei : Xue sheng ying wen, 1978). Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. The bridge of San Luis Rey. Illustrated by Amy Drevenstedt. (New York, N.Y. : Boni, 1927). 聖路易之橋 聖路易王橋 |
Publication / Wild8 | |
| 9 | 1979 | Wilder, Thornton. American characteristics and other essays. (New York, N.Y. : Harper & Row, 1979). | Publication / Wild17 |
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| 10 | 1990 |
[Wilder, Thornton]. Qiao hong niang. Sangdun Weierda yuan zhu ; Chen Junrun fan yi ; Chen Yinying dao yan. (Xianggang : Xianggang hua ju tuan, 1990). (Xianggang hua ju tuan ju ben ; 87). Übersetzung von Wilder, Thornton. The matchmaker : a farce in four acts. Ed. by F.Y. Thompson. (London ; New York, N.Y. : Longmans, 1938). (Heritage of literature series ; sec. B, no 31). [Uraufführung Edinburgh Festival, Theatre Royal Drury Lane London 1954]. 俏紅娘 |
Publication / Wild7 | |
| 11 | 1992 | Conversations with Thornton Wilder. Ed. by Jackson R. Bryer. (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 1992). | Publication / Wild11 |
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| 12 | 1996 | Stein, Gertude ; Wilder, Thornton. The letters of Gertrude Stein and Thornton Wilder. Ed. by Edward Burns and Ulla E. Dydo with William Rice. (New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, 1996). | Publication / Wild15 | |
| 13 | 2008 | Wilder, Thornton. The selected letters of Thornton Wilder. Ed. by Robin G. Wilder and Jackson R. Bryer ; foreword by Scott Donaldson. (New York, N.Y. : HarperCollins, 2008). | Publication / Wild16 | |
| 14 | 2012 |
Wilder, Thornton. Chefoo, China. [Unvollendetes MS späte 1960er Jahre]. In : Wilder, Thornton. The eighth day ; Theophilus North ; Autobiographical writings. J.D. McClatchy, editor. (New York, N.Y. : Library of America, 2012). (Library of America ; 224). [Yantai, Shandong]. http://www.loa.org/images/pdf/Wilder_Chefoo_China.pdf. http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/02/chefoo-china.html. |
Publication / Wild12 |
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| 15 | 2013 | Thornton Wilder Society. Works : http://www.twildersociety.org/works/the-cabala/. | Organisation / Wild4 |
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Secondary Literature (3)
| # | Year | Bibliographical Data | Type / Abbreviation | Linked Data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1987 | Luk, Y.T. Chinese theatricalism and modern drama. In : Comparative literature studies ; vol. 24, no 3 (1987). [Betr. Bertolt Brecht, Thornton Wilder, Jean Genet, Luigi Pirandello]. | Publication / LukY.T.1 | |
| 2 | 1992 | Conversations with Thornton Wilder. Ed. by Jackson R. Bryer. (Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 1992). | Publication / Wild11 |
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| 3 | 1995 | Chen, Xiaomei. Occidentalism : a theory of counter-discourse in post-Mao China. (New York, N.Y. : Oxford University Press, 1995). [2nd rev. and expanded ed. (Lanham, Md. : Rowman and Littlefield, 2002)]. | Publication / CheX5 |
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