The Enthusiast: A Life of Thornton Wilder

by Gilbert A. Harrison

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0899191975
• ISBN13: 9780899191973
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields
• Length: 403 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Still Unmatched

Thornton Wilder wrote so beautifully for the stage, and left his own personal, private life, such a blank page, that I don't envy the biographer who has to make something real out of the tatters and postcards he left behind. And yet Gilbert Harrison does a fine job. I didn't think the book told enough when it came out in 1983, but maybe I was expecting more than I should have, for on re-reading this book this past week I was struck over and over by how much indeed Harrison brings to live his evanescent, elusive subject. Wilder's admirers were always pained, during his lifetime, about how little he actually produced. Why, oh why, did it take him so long to write his three famous plays, and why so little other work? It wasn't as though he was a busy family doctor like William Carlos Williams, or needed to hold down a manual job to make money, for family circumstances seemed comfortable; although Harrison pulls back the curtain and reveals some of the details of Wilder's financial life, in a way more clouded than his sexual history. And we see, just about for the first time, the extent to which Wilder was always writing, always, but he was such a perfectionist that his experiments hardly ever pleased him! Such an oddity, for the plays that came out after his death were just as good as the ones he had produced, and I think as time goes by the magnificent LIFE IN THE SUN will become better and better known, it is totally beautiful; while the short play cycles, including the SEVEN DEADLY SINS and the SEVEN AGES OF MAN, are simply wonderful and everyone should have the two newish compliations of COLLECTED SHORT PLAYS at their bedside. He seemed to know everything about human life, not just the sunny, heartwarming OUR TOWN moments, but also about the chill and the pall that, say, we love reading Auden for, or Sartre's NO EXIT. He was scary, as he proved in the devastatingly nihilistic speeches he gave "Uncle Charlie" in the script he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock, SHADOW OF A DOUBT. Did he hold back on the remaining one act plays (and THE EMPORIUM) because they were possibly too bleak? If so, we now have them to treasure. Did he fail to find happiness in his private life due to homophobia, or perhaps to a crippling shyness which led him to abdicate from the body's demands? Harrison is good at all of these lines of inquiry, but most of all he gives us the sense of a life rich in a hundred ways besides the usual, including the generosity some called saint-like but which, as the wise know, is nothing but a sublimated form of curiosity. The giver wants to see the reaction of those to whom he gives. That's all Dolly Levi really wants, to see real life from the angle of the donor.