The Woman of Andros / the Ides of March by Thornton Wilder
I bring my precious Calpurnia to you next autumn.
LXXII
Calpurnia to her sister Lucia.
[March 15.]
Each day, before this departure, grows more precious. I am ashamed that I had not realised before more clearly the fortitude that is required of a soldier’s wife.
Yesterday afternoon we dined with Lepidus and Sextilia. Cicero was there and the company was very merry. Later my husband said he had never felt such friendship for Cicero, or from him; and this in spite of the fact that they baited one another with such sharpness that Lepidus did not know where to rest his eyes. My husband gave an account of the revolution of Catiline as though it had been a rebellion of mice against a worried cat called Cicero. He rose from the table and darted about the room peering into the wrong corners. Sextilia was laughing so that she got a stitch in her side. I find a new husband every day.
We came away early and before dark. My husband asked if I would let him show me some places that he loved. I was anxious to be off the streets, as you may well imagine, but I have learned not to urge caution on him. I know that he is well aware of the danger and chooses these risks in all consciousness. He walked beside my litter, followed by a few guards. I called his attention to an enormous Ethiopian who seemed also to be following us. He explained that he had once promised the Queen of Egypt that he would never object to the presence of this attendant who has since appeared and disappeared mysteriously, sometimes standing all night before our house and sometimes following him about for three days at a time. He is, indeed, a terrifying figure, but my husband appears to be very fond of him and was continually addressing remarks to him.
The high wind was rising that was soon to turn to storm. We went down the hill and into the Forum, stopping, dear Lucia, at this and that while he recalled a moment in history and in his own life. How he rests his hands on what he loves and how he gazes into my eyes to make sure that I am sharing his memory! We went into little dark streets and he put his hand against the house where he had lived for ten years as a young man. We stood at the foot of the Capitol. Even when the storm broke and the passersby fled by us like leaves, he would not hasten his steps. He made me drink from the spring of Rhea [reputed to insure fecundity]. How is it that I can be the happiest of women, and yet so filled with foreboding?
Our little trip was all unwise. We both passed a most disturbed night. I dreamed that the pediment of the house had been lifted in the storm and dashed upon the pavement. I awoke to find him groaning beside me. He awoke and flung his arms about me and I could feel the loud beating of his heart.
Oh, may the Immortal Gods watch over us.
This morning he is not well. He was fully dressed and ready to set out for the Senate when he changed his mind. He returned to his desk for a moment and has fallen asleep there, which his secretaries tell me has never happened before.
Now he has awakened and gone off, after all. I must hurry and prepare for the guests this evening. I am ashamed of this letter, so womanish.
Suetonius: The Lives of the Caesars: Book One.
[Probably written some seventy-five years later.]
When he sat down, the conspirators thronged about him and Tillius Cimber, who had put himself at the head of them, came close to him as though he were about to ask a question. When Caesar with a gesture tried to hold him at a distance, Cimber seized hold of his toga at both shoulders. As Caesar exclaimed: ‘Then this is violence!’ one of the Cascas, standing at his side, plunged a dagger into him, just below the throat. Caesar caught hold of Casca’s arm and ran his pen through it; but as he tried to rise to his feet he was held down by another stab. When he saw that he was surrounded on all sides by drawn daggers, he wrapped his head in his robe at the same time drawing its folds about his feet with his left hand so that when he fell the lower part of his body would be decorously covered.
In this manner then he was stabbed twenty-three times. He said no word, merely groaned at the first stroke, though certain writers have said that when Marcus Brutus fell upon him he said in Greek, ‘You, too, my son!’
All the conspirators took themselves off and left him lying there dead for some time. Finally three common slaves put him on a litter and carried him home, one arm hanging down over the side.
Antistius the physician said that of all those wounds only the second one in the breast would have proved fatal.
AFTERWORD
Thornton Wilder was never able to do his own writing in the family house he built in 1930 outside New Haven, Connecticut, from royalties he received from The Bridge of San Luis Rey. As he liked to put it, he had ‘to escape to write.’ And what glorious escapes they often were. Students of Wilder’s writing habits can feast on many a transatlantic crossing (‘Baby does best on boats,’ he was fond of saying), as well as stays in hotels and inns in Europe, the United States, and Canada, or at artists’ watering holes such as the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ranch in Taos, New Mexico. But on September 23, 1945, when Lieutenant Colonel Wilder was discharged after more than three years of active duty, two of them spent overseas in North Africa and Italy, he briefly entertained, but then dismissed the notion of more foreign travel. Suffering from mental and physical exhaustion manifesting itself in restlessness and a desire to be away from groups, he decided instead to become reacquainted with his own country, using what became for him as for millions of fellow Americans, the new favoured means of transportation: the privacy of the driver’s seat in his automobile.
Therefore, that October, he saw doctors and dentists, purchased a new civilian wardrobe, and attended to many management details involving his literary works, especially international performances of Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. Then Wilder all but leaped into his 1939 Chrysler convertible with unreliable tires – wartime rubber rationing still being in effect – and headed for Florida. On the top of his writing agenda was The Alcestiad, a play he had begun before the war. It was on this trip, in November, probably in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, that his priorities changed. He wrote his sister, Isabel: ‘Just for the fun, I began the Caesar-Clodia-Catullus-Cicero novel in letters, the hardest writing I’ve ever done.’
The ‘fun’ quickly turned into a serious work. By January 1946, Isabel wrote to other Wilder family members that she was planning a gathering at home for twenty-six guests to hear Thornton read from the growing Caesar manuscript. By May, after short trips to a couple of favourite writing haunts in Newport, Rhode Island, and Atlantic City, New Jersey, he had completed the first two books of the novel and was reading it to friends.
Work came to a standstill when Wilder’s mother died in late June, and he needed to give his attention to family affairs. His writing schedule was disrupted further by commitments to star in the role of the Stage Manager in three summer theatre productions of Our Town. Many months later, in January 1947, he once again broke free, this time with new tires on his car, and aimed the Chrysler for the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, then a month (a boat trip at last!) in Mérida on the Yucatán Peninsula, followed by an easy motoring trip home. The novel was growing again. On his way home he stopped in Washington, D.C., where he spent two weeks in late April and early May at the Library of Congress reading works on the conspiracies against Caesar, because that piece of the book, he wrote to an actor friend, Joe Layton, ‘I can’t so easily spin out of my head.’ From Washington he also wrote his attorney that he had decided to title the work The Ides of March, adding, ‘it will stir up a considerable shindy, I expect. It’s like nothing else.’ He delivered the novel in the fall of 1947.
‘The Caesar-Clodia-Catullus-Cicero novel in letters’ that he had picked up in November 1945 – when in fact his play-writing project had bogged down – had a long history of its own. Wilder grew up in a family where his news-editor father believed so passionately in the efficacy of classical languages that he wrote an editorial, ‘The Passing of Latin,’ that is said to have ‘forced the Yale Corporation [t
Wilder first encountered Julius Caesar, his main character in The Ides of March, in the classroom in 1910 – 1911, at the China Inland Mission School in Chefoo, when he was thirteen years old. (According to the winter term report card in 1911 he stood sixth in a form of twenty-three students in ‘Selections from Caesar.’) Always reticent about his undergraduate academic record (by his college years, Wilder was often writing, reading, and attending plays for which he received, sadly, no credit), he was in fact an excellent Latin student. With the exception of one real and one near disaster in grammar courses, he received grades of no less than B+ in four of six Latin courses taken at Yale.
His able record (most of the time) in Latin helped to open the door for his seven-month stay as a ‘visiting student’ in the Classical School (the archeological wing) at the American Academy in Rome in 1920 – 1921. Indeed, one of the reasons he was sent by his family to the academy was to enhance his credentials to become a secondary school Latin teacher.
Wilder’s sojourn in Rome in 1920 – 1921 inspired his first novel, The Cabala, a story set against the backdrop of the twentieth-century city. But as he would later explain in a 1956 interview with an Austrian journalist, it was here that he also ‘got the idea for my fictitious autobiography of Julius Caesar.’ Although that idea was set aside for a time in favour of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) and The Woman of Andros (1930), it was by no means forgotten. In 1931, for example, he corresponded with the translator and classicist Sir Edward Howard Marsh about ‘a conversation-novel I want to do some day. Turning on the famous profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea – with Clodius, Clodia, Catullus, Caesar, Cicero.’ In 1935, it appears on his project list with a working title: ‘The Top of the World – (Caesar, Cicero, Catullus, Clodius, Clodia).’ A few paragraphs of this project exist in Wilder’s papers, written in a traditional narrative style, as well as in an entry in his journal from January 9, 1939:
Suppose I wrote ‘The Top of the World’ and prefaced with this note: ‘In this novel I have put into Julius Caesar’s mouth words gathered from many authors in many ages. The discourse to Catullus on nature is a paraphrase of Goethe’s Fragment of 1806. The arguments on the immortality of the soul in the conversation with Cicero are from Walter Savage Landor and he in turn was indebted for several of them to Plato and Cicero.’
The history of the pre-story of Ides in the 1930s also involves the murky realm of combined fact and conjecture. The facts include that in interviews or letters after the publication of Ides, Wilder always credited the focus of the book to probing conversations he had with Gertrude Stein in the late 1930s about the nature of greatness and leadership as these questions apparently applied to various professions, from Hollywood stars to political leaders. What they discussed may have played a role in fastening his interest on behaviour as practiced by leaders (and those around them) at ‘the top of the world,’ wrestling with outmoded belief systems and governmental practices, topics that could also be considered timely given the historical context of the 1930s.
Also in the realm of conjecture is the precise role that his talks with Stein played in his belief that the novel in its traditional narrative form (told by an omniscient author) was losing its vitality as a vehicle to speak to the modern mind. The future, or at least his future as he conceived it then, would be spent on drama – an art form that held the potential for all but eliminating the storyteller in favour of ‘pure action without comment.’ At least this was the view Wilder conveyed to a reporter from the New York Sun when he disembarked from an ocean liner in New York on his return from Europe in November 1935. It was, of course, a pledge he kept when he wrote two highly experimental plays, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). But it was also a pledge he kept when he wrote The Ides of March, a book composed of letters and other written fragments, each, by definition, ‘pure action without comment,’ and thus a present tense, stage-like, and intimate way to reach an audience of one person at a time. Wilder, moreover, did not even call Ides a novel. He called it a ‘fantasia’, for which the Merriam Webster definition is ‘a work (as a poem or play) in which the author’s fancy roves unrestricted.’
During overseas duty in World War II, Wilder served as a staff officer in the strategic planning section of Army Air Force Intelligence, based first in Tunisia and later, for nearly a year, in Caserta in southern Italy. His wartime duties did not include teaching, lecturing, or writing; instead, he was assigned duties in a vast enterprise that included the invasion plans for Sicily, where actions had direct, immediate, life-altering consequences.
During a week’s leave in Rome in September 1944, Wilder began to think deeply again about his Caesar story. It is not surprising that his thoughts returned to another warrior in another time of war. During a State Department – sponsored goodwill tour of four Latin American countries in 1941, Wilder had enjoyed an unforgettable literary encounter with the letters of the revolutionary soldier Simon Bolívar (1783 – 1830). Later, in a 1948 interview, Wilder noted that ‘Bolívar’s mind worked something like Caesar’s’ and observed that his disillusionment, too, ‘was without cynicism.’ Wilder reflected that these comparisons between Caesar and Bolívar ‘took more definite form’ in his conversations with Gertrude Stein about the ‘nature of creativity in men of action as opposed to men of reflection.’
Wilder deliberately chose never to write about the war directly, ‘but god forbid,’ he wrote in his private journal in this period ‘that nothing I write will ever fail to contain what I experienced there.’ And what he did experience – his own direct involvement for the first time with death and destruction – elevated with new urgency the familiar question he poses in all his work: What resources do we have to live by in the face of the worst that the world can do to us?
After the war Thornton Wilder plunged with wild abandon into the new existentialist thinking making its way across the Atlantic in journal articles, pamphlets, plays, and books; materials that he all but assaulted in bookstores and the periodical room of the Yale Library. He was hardly alone in this enthusiasm for the chief progenitors and subsequent architects of existentialist expression in the postwar period. But Wilder’s encounter was notable for the depth of its impact. It can be measured in part by his numerous notations in volumes of philosophical discourse and by his personal friendship with Walter Lowrie, the Kierkegaard scholar, and with Jean-Paul Sartre, for whom he translated Morts sans sépulture, produced off-Broadway in 1948 as The Victors.
Wilder’s letters in this period are full of excitement. For example, after meeting Sartre for the first time in February 1946, Wilder wrote his brother, Amos, a New Testament scholar, poet, and literary critic also deeply engaged in studying the intellectual currents flowing from Europe:
Dammit – had a 5-hour field day with Sartre. Tough and gay. Yes – we now Cher Maître one another. . . . Yes – liberty is ours precisely by virtue of our limitation and misère; the fact that we die and know we are to gives the transcendence; sin is the refusal of freedom and freedom is attained by engagement in the world, by the chaining ourselves with responsibility.
And to his friend Dr. Joe Still in a letter written a month later about Sartre’s existential ideas:
Baby, you’ll sit up. There is no God; there is the concession of the absurdity of man’s reason in a universe which can never be explained by reason; yet there is freedom of the will defended for the first time on non-religious grounds, and how.
His intellectual encounter with Kierkegaard and Sartre provided Wilder with the philosophical framework for The Ides of March. He was particularly drawn to Kierkegaard – and had been even before the war – because of that thinker’s moral and ethical world vie
On returning [from the war] I took up a theme which I had already partially developed before the war. I spent almost a year on it, only to find that my basic ideas about the human situation had undergone a drastic change. I was not able to define the change myself until the writings of Kierkegaard were called to my attention by my theologian brother. All my life I have passed from enthusiasm to enthusiasm and gratitude to gratitude. The Ides of March, my new novel, can be said to be written under the sign of Kierkegaard.
And what exactly was Thornton Wilder getting at in Ides? In a talk about the book’s publication reported in the Boston Herald in March 1948, he put it this way:
Modern man has taken such pride in the exploration of his mind that he has forgotten there must be some laws governing that exploration. Whether it comes under religion or ethics or mere judgment such laws must be found and respected. Otherwise the mind leads him straight to self-destruction. So my book is Caesar’s groping in the open seas of his unlimited power for the first principles which should guide him.