Synopses & Reviews
Instructor s Guide Note To Teachers
"Theophilus North, published in 1973, was the last major work of Thornton Wilder (a number of one-act plays have been published posthumously). He said himself, Not bad at seventy-five, wot? The book is not autobiographical, although the character of Theophilus shares many similarities with Wilder. To write it he returned to episodes from his young manhood for material, serving in the Coast Guard in Newport, Rhode Island, graduating from Yale University, teaching at the prestigious Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. Theophilus North comes to Newport with all of these experiences and proceeds to set to rights the lives of the people of Newport. But the book is shaped by a lifetime of learning and writing, and the point of view of the young North is always balanced against the wisdom of the narrator who looks back affectionately on the brash confidence of his alter ego.
Despite its lengthy stay on the best-seller list, "Theophilus North has not much in common with major works by American authors published in the 1970s, many of which reflect the social divisions of the Viet Nam war and the radicalization of some elements in American society. For example, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for 1972 was won by Wallace Stegner s outstanding novel "Angle of Repose, which, like "Theophilus North, involves a kind of historical investigation. But in Stegner s novel the narrator, an amputee whose wife has deserted him, is researching the deeply flawed marriage of his grandparents. A parallel theme to the emotional destruction is the ecological damage done to the American west by the pioneers. Both the past and the present aregrim, although not hopeless, stories of the tragic effects of American ambition and idealism. Wilder and Stegner s lives and creative careers overlap significantly (Stegner, 1909-1993, Wilder 1897-1975) but their novels could not be more different. Despite North s clear-eyed analysis of the emotional and intellectual blindness that traps so many of his students and acquaintances in Newport, particularly among the wealthy, the book s tone is comical and North (and Wilder) judge human weakness tolerantly. But Wilder had differed from other American writers of comparable stature all his life.
Wilder said in his later life, I guess I was the only one of my generation of writers who did not go to Paris. In other words, while the avant-garde of American fiction, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Djuna Barnes, among many others, were seeking new forms of experience and art in the cafes and bars of Paris, Wilder spent a year in Rome at the American Academy studying archeology. This is not to say that Wilder was uninfluenced by the artistic movements that came to be known as modernism; in the 1930s he became close friends with Gertrude Stein, one of the leading intellectual lights of the expatriates in Paris, and Wilder s drama in particular is among the most formally daring in the American repertory. The year in Rome had a profound effect on Wilder nonetheless. North mentions early in the novel his admiration for Heinrich Schliemann, whose excavations of Troy demonstrated the historic existence of Homer s fabled city. Almost as important as Schliemann s discovery was his life story. He was a poor boywho became a successful businessman and then an amateur archeologist purely because of his childhood love for the Iliad. Hence anyone could study the past and learn its lessons. Wilder s own brief participation in archeological digs helped create Wilder s serene view of the passage of time and mortality. Subsequently the importance of each life remained perpetually in relief against the background of history. History itself was complex, with different historical epochs overlying each other. Individuals had to be understood through historical epochs, but human nature remained a constant, however differently expressed through the political structures or fashions of a particular time. And every man could be his own archeologist. Theophilus repeatedly recurs to his own archeological schema for Newport, the nine cities of Newport. Some exist simultaneously and some are historical, but in all of them individuals express (or expressed) themselves within the social sturctures available while suffering and enjoying like humans at every other time.
"Theophilus North is also a compliment and tribute to its dedicatee, Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977). Hutchins was a friend of Wilder at Oberlin College and Yale. He served in the U. S. Army Ambulance Corps in Italy and was decorated for bravery under fire. He received his law degree from Yale in 1925 and was named dean of the Yale Law School in 1928. Not yet thirty, he became president of the University of Chicago in 1929, where, in 1930, he was joined by Wilder who taught in the English department for six years. Hutchins was a man of immense energy and self-confidence (and exceptionally charming and good-looking). Hebrought to Chicago his friend Mortimer Adler and with him established a great books program over the objections of many of the faculty.
Hutchins believed that education should be both interdisciplinary and grounded in the major works of western philosophy. First, too narrow a focus on a particular field would make it difficult for a student to see how academic disciplines informed each other. A lawyer or a philosopher could learn from a sociologist or a historian and vice versa. Also, narrow specializations made narrow minds. All students should be deeply grounded in the most important texts of western civilization both to understand themselves through the millennia-long discussion of what constituted a good life or a life worth living and to be able to participate effectively and wisely in American democracy. Hutchins would go on to be a the editor of the "Encylopaedia Britannica and to stand courageously for academic freedom during the McCarthy era of the 1950s.
Hutchins ideas are recognizable throughout "Theophilus North. North himself is intellectually omnivorous: he studies everything that falls in his way: architecture, music, philosophy, and people of many social levels. He moves easily in the world of a yellow journalist or a distinguished diplomat, can converse with an autodidact or European aristocrat. He mentions that among his ambitions he had wanted to be a picaro (el pí caro), the scamp of European literature whose archetype is Odysseus, part hero and part con man. His wide interests make it impossible for others to typecast him into a particular role, whether insurance investigator, Yale man, or servant. Nevertheless, certaincentral authors of the Western Canon hang above North s experiences, helping him and others to make sense of their own lives: Dante, Swift, Cervantes, Goethe and Berkeley are only a few of the many authors mentioned in the book. At the same time North s sympathy with American authors such as Longfellow and Thoreau firmly ground him in the American experience.
And finally "Theophilus North is a kunstleroman, a novel about the development of an artist. North helps those he can at least as much for the new experiences as for any moral reason. Then he writes characters of the people he has met, and the details of the escapade in his journal. Thus he develops the tools of a writer: acute perceptions, a capacious memory, and the ability to work hard at his writing. At the end of the novel the car mechanic who has read the work that North has left carelessly in his old jalopy
Synopsis
Marking the thirtieth anniversary of
Theophilus North, this beautiful new edition features Wilder's unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.
The last of Wilder's works published during his lifetime, this novel is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventure of his twin brother who died at birth. Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade. Soon the young man finds himself playing the roles of tutor, spy, confidant, lover, friend, and enemy as he becomes entangled in the intrigues of both upstairs and downstairs in a glittering society dominated by leisure.
Narrated by the elderly North from a distance of fifty years, Theophilus North is a fascinating commentary on youth and education from the vantage point of age, and deftly displays Wilder's trademark wit juxtaposed with his lively and timeless ruminations on what really matters about life, love, and work at the end of the day—even after a visit to Newport.
Synopsis
Marking the thirtieth anniversary of Theophilus North, this beautiful new edition features Wilder's unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.
The last of Wilder's works published during his lifetime, this novel is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventure of his twin brother who died at birth. Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade. Soon the young man finds himself playing the roles of tutor, spy, confidant, lover, friend, and enemy as he becomes entangled in the intrigues of both upstairs and downstairs in a glittering society dominated by leisure.
Narrated by the elderly North from a distance of fifty years, Theophilus North is a fascinating commentary on youth and education from the vantage point of age, and deftly displays Wilder's trademark wit juxtaposed with his lively and timeless ruminations on what really matters about life, love, and work at the end of the day -- even after a visit to Newport.
About the Author
Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was an accomplished novelist and playwright whose works, exploring the connection between the commonplace and cosmic dimensions of human experience, continue to be read and produced around the world. His Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of seven novels, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, as did two of his four full-length dramas, Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943). Wilder's The Matchmaker was adapted as the musical Hello, Dolly!. He also enjoyed enormous success with many other forms of the written and spoken word, among them teaching, acting, the opera, and films. (His screenplay for Hitchcock's Shadow of Doubt [1943] remains a classic psycho-thriller to this day.) Wilder's many honors include the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the National Book Committee's Medal for Literature.