Theophilus North Original NY Times Book Review

By Granville Hicks for the NY Times Book Review

Oct. 21, 1973

Of the eight eminent writers of the twenties and thirties about whom Malcolm Cowley writes in “A Second Flowering,” only one is still alive, Thornton Wilder. Wilder survives not merely as a man but also as a writer. In 1962, when he was 65, he retired to the Arizona, desert to meditate upon a novel, which became “The Eighth Day” (1967) and won a National Book Award. Now, in his 77th year, he has another book, “Theophilus North,” which might conceivably equal the popularity of his second book and first best seller, now half a century old, “The.Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

A new departure in an old‐fashioned way

From the beginning each of Wilder's books has been a‐ new departure. “The Eighth Day,” a combination of mystery story and family chronicle, differed from anything he had previously written in tone, narrative method and setting. “Theophilus North” takes off in an even more surprising direction. Although it is fair enough, as such things go, ‐ for the publisher to call it a novel, a term more and more loosely used, it is a novel made up of closely related short stories. So far as I can remember, Wilder has published no short stories in the past, though many short plays, and so once more we find him at work in a medium that is new to him. The stories, moreover, as stories, are adroit, amusing and altogether successful in an oldfashioned way.

The principal unifying factor is Theophilus North, who is both narrator and hero. Like T. Wilder, T. North was born in Wisconsin in 1897, the son of an influential newspaper editor, and received part of his education in China, his father being Consul General in Hong Kong and Shanghai. He spent a year during World War I in the Coast Artillery and returned to Yale to get his A.B. in 1920. He—the pronoun still refers to either T. Wilder or T. North—taught for some years at a private school in New Jersey and took his M.A. at Princeton. But outward characteristics of this order often; seem to play a small part in Wildees work, and it may be that the resemblances here are part of some game with which Wilder is amusing himself. At any rate it is clear that the novel, or whatever you choose to call it, is not autobiographical in any important way. Whether in some subtler sense North stands for Wilder is a harder question to dispose of.

Wilder's plan for a collection of closely related stories requires an. approximate unity of time and place, and it is further necessary that North, in order to perform his dual role, must be able to observe and participate in a variety of actions on several social levels. Wilder” solves the problems with an ingenuity that is concealed by his offhand manner. Having settled by chance in Newport, Rhode Island, in the summer of 1926, after giving up his job in the New Jersey prep school, North supports himself by teaching tennis to boys and girls and by reading in any of several languages to people who need his services. Soon he knows the city well, and comes to believe that in Newport, as in Schliemann's Troy, there are nine cities. He sees most frequently the inhabitants of the sixth city, the very rich, and those of the seventh, their servants, and strongly prefers the latter to the former. In general, though he makes something of the nine cities, sociohistorical generalizations are not Theophilus's primary interests, nor are they Wilder's.

There are a dozen incidents in which Theophilus proves helpful to inhabitants of Newport. His specialty is saving marriages and smoothing the course of true love, but he also practices his own brand of exorcism on a haunted house, thwarts the avaricious heirs of a gifted old man, saves a young man from being the victim of a talent for what North calls “calligraphic mimicry,” helps a legless boy live up to his potentialities and eases the passing of the venerable Tante Liselotte. Although at the outset Theophilus announces his desire to keep to himself and not be involved in the life of Newport, he turns out to be a habitual Good Samaritan, or perhaps one might compare him to an uncommonly conscientious and imaginative Boy Scout.

Sometimes Theophilus does his good deed by means of a trick that might have been employed by O. Henry, but the trick always turns out to have deeper implications than 0. Henry would have given it. In “Diana Bell,” for instance, Theophilus prevents Diana from eloping by giving her and her lover opportunity to bore one another. Wilder tells the story with humor and gusto, but Theophilus is concerned with more than the snobbish wishes of Diana's parents, and he has something to say about incompatibility. In the same way a little common sense is enough to dispose of the neurotic symptoms of the aging but by no means moribund Dr, Bosworth; a large part of his trouble, however, is what Theophilus calls “the death watch,” the vigilance of heirs to speed a rich relative on his path to the grave, and that is harder to deal with. In a couple of stories literature plays an important part in North's therapy, and in others he is—or at any rate appears to his neighbors to be—a faith healer. (Like Hawthorne, Wilder makes ambiguous use of the supernatural.)

Wilder's tone remains consistently lively, is often comic, and the book is extraordinarily entertaining. There are those, I have no doubt, who will call it corny, and sometimes it comes recklessly close to sentimentality — as “Our Town” does, or, for that matter, “The Skin of Our Teeth” and “The Matchmaker.” (Theophilus sometimes makes me think of Dolly Levi.) Occasionally, I admit, I felt that a story might have been written for some woman's magazine, perhaps one that flourished about 1826. But in spite of an excess of sweetness now and then and some obvious manipulation for the sake of happy endings, the stories hold the reader in a firm grip.

It might be enough to say that the book is fun to read and let the matter rest there, but Wilder's works as a rule have multiple meanings, and have a persistent sense that these stories are saying something, though not in a loud voice. According to Cowley, Wilder ascribes himself as “fundamentally a happy person.” Cowley continues: “He likes to find the goodness or greatness in people and books. He is optimistic by instinct, in the fashion of an older America.” At the same time there is in his makeup a tough, streak of pessimism. “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” was widely believed to carry a message of consolation and hope, which is probably why it sold so well, but in the end of Brother Juniper's examination of the lives of the victims of the bridge's fall he can conclude only that there was “perhaps an intention.”

In “The Eighth Day,” when Dr. Gillies is asked to speak to the inhabitants of Coaltown on Dec. 31, 1899, the eve of a new century, he describes to them in flamboyant terms the wonderful age that is coming. But Wilder breaks in to inform the reader: “Dr. Gillies was lying for all he was. worth. He had no doubt that the coming century would be too direful to contemplate—that is to say, like all the other centuries.” He lies because of the young men in the audience: “It is the duty of old men to lie to the young. Let these encounter their. own disillusions. We strengthen our Souls, when young, on hope; the strength we acquire enables us later to endure despair as a Roman should.”

If Wilder is an optimist; his opportunism operates only in the short run, for his view of man's fate is by no means cheerful. But he does see that there are happy passages along life's way, and he seems to believe that we should make the most of them, not merely in the sense of seizing the day but also as experiences to be taken into account in our judgment of the human condition.

What Theophilus North learns in Newport is that most people could be happier than they are, and experimentation teaches him that sometimes he can improve their lot. His first name proclaims that he is a lover of God, but we see him as one who loves his fellow man which—as Leigh Hunt observed —may be the same thing. As for the second name, it may be a reminder of the cold wind of skepticism. It is like Wilder that he should celebrate 50 years of distinguished writing by producing a book that is gayer in spirit than anything he had previously written, that generously displays his varied talents and that asks more questions than it answers.

It might be argued that Theophilus is what some critics would call a Jesus‐figure. He heals the sick after his own fashion, and his deeds attract a large following. Members of the establishment denounce him for stirring up the people. But I don't want to push this as far as it might be pushed. It is more useful to suggest that Theophilus in various complicated ways fulfilled his early ambition to be a saint. He lists saintliness first among the nine ambitions that he held at one time or another in his youth. Eventually he abandoned this ambition as beyond him, but all his ambitions influenced his life. “The past and the future are always present within us.”