Thornton Wilder met Sigmund Freud in the fall of 1935.  Freud had read Wilder’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination.  “’No seeker after God,’” writes Wilder’s biographer, “he threw it across the room.”  At a later meeting Freud apologized.  He objected to Wilder’s “making religion a theme for amusement.”  “Why should you treat of an American fanatic; that cannot be treated poetically.” 

As usual, Wilder was running against the literary wind; but more than holding his own.  He had already won a Pulitzer (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) and would win two more (Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth), despite the fact that his themes were Classical and Christian in a critical era that usually rewarded secular “realism” and wanted Depression stories that reflected class conflict and the hard times of the underclasses.

The irony of Freud’s response to Heaven’s My Destination is that Wilder would, forever after meeting Freud, call himself a “Freudian.”  He never read Marx—“had no interest”—but Freud struck both intellectual and emotional chords.  Wilder wrote in his journals that religion suffers assaults from new enemies every hundred years or so, and that psychoanalysis is the newest, and maybe the most dangerous one: “It attacks in two places: the sense of sin, and the concept of a personalized agent behind the universe who can bestow security.  Both concepts it traces back to the infantile life.”  He was never analyzed, but he deeply appreciated Freud’s poetic insights; he wondered why everyone hadn’t noticed Shakespeare’s obsession with dreams; and sin so often linked up with sex and “our murder”—the Crucifixion.  On a more personal level he often said that the Wilders were all “crazy as coots.”

Freud had told Wilder during their first meeting that “I come from an unbroken line of infidel Jews.”  He had, however, just recently revised his lifelong conviction that “religion is an illusion; now I say it has a truth—it has an historical truth.  Religion is the recapitulation and the solution of the problems of one’s first four years that have been covered over by an amnesia.”  Freud’s epiphany tempted Wilder, whose early life with an unbending, dogmatic, missionary-spirited Calvinist father and an adoring, sensitive, literary mother—complicated by his birth as the twin who survived, had to be covered over by something-or-other.

Part of this, Thornton Wilder had already worked out in his Depression novel, Heaven’s My Destination.  It is his funniest novel (and maybe his best), and Freud was right: It is about an American fanatic.  The story line is one year in the life of George Brush, a traveling salesman (in school books) whose territory is pretty much American picaresque—Tennessee and Kentucky, Missouri and Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.  He travels from adventure to adventure by rail, stopping regularly only at Queenie’s boarding house in Kansas City (the exact middle of the nation, it should be noted), where he shares a dilapidated flat with Louie, Herb, Morrie and Bat.  “Brush’s friendship with these tenants reposed upon a complicated treaty.  Brush promised not to harangue them, unless invited, on religion, temperance, chastity, and tobacco; and they in  turn promised to remain within reasonable limits of decency in conversation and in the invention of practical jokes.  The cement of this precarious friendship lay in the fact that Brush carried a wonderful second tenor and that the practice of singing in parts constituted their chief pleasure.”  It reminds you of a depressed fraternity house:  Reasonably good-natured young men, instead of sometimes going to class go to increasingly marginal jobs (which, except for George, they lose) and otherwise occupy themselves with Animal House pleasures. Nobody has a home.

George wants one.  “Brush no longer regarded the farmhouse in Michigan as his home; he had no home,” and his parents never appear. His chief ambition in his twenty-fourth year is to Found an American Home.  The object of his ambition is the proverbial farmer’s daughter whom George the traveling salesman “ruins” one night in the barn of a farm he never again is able to find.  “You know what I think is the greatest thing in the world,”  says George. “It’s when a man, I mean an American, sits down to dinner with his wife and six children around him.  Do you know what I mean?”  Except that he later locates Roberta in a Chinese restaurant, one is tempted to regard the whole episode as a Freudian dream, as pseudo-real as the abstraction he calls an American Home.

George’s other serious preoccupation (that is, literally before his job) is to find a way to live out his religion.  He’s a Baptist, he says, converted in his sophomore year at Shiloh Baptist College (“a very good college”) in Walling, South Dakota, where he excelled at sports, music and in the classroom—“I got all A’s.”  He can’t figure out why his classmates never elected him to one of the “literary societies,” and is greatly disappointed that one of his teachers blew up one day and said to him, “You’ve got a closed mind, Brush, an obstinate, closed mind. It’s not worth wasting time on you.”  George insists that, deep down, “I’m the happiest man I’ve ever met,” but admits that most people he meets, especially on trains, depress him, and that “people are always getting mad at me and…even disgusted.”  He thinks it’s because his ideas aren’t the same as everybody else’s.

Eight different characters call him “crazy,” or “nuts,” including the one woman who admits she would marry him in a minute, if only he would ask.  Any number of scenes—the novel is like a play in that it develops in a series of beautifully connected scenes rather than in a plot—illustrate why so many people reacted this way, but here is George “witnessing” to a jaded, whiskey and smoke besotted veteran traveling salesman on a train:

   “Brother, can I talk to you about the most important thing in life?”

  The man slowly stretched out his full lazy length on the reversed seat before him and drew his hand astutely down his long yellow face. “If it’s insurance, I got too much,” he said. “if it’s oil wells, I don’t touch‘em, and if it’s religion, I’m saved.”

   Brush had an answer even for this. He had taken a course in college entitled “How to approach strangers on the subject of Salvation”—two and a half credits—generally followed the next semester by “Arguments in Sacred Debate”—one and a half credits.  This course had listed the openings in such an encounter as this and the probable responses.  One of the responses was this, that the stranger declared himself already saved.  This statement might be either 1) true, or 2) untrue.  In either case the evangelist”s next move was to say, with Brush:

   “That’s fine. There is no greater pleasure than to talk over the big things with a believer.”

   “I’m saved,” continued the other, “from making a goddam fool of myself in public places.  I’m saved, you little peahen, from putting my head into other people’s business.  So shut your damn face and get out of here, or I’ll rip your tongue out of your throat.”

George is indeed a meddler.  “I’ve drawn up a few rules for girls,” he says to the unfortunate Mississippi Corey (whose father tries to sell her to George for $35,000!), and proceeds to reduce her to tears.  “You might get to be a really nice girl if you worked on these rules,” he says.  They are what one would expect: Don’t laugh out loud, drink or smoke, make “unnecessary movements” with hands or eyes, or believe in evolution.  At the same time George idealizes his farmer’s daughter from the haymow, and is completely unaware that the ladies whose “home” his boarding house friends take him to for Sunday dinner are whores. 

His meddling lands him in jail three times—first for riding in a Jim Crow car in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (“I believe in the equality of races.”); second, for causing a bank run in Armina (Arminian?) Oklahoma when he withdraws his money and tries to refuse the interest it has earned (“savings banks are practically immoral”).  The third time involves two offenses in Ozarksville, Missouri: for trying to help a little girl and being accused by her parents of attempting to kidnap her (George has taken a vow of silence and exchanges notes with the little girl); and for letting a robber go with the money from a poor old lady’s store to test out his belief in Gandhi’s concept of ahimsa.  The trial for his Ozark offenses is one of the funniest moments in American literature.  All his incarcerations are “misunderstandings,” but it’s easy to believe that this will keep happening to George, and that most people will think he’s “crazy.”

But George is not only a meddler.  His textbook company sends him to Lake Morgan Chautauqua and Recreation camp, Morganville, Oklahoma, to meet with Judge Corey (the unfortunate Mississippi Corey’s father), who pretty much controls textbook selection in the Oklahoma legislature.  George bunks with Dick Roberts, a depressed businessman whose wife has brought the family to Camp Morgan to cheer him up.  Roberts has terrible nightmares and walks in his sleep; his wife tells George that “Sometimes it seems like he thinks the depression’s his own fault.  You know, he’d kill himself for the insurance.  I know he would.”   When Roberts wakes in the middle of the night and wants to wander off, George says, “I must go wherever you go.”  Another hilarious scene follows, Brush “borrowing” and wrecking a car in a keystone kops chase, breaking up Judge Corey’s poker game to get help.  “Is he nuts?” the Judge asks when George tells him they “gotta save a man from killing himself.”  “No,” says Brush, “It’s…business, partly. It’s the depression.”  The Judge cries, “now don’t you go mentioning the depression. That’s what causes all this.  Don’t you say that word again.”  George finds Roberts and sticks to him like a leech.  He forces the poor man to listen to him—“you’re not going to think any more about these things.”  He makes a fire: “If you can’t sleep, never mind; just look up through the trees.  I shouldn’t have let you tramp around with your head full of thoughts like that.”   George sings to Roberts all night, “almost everything he knew.”  In the morning Roberts is “pale and embarrassed. They returned to the camp in silence and went to bed in the tent.”

Wilder always said that Heaven’s My Destination is a depression novel.  “You’ll see,” he wrote to a friend, “all about the Depression.  Funny, vulgar, heartbreaking—and a bit sociohistorical document.”  He later said that it is “in every paragraph a Depression novel,” and thought it was the best thing he had ever written: “I never before liked any of my books.  They embarrassed me.”  Thornton’s biographer says that a lady wrote to him that she loved the novel but hated George Brush.  He wrote back, “Thank you, but the book is autobiographical.”  Maybe a snippy response, but also quite true.  George Brush is Thornton the meddler, Thornton Wilder the Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress. He said that “George Brush is a sort of Short History of the American Mind raised by exaggeration into humor: Idealistic, but unclear; really religious, but badly educated in religion. A subtitle also might be: How instinctive goodness learns to express itself in a contrary world.”

George is Thornton in many ways.  They both rush around, landing in places where they can’t stay, trying to progress but not getting very far with it.  George says, “In my opinion the world’s getting better and better,” but he’s also impatient with God: “why’s he so slow in changing the world?”  A timeline of Wilder’s life looks like George Brush’s train schedule, except that Thornton might be in Rome, Berlin, Barcelona, London, New York, Chicago, Bejing, Paris while George goes from Armina to Ozarksville; but they both are on the road.  Trying to be good.

One of Wilder’s more perceptive critics says that his books are in the “Puritan Narrative Tradition” and that Heaven’s My Destination is the American Pilgrim’s Progress.  There’s much truth to this.  Heaven’s My Destination is an allegory (although Wilder professed to dislike allegories) and George Brush is a sort of Christian trying to make it to the Celestial City.  Many readers in the 1930s thought that George was Don Quixote tilting against American windmills, and there is some truth in that, too, especially in the way that George’s “friends” set him up with cruel practical jokes.  Wilder says that he had been teaching Cervantes at the University of Chicago when he started to write about George, but we should probably be skeptical about almost everything Wilder says about his own writing.  He draws from many sources.  Even the doggerel that introduces George Brush is deceptive:

George Brush is my name;

America’s my nation;

Ludington’s my dwelling place

And Heaven’s my destination

(Doggerel verse which children of the Middle West were accustomed to

write in their schoolbooks.)

In fact, Wilder borrowed the verse from James Joyce:

Stephen Dedalus is my name.

Ireland is my nation.

Clongowes is my dwellingplace

And heaven my expectation.

Thornton borrowed joyfully, and he tended to talk too much about what he wrote.  He might have been more mysterious, like other honored writers of his time like Robert Frost, America’s foxy grampa, Willa Cather, or even Booth Tarkington.  They had in common a reluctance to submit to the cultural norms of their generation and a strong sense that we learn best about serious things like the Depression from Classical and Christian sources, not from ideology.

But George is certainly a pilgrim, and he spends a lot of time in the slough of despond.  “Maybe,” he says at one low point, “I can’t settle down and found an American home.  Sometimes I think I may get so discouraged that I may fall sick—or worse. Because that’s all sickness is—is discouragement.”  His friend Herb dies of discouragement—of depression—and gives George his daughter to raise.  The little girl becomes George’s connection to his American Home, and ironically to his Great Depression.  Roberta agrees to marry him because of the girl, but for all his energy and conviction, George cannot make it work.  When Roberta’s sister Lottie tells him that he has to give it up, George cries, “You want me to get a divorce like all those people in the newspapers, and so go on smoking and…giggling and drinking to the cemetery.  That’s what you want.  You want us to lead lives like…senseless, silly people that have no ideas and no religion and no thoughts about the human race.”  Lottie makes him face things squarely for once in his life, but George doesn’t give up easily: “Isn’t the principle of the thing more important than the people that live under the principle?”  Lottie replies, “Nobody’s strong enough to live up to the rules.”

George’s desire to “live up to the rules” goes to the heart of Wilder’s story.  Was he telling the truth when he said that the novel was autobiographical?  His biographer says that Wilder had decided by the time he went to Oberlin College that “religion is the emanation from an extinct star.”  He wrote in his journal that “An American is a man who has outgrown his father.”  His attitude about prayer is that it “has always been the effort to make Absolute Wisdom change its mind.”  George Brush’s lack of progress on his pilgrimage is a reflection of Wilder’s insight into why American men could not deal with their own depression, or with the Great Depression.  Wilder said that he deduced from Ralph Waldo Emerson that every American “must be the founder of a new religion,” and “is an autodidact and a bad one, i.e., is badly educated.”

George Brush is all of the above, but wants to be good.  Although he has the outward trappings of an evangelical Christian, he never prays, never mentions the name of Jesus (which, interestingly, John Bunyan rarely does in Pilgrim’s Progress), gets out-quoted on the Bible from a man who is even nuttier than George, resorts to a bad imitation of Ghandi when he wants to act in a Christian manner, and cannot defend himself when he is confronted with the inevitable Satan character, George Burkin.  Brush has no home, no church, no community; like so many Americans of the 1930s, he feels alone.  It’s depressing to want to be good and to not know how to go about it.  Wilder quotes his own character in the prologue:  “Of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.”

Burkin, like so many satanic characters in great literature, is the most interesting character in the book.  George Brush meets him in jail in Ozarksville: “My name is George M. Brush. I come from Michigan and I sell textbooks for Caulkins and Company.

Any birth marks?

What?

The man lay down again.  My name is Zoroaster Eels.  I lie on benches for a living.”  Burkin fesses up to his real name in time, and describes himself as the greatest artist in America, a motion-picture director at present unemployed.  He is in jail for being a peeping Tom, having lurked around a Middle Class Home looking for material on what he knows is the sordid life of most respectable Americans.  After George tells him his life story, Burkin says, “I’ve been hunting for some one like you for a long time.  To think I had to go to jail to find you.”  He tells George, “Do you know what you are?  You’re the perfectly logical man.”  And George, “for delight, could scarcely believe his ears. I? I’m logical?”  The flatterer knows his victim.

George opens up to Burkin.  He tells him how he was converted in his sophomore year at Shiloh Baptist College, by a girl evangelist who, it turns out, got her inspiration from an older woman sticking needles into her arms.  Burkin says, “So your big ideas about life were fed to you by a sixteen-year-old girl while she was hopped up with drugs?”  George still thinks he is logical: “Nothing that you could say would change my mind.”  But Burkin asks for a half hour without interruption.  “Can’t you see that what you call religion is just the shiverings of the cowardly?”  He tells George about the pretensions and absurdity of “man’s egotistic terror before extinction.”  George yells at him, “can’t you see that you don’t know anything about religion until you start to live it?”  George runs away, because although he sees the face of evil he can’t argue with it.  He’s too logical.

George gets sick.  He ends up in a Dallas hospital, dying from depression:  “One day he arose to discover, quite simply, that he had lost his faith.”  It was like losing his arms and legs, and by the time he got to the hospital “Brush had a little of everything.  There was a touch of amoebic dysentery and a suggestion of sinus; there was something of rheumatism and more than a hint of jaundice. His respiratory organs weren’t right, a kind of asthma, and his heart had a murmur.  The whole machine had run down and he grew worse daily.”  He rejects the words of comfort from a foolish Methodist minister who tries to pray with him.  “I made the mistake,” George says, “all my life of thinking that you could get better and better until you were perfect.”  He is about to die, and wants to.

Then, on a good Friday, he gets a present.  It’s “an ordinary silver-plated spoon,” willed to him by Father  Pasziewski, Queenie’s priest from Kansas City, whom George had never met but knew from Queenie’s reports over the year had been praying for him.  All George knew about Father P was what Queenie told him:  He was a good man who tried to live out his religion and somehow every project he worked up to make people better failed.  What Queenie told him about George caused him to pray every day.  George perks up.  This unbought gift of grace, this sacramental and clearly Catholic gesture, sends him back on the road, probably to find himself back in trouble quite often—through “misunderstandings,” of course.  As George had said to one of his nurses, “if you must know, I’m not crazy.  It’s the world that’s crazy.  Everybody’s crazy, except me; that’s what’s the matter.  The whole world’s nuts.”

Wilder’s friend Gertrude Stein thought that Heanven’s My Destination was perhaps the most American novel ever written.  Edmund Wilson liked it better than anything Wilder wrote.  It was translated into Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Punjabi and Arabic.  Just as postwar Germans understood that Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth was a war story, people around the world seemed to understand that Heaven’s My Destination was one of the best of all depression stories.

Thornton Wilder was certainly not a conventional Christian.  He did understand, however, that the world is not driven by economic forces.  Even as Freud admitted near the end of his life that religion has at least “an historical truth,” Wilder tried to teach us that the malaise that every so often interrupts our happiness is spiritual at its source.

_____

John Willson is a somewhat retired professor of history (now emeritus), Hillsdale College, Michigan.  Prior to his arrival in Hillsdale in 1975, Willson taught at St. Louis University.  Students at Hillsdale College named him “Professor of the Year” three times, and an administrative-faculty committee awarded him with the Daugherty Award for Teaching Excellence.  The Detroit Free-Press named him one of “Four Terrific Teachers” in Michigan.  During his full-time teaching years at Hillsdale, Willson was named “Professor of the Year” three times by students, won the Daugherty Award for Teaching Excellence, and was named one of "Four Terrific Teachers" in Michigan by the Detroit Free Press in 1986.  He and his wife, Helen, have three daughters, ten grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.