Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait, by Richard H. Goldstone

PURITANISM WITH A PRETTY FACE

The “common reader,” approaching a biography of a literary figure, must be excused some qualms. Time was when such were palatably readable. But the impressionist tradition of George Saintsbury or Edmund Gosse, or even Lytton Strachey, seems today subjective and superficial, so that the trend has been to more and more ponderous multivolume biographies—ofDickens, Thackeray, Scott, James—in which the author’s every work is summarized in relentless detail, and which conclude with an anthology of other people’s opinions. (The beauty of Richard Ell-mann’s biography of Joyce is that Joyce did not write all that much and experienced a good deal: his final flight from German-occupied France, muzzling a mad daughter, forms the stuff of a genuine thriller.) Given that the genteel tradition was facile, this tiptoeing around the great resulted in at least one general reader wanting to grab the biographer by the throat and tell him: Look, I know how to read. By comparison, then, with the Forschung-biography, Richard Goldstone’s “intimate portrait” of Thornton Wilder (who, ever the soul of courtesy, died just after publication day) is all light and grace.

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Geoffrey Wagner

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PURITANISM WITH A PRETTY FACE

The “common reader,” approaching a biography of a literary figure, must be excused some qualms. Time was when such were palatably readable. But the impressionist tradition of George Saintsbury or Edmund Gosse, or even Lytton Strachey, seems today subjective and superficial, so that the trend has been to more and more ponderous multivolume biographies—ofDickens, Thackeray, Scott, James—in which the author’s every work is summarized in relentless detail, and which conclude with an anthology of other people’s opinions. (The beauty of Richard Ell-mann’s biography of Joyce is that Joyce did not write all that much and experienced a good deal: his final flight from German-occupied France, muzzling a mad daughter, forms the stuff of a genuine thriller.) Given that the genteel tradition was facile, this tiptoeing around the great resulted in at least one general reader wanting to grab the biographer by the throat and tell him: Look, I know how to read. By comparison, then, with the Forschung-biography, Richard Goldstone’s “intimate portrait” of Thornton Wilder (who, ever the soul of courtesy, died just after publication day) is all light and grace.