How to Be an American Writer, Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

There is another mode of American literary populism that is not so much about making the ordinary person larger than life, as in Walt Whitman’s poetry. This other strain of American populist is concerned with finding the pathos in small, everyday moments. Maybe my favorite U.S. populist in this vein is Thornton Wilder, author of the play Our Town, and the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, among other works. Wilder wrote many different kinds of books and plays, but here I’m just going to address his more naturalistic writing.

Thornton Wilder

In addition to Our Town, which beautifully celebrates meaningful moments in small-town American life, Wilder wrote a wonderful one-act play called The Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden. How much more mundane can you get than a family road trip from one city in New Jersey to another? The family members are traveling to visit the eldest daughter, who lives with her husband in Camden. En route, the family talks about the most banal topics—billboards they see with ads for spaghetti and cigarettes. They debate whether to make a pit stop at a gas station, whether the son is old enough to take a paper route. The mother is the loudest, most uneducated, obnoxious character. When the family finally gets to the home of the fully grown daughter, it’s the usual small talk—how much the kids have grown, how nice her house looks. Can life get any more boring?

Then suddenly, Wilder has the mother send the other family members off on various errands. The mom is now alone with her grown, married daughter.

You can see a video of part of a production of the play here. The scene I’m going to discuss starts right after the 2:40 second mark and goes till about 4:07.

The married daughter unexpectedly breaks down and starts sobbing, and the mother folds her in her arms, so we see that the daughter is still her child, even if she is fully grown and living on her own. The audience finds out the real purpose of the car trip—the mother has come to console her daughter on her recent miscarriage. The mom had missed her chance to do this when the daughter was in the hospital right after she lost the baby—a gruff doctor had sent the mother away. This moment when the mother finally gets to soothe her daughter in Wilder’s play is so surprising, so poignant. We realize that all those mundane details are just the wrapper, the outside of life, and inside are the incredibly moving moments that sustain us.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Be an American Writer, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer, Part 4: Populists and Walt Whitman

The next blog in my series on approaches that U.S. writers take to American society is about a literary stance that is in some ways the diametrical opposite of the expatriate, the subject of my last two posts. I call this type of writer the populist. The populist writes about moments in the American experience that convey a deeper truth. He or she is looking for the inspiration and epiphanies that exist even in seemingly mundane lives or moments. 

The poet Walt Whitman was a populist writer who believed that American life was the greatest possible inspiration for literature. In his preface to his book, Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote, “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Whitman adds, “…the genius of the United States is… always most in the common people.” 

Walt Whitman

Whitman took his own advice in choosing subjects for his writing, for instance in “I Hear America Singing”:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam...

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

I like to imagine Walt Whitman coming up with the idea for this poem by taking a walk in the morning around his neighborhood in Brooklyn, hearing two or three people singing as they work. From that day on, I can imagine that Whitman was alert to the poetic possibilities of people singing, and he collected bits and pieces of other moments to create this collage of different American laborer-singers. 

How beautiful that he starts his poem with, “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.” We don’t often think of the word “carols” outside of the phrase “Christmas carols,” but it does have a more universal meaning of “song” that Whitman draws on, even as he assigns the sacred connotations of “carol” to work songs, as opposed to religious hymns. Who is singing? The entire continent of America, as though it were a giant folk hero, a Paul Bunyan or John Henry, but with a song instead of a hammer or axe. I like the inverted syntax of “the varied carols I hear,” putting the subject and verb of that clause after the object of the verb, the carols. Beginning and ending the first line with the words “I hear” is a formal rhetorical device that Whitman transforms by using it nonchalantly and making it feel like the most natural, American speech.

Whitman is the essential populist, believing in the goodness and beauty of the common man or woman. He celebrated the dignity of enslaved Africans in his poem “I Sing the Body Electric”:

A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.
Gentlemen look on this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it…

Whitman’s brand of populism is to describe the workingman or woman as embued with dignity, even divinity, almost larger than life. In the next blog, I’ll talk about another form of American populism, one that celebrates the small moments in life.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 6: Populist Writers: The Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Part 9: Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry