I’m a fan of Thornton Wilder for some reason. I adore The Skin of Our Teeth, despite how totally dated it feels. I can stand Our Town, despite its iconage. And I really like The Ides of March (New York: Signet 1963).
It’s a very odd book. It’s set in ancient Rome, and more or less deals with the end of Julius Caesar’s reign. It’s deliberately ahistorical; one of the three major plot strands is lifted from its proper time to make the story more interesting (much as Tim Robbins does with Cradle Will Rock). He invents characters for his characters, if you know what I mean; Catullus, Clodia Pulcher, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar are invented for his own purposes, and their resemblance to the historical record is useful rather than constraining.
They are memorable characters, characters you are glad to have spied on (it’s epistolary), without actually being people. They are ideas of people. When they interact, it’s the interaction of ideas of people, ideas of love, ideas of hate, ideas of beauty, ideas of ambition, ideas of life.
A couple of points spring to mind. Both in Ides and in Skin, there is an evil character who blames his or her viciousness on childhood abuse. In both, it’s not clear whether they are telling the truth about that abuse. It’s more complicated than that, of course... In Skin, it’s the character of the actor playing the Cain character who explains his attacks on the character of the actor playing the Adam character by accusing his father of abuse; even if this disputed event occurred it doesn’t explain Cain’s actions, only those of the man playing him. In Ides, it’s Clodia, beautiful, vicious, and witty, who explains her nihilism in terms of her childhood sexual abuse. No-one responds to her; I can’t tell if they simply ignore what is outside their comprehension, if they disbelieve her, or if they are, finally, simply tired of talking about it. I’m curious how people read it at the time; in the forties, such a plot device was less hackneyed than it is now.
Another thing I was thinking about is how clever the structure of the book is. There’s a lot to talk about: the four-part structure, each going over the same period of time (well, each part starts earlier and ends later than the previous) but focusing on different themes, bringing different complexion to the events in it. The thing I really noticed this time is how the act of reading other people’s letters is slowly brought forward. In any epistolary novel, there’s an element of spying, of illicit discovery; in this one, that element is highlighted by the characters’ use of spies and informants to read each other’s mail, and their subsequent caution in expressing their meaning in writing.
I could go on, in a rambling way, about the things I admire about this bizarre and compelling book. But there are limits.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.