NYT Praises Thornton Wilder Biography for Its "Sexlessness"

Thornton Niven Wilder was gay. He enjoyed an affair with Sam Steward while writing Our Town. He was great friends with Gertrude and Alice in Paris when their salon was dominated by their "seconde famille" of gay men, including Carl Van Vechten, who photographed him at left. One link that gave deeper meaning and context to his numerous other friendships with people like Willa Cather and Montgomery Clift was their unvoiced common queerness. 

So it's a sour surprise to read that Penelope Niven's 832-page biography released this week from Harper apparently erases Wilder's private life just because he was reticent in his own time. The sourness turns rancid upon seeing the NYT praise a biographer for whitewashing an enormous, relevant aspect of her subject's life.

Charles Isherwood writes, "Among the refreshing aspects of Penelope Niven’s new biography, Thornton Wilder: A Life, is its startling sexlessness, the paucity of the kind of dish that sometimes has seemed to drive the market in literary biography in recent decades. Ms. Niven, the author of books about Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen, has dug deeply into the copiously documented life of her subject, drawing on access to substantial troves of previously undisclosed family papers. And yet, setting aside the dubious testimony of a single man who claims to have gone to bed with Wilder, Thornton Wilder: A Life tells of a life lived without the sexual relationships and romantic attachments that we sometimes falsely assume to be the most momentous passages in an artist’s — or anyone’s — life."

This is a preposterous leap of illogic for a critic to make. Sex need not be the "most momentous passage" to be worthy of inclusion in a lengthy examination of his life.

Possibly Isherwood is misrepresenting the book. Edward Albee calls it "a splendid and long-needed work."

Comments

[Elliott Mackle]

Yeah, reading the piece, I at first assumed it was by their reliably homophobic critic Michiko Kakutani.

[J.P.]

The "sexlessness" will insure I won't read it...I don't read biography simply to learn that a person is crotchless or that the author of said biography can't handle sex. :(

[edfu]

This is even more outrageous coming from the openly gay Isherwood, who, before ascending to the N.Y. Times, wrote a biography of a famous porn star.