Thornton Wilder Sees Development of Narrative Novel Into New Form-Calls Style "By-Product of Personality"

"It looks as though the well made narrative novel is breaking up," said Thornton Wilder in an interview with a CRIMSON reporter yesterday. Mr. Wilder lectured last night at the Copley Plaza.

"The twentieth century mind seems unwilling to accept characters and incidents hung in mid-air by an author's fancy. Proust, Joyce. "Orlando." "Death Comes to the Archbishop," and may I say my own work all verge into the province of memories, diaries, historical narrative, and autobiography.

"I regard my own writing as French in form (Saint-Simon's 'Memories' and La Bruyere's Essays), German in sentiment (the music of Bach and Beethoven), and American in eagerness and energy.

"The last twenty years represent that stage in the development of civilization where reportorial books--satirical description of customs and mauners--are most, valuable. For that kind of work experience on a large daily newspaper, before the mast, or behind the bar is the best kind of preparation. But at present the interest is more inward. The proper preparation is to acquire the greatest cultural tradition possible. The day of bright, gifted auto-didacts is over. The profound assimilation of a little experience is now more valuable than hurried acquaintance with a great many sharp unrelated facts. The literature of super reporting from time to time can rise to a virtuosity that gives it all the effect of creative lyricism. But it takes a real genius such as Balzae to accomplish this, and more often a writer falls into sterile description."

When Mr. Wilder was asked about "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" and his literary plans for the future, the author said, "The book was written between the duties of a teacher at a preparatory school in Lawrenceville, New Jersey under the growing feeling that its subject matter and the catastrophe of the opening page would forever cut it off from a wide circle of friends. At present I have finished about a quarter of a work to be entitled "The Woman of Andros," my first novel--in the sense that the others were collections of novelettes. The new book is laid in the islands of the Aegean about 400 B. C. and, is based on the retrospective action of a comedy of Terence. Terence's play in turn was based on a lost original of Menander, so that the pilfering is merely contagious."

In response to a question as to what steps a young author should take to acquire style, Mr. Wilder said. "Style is a by-product of personality, and in my opinion nothing can harm the notation of one's personality, which is style, so much as the technical study of organization, paragraphing, periodic sentences, and specific details. The technical side of style should be learned almost unconsciously on the tide of one's tremendous nourishing enthusiasm for certain authors of one's own choice