Written by Siel Agugliaro
At the beginning of the last century, a playwright had four of his works being produced in Broadway at the same time. He was the first American dramatist to be regularly (and successfully) produced abroad. He wrote an impressive amount of plays, from society plays and historical dramas to farces and melodramas, and he was responsible for more than twenty American adaptations of works by European authors, from Victorien Sardou to Oscar Wilde. Shortly after he died, scholars said of him: “when [he] began to write, American drama scarcely existed; when he died it was reality… He did more for American drama than any other man in history” (William Lyon Phelps, Essays on Modern Dramatists, 1921). In 1971, his name was included in the Theatre Hall of Fame, instituted in that year to “honor those who have made outstanding contributions to American theatre.”
But today, almost nobody remembers who Clyde Fitch was. In the eyes of younger playwrights and critics, Fitch’s poignant characterization of the protagonists of his works gradually lost relevance as the social context that had inspired them was fading away. For playwright Noël Coward, Fitch was an “old-fashioned” author who wrote “stilted and dated” dialogues, and a few unsuccessful adaptations of Fitch’s works (the opera Jinks, premiered in Kansas City in 1975, and the 1980 Broadway production Hijinks!, both based on Fitch’s play Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines) didn’t do much to rehabilitate the name of the once famous playwright. But even at the peak of Fitch’s career, there was another aspect that led critics to look at him with suspicion, and which to an extent loomed over Fitch’s figure even after his death: he was homosexual.
Granted, no reviewer in Fitch’s time openly stated it. Fitch himself, aware of the rigid confines of the patriarchal society in which he grew up – and to which his work as a writer catered to – strove to keep his sexual inclinations as secret as he could. Nevertheless, rumors circulated. A notorious dandy with a penchant for foreign arts and sartorial luxury, Fitch had been considered “effeminate” since his high school years. This is how writer William Lyon Phelps, who was in school with him, remembered those days:
[Fitch] was even at the age of fourteen a complete individualist…instead of speaking our dialect he spoke English accurately, and even with eloquence, he was immaculately, even exquisitely clothed; he made no friendships among the boys and it was evident that he regarded us as barbarians, which we were… We treated him exactly as the graduates of Oxford ten years earlier had treated Oscar Wilde; they threw him in the Cherwell and wrecked the beautiful decorations of his room in Magdalen.
At Amherst College, where he graduated in 1886, Fitch became especially known as a scenery painter and amateur actor. Because of his slight frame, Fitch was often asked to play female roles, such as Constance Neville in Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, and Peggy Thrift in William Wycherley’s The Country Girl. These and other classics of English literature later inspired the style of Fitch’s first plays: Beau Brummel, Frédéric Lemaître, and Betty’s Finish, all produced in 1890.
Fitch was especially known for his ability to create well-characterized figures of women with whom the increasingly female-dominated audience of the time could easily identify. In some cases, those characters worked as perfect vehicles for future projects. For example, the English actress and theater manager Olga Nethersole asked Fitch to write a theatrical adaptation of Alphonse Daudet’s novel Sapho (1884) for her. Produced, directed, and interpreted by Nethersole, Fitch’s Sapho (1899) was a triumph with American audiences, who were intrigued by the piquant plot about the love affairs of the lead woman Fanny (Nethersole) with unmarried men. In New York, the show was an authentic succès de scandale. Shocked by the explicitness of the plot which featured an outrageous scene (for the time) in which Fanny and her partner left the stage to consummate their love in an unseen bedroom, several organizations, including the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New York Mother’s Club, sued the show organizers for indecency, interrupting the production for more than a month. Overwhelmed by the events, Fitch suffered a nervous breakdown which some scholars believe was the result of his realization of the risks posed by such a scandal for his own private life. “Fitch sensed the ‘danger’ that his private life was on the brink of public exposure”, theater historian Theresa Saxon suggests.
Despite the general obscurity to which Fitch’s work is still consigned, the name of this playwright has known, in recent decades, a limited rediscovery, especially thanks to the growing field of gender studies. Fitch’s homosexuality has been extensively discussed, as well as some of his most notable romantic relationships—particularly the one with Irish playwright Oscar Wilde at the end of the 1880s. But how, and to what extent, did Fitch’s personal life influence his literary output? From now onwards, Penn will have a word to say on this matter. After many decades in which they could be found only through the old card catalogue, two collections of unpublished typescripts of 11 plays and theatrical adaptations by Fitch (Clyde Fitch typescript and letters, circa 1890-1909, and the Edith Wharton and Clyde Fitch typescript of “The House of Mirth”, circa 1895) can now be easily accessed. Covering the whole of Fitch’s career, from the early 1890s to his premature death in 1909, these typescripts offer a unique perspective on his work and the social context in which he was living and operating. Thanks to them, a new posthumous chapter of Fitch’s queer story will perhaps soon be written.
Unique at Penn 