Penelope Niven
Page 94
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 781.
34: KALEIDOSCOPIC VIEWS (1950S)
1. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 551, July [no day], 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
2. TNW to Thew Wright, January 5, 1952, Private Collection.
3. “Repugnant”: TNW to Dr. Hans Sahl, August 22, [1950?], Marbach; “Isn’t he awful”: TNW to Malcolm Cowley, March [1952?], SL, 501–3.
4. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 556, August 5 and 7, 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
5. TNW 1948–61 Journal, Entry 608, May 9, 1952, TNW Collection, YCAL.
6. TNW to Thew Wright, October 10, 1951, Private Collection.
7. TNW to Thew Wright, January 5 and 23, 1952, Private Collection.
8. TNW to the President and Chancellor, American Academy of Arts and Letters, February 17, 1939, Copy, TNW Collection, YCAL. At this ceremony Carl Sandburg received the Gold Medal for History and Biography for his Lincoln work. TNW had been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1929 and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1939. See Louis Auchincloss, Jack Beeson, Hortense Calisher, et al., A Century of Arts & Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), vii–xii.
9. Pearl S. Buck, “Presentation to Thornton Wilder of the Gold Medal for Fiction,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 2nd series, no. 3, New York: 1953.
10. TNW, “Acceptance by Thornton Wilder,” ibid.
11. TNW to T. E. Harris, November 27, [1951?], copy, Private Collection. The invitations to TNW and ANW were extended by William E. Stevenson, President, Oberlin College, November 14, 1951, TNW Collection, YCAL.
12. TNW to Isabel Wilder, [Fall 1951?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
13. Charlotte Wilder, undated, unpublished manuscript fragment, [1951?], TNW Collection, uncataloged manuscripts.
14. Charlotte Wilder to Isabel Wilder, September 29, 1950, TNW Collection, YCAL.
15. Charlotte Wilder to Catharine and ANW, September 6, 1950, TNW Collection, YCAL.
16. TNW to Charlotte Wilder, [June 6, 1953?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
17. Ibid.
18. TNW to Catharine and ANW, [September 10, 1953?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
19. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 608, May 9, [1952?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
20. “Worthless story”: ibid. “Story ideas”: Charles Feldman Group Productions Contract and Certificate of Authorship, signed by TNW June 20, 1952, Private Collection.
21. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 608, May 9, [1952?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
22. Ibid. De Sica did not complete the project. The 1956 film Miracle in the Rain was written by Hecht and directed by Rudolph Maté.
23. TNW, “Report of the Rapporteur General,” International Conference of Artists, Venice, September 28, 1952, UNESCO document, UNESCO/ART/DIV/7.
24. TNW to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, October 11, [1952?], SL, 503–5.
25. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 624, October 11, [1952?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 636, January 28, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. TNW to Eric Bentley, January 5, 1956, SL, 539–41.
35. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 606, March 6, 1952, TNW Collection, YCAL.
36. The Lope papers are reprinted in Gallup, American Characteristics, 257–77.
37. “An Obliging Man,” Time, January 12, 1953, 44–49.
38. See Janet Wilder Dakin, Jeffy’s Journal: Raising a Morgan Horse, Sheila Rainford, ed. (London: Stephen Greene Press/Pelham Books, 1990; distributed by Penguin Books USA).
39. TNW to Janet Wilder Dakin, May 8, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL. TNW addressed his sister fondly as Janetberry, one of the family nicknames.
40. Tyrone Guthrie, A Life in the Theatre (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1959), 233.
41. TNW to M. Abbot Van Nostrand, Samuel French, March 11, 1952, Private Collection.
42. Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont to TNW, December 31, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.
43. TNW to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, “All Souls Day” [November 2, 1954?], SL, 522–24.
44. TNW to Harold Freedman, October 7, 1954, Private Collection.
45. Ibid.
46. Alan Dent, News Chronicle, August 24, 1954, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
47. Derek Granger, “The Matchmaker,” Financial Times, August 24, 1954, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
48. Thew Wright to TNW, May 19, 1954, Private Collection.
49. TNW to Thew Wright, January 14, [1954?], Private Collection.
50. Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont to Isabel Wilder, November 6, 1954, TNW Collection, YCAL.
51. Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont to TNW, December 14, 1954, TNW Collection, YCAL.
52. For more production details on The Merchant of Yonkers and The Matchmaker, see TNW, Three Plays.
53. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 698, September 6, [1954?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
54. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 699, September 30, [1954?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
55. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 702, December 7, [1954?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
56. TNW to Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, July 19, 1950, SL, 489–91.
57. TNW, The Alcestiad, in McClatchy, Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater, 376–77.
58. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 658, September 18, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.
59. TNW, Journal, Entry 662, November 17, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.
60. TNW, Journal, Entry 704, January 6, 1955, TNW Collection, YCAL.
61. TNW, Journal, Entry 702, December 7, [1954?], TNW Collection, YCAL.
62. TNW to Thew Wright, November 19, 1954, Private Collection.
63. TNW, Journal, Entry 704, January 25, 1955, TNW Collection, YCAL.
64. Ibid.
65. TNW, The Alcestiad, in McClatchy, Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater, 429.
66. TNW, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 107.
67. TNW, The Alcestiad, in McClatchy, Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater, 428.
68. TNW, Journal, Entry 704, January 25, 1955.
69. Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont to TNW, February 18, 1955; March 4, 1955; and April 29, 1955, TNW Collection, YCAL.
70. Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography, 257–58.
71. “Comedy or Tragedy? Mr. Wilder Discusses ‘A Life in the Sun,’ ” The Scotsman, August 12, 1955, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
72. Rosemary Harris to PEN, March 27, 2010.
73. “ ‘A Life in the Sun’: Thornton Wilder’s Classic Morality,” The Scotsman, August 16, 1955, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
74. TNW to Thew Wright, August 18, 1952, Private Collection.
75. TNW to Richard H. Goldstone, “The Art of Fiction XVI: Thornton Wilder,” Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Malcolm Cowley, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 101–18; reprinted in Bryer, Conversations with Thornton Wilder, 64–79.
76. Timothy Findley, Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer’s Notebook (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1990), 32–33.
77. Ibid., 33.
78. TNW, Journal, Entry 649, July 20, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.
79. TNW, Journal, Entry 472, November 4, 1950, TNW Collection, YCAL.
80. TNW, Journal, Entry 649, July 20, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. TNW to Louise Talma, May 14, 1956, YCAL.
85. According to the records of the Harvard University English Department, TNW was not alone in leaving his Norton lectures unpublished. The art historian Erwin Panofsky’s lectures were published in 1953, after his appointment for 1947–48.
86. TNW, Journal
, Entry 425, May 7, 1949, TNW Collection, YCAL.
87. TNW, “Notes Toward ‘The Emporium,’ ” February 23, 1954, TNW Collection, YCAL.
88. Ibid.
89. TNW, “Notes Toward ‘The Emporium,’ ” June 17, 1954, TNW Collection, YCAL.
90. TNW, “Notes Toward ‘The Emporium,’ ” February 9, 1954, TNW Collection, YCAL.
91. J. Howard Buzby and Arthur G. Broll, Co-Chairmen, 1956 Judges Committee, Miss America Pageant, to TNW, April 20, 1956, TNW Collection, YCAL. TNW’s holograph note at the end of the letter, May 12, 1956, explained his response. The Skin of Our Teeth had also been presented in an hour-long television version on ABC in August 1952, with Thomas Mitchell as Mr. Antrobus, Peggy Wood as Mrs. Antrobus, and Nina Foch as Sabina.
35: “THE HUMAN ADVENTURE” (1950S AND 1960S)
1. “Sick as a dog”: TNW, Journal, Entry 747, June 11, 1957, TNW Collection, YCAL.
2. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 724, April 3, 1956, TNW Collection, YCAL. This entry is published in large part in Gallup, The Journals of Thornton Wilder, and gives the name as Tom Everage, although Wilder actually writes John Everage in his journal.
3. Ibid.
4. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 728, April 8, 1956, TNW Collection, YCAL.
5. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 736, December 2, 1956, TNW Collection, YCAL.
6. Ibid.
7. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 771, December 25, 1960, TNW Collection, YCAL. “Grand Guignol” referred to the popular theater in Paris known from 1897 to 1962 for its repertory of macabre, often violent short plays.
8. TNW, “Transition from The Alcestiad to The Drunken Sisters,” The Alcestiad or A Life in the Sun, A Play in Three Acts with a Satyr Play, The Drunken Sisters, 107–9. The German translation of the play was published in 1960 by S. Fischer Verlag, but The Alcestiad was not published in the United States until 1977. The Drunken Sisters was published in the November 1957 edition of the Atlantic. See also McClatchy, Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater, 431–32; and Gallup and Tappan Wilder, The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, vol. 2, 115–24.
9. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 736, January 31, 1957, TNW Collection, YCAL.
10. TNW to Eileen, Roland, and Julian Le Grand, December 19, 1956, SL, 545–47.
11. Deutschsprächige Aufführungen der ALKESTIADE, TNW Collection, YCAL.
12. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 745, June 8, 1957, TNW Collection, YCAL.
13. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 739, May 26, 1957, TNW Collection, YCAL.
14. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 742, June 2, 1957, TNW Collection, YCAL.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. TNW, preface to Three Plays, xxxii.
22. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 742, June 2, 1957, TNW Collection, YCAL.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid. TNW referred here to Ellen Wood’s 1861 bestseller, East Lynne, and to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational Lady Audley’s Secret, published in serial form in 1862. He may have meant to cite Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891).
26. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 749, June 15, 1957, TNW Collection, YCAL.
27. Ibid.
28. “American Plays Given in Berlin,” New York Times, September 21, 1957.
29. TNW to Thew Wright, September 29, [1957?], Private Collection.
30. TNW, “Culture in a Democracy,” in Gallup, American Characteristics, 68–69.
31. Ibid., 70. See also Cynthia Ozick, “T. S. Eliot at 101,” New Yorker, November 20, 1989, 119.
32. TNW, “Culture in a Democracy,” in Gallup, American Characteristics, 72.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 73.
35. Paul Fussell quoted in Horst Frenz, “American Playwrights and the German Psyche,” South-Central Bulletin 21(February 1961): 1, 6–9.
36. TNW to Thew Wright, [Fall 1957?], Private Collection.
37. Horst Frenz, “Thornton Wilder’s Visits to Postwar Germany,” American-German Review 24 (October–November): 8–10.
38. Frenz, “American Playwrights and the German Psyche.”
39. ANW, Thornton Wilder and His Public, 13.
40. TNW to Laurence Olivier, December 10, [1960?], SL, 575–77.
41. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 755, November 24, 1958, TNW Collection, YCAL.
42. Norman Bel Geddes to TNW, February 10, 1938, TNW Collection, YCAL. Bel Geddes had produced extravagant sets for Max Reinhardt’s The Miracle in 1924. He was also known for his architectural, industrial, and civic designs, and for his futuristic prototypes for automobiles.
43. Norman Bel Geddes to TNW, January 6, 1958, TNW Collection, YCAL.
44. TNW, Treatment for “A Film on the Role of America as Returning to Share What It Received from Europe,” February 1958, TNW Collection, YCAL.
45. TNW to Norman Bel Geddes, January 19, 1950, copy, Private Collection.
46. See Edward M. Burns with Joshua A. Gaylord, eds., A Tour of the Darkling Plain: The Finnegans Wake Letters of Thornton Wilder and Adaline Glasheen (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2001).
47. TNW to Adaline Glasheen, [October 1962?], Burns with Gaylord, A Tour of the Darkling Plain, 393.
48. TNW, “Finnegans Wake: The Polyglot Everyman,” TNW Collection, YCAL. This piece and the alternative draft are published in Burns with Gaylord, A Tour of the Darkling Plain, 595–611.
49. TNW, “Finnegans Wake: The Polyglot Everyman,” alternative draft, TNW Collection, YCAL.
50. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 759, November 10, 1959, TNW Collection, YCAL.
51. Ibid.
52. TNW to Adaline Glasheen, October 11, 1959, in Burns with Gaylord, A Tour of the Darkling Plain, 242–43.
53. TNW, 1948–61 Journal, Entry 750, November 10, 1959, TNW Collection, YCAL.
54. TNW to Ludi Clair, December 28, [1958?], Private Collection.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Rorem apparently wanted to set some of Wilder’s three-minute playlets to music in 1961, but Wilder asked him to “wait a year” because of the then-current “glut” of operas based on his work. [TNW to Ned Rorem, June 25, (1961), Private Collection]. The Our Town opera project, conceived many years after Wilder’s death, had its premiere in 2006, with music by Rorem and libretto by J. D. McClatchy. Wilder had granted Bernstein, along with his colleagues Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, permission to create a musical version of The Skin of Our Teeth in 1964, but the collaboration fell apart. Bernstein apparently wanted to go in a different direction with an opera of The Skin of Our Teeth, but Wilder declined permission for that project.
58. TNW to Robert H. Thayer, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State and Coordinator of International Educational and Cultural Relations, October 16, 1960, TS copy, TNW Collection, YCAL.
59. The Theatre Guild American Repertory Company performed The Skin of Our Teeth, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and William Gibson’s The Miracle Worker. The tour concluded in October 1961. From July 18 through July 30, 1955, Alan Schneider had directed a production of The Skin of Our Teeth starring Hayes, with Mary Martin as Sabina, George Abbott as Mr. Antrobus, and Florence Reed as the fortune-teller.
60. The actress Nancy Nutter da Silva and the artist and designer Arthur “Pete” Ballard provided vivid eyewitness accounts of the European productions to PEN, October 2010.
61. TNW to Gertrude Hindemith, April 11, 1960, SL, 569–70.
62. TNW to Catherine Coffin, February 7, 1963, SL, 621–23. TNW knew Kilty’s work with the Brattle Street Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and admired his play Dear Liar. He and Kilty had worked together on the Ides script for nearly three weeks in Atlantic City. The adaptation of The Ides of March was moderately successful in Berlin in 1962, and in 1963 was approved for production by the Moscow Ministry of Culture. It had perform
ance dates in Warsaw, Turin, Milan, Rome, and Paris, in addition to London, where the reviews were largely negative.
63. Findley, Inside Memory, 27–32.
64. TNW to Edward Albee, November 22, [1953?], SL, 516–17.
65. TNW to Edward Albee, August 17, [1958?], SL, 554–55.
66. TNW to Everett Gibbs, May 22, 1967, Charles Von der Ahe Library, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.
67. Ted Mann Interview with Ken Witty, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
68. Art Carney was also an experienced stage actor. He left The Honeymooners in 1957 (he would later rejoin Gleason) to take on dramatic television roles on Playhouse 90 and Kraft Television Theater.
69. Sammy Cahn (1913–93) was nominated for twenty-six Academy Awards for his songs, and won four for Best Song, including “Three Coins in a Fountain” and “Call Me Irresponsible.”
70. Ted Mann Interview with Ken Witty, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.
71. Ibid. In his Paris Review interview in 1957, TNW said that he still regarded the theater “as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” His growing disappointment with the quality and cost of Broadway productions led to his increased support of off-Broadway theater.TNW’s one-act plays are published in Gallup and A. Tappan Wilder, The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, vol. 1, and in McClatchy, Thornton Wilder: Collected Plays & Writings on Theater.
72. TNW to Cass Canfield, March 13, 1962, SL, 595–96.
73. Ibid.
74. TNW to Irene Worth, March 18, 1962, SL, 597–99. The opera was published by Carl Fisher in 1978, as The Alcestiad: An Opera in Three Acts.
75. Don Irwin, “Our Town Costume for a Cabinet Soiree,” New York Herald Tribune, May 1, 1962, 1, 10.
76. TNW to Irene Worth, March 18, 1962, SL, 597–99.
77. TNW to Glenway Wescott, March 30, 1962, SL 599–601.
78. TNW to Louise Talma, May 17, 1962, SL, 601–4. On January 19, 1957, Isabel Wilder wrote to Janet Wilder Dakin, “Thorny has a dark gray, red-lined Thunderbird! Oh, oh, fabulous!!” Private Collection.
79. TNW to James Leo Herlihy, July 25, [1969?], SL 666–69.
80. TNW to Charlotte Wilder, November 30, [1960?], Private Collection.
81. TNW to James Leo Herlihy, July 25, [1969?], SL, 666–69.