The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

remark he has let drop about me. And he likes nothing better than to read aloud with some one which is dearer to me than solitude itself. Then there is Farquhar, the great runner, a kind of gaunt intense boy, all silence and awareness. Then there is Katharine Hubbard, Fra Elbertus’179 daughter, by an early alliance, an excellent performer on the piano and a wonderfully vivid girl, and pretty as a mermaid and as fresh and strange. I know all three of these a little, but I have neither laid siege to their confidence as I have with so many—for in friendships it seems I have always to take the initiative, seldom being myself pursued—. On the other hand I have known intimately Mr. Wager, Walter Smith and Nina Trego and last year Harold Spore, Theordore Wilder and Ruth Kellar.

  How many times, after making a new acquaintance I have said: now I know all that are in this village, between whom and myself an acquaintance would prove valuable. And before evening new personalities suddenly strike me as necessary to my human education and I go out to find.

  All this curiosity has taught me a hundred tricks of getting to know people, of fastening on them, accidental-like, and of making them say things illuminative of themselves. I have developed a kind of conversation method of insisting on saying sudden significant things in order to bring others to contributing sudden significant things, and becoming restless unless the conversation darkens with revelation. It is like drama, in which the dialogue must for always be throwing light before or behind and at the same time be searching itself.

  This is not to give the idea that what I want is earnestness and starting tears; anything will do for me—the atmosphere of the other person’s homelife, his interest in electricity, her opinion of X,—no I can’t explain what I want but I recognize it when it comes and quiet myself like a child at a fairy story. Enclosed find picture of Nina. I received suitcase. Leave for Berea next Friday morning

  Thornton

  55. TO WILLIAM GOODELL FROST.180 ALS 1 p. Berea

  Men’s Building, Oberlin, O.

  June 10, 1917.

  Rev. Wm. Goodell Frost

  Berea College, Ky.

  Dear Dr. Frost,

  My father writes that he has arranged for me to work at Berea College during the summer. I am looking forward to the experience and have been much interested in the catalog. I hope that my comparative lack of experience will give the minimum of trouble.

  Unless I hear that it is inconvenient to you I intend to arrive at Berea on Friday afternoon, June 15. Thanking you for the opportunity your kindness has extended, I remain

  Sincerely yours,

  Thornton N. Wilder

  56. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  c/o Berea College Berea Ky.

  July 1 1917

  Dear Papa,

  Thank you for the ten dollars. Five of it are gone for tuition. I hoped less but one can’t be surprised at that for seven weeks @ 2 ½ hours a day. The teacher is really very good and walks around under the name of Livengood. Then one and eighteen cents when to pay for two little textbooks of business letters etc. I will probably not want more for a great while now that I’ve bought me a straw brimmy hat and have raked out some more old trousers.

  I was sick for four days, but except for one of them went on with my work. They had put us into the room next to the washroom and we found that the hot pipes went the whole length of one wall and acted in the nature of steam heat day and night. The room was hot just as an oven is hot. I carried the thing to Mr. Trosper, our dormitory monitor, who promised to see about it, but he kept delaying. He’s one of these persons who believe that the most forgivable excuse in the world is to say “Now frankly I tell you: it clean went out of my mind.” I kept pegging at him and extracting nothing but hearty promises; and all the times my headaches and perspiration baths continued. At last I jumped to the official beyond him one step and now we have a new room, cool as a cellar.

  The custom with farmers around here is to work until eleven and then lay off until two-thirty, but we poor drudges leave the farmhouse after twelve and are back and started before one. The heat in the fields is often intense and I am almost broken up by it, until the later clouds sail before the sun.

  The stupidity and primitiveness of my roommate drives me to tears of vexation. He brought here no change of clothes for himself, and he so wide-eyed envies me everything I have that I have been driven to lend him some pieces of my delicate finery that will be hard to ask back from him. He never saw light union suit underwear before and gasps at the price of it. He is as vain in the suit I lent him as a girl with a feather. He takes a bath just so the boys can see the slim whiteness of it as he comes and goes in the hall.

  Thanks for the Ole Virginia days.181 I will get to them soon. I am now on Froude’s Life and Letters of Erasmus, that Mr. Wager brought to my attention.

  I have given some of my new and lighter MSS to Mrs. Embree182 to read for fun. What can she find to keep her aware in Berea. You will be interested in the Pres. Frostiana I have collected. As one remarked in Berea: Its the first time I was ever in a real Oligarchy.

  I’m learning more Ira Sankey Hymns than I ever learnt even in Mount Hermon.183 The Mountain Peope are a vague element and I don’t know whether I have laid hold of it or not. There is certainly nothing of Lincoln around here. Perhaps they are all asleep with hook-worm—Like my roommate. Explanations are so easy

  Lots of love

  Thornton

  57. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  Mt. Carmel

  Sept. 7 <1917>

  Dear Amos

  The hateful red-tape of entering College is being unwound around here in order to transfer me to Yale. All the rattling skeletons of the past are being un-graved ie the application blank is being filled out by Thacher, B.H.S. and Oberlin. I have lost all interest in entering Yale or any other College, but Father prophesies that the war will end before next September—which isn’t committing himself very much—and then says that all three of us will be seniors at the same time.184 I don’t want to go to College any more and I don’t need it. It has come to the place where it positively harms me. And a lot of Papa’s money that hes grown to be almost tearful about, is spent in just keeping me mediocrely respectable and all the fidgety apparatus that goes up to make “Mr. Wilder’s son—a junior at Yale.” I could take half of this gentlemanly money into my own victorious developement if he only let me take a year in strenuous quill-driving about Washington Square, talking til fifty o’clock in the morning with the young blood of American literature, instead of the corrected and sandpapered etc etc from the prep. schools. But you must have heard invective like this before. With me its à propos because I have an offer from the Cincinnati Little Theatre to join their Repertory Company. Its just that practical experience I need to almost finish me off as dramatist, but the familie won’t hear of it.

  I am sending you the last copy of your class Oberlin Magazine, with myself representing you.—(with a study in abnormal psychology more suitable to a Pathology museum than a sweet college magazine.) Note the poem by Nina, Trego.185 I send you also a playlet illustrating the history of religion—(oh no! nothing’s too pretentious for me!) in which the whole idea is in the title and the last lines. This playet illustrates the Roman Catholic tendency in me that pains dear Papa so, and Mama too, who has become so full of Theology and metaphysics that I’m afraid of her. Charlotte is typeing some others that illustrate better my dramatic method. This one is only a baby oratorio.186

  In these war days and with you so intimately engaged, we are ashamed to mention that we went to such-and-such-a movie, or spent a fortnite at such-and-such a seaside place. I wonder how you picture America in wartime anyway?

  There are a good many khaki men on the street cars; all the women knit all the time; flags droop to the right and left; everything costs more; and all the nicest young men are wearing silver on their shoulders.

  Butstill loungers smoke on the corners, still young men play tennis on the University courts; and Yale boys with
their hair scrupulously parted in the middle drive up in huge cars to the street corner and ride off with wonderful girls in astonishing clothes. And still the Waterbury street car is overcrowded between 2 and 4 P.M.

  lovingly for your 22nd Birthday

  Thornton aged 20 6/12

  58. TO CHARLES H. A. WAGER. ALS 4 pp. Smith

  414 Berkeley Hall

  New Haven

  Sept. 25 <1917>

  Dear Mr. Wager,

  This is my first night in my room. I have just come back from seeing Sara Bernhardt. The white stones I lay upon important days are my envelopes to you.

  Just before I moved here I read the first part of Sinister Street.187 It is a wonderful picture of the amenities and atmosphere of Oxford life—(The second part is of course an entirely different matter as The British Censorship said.) And it is with that illustration that I cannot help hunting for resemblances. College does not open until day after tomorrow, but already the boys are coming in. Quite a number of windows are brightly alight in the walls that overhang Berkeley Oval.

  I am happy and expectant, but my family is troubled. The entrance-board has sat upon my application and decided that I am a Sophomore. But Dean Jones is a classmate of father’s and promises a successful subterfuge.188

  I saw Bernhardt in the Fourth Act of “Merchant of Venice” and the Last of “Camille.” In the former she had that nervous technical proficiency of Mrs. Fiske. That flecking of a point with the hand and the turn of the shoulder; and she smiled and laughed far too much. But Camille was very wonderful. What a great tragic face she has to begin with. And the voice.

  I am awaiting minute by minute by roommate that the Authorities will assign to me. Bob Hutchins wrote a splendid letter from the Oberlin Ambulance Unit, regretting that he couldn’t be with me.189

  Did I tell you that my Mother and I were reading the Fioretti190 that you gave me, all summer. And that at our Cape Cod hotel I sat next to the Colgate Geology Professor who spoke very highly of you & wanted to be remembered? (I forget his name; what the ladies called “the nicest man!”<)>

  Like Henry James’ hero we burn our candles Thursday for your Bricharis birthday altho the office really fell on Aug. 22—lagging not far behind Samma in our protestations.191

  Excuse this ink and paper. Amos writes that he is near Jimmy Todd in Saloniki.192

  I am learning shorthand and typing at a Business College from 9-1:00 every day so that when my hour strikes I may be as useful as the 7th clerk of a sub-quarter master.

  Afftly

  Thornton

  59. TO THEODORE WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  Box 414 Yale Station, N. Haven

  Feb. <19>’18

  Dear Ted,

  I received your humorous letter and the trunk, and all’s well. I was a ninny to leave such a tiresome job to anyone else anyway and I hope you will forgive me for inconveniencing you. ¶ The social notes at the end of your letter were intense reading: I was absorbed in finding out that Theodore Wilder will resume sharing an elegant apartment with Mr. Durand Wilder,193 the idol of the Freshman class, during the Spring. Agnes’ engagement came to me as a greater shock than my gentlemanly reserve can express: but it was a model of womanly delicacy and fine feeling that she did not send me the embittering news herself. I never could quite make out whether I was on the point of being engaged to Agnes or Nina Trego. An alliance with the former would have been exhilirating, and the quarrels would have been fine, vigorous and as tonic as sneeze. With Nina life would be close-centred, nervous, with only oases of serenity and the quarrels would have been silent, repressed, dark and intense. In considering a possible wife—this is a real ipse dixit,194 Ted—choose her in the light of her quarrels. Ascertain her style in argument, her method in animosity. ¶ But I hear you laughing at me.

  You didn’t tell me enough about your Grandmother, Aunt and Sister. These deficiencies are not to be excused. If I stepped (without knocking) into the good old house on N. Professor St (imagine me as returning from my solitary four-mile walk!) would I find everything very much as it used to ? Grandmother at her desk? Agnes the sudden-smiling busy at the telephone, endlessly farewelling? You and Durand on the point of leaving on the other’s wheel?—(there is only one wheel but it always seemed to belong to the one who wasn’t using it, and had to be petitioned for.) And our much enduring Aunt Mame sewing upstairs in the frontroom or in the kitchen, finishing some fragrant bread and generous of it? Or have I imagined it wrong, and does Margaret, instead of holding her head upstairs over her Algebra, now usurp Agnes’ place at the telephone chair?195 Keep me in touch with these alterations; they are of more moment to me than the hopping crowns of the Balkans.

  There are no changes in my life to report, except that now I reside in the oldest dormitory in Yale, the celebrated Connecticut Hall, once roomed in by Nathan Hale, Horace Bushnell and Edward Rowland Sill.196 The floors tip like the ocean through a porthole, and the ceilings sink to meet them, but Yale traditions and Yale history leaks from every crack and wormhole. It is the best we can come to in America that bears the flavour of old Oxford and Cambridge. I am still taking eighteen heavy hours, Business College three hours a week. I am still “writing” much, both for the waste-basket and for posterity which is only a temporary postponement of the waste-basket. I received a fine letter from Harold Spore, a charming one from Marian Tyler that I intend to answer momently—and Oh Ted! a wonderful one from Mr. Wager. A marvel, boy.

  Amos is in the artillery,197 I suppose you know. Bergström, Oberlin ex ’19 is here in the Yale R.O.T.C. Tell me what news you can of the Oberlin bunch at Allentown.198 Will they move to France en masse? ¶ Tell me if Hotchy199 is in town; if he is remember me warmly to him and tell him to send me his address. I owe a letter to Mr. Jeliffe that I am ashamed to have delayed so long to answer. Remember me affectionately again to your whole household, with great wishes for yourself

  Thornton

  60. TO BRUCE T. SIMONDS.200 TLS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed: War Industries Board / Washington)201 Yale

  July 19, 1918

  Dear Bruce, my bonny,

  From now on address me: c/o Chevy Chase School, Washington, D.C. where all your letters will find me happy, tired and temporarily excited. I have moved from the gloomier (that’s my little joke!) atmosphere of the Perpetual Carousal, finding that four boys in a small apartment whether it belonged to a literary Marquise or not, was both warm and excitable, especially when the noise is created by that perpetual competition in cleverness which constitutes the relation of Steve and John.202 My home is now almost three quarters of an hours ride away from Washington and them. It is in a fashionable old-colonial-fronted Girls’ School which for the summer is turned into a suburban mens’ club. There are lawns and verandahs and great halls, and although I arrive there every evening at about seven very wan and staggering a little I am usually able to pick up a little spirit before I go to bed. In other words I have written two whole new scenes into Vecy,203 and the two that I like the best in the whole play. But here in this whole town I have no one to whom I would care to read them, except WilliamRose Benet,204 whom I have got to know very well, and he me. I havent read them to him yet, but he is coming out to hear them some near Sunday afternoon under the wide elms of the Chevy Chase Tearooms. And dear Brucekins, you cant imagine how starved I am for music. To a large extent it was my hungar for music that took me to see Hearts of the World205 three times, for there was a large orchestra that played from time to time the more conspicuous of the melodies (though which of his melodies are there that are not conspicuous?). After a while even the commoner tunes in it had a strong appeal for me and I induce a grand melancholy in myself at any time just by singing over a few, and remembering the great marvelous face of Lillian Gish who has succeeded in my opinion to Mae Marsh206 as the greatest screen actress. I realize however that that is an argument in which you have not yet achieved a full locus critici.207 One of the greatest omissions of my faltering life lies there: I
did not introduce Bruce to the celuloid.

  Drop me now and then a card of some cool shore you come to on your trip, for the weather here shows signs of breaking its matronly temperateness and becoming in Falstaff’s figure, characteristically misquoted be me, “a wench in flame colored taffeta.” I wish it would occur to you to give a red cross trip to open the hearts of the arrogant worldly stiffnecked art-supercilious Washingtonians. There is scarcely none of the lovable middle-class in this city Bruce dear, just a lot of marble-faced limousiners and a lot of wretched women clerks living on a farthing a day, forty thousand of them, desperately driven.

  I told you I guess that I sent my ten playlets to the yale press but except for a cordial note from mrs day (i am too tired to strike the capitals—) saying that the press was forwarding THEM to her—(i am never to tired to capitalize that kind of thing.)208

  My mother and three sisters are all up at Mount Holyoke together where Charlotee is doing War Farm Work. Arthur Hopkins will be in Washington the last week in august putting on a play. Shall I try to make an appointment to read to him do you suppose, or just send it in to his bored readers? Did you know that he had secured the new great matured John Barrymore as his star for the coming season and was to produce him in a series of plays, and was going to do the same with Alla Nazimova, probably putting on the greatest play since Hamlet, namely the Master Builder?209 I weep at these beautiful things. I want to write a play for J.B. about a young Lord Sands a fated gifted tragic boy of the Yellow Ninties period, with a highly colored background of Whistler, not Wilde, a little Beardesly, Dowson etc. A boy that took a rococo period too seriously and died like L’aiglon.210

  As you love me, do not laugh at my silly plans.

  Conceit and ambition are the first luxurious of a tired frustrated man.