The Bridge of San Luis Rey was published in the United States on November 3, 1927 (the English edition had appeared the previous month), to rave reviews and stunning sales on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time Wilder traveled to Miami, Florida, over the Christmas holidays to recuperate from his surgery, it had become clear that his second novel was already a huge success. The implications of this became apparent when he returned to Lawrenceville for the spring term: His dormitory home was deluged with telegrams and letters requesting interviews and speaking engagements, and packages of books to be signed were delivered daily. Most gratifying, perhaps, were invitations to meet notable authors whom Wilder, hitherto, had admired only from afar. In May, his novel won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilder had suddenly become an acclaimed author with a popular following and a great deal of money in his pocket.
In June 1928, Wilder resigned his position at Lawrenceville, but his association with the school was not entirely severed. At the beginning of July, he sailed for Europe with three Lawrenceville boys he had agreed to chaperone for a few weeks in England. After some travel, they joined Wilder’s mother and two younger sisters in a large house in Surrey he had rented for his family. Wilder stayed on in Europe for the rest of the year. During his recuperation in Miami the previous December he had made a new friend, someone just his age, and had planned a walking trip in the Alps with him for September. His companion was the book-loving heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Gene Tunney, an acclaimed athlete and international celebrity. Because Wilder’s recent success had turned him into a literary lion, it was not surprising that this seemingly disparate pair attracted widespread press attention, which continually interrupted their trip. The press surveillance ended only when the two men were able to slip down to Rome for Tunney’s private wedding.
With that furor behind him, Wilder retreated to the south of France, where he spent a month writing, exercising, and socializing before meeting his sister Isabel for a round of theatergoing, concerts, and visits to museums in Munich and Vienna. After spending Christmas with their aunt Charlotte in Switzerland, Wilder and Isabel returned home at the end of January 1929. No longer could he pursue his vocation as a writer in relative anonymity. From this point until the end of his life, forty-six years later, Thornton Wilder was to live the life of an internationally renowned and acclaimed literary figure. In this climate, the privacy and seclusion he needed to pursue his vocation became increasingly difficult to find.
63. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Oct. 14 <1920>
Roma
Dear Family:
I have this minute arrived in Rome, and am waiting up in my room at half-past ten for some supper. The train was two-and-a-half hours late, and I know no more of Rome than can be gained on rainy evenings crossing the street that separates the station from the Hotel Continentale (the last room left for 22 lire). I had resolved not to write you until I had received your letters forwarded, but they failed day by day to come so I have hurried up to Rome to get them. French Lemon1 may have decided not to forward to Cocumella on the Wagers’ casual advice, or they may be found at the Boston. Tomorrow will straighten out.
In the meantime (while my hunger resounds in my stomach like a great bell) I must tell you some of the news of the last week and a half in Sorrento. One day for instance when I had been walking enraptured for hours among the bronzes and marbles of the Museo Nazionale I returned at 3:30 to the Immaculata to take the Sorrento boat. I bought my ticket, went aboard; it was expected
is lost in the sliding blue-black dust, yet so steep that every step for two hours and a half is palpably lift. I suddenly got anxious about Charley White; he has been shut up in a bank for a year and a half and was unprepared for this. He insisted on going on, though he was on the verge of palpit
(Now it is morning and Stupidity is impatiently waiting for café-au-lait. A busy modern city with only a hint of romance is riding the tide under my window. In a few moments I am going to dash over to French-Lemons; then to the Londres-Cargill, an almost unheard of hotel with a room at about eight lire! Then this afternoon to the Academia.)
Love to you all. I’m dying to know about you.
Will write again tonight
Thornton
Looking in the cheval-glass I see a young man of about twenty-one who implicitly, or by his reason of his large shell glasses, presents an expectant eager face to the view. His shoes and clothes are in travelstate, but he is carefully shaved and brushed. On his pink cheeks and almost infantile mouth lies a young innocence that is not native to Italy and has to be imported in hollow ships, and about the eyes there is the same strong naivete, mercifully mitigated by a sort of frightened humor. He is very likely more intelligent than he looks, and less charming. Alone in Italy? To study archaeology! Why each single tooth in that engaging upper row is an appeal in the name of Froebel and in the name of Wordsworth to let childhood enjoy its rainbow skies and imagined gardens while it may.10 A delicious little breakfast has come, with a marmalade of orange and pineapple, and though I want you all here all the time, for this particular meal I choose Isabel.
TNW’s Yale graduation photograph, 1920.
TNW’s Yale graduation photograph, 1920. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
64. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Am. Acad. At Rome
Dec. 4, 1920
Dear Papa:
I have received the remittance and acknowledge statim.11 I was told it was coming the latter half of November and had planned things down to a science. Its delay by so much as a week (to say the least) compelled me to ask the Secretary here to forward one hundred and fifty lire, as you will see on the bill enclosed. I was also told that you were sending me eighty dollars, which on the day of your mailing would have been at l
If this means that your method of conducting my arrangement has changed it deserved explanation before it was put in practice. I gratefully accept anything, but like to know the worst. If I am to
Out of the 1500 I have already paid:
The bill for November Lire 709.45
10 Italian lessons 70.00
A pair of gloves 45.00
I’ve immediately stopped Italian lessons.
Is the idea for me to stay in Italy as long as I can for $900, or is it to stay for one year under as pinched conditions as possible? We parted on the first agreement.
On a generous amount of money I could make quite a little agitation on this Roman scene that recognizes extraordinary eccentric sharp young men, as it did when Emperors adopted them! Enclose yesterday’s cards received.
On a discreet amount I could still do the name Wilder modest credit and gain entrance to regions incomputably valuable to a younger writer who misses nothing, as far as observation goes.
On an adequate student allowance I can walk about and see things and meet rather complacent Americans at the hotels, and do a little work without worries, and with an extraordinary amount of pleasure.
At present, as a shabby repressed soul, I can breathe and go into museums (not too often) and get a great deal of pleasure in a denied, envious sort of way with all my capabilities still in the cocoon.
love
Thornton
On my margin I couldn’t by any Xmas presents on time. Photos later,—
65. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Porta San Pancrazio
Roma Italia
Dec 13, 1920
Dear Amos:
I’m so ashamed at not writing before, especially in view of your closely-written and -observed letters, that I don’t know what to say. I have certainly be
A vacation from dalliance comes to me with the visit of Harry Luce and Bill Whitney over Xmas.12 I have just trod the via dolorosa of Roman pensions (unprecedentedly overcrowded) and finally found them a room-and-pension for 25 lire a day—less than a dollar in present exchange: Within stones-throw of the house where Keats died (little as that will mean to them!) and the College of the Propeganda of the Faith13 (little distinguished in your mind, you Calvin, from the Inquisition and other practices of the Whore of Rome,14 about which you have only the vaguest and most superstitious of ideas). This last thought of mine is so important that I am going to drag it out of brackets and continue it, by belaboring you for your ignorance and prejudice before the most beautiful religious system that ever eased the heart of man; centering about a liturgy built like Thebes, by poets, four-square, on the desert of man’s need. You and I will never be Roman Catholics, but I tell you now, you will never be saved until you lower your impious superiority toward this magnificent and eternal institution, and humbly sit down to learn from her the secret by which she held great men, a thing the modern church cannot do; and a church without its contemporary great men is merely pathetic.
¶ Charlotte is spending Xmas with the Blakes15 in Florence, I hear, then coming on to me. I receive this indirectly. ¶ Don’t acquire a barbarous lowland accent to your French. ¶ I’ll try and pick you up something for Xmas, though I must borrow to buy it. ¶ Tell me any intimate dope you may get from America on our parents; Mother’s letters are delightful quiet dining-room table affairs, and Father’s are trenchant homiletic. It’s foolish to expect other people to write as revelatory letters as I do, but I wish that they’d at least intimate the alternations of climate in their minds and hearts. ¶ I’m not at all sympathetic with your shockedness over fellow-students conduct: you haven’t learned Morals, you’ve learned the Code of Morals. Politenes
s and Celibacy are a matter of indifference to God. Go deeper. If possible, sin yourself and discover the innocence of it.
love
Thornton
66. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Accademia Americana
Porta San Pancrazio, Roma
Feb 1, 1921
Dear Papa:
I have been shamefacedly conscious all these last few weeks that you were just about to receive, or had received, an ugly-toned letter from me. I would give the world to recall it, especially now that your beautiful grave reply has come. Now I am conscious that you are receiving two more “financial” letters, not bad-spirited I hope, but violent and despairing. You see the date on my letter and will be glad to hear that I have payed my January bill with a little help from a discreet unexpected source, and can now live weeks and weeks without raising my voice. The whole original trouble lay in the fact that I did not realize my monthly Academy bill was £500 (now £600) and that my original Express checks gave out soon after I arrived in Rome and could no longer eke out the transoceanic remittances. I think I have now learnt how not to spend lire; and am out of the danger of ever exhibiting myself in such a disgusting uncontrolled state as you’ve had to look at lately.
Just the same I’d like to go away from this crowd about Easter time. My two courses in Epigraphy and Roman Private Life will be finished by then, and I think the new one, Numismatics. They are full Post-Graduate School courses, and although I have groped, and scrambled and lagged behind the PhD fellow-students I think I can get the professors to sign a little document to the effect that I passed the courses. Teas and dinners increase, and I hope it can be said I have improved those opportunities too, but I would be glad to leave that. There is only one friend I shall greatly miss. The dim churches, the pines, the yellow sunlight you will see in my eyes for years—it doesn’t matter when I leave them. I should like to leave for a week or two in Florence and the hill towns about the middle of April—then up to Paris until sailing home in late June,—either by the Fabre Line again from Marseilles or if I can find one cheaper from northern France.
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 15
