The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  My little English Club is coming along in the most delightful manner. The boys read very earnest bad original poems to oneanother. We take, eight of us, walks through the bare tree trunks of a hesitant Spring; its really too easy for me—imaginative boys from homes and schools that never fed an imagination—my flattest remarks on books or style or even people are manna to them. I’d like to give you all their innocent names if I thought they would evoke for you as they do for me, the awkwardness and charm and rush of their opening minds. ¶ We have almost found, you and I, that, with food and shelter, I can be happy almost anywhere. If the Amherst offer comes after all, and now I can no longer accept it, without doubt it indicates a scene where I might too have been happy; but not happier than my second year promises to be. Now I have learned some of the principles of teaching, now that I have mastered all but the obstinate core of the problem of classroom disciple (the core—those one or two fundamentally bad boys who are bored and restless and vindictive anywhere except in a pond of mud); and that I have made many friends and got over my worried distressed eager-to-please attitude,—I look forward to reaping a harvest after my real labors of this year.

  Will you send an occasional letter of mine to Oxford. I write to the mad air-fed ladies every now and then myself. To you I can write hurriedly, between bells, but to them I compose like an artificer, and the result I write them with despicable infrequency. Keep urging the wild witch Charlotte to tell me how it goes.33 ¶ If I save hard, am I justified in looking forward to months on it at Monhegan this summer?

  love from

  Thornton

  73. TO THE EDITORS OF THE DIAL. TLS 1 p. Yale

  Box 282, Newport, R.I.

  August 3, 1922

  The Editors of The Dial

  152 West 13th Street New York City.

  Dear Sirs:—

  I am submitting under separate cover the MSS of a series of imaginary memoirs of a year spent in Rome, entitiled The Trasteverine. These give the appearance of being faithful portraits of living persons, but the work is a purely fanciful effort in the manner of Marcel Proust, or at times, of Paul Morand.34

  Attached hereto find return postage.

  Very truly yours,

  Thornton N. Wilder

  74. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. TLS 2 pp. Yale

  Box 282, Newport, R.I.

  August 22, 1922

  Dear Mom:

  I have told the family where I tutor that I must go away Friday; so now I give a lesson every day and am a solid fellow. In the afternoons I take the ferry to Jamestown, walk out to a remote point of land, so far from the World (that father cannot get over his fear I am in town to cultivate!) that I need only wear the trunk of my bathing-suit. Here I read and read, exposing myself to the ultra-violet rays of the sun that give me a thorough sunburn. Every now and then I plunge in and swim a big arc, then come back to read some more. The other day as I was just about to enter the ferry on my return a boy came running out of breath to shake hands; a Laurentian whom I didn’t remember from Adam, but an auspicious beginning of the new year.

  There is a new, very radical magazine, called the Double Dealer, published in New Orleans, that has accepted two “Sentences” of mine, drawn from the Roman memoirs. I’ve never even seen a copy of the paper; but will forward all to you when it comes out.35 “The Dial” a very high class, though ultramodern, review is flirting with the publication of the whole Memoir. I only sent them the first book, ten or twelve thousand words. They write back that it is hard to estimate a fragment, that some pages are interesting, and those that aren’t may be so because of their relation to the unfinished whole. They enco rage me to send them the rest. Well, I can hardly send them books seven and eight when I have not begun Book Two. And I am unwilling to kill myself with the composition of an interminable Book Two without still greater assurance of their using it.36

  You remember that I told you how when I met Mrs Augustus St Gaudens in Rome? She confided to me that her son, Homer, the stage designer, was engaged in dramatizing General Ople and Lady Camper, a long short story of George Meredith, for Maude Adams, their very good friend.37 I suddenly became curious to see it and send to Trixie Troxell,38 my friend in the Yale Library, to send it to me. It is quite amusing, but utterly unsuited to stage arrangement; and the idea of Maude Adams as the sophisticated dictatorial Lady Camper is the crowning absurdity. Since then I am mulling a play about the riotous character of the Countess of Saldar in Evan Harrington.39 I tell you all these tentatives because it may set you reading the old books to distract your mind, and because even as unfinished impulses they might interest you.

  The fleet has been in the harbor and the community is after giving them a block dance. A stretch of well-paved Washington Square, as wide as the Yale campus and twice as long was roped off and sprinkled with corn meal. The moon was shamed by strings of colored electric bulbs and by batteries of searchlights with petticoats of amber gelatine in front of them. Up until eight oclock a twenty-foot hem of craning citizens was held back by the police, while in the center of the naked acre on a few precarious chairs sat the patronesses, Mrs Admiral Sims, the mayoress, and some ladies from the Summer Colony whose closest connexion with the navy resided in the fact that they were great-grand-daughters-in-law of Cornelys van der Bildt,40 the ferry-boy of Staten Island and pseudo-commodore. The grand march was so long that it reminded me of the armies of David Belasco41 where, as soon as a soldier passes out of sight of the audience, he rushes around behind the scenes and re-enters on the other sight as some one else; it was headed by a great deal of gold braid and brought up by a million gobs and their girls. There were two alternating bands composed of musicians off all the cruisers and very good they were too. I went and stood near them to subject my deliciously suffering spine to the rages and hurricane of the great brasses; just as in Rome (when the lira was at twenty-eight) I would get a seat for Verdi’s Otello fairly on the percussion, so that during the Taking of the Oath at the end of the Second Act my nervous system might happily be reduced to rags. Someday I shall take a camp stool and sit inside the bass drum during a performance of Elektra.

  You will have a great headache from seeing all these misprints. I will close by saying that I shall not be able to see Charlotte after all; she is gone on a few vacation trips until the thirtieth. I take the night boat for New York Friday night and will be with Father Monday morning to help him on the Journal Courier for two weeks while he goes to Maine. I don’t know what he thinks I can do, but I am willing to try. Love to you all, named Wilder and to Aunt Charlotte. I am eager to hear anything you can snatch time to say.

  love

  Thornt

  75. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  Davis House Lawrenceville NJ.

  Sept 19 1922

  Dear Mother:

  I must write you something at this psychological moment. This is the first night that the boys are back in the house. Mr Foresman is away at committee meeting and I have just turned out the last lights. A most well-omened silence wraps the house. Thirty-three heads have fallen back on their pillows as though they had been chopped off. The excitement of arriving and shaking several hundred hands has fatigued them, just as football practice and Latin will next week. There are a dozen new boys in the house and of course we are all looking each other over furtively. There are almost a dozen new masters in the School, too, all young but three. They come from all sorts of backgrounds and are much shyer than even the new boys. Mr. and Mrs. Foresman, with whom I live are looking well; he is a little stout man, an old football celebrity, with blunt ideas and a jovial reticent manner; she is much superior intellectually, a Cornell graduate, but domesticating rapidly—her not inconsiderable good-looks gradually approaching the benignant maternal. Her French and Latin are in astonishingly good repair, and we play piano four-hands after a fashion. The baby Emily, age three, is a squirming little girl with a piquant French face. Contrasting though we are, Mr. Foresman and I get on finely. I
often think that the reason I have got on in the House so well, is because his personal affection for me is always forseeing and averting things that might embarrass me. The result is that I am being extremely well paid for being happy. In return fortunately I am able tacitly to help him; today, for example: Mr. Foresman has a horror of meeting the fathers and mothers and making conversation. Consequently in the face of express orders from Foundation House to stay at home, he drives off to Trenton, and leaves to me to a dozen fascinating encounters with mamas depositing their sons in our spiritual Pawn-shop* Human nature is often as simplified as the comic supplements represent it: I have had exactly twelve proud, deprecating, anxious accounts of some priceless sons. The same apology for their inability to study, the same confidence that the fundamental gray-matter is all right, the same anxiety about blankets.

  I have written now into profoundest night. The last mattress has creaked, the last slipper flopped back from the bathroom, the last yawn-blurred words between room-mates, exchanged.

  lots of love

  Thornt.

  Dear Mom:—

  I forget whether I sent you a copy of The Plain Dealer, so if I send you another put it down to utter indifference to the honor of print, rather than to pride. I shall send you Lefty’s novel42 too, when I can get into Trenton. You should see my room. I got an introduction to a department store and started shopping on account. Two deep blue rep curtains as a portere between my study and my bedroom (there was a dusty red thing there last year) two deep blue strip rugs crossed the empty bit of floor by my desk, a really beautiful blue, without design except for two inches of still darker blue around the edge; and white curtains for both windows. Vous m’en direz des nouvelles!43 I just controlled myself from buying one big deep blue rug a foot thick, that would pervade the room and (being a little too big) would turn up to climb the walls for about an inch all around, like the toe of a Turkish slipper. I have a big rectangle of blue cloth that says YALE on it, but it seems to have been lost over the Summer; it was to be, of course, the keystone of the decorative plan!

  I am to teach 24 hours this year, if there is still pressure on me to take an hour of Bible. Naturally with such a load I don’t have to take any Study hour supervision in the Big Study (that I am very glad to be out of). I have no 1st Formers to teach, though I was supposed to have shown some aptitude for the wrigglers last year: instead I teach a 2nd 3rd 4th and 5th—these last two mature ones are, of course, my dulce decus.44

  I am fashioning a new 3-minute playlet, very strange called And The Sea shall give up its Dead.45 which I shall send you, if it comes to anything.

  Excuse now if your grown-up and busy son rushes away to help boys arrange their schedules to direct tramping negroes on the stairs as to the destination of trunks, and to brush the teeth of his thirty three stoopids. Love to Isabel, who may find an outlet for herself and a chance of helping Charlotte enormously on that page of the Youth’s Companion.46 I’ve just about broken my neck looking around for something else odd to send Janet, but I swear there’s no originality in our shops. To Amos a salute, as we may be on the brink of new wars, wars in Palestine too for a generation that can see no irony. love

  Thornts

  76. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

  Davis House, Lawrenceville, N.J.

  Oct 9, 1922

  My Dear Mrs. Wilder,

  Your son has asked me to write to you in his stead for two reasons. The first is that he is so ashamed of not having written you for so long that he has no idea of how he should begin. The second is that since you have never received a letter from Lawrenceville written by anyone except himself, you might enjoy someone else’s view of the life there. I am not only in his house, but in two of his classes and can give you some idea of how he appears to us.

  If you are going to excuse his silence, it will be a shear act of grace. It is only fair however to tell you the few arguments he might put forward. He teaches twenty-four hours; most of the masters have between eighteen and twenty-three. The correction of papers for so many is enormous, to say nothing of the tiredness that follows it at night. Besides just as he was about to write you last week something urgent arose. One night while we were at supper I was bidden to answer the telephone. It was for him—a long distance call from New Haven. When I told him they were waiting for him, he changed colour, dropped his spoon into the soup, and ran. It turned out to be Mr. De Lacy of the Brick Row Book Shop. Mr. Hackett had been struck by an editorial in the Journal-Courier during the Summer on the Shelley Century, and had called up your husband, thinking he had written it. Dr. Wilder redirected him to your son. They wanted a longer article in the same vein, to be printed in the Yale Alumni Weekly as an introduction to the collection of Shelleyana they were offering for sale shortly. The collection was to include a locket containing some of the poet’s ashes, set in fourteen aquamarines and listed at three hundred and fifty dollars, a beautiful portrait of Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley, for the first time drawn out from the obscurity of a private collection, and many first editions. The Book Shop assumed that the article would be a labor of love, but would instruct its treasurer to mail him ten dollars. This was Thursday night and the material must be in New Haven Monday. The school pressure was hard enough without this, but he undertook it. He has intimated that if the article is printed in the Weekly and meets the favor of such Tinkers, Phelps, Berdans,47 as have hitherto watched him but doubted his adequacy to conventional tasks, like that, it might lead to offers of college teaching. Again, it is probably a delicate sounder from the Book Shop that has now three branches and is looking for cultivated young men to station at their outposts. At present he feels disinclined to join either connexion, but he would like to have them offered to him. The finished essay was amusing, although it had serious weaknesses of structure. To me it has a tremendous air of learning, though Mr. Wilder says that is merely the result of a hasty pillage of some source books that can be found in any good library. It is not unlikely however that the article will not suit the requirements of the Book Shop; it does not go into ecstacies over the brooch filled with ashes, and a repulsive portrait of Shelley (companion piece to that of his wife) is given a cold notice. Everybody knows that the Brick Row Shop has grown more and more bloodlessly financial, and the economic interpretation of your son’s piece is temperate; he refused to boot-lick. However, it is at least suave; they may have to use it for lack at that eleventh hour of other material. If it goes in, he is almost certain of its attracting notice. In parts it is green, but in others it is trenchant and witty with his characteristic precision of words tempered of late by his much French reading.48

  We get on very well with him in the house. He almost never interferes with us, and we do not play dirty tricks on him like they do in other Houses. He doesn’t come out and watch our football much, but perhaps if he were the kind that did he wouldn’t be able so well to help us in Latin etcetera. In class he talks so fast and jumps on you so sudden for recitations that often you don’t know a thing. Please write him for his own good to speak slowlier, as it would be for his own good. Of course this year he is an old master now, and has the hang of keeping a classroom down and never has to give marks, any more, or even fire us out of the room, like new masters do. He must have learnt summers somewhere. Can you explain why he hasn’t any pictures of girls in his room, nor even of you, everybody has pictures of women in their room, can you explain this? Why did you give him a name like Thornton for, didn’t you know it would be a thing we would hold against him, you might have made it Theodore through even Theodore is bad, and Bill or Fred is best. Don’t think I’m crabbing, because after all he’s all right for the present and you don’t expect a master to be everything. He says he has some sisters, are they good-looking, or are they like him, and nothing can be done about it. Thanking you for your patients, I am

  faithfully yours

  George Sawyer Naylor.

  77. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

&n
bsp; Davis House Lawrenceville N.J.

  Feb 10 1923

  Dear Mama:

  Your wandering boy tonight is very contrite. If Father however forwarded to you my playlet, as I bade him, let me count that as a letter, and the case is a little less damaging.49 My letter before that described to you my Xmas vacation. Since then I have lain very low in Lawrenceville, teaching without respite. Last Tuesday however a fellow-Master, Mr. Rich, two faculty ladies and I acted Barrie’s The New Word50 before the Woman’s Club. This choice one-act play was in the volume Isabel sent me a year ago with the inscription “bought in a shop in Tottenham Court Road.” We are to repeat our performance Thursday night in front of the boys, our most exacting public. I am including a review I wrote of our student Dramatic Club’s latest effort.51 So much for “events.”

  Isabel’s letters from Paris to yourself, to Father, and to me—I receive them all ultimately, are absorbing reading. My stomach faints with emotion at the very address: 269 Rue St. Jacques. I expect I shall have saved enough for a trip by this Summer, but I am afraid to use it. Any sums I may be able to put by (and even such will be less than a thousand) will be too valuable as a resource for us Wilders and I do not want to touch it until the year following. No doubt you are astounded to notice this touch of avarice; but believe me, I am a very naughty boy and the reverse of avaricious. I am just about agreed to join one of two Summer Camps that are angling for me—to do a little French tutoring, spend the days in a bathing-suit under breezes smelling of the pines, with almost no fixed or disciplinary duties. There will be a considerable interim at the beginning and end of the Summer, and generous leaves of absence during it, so if you are back here I shall