The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 19
Its the malady of the Wilders; each is better when the others aren’t around. Father is ponderous when Amos and I are near; but I enter houses that he has just left and I hear wonders of his wit and nonsense. Hasn’t Charlotte insisted a hundred times, almost with tears, that when we are not around she is Madame Recamier? I have even a suspicion that Isabel is more buoyant at those parties where there is no chance of meeting my depreciating eye over the shoulders of the dancers.
When you go out with me you may be as talkative or silent as you choose—you may stare at the carpet, or trip over the rug—it is too late to erase from my mind the conviction that you have the purest natural and cultivated talent for living that I have ever seen. Your technique ranges from diplomatic dinners to village book clubs; do not suppose that a Mrs. Williams cannot sense the presence of a lady and feel troubled. (The malice of her tea-table has become a scandal in New Haven; I heard indignation against her from all sides. Besides she hasn’t the remotest idea that she should reach out to an unassimilated guest, or respect a newcomer’s ignorance of her circle, and so on. However I do not need to expose her to make your gift the brighter; you are what you are.)
I read and read the endless tide of Madame de Sévigné’s letters, and enjoy more and more the happy resemblance of your natures. If I could only give you a Les Rochers79 where you could retire for a few months every year, with a Breton climate, a son to read to you, your walks in the allées.—some books fallen on the gravel-path, as you sit thinking in the sunshine of Madison and Berkeley days. Don’t be worried that you cannot fling Isabel into Hillhouse Avenue80 by the sheer impetus of your welcome there; let you take your deserved rest. Presently you will encounter by nature some congenial friends—more delightful even than Mrs. Day and the old corps de venues.81 Do not even read; compose your mind with an occasional unostentatious concert. You have something to talk with that hundreds of restless women have not,—the excellence of your own mind, with its monologue of temperate wise humorous comment. Only think of the poverty of their thoughts!—They have read nothing; they have been nowhere; they have not been favored by God with the slightest innate distinction to turn these things to mental magic if they had them.
Get ready to come down here, for interruptions arise until it seems that it will be impossible for me to see you for a long while unless you accept my invitation to come. But more soon from Him who Laughs at your Fears
Thorn.
82. TO MATHER A. ABBOTT. ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed Lawrenceville School / Lawrenceville, N.J.) Lawrenceville
Jan 26 1925
Dear Doctor:
I have been hunting for an opportunity to tell you that I am planning to go to the Princeton Graduate School next year and roll up a magister artium.82 If all goes well my hope is to come around about this time next year and ask if I can be useful to you Fall after next. My father is especially insistant on the degree and has at last persuaded me to try for one. And I am glad I shall be still your neighbor,
Sincerely,
Thornton Wilder
83. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Lawrenceville School / Lawrenceville, N.J.) Yale
Feb 4 1925
Dear Da:
I was intending to write as soon as the Princeton Graduate College had announced to me that my application was accepted. It will be here any day; in the meantime know that my bridges are burned at Lawrenceville. Now that the four years are drawing to a close I can feel regret at missing the class-room routine (and at not having done it better), but I can see more clearly the vulgarity, the superficiality of the present régime—above all the devestating lack of sympathy for boys (one side of which is exactly too great a sympathy for their complaints and requests and their wheedling). Nor can tongue tell the childishness of the chief: his cruel generalizations on absent masters (all the worse because he does not believe them himself and will instantly change his tone if the subject is suddenly cast in a more favorable light); his hard turning away of masters of twenty years service by a letter as late as May; his gorging on flattery; and so on. I will be right sorry to leave Mr. and Mrs. Foresman. He must have had a sinking of the heart when three and a half years ago he saw a slight and anxious (and ill-dressed) stranger coming up the path with an enormous suitcase, and personifying all that boys find most ridiculous. Oh là-lá, I’ve gone through the machine. Enclosed find insurance remittance. I shall enquire among my fellow veterans about my bonus. I am getting awfully alive to money. My article83 is all proof-read and now all I have to do is to wait for the cheque that will reimburse me for all the expenditure of the holidays.
¶ I now do my running out-of-doors on a new board track, my bare knees among the snowdrifts. ¶ It’s all settled that I get 300 bucks for tutoring at a camp on Lake Sunapee, Middle New Hampshire. ¶ When we were small in Berkeley you used on Sabbath to force us to read a book which now I dip into voluntarily (I won’t pretend that I am dematerialising utterly): Law’s A Serious Call.84 It’s pretty good but God had better hurry and raise up a new devotional literature for an age of Bessemer85 and Radiotelegraphy—the impress of machines is more than skin-deep. My generation can no longer exclaim in the purple light of an eclipse that the heavens declare the glory of God; eclipses aren’t at all strange; we have found that space is finite and we have chased the unknowable down into the kernals of an atom. If that explodes tomorrow I shall have nothing to pin my faith to except the music of Schubert, the prose style of George Santayana and the disinterested affection of two people in New Haven—(and even one of them is the most grudging Isaac sighed over Jacob.) ¶ Give my love to the other, whom it will not embarrass; tell her she’s mostly right about Jennifer Lorn86 but must trust in its successor. Be good and send me more clippings.
thine
Thornt—
84. TO ROSEMARY AMES.87 ALS 4 pp. Yale
96 Bishop St. New Haven Conn
July 4 1925
Dear Rosemary Ames:
If any of your friends would frown on our clandestine correspondence per se, how much more would they frown on it if they knew what I have to tell you. Remembering that you are the only living girl who never shocked Dr. Abbott I’m almost afraid to answer one of your questions. But.
People aren’t far from the truth in assuming that the ladies of the stage are of entirely different stuff from our mothers and sisters and aunts. But the change in the actress has not come about from the kind of people she has had to associate with. If I believe what my sisters tell me a lady is not free from persecution in any walk of life?
The actress pays no formal calls; she is too busy to receive any; if she kept up social relations with her mother’s friends she must suffer their curious and fascinated gaze; as a freak would. If she becomes famous she becomes loneliest of all, for then even her closest friends (I know Maude Adams’ best friend88) must handle her with a certain insincerity. In other words she lives a life in which the What-Will-People-think becomes unimportant.
Worst of all the excitement and fatigue of acting (especially of good acting) make her hungry for praise and lively suppers. One can’t go soberly to bed at eleven after a superb climax; one is so self-dazzled that one’s best friends seem dull: one wants new bright admirers. Last of all, the actress feels herself becoming something more than a lady: an artist. The old things are no longer important and a new set of needs comes in sight.
I think there’s only one school better than the Theatre Guild’s and that is Boleslawsky’s Laboratory Theatre89; but he long since picked his class and has been working with them for two years. I almost joined it. I have attached a clipping to show what good people you can learn from and what a close connection the Guild School has with the real stage. I distrust the Sargent School90 and the Academy because they turn out good slick competent Broadway actors, not actors that work from within from a long painstaking experimented technique
Through
happens next. All best wishes in your war with the Familly. Grim persistance is better than dramatic flare-ups. Promise them you’ll live at one of those Y.W.C.A clubs. And so on.
Most sincerely—
Thornton Wilder
85. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
c/o Roger Coleman, Esq
Newbury. Lake Sunapee
New Hampshire
Dear Mother
I had a postcard all written to you when your full crowded letter came to which only a piker could return such a jot.
To make a long letter out of jots let me begin by saying that although Part three of The Caballa is refractory (I don’t
Let me describe some diversions of wistful bachelors. We have been three times to dance at the Grauliden; the manager is only too glad to have us and introduces us at once to various damsels all forlorn. Meet Miss Corday, who en plein fox trot announces that she is a Beautician. Young though she is (some twenty-three) she has her own shop in New York, her own manicurist; the business pays well, she saves a good purse to squander on three weeks at a smart hotel, playing the lady, and looking for rich widowers. She had also been an exhibition diver at Long Branch, and a Five-mile International Swimmer. I know lots more about her ….. Meet Miss Henry, pretty, rouged, and thirty-eight, who is an illustrator, yes, she illustrates medical journals and can be found sketching in the operating room of Johns Hopkins any time these winters. She saves a good purse to squander on three weeks at a smart hotel, playing the lady, and ….. Meet Miss Pursley. She looks exactly like Katharine Cornell. Black evening gowns; enormous earpendants in seed-pearls. She is a designer for Lord and Taylor, or rather a disposer of fabrics and apportioner of materials among the different shops making clothes for that firm. She hopes next year to go to Paris and study with Paul Poiret. I spent the evening asking every partner whether they could present me to her and at last I found a Galeoto:92 I still half believe it was Katharine Cornell on vacation.
The scene shifts to a dinner party at Mrs. Wertheimers. Left to right Mrs. Wertheimer,93 a proud sad Jewess with literary yearnings, thirty-five on her own confession; Mr Dresser, headmaster of Wood-mere, a preparatory school for Jewish boys on Long Island; Mrs. Rosenthal, a vivacious young matron who would be an actress if her husband allowed her; Roger Coleman, Yale football, very tall and a little noisy with highballs; Mrs. Dresser, very sweet middle-age, a little shocked; Mrs. Giers, già Giersburger, comic falsetto manner, very funny, more stage yearnings, warm (nay, moist) sympathies; Mr. Taylor, fellowmaster; Mrs. Coleman, the prettiest woman in the world, the very face that magazine covers fall short of fixing, but with a difficult carping disposition; then me. Though it is little more than a camp and there is a shortage of table silver the food is wonderful. After dinner, movies, for the hostess owns her own motionpicture camera, charades, horseplay, scotch. Where you ask are Mr. Wertheimer, Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Giers. Down in the law offices of N.Y., madam, far from the merry wives of Blodgett94 who hold their parties in the middle of the week so that the broken glass can be swept up before the Friday night invasion of husbands.
But you don’t like my letter. Try this.
I canoed over to church this morning, St. James of Birkhaven, a fine sermon, and Dean Wilbur Cross95 passing the plate. I told him I was coming to see him soon, tho’ how I shall explain my residence next year I cannot see.
Or this:
Dear Ellie Jones Campbell96 and consort called on me and took me home to dinner. Good chops and things, a slightly confused rolly-poly husband, a nice house with canoes and motorboat. The Doctor inspires confidence, a research chemist with a taste for the Church Fathers. We swam and then they brought me home late across the black lake weaving in and out among the coloured signal lights, and buoys and poles.
Today I went with Mrs. Coleman (to whom in the absence of the husband I am playing a little perilously, the cavalière servante97) to a benefit bridge party and tea dance given at one of the great estates about the lake. Miles of cars parked en queue; a sprawling shingled house with fern gardens snapped from Town and Country; hundreds of people bowing, staring; a picture raffled; Turkish girl selling cigarettes; crowded dance floor; the hostess very condescending to the vulgar strangers who were peering at her rooms. Great satisfaction of dancing with Mrs. Coleman. The prettiest lady on the floor, being stared at, being pointed at—“there, the one in blue! She’s coming now!”
I’m reading The Golden Bough, the one volume edition abridged from twelve. Tons of folklore, witch doctors, how to make it rain, May day myths, Spring ceremonies, resurrection legends ….. the evidence accumulating like a great Juggernaut trying to flatten out any particular importance that might be reserved for Christian doctrine. But the theoretical interludes are a little pompous and repetitive and there remains a chance that the notions I learned at your knee may survive.
Give my love to the whole house. I think its splendid of you to have gone to Storrs and to New York. I feel as though I’d see you very soon. Love to Father and tell him I take great pleasure in all his enclosures. Your adoring son. Thornton.
86. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed Graduate College / Princeton University) Yale
Oct 2 1925
Dear Amos
You must not let the deliberations of these committees worry you. I’m now sure that you’re not meant to be a preacher at all; I’ve been rereading your poems. Now I think that some passages in them are so fine that writing more should be your only business. I was just stupid never to see before that such passages as the “Muse on this epitaph….” And the “life’s sufficient lures” ought to cut you off from being a clergyman.98 The clergyman will kill the poet. It’s the passages in which you talk least about “He” and “Himself” that are best.
You must not allow yourself to believe that the verdicts of vestrymen have anything to do with your qualities; your pretensions are far above anything they can estimate. Father either. At heart Father is about sixty times more worldly than you or I. He is devoured by the College President Complex. There are times when I feel his perpetual and repetitive monologue is trying to swamp my personality, and I get an awful rage. He has wonderful and beautiful qualities, but he has one monstrous sin. Mother, Charlotte, you and I (and lately Isabel) have lived in a kind of torment trying to shake off his octupus-personality.
Don’t you hesitate to suddenly turn down all the committees. Tell him you are not looking for a job. Settle down for at least six months in Mansfield Street.99 Perhaps more. Perhaps forever. You have justification enough in your lines. I will defend you; Charlotte and Mother will.
Come down here for a week-end if you like. I have an extra cot in our study all ready for you.
Anyway don’t you be afraid of anything on earth. You have the goods. I was a fool not to have been so sure of it before.
love
Thornt.
87. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Private
Grad College Princeton N.J.
April 25 1926
Dear Amy:
Your remembering a birthday by more than a letter gave me that same Wilder mortification that Mother always experiences when one so much as pays her carfare for her. But I thank you very much and will try to do something with it that will allude to your good wishes.
You were very restrained in your glancing at the misprints and at the graver limitations of my book. Most of the misp- are not my fault. The final proofs were perfect, I feel sure. But at that stage the firm suddenly decided that the book was too short and began expanding it by all the devic
es known to the trade. In the respacing of lines therefore many must have been broken and crazily repatched by the typesetter: But a few of the errors remain my maxima culpa!—
heure de champagne
exampla gratia
The chronological tangles at the close of Book II and the middle of V. The misprint that lacerates me most is p. 196 the conversion of France!!100
Almost no one likes the last book. I should have “prepared” it more consistantly thru the earlier. Well—all in all, I have learned lots of lessons—to be scrupulously attentive; to be more flowing; to extract all the possible resonance from repetition and echo etc. etc.
No big reviews in yet. Bonis not seriously advertising until some blurbs begin. The thought visits me every now and then that Bonis may give it a brief and decent interrment. They are very rich and keep their eyes mostly on their enormous successes. Even a thousand copies is chicken feed for them. Apparently both Princeton and New Haven villages are having a moment’s tea-table excitement over it. After all I earn my living elsewhere and have elsewhere my real pleasures. Many delightful & reassuring letters have come. (they were as specifically phrased or as full of helpful aperçus as yours). You are right about IHS.101 I am too young and too undedicated a person to achieve a restrained Grand Style (which I pretend after)—notes of burlesque, smartalecisms and purple-rhetoric creep in and are only discovered when it is too late. Let me promise you tho that tons of bunk were deported in the successive readings of the proof. Hope for the best.
The acct of your circle and your routine sounds beautiful to me. Do be awfully wise about your health. I do my long run or my fierce handball every day and what began as an act of will has become a pleasure & a necessity. I hope you’ll get married soon. As for your poems please be patient and self sufficient; in these matters early or late isn’t so important<;>