The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 22
Ever
Thornt.
97. TO CHARLOTTE E. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
75 Mansfield
New Haven
May 2, 1927145
Dearest and sweetest of Charlottes:
I forgot when you were here to thank you for this elegant stationery and to be very meek about the overtone of reproach involved. So an hour after putting you on the train I shall write you a letter though sheer astonishment may endanger your health. Many thanks; naturally I had that minute of terror with which any Wilder views any other Wilder buying anything. But if you always buy to such advantage, buy on and tell me when it’s all gone.
Did you see the two sailors playing checkers on the train in the seat in front of yours and how they gasped for envy when I kissed you so loudly. Always kiss on trains; it gives the whole car something to meditate upon for the rest of the ride. A kiss in a railway station always reminds people that for all its appearance Life among the Anglo-Saxons is more than mere Amiability.
Try more and more to carry about with you a little secret deposit of contempt. Do not fill your late twenties and early thirties with the flutter of little friendships however comforting. Read, read the classics and the great critics on the classics. My motto is Prepare for the forties and fifties. Your friends are mostly gentle and sweet. They do not require enough of you. They lean on you (I’m sure) but after this Wheaton interval you will find, and I shall bring you, friends of a bigger mold. Not bigger by brains (at l
Be awfully wise about your health. Cut your classes in cold-blood and tear up exams if you are indisposed. Don’t give a goddam for the Sour Spinsters. No pastry. No whipped cream. You are very good looking and you do nothing about it. That is criminal. Set aside money for cold creams, massages and nice things for your hair. Good looks are a tremendous blessing and every now and then you insult yours. Be a vain woman; use your glasses sparingly; stand well and walk without constraint. In your new evening dress you put yourself at an advantage that thousands of women cry all night after in vain. Good looks and good clothes are courage. Don’t you think you’d better take up tennis—will you let me give you a raquet? have you one? don’t be reticent about gifts with me, idiot.
love
Thornt.
98. TO EDWARD WEEKS.146 TL (Copy) Yale
75 Mansfield St.
New Haven, Conn.
June 3, 1927
Dear Mr. Weeks:
I am sending you under separate covers two very untidy portions of The Bridge of San Luis Rey Of course I should be prouder than I say if the Atlantic could use some of it. As you see there are two separate novelettes there, but the process in surgery would be beyond me. When I was in London Mr. Squire147 wanted to run the chapter on the Marquesa de Montemayor (a treatment of the life of Mme de Sévigné) but at that time I didn’t see how the piece could be extracted from its “theological” frame. If you saw possibilities in the story of the twin brothers; then to retain some of the poignancy I think the portrait of Madre María del Pilar whould
The whole book will be very short (you have two thirds of it there; the Uncle Pio section excerpted would be a little strong for the Atlantic) and I should be dazzled at your liking the whole. But Boni’s and Longmans, Green want to bring it out simultaneously (there is a copyright law about that) in the early fall, and I suppose your tables of contents are pretty well packed for many months to come. I don’t mean it to look pretentious when I ask you to let me have the script back as soon as possible …. I haven’t quite finished Parts Four and Five and am all flustered.
Whether you feel it suitable for your magazine or not, please write me an editorial-advice letter; I am eager for suggestion and if you found certain parts too sentimental or too didactic or others too summary etc., I should be very indebted to you for saying so. I am not haughty about alterations in matters of “taste” either!
I hear that you are doing Ernest Hemingway’s Five Thousand Grand.148 That’s fine.
Well, whether anything comes of my ambitions for the Bridge and yourselves, thanks very much for writing to me, and excuse all this careless typewriting.
Very sincerely yours,
Thornton Wilder
99. TO C. LESLIE GLENN.149 ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed The Elizabethan Club / of Yale University) Yale
Wed June 14 1927
Dear Les:
There is a piece of news here that I scarcely dare to tell you. Dr. Abbott has been after me to come back and teach at Laurenceville and today I telegraphed him that I would. That’s an awful come-down after the pretentious outlines I laid down for myself in front of you. It was partly the result of my rereading The Bridge. The Bridge is far better than the other, but it is so sad, not to say: harrowing, that I doubt whether it finds as many readers as the other. There is a faint chance that its very earnestness may strike right into the need of a large number, in which case I might spend the Fall taking long walks in the Austrian uplands. But with a dear vague impractical family group like mine I don’t dare stake on the margin of risk. If something happened to Father ….. etc. Besides I love the Laurenceville atmosphere, my “running”, the proximity of the Princeton library and the flights to New York and New Haven, and I shall ask for a very moderate wage in return for a modified teaching schedule. If you are very disappointed in me, just remember that it is for one year. In one more year I should be able to find a real niche somewhere.
We took our sick man from the hospital to the Pennsylvania station Monday. He still has no idea that he is as ill as he is. The doctors keep up the most amazing hopeful soft-soap as a matter of policy. He will not live through the Summer. I go down Friday for a week and a half.150
Someone told me by accident the other day that the Worcester Art Museum contain three El Greco’s. El Greco is a religious painter compared to whom Raphael was merely the inventor of the Christmas card. He is the perfect illustration of some of Rudolph Otto’s finest pages.151 Steal an hour away from Martha and invite Mary for a trip thither.152 You will probably see pictures that look as though they were seen through the elongating mirror of an amusement park and painted in a bilious green. If you can accustom your eye to it you will be catching one of the most extraordinary transcripts of the numinous in all art. (I shouldn’t have said that about “stealing an hour from Martha”; you are never with one to the prejudice of the other.)
C. Leslie Glenn.
C. Leslie Glenn. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
¶ The more I think about the girl at Smith and your way of thinking about her and her way of thinking about you, the more I think she is the real best find. ¶ Now that you see that I can write a sober simple letter will you do me the favor of tearing up the other two or three? The only part that you are to retain in them (mentally) is the notion that I was greatly helped by my stay and have gone about some amateurish attempts at trying it on other people. An awful hope is stirring in me. Perhaps ….. well, it’s too soon to tell. ¶. The proofs for the first 3 parts of The Bridge came this morning. I’m going to have Boni send you some duplicates and you tear them up when you have shuffled them. ¶. Isabel sails for England Friday just in time to avert a nervous breakdown. I threw a little party for my women downtown tonight. You wouldn’t have known they had a care in the world. The wonderful resiliency of the human spirit when it is fed by affection from no matter where. ¶. Every now and then I would love to think of you at Worcester one more year, partly because I don’t like to think of you climbing in and out of trains and meeting every day new faces and partly because the good people at Worcester are so fond of you and will probably have to discover in your place a ‘busy’ young curate, or an effortful one, or a smug one or something. ¶. My little millionaire tutoree Gibbs Sherrill is about to spend his second summer with Dr. Grenfell, and sends me from Groton a
composition he wrote about the great doctor.153 I wrote to Gibbs about the ministry and so on (he would not be so bad in Worcester ten years from now); he writes back with a tentative wonder and wants to know who, how and why you are! ¶ I enclose one of the English reviews of my book. If I were a bigger person I probably would not send it, but now that I am retreating, “declining” to an assistant-mastership again, in a last faint spurt of pride I want to show that I have a little corroboration for the claims I made for myself. My weaknesses are no secret to you and I suppose you can oversmile this as you have the others. ¶ The English language (as I’m always saying) does not comfortably permit of the expression of great regard between gentlemen; but let me indulge in a paroxysm of understatement and announce that I am pretty attached to you, pretty attached, as it were.
ever
Thornton
100. TO GRACE CHRISTY FORESMAN.154 ALS 6 pp. Yale
75 Mansfield Street
New Haven
July 25 1927
Dear Mrs. Foresman:
As you may be in Pittsburgh I am sending this letter to Lawrenceville and hoping that it will not take too long in getting to you.
You may have suspected that even during the last weeks of Clyde’s life Dr. Abbott had offered me the Davis House for the following year. I turned it down without even hesitating, partly because the very idea of taking his place (especially if he were still alive in retirement) seemed unfriendly, partly because the responsibilities and the details were distasteful to me and would even find me plain incompetent. But I did tell the Doctor for a while that I was really tempted by the idea of going in again as Assistant, if he could find a congenial Head. He was very pleased because he was eager to retain a continuity in the Davis Line and thought that a certain middle-aged master now in the Lower School, I forget his name, would do. But the next time I went back even that much house routine seemed to be not what I was looking for and so I declared for Mrs. Brearly’s.155
But less than a week ago he telegraphed to me offering the House again. The message had to be forwarded to me in the North through my father’s hands who begged me not to refuse, adding that it would do a great deal to ease some of the problems in the family also. So I accepted.
Oh, I shall be so bad when it comes to all those details of demotion and credits and signing the boy’s allowance checks and a hundred and one other things. But at least I can hope to aim toward the simple wonderful thing that Clyde maintained. I should love to think that you wish me well and that you still feel that you are an active Davis House “master” and a part of us.
If I knew when you were going to be in Lawrenceville I should come down and see you there and talk over with you buying the furnishings or some of them, or whatever suited you. I don’t even know whether the School supplies some of the Housemaster’s furnishings or not. Anyway do be sure that all the plans are yours. Yours to live there as long as you like, and I hope, to return often.
I am still at work on the last pages of The Bridge and trying to weave into it all the thoughts and the meanings of our last few months. I think of Clyde so often and now it seems to me that he knew, after all. I wish I had many months yet to assimilate it so that in the book it would come out beautifully and persuasively; but I must close it up soon and drop literature for a whole year.
Give my love to your Mother and keep me fresh in Emily’s mind.156 I wish she and I could steal away to another Secret meal. Perhaps you will be in the East soon and I shall see you again before long. I wish I could be useful to you in finding you something “to do”. But for a while I hope, you are resting, best of all in Our House, by your garden.
Affectionately ever
Thornton
101. TO LEWIS S. BAER. ALS 3 pp. Berg
75 Mansfield St.
New Haven Conn.
July 25 1927
Dear Louie:
If your firm were in serious difficulties at the edge of bancruptcy I should be patient, but I cannot believe it is.157
I have always been very grateful and loyal to you for having discovered me. This loyalty is a very real thing to me and I should never dream of leaving your Firm merely for bigger Terms elsewhere, though I have had them. But my loyalty is being thrown away, if you cannot be normally considerate of me these early difficult years. You have not yet caught up to the January statement; you promised me some of the Spring royalties; and surely some of the Advance on a book of which four-fifths is set up. In a few weeks the translation of Paulina 1880 will be ready which I am willing to sell en bloc for three hundred dollars down, but which will certainly be too expensive for your Firm.158 I shall stay with Bonis’, not only
My new job at Lawrenceville requires my furnishing a house and sends me on a number of trips this Summer, so please send me my five-hundred, Louie, and let us keep the association cordial.
Ever
Thornton
102. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Blodgetts Landing
Aug. 22 1927
Dearest Isabel:
Look what befell me. I was on the way from a weekend at Cape Cod with the T-s to a week with Les Glenn at Champlain with perhaps a Sunday night supper at Mrs MacDowells.159 Then I was going back to New Haven to finish Paulina and to sit with Mama. But I decided to stop in here a day or two and say howdy to my old camp. Presto, they wanted me to stay and teach. You know how I love an Even Tenour. So here I stay set. They offered me wages, but my pupils are so few that I allowed that board and lodge was enough. (Now I have a new pupil to tutor after hours and that’s money.) The usual crazy thing has happened: I love it. I take twelve mile walks almost every day; I swim over a mile; I’m brown-black and roaring with health. And two of the nicest boys on the lot are to be among my 33 at the Davis House next year.
Of course Amy Wertheimer is in the vicinity. I only show up once a week. She’s resigned and wistful. She always has house guests so that there isn’t much occasion etc.160
The Bridge was finished etc. Longman writes about a nice format. Boni is revolted that it isn’t long enough to keep up the fraud of a 2.50 book. He wants six to eight illustrations, and the Canadian and Esquimaux rights. I begin to see a lit. agent to keep Bonis quiet.
I’ve bought over all the Foresmans’ furniture for five hundred bucks. There will be much additional outlay for linen. So I guess I’m a weighty schoolmaster for some years. With anyone else it would be wrecking one’s talent for money and all that slop: but for very special reasons I think it is a subtly remarkable solution for me. I don’t write in leisure. I don’t write from any aspect of my life that daily life can exhibit. I am Dr Jeykel and Mr. Hyde. And the more ordinary and uneventful Mr. Hyde’s life is, the better Dr. Jeykll pursues alchemical research.
The rumour reaches me that Dr. Abbott has grown so impatient with certain of the big housemasters’ wives that he has decided to keep certain of the big houses as Bachelor Establishments. Men’s Clubs; Camps, almost. He is wrong. Davis makes the third of these. But you and Mama can come and stay as long as you choose to the delight of the proprietor and of the boys, I wot.
Well, how are you? Do you love London? and Oxford? Are you tranquillizing out? Ach, honey, I should have joined you over there. I could have perfectly well. Boni just slipped me five hundred dollars on the Bridge.
How about the sentimental ghosts of New College (was it New?). All that assimilated long ago? I am going to write herr. Childers, I’ve decided, and ask him to come to Davis. He’s the kind that haunts New York pretty often, pullman or no pullman. Next week I’m going down to Peterborough where Rosemary Ames is star pupil at the Mariarden Theatre Camp. Such letters—quite turn my head—also from Gwynne Williams. Eco161 writes frequently elaborate introspective fantasias. I trot humbly along behind. I’d rather put my head in a lyon’s mouth than spend a weekend at Chappaqua. But, God, what brains. She’s
getting raises and rolling up influence: if only she doesn’t get fired on a touch of temper.
Our adorable mother misses you girls no end. They had some mean hot days, but on the whole the Summer has been very cool and the farmers crops are a month late and lack flavor (dope acquired from Doug Townson, the canner).
What shall I write next, by slow stages at the Davis? Plays, I suppose. Another letter from Charles Wagner wanting to see some and all that. But I have no burning ideas.
Go to St. Mary’s, for me.
Reread the first part of Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.
Take a scoot over to Cambridge and write a charming little essay for The Literary Review.
I hope your homeward trip is better than your outward, and that there are some nice gents.
Lots of love and ever thine
Thornton
I own a paino and a victrola. And a handsome dining room table and six chairs and a big sideboard. Wouldn’t it freeze y’?
103. TO CHAUNCEY B. TINKER. ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Yale