The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 26
Very sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
P.S. My agent is Mr. Harold Freedman of Brandt and Brandt. I have asked him to make a reasonable arrangement with Mr. Goodyear.44
T.N.W.
119. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) NYU
Nov 2 1932
Dear Lady Colefax:
Many thanks for the encouragement to go and see Francis Lederer.45 I shall try to call on him at the end of this week. German theatrical records are my hobby and I know a great deal about him.
Rehearsals for “Lucrece” begin very soon. Being only a translator I feel very remote from it. My heart-beat hasn’t registered the slightest acceleration except at the moment that I realized that success would mean one hundred and eighty dollars a week. I’m so seldom mercenary—and never as regards my own works—that I cite that curious experience to you in order that you may see how indifferent I am. I am a great admirer of Kath. Cornell, the woman, and happy that this will bring us often together, but I distrust some of the casting and the commission for some music from Deems Taylor. I have never met Robert Edmond Jones.46 People say we look alike, talk alike and think alike; which bores me in advance.
I translated a piece for Gilbert Miller—Die Braut u. Torozko by Otto Indig from the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Not literature, but a delightful play. I hear Mr. Miller is disappointed that I did not alter it more. So I must sit down and alter it.47
The middle point has arrived of my year’s absence from the University of Chicago. In the six months I have done the two translations and a third of a novel. The novel is very funny and very heartrending—a picaresque novel about a young travelling salesman in textbooks, very “fundamentalist” pious, pure and his adventures among the shabby shady hotels, gas-stations and hot dog stands of Eastern Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma etc. His education, or developement from a Dakota “Bible-belt” mind to a modern grossstadt48 tolerance in three years; i.e. the very journey the American mind has made in fifty years. I don’t know what to call it, but I am thinking of this:
Heaven’s my Destination
by
xxx
George Mercer Brush is my name, America’s my nation;
Ludington’s my dwelling-place.
And Heaven’s my destination.
(Doggerel verses which children in the Middle West used to inscribe in the fly-leaves of their schoolbooks.)
The book has given me a great deal of pleasure. If it turns out that I am not a humorist and that the whole project was a lapse of judgment I shall not greatly care.
Lately I have been going up to New York a little and seeing people. My best friends there (Chicago holds my real ones) are Jed Harris and Ruth Gordon. Lately Edward Sheldon.49 I have a sort of urchin’s hero-worship (urchin-watching brilliant lion-tamer in spangles) for Norman Bel-Geddes. I like Marc Connolly,50 but as it were a little helplessly: he has so little cultural or emotional fond, for all his gifts.
Had lunch last Sunday with Ruth Draper and we talked of Lauro.51 Tears and everything. She confesses that she invites and cherishes grief; has been so shaken that she has no new monologues and so must tour new territory—South Africa.
Alex. Woollcott is a real pleasure too. The gaiety of good digestion combined with a curiosity about crime and flambuoyant personality whether it be Mary Baker Eddy or the Empress Carlotta.
Myself have dwindled to the least fashionable of authors. Few book reviews come out without a passing disparagement of my work. But I don’t mind. I have a rather low opinion of my books myself, but am fairly conceited about the next ones.
I want to thank you very much for calling my attention to Charles Du Bos.52 I derived a great deal from the Journal and the Byron. Less from the Gide. If you should see him, reproach him for being so slow about the Nietzsche et la symphonie héröique de la pensée à contre-courant. This used to be announced among the works à paraitre53 and has now disappeared from the promises. To my dismay; for I need it. Nietzsche has been my great discovery of this last year, my meat and drink. Nietzsche does not trouble my faith, for I see already enough what Egon Friedell54 meant in calling him “the last great believer in Europe;” but I need a great believer’s help in isolating the essential from the accidental Nietzsche. So do what you can to provoke such a book—tortured footnotes and all.
I haven’t liked anything F L Lucas has done since the manual on Tragedy. Not the poems. And the papers in Life and Letters don’t stand long enough on one spot to be helpful. There was a grievous lapse of taste in his paper on France.55
Phillip Sassoon and I have fallen away. He came to Chicago and I got him a lecture at the University. He must have thought his audience was imbecile. There was a great deal of manner and charm and no substance. And when last in London he introduced me for one disastrous evening to his clique—a dinner at a Mrs Fitzgeralds, where were Cole Porter and Lady Cunard and others; and such unsavory double-entendres were flying about—my naive remarks were twisted before my face to the merriment of all. Finally they were ashamed of themselves and went to the other extreme and were very sweet and gentle to me in words of one syllable as though I were a peau-rouge56 at an orgy at Sceaux.
At present my day-dream enthusiams are
Reinhardt’s plans The poetry of Mörike57 Nietzsche
Croce on 17th & 18thCentury Naples58 The plays of Nestroy and Raimund59 Walter Winchell
The music of Bruckner The Barthian mov’mt60 The new pieces of the Compagnie des Quinze61
It’s a little late for me to apologize for not having written you for so long; and to tell how much I enjoyed your letter written from the villa in the Goldoni-Casanova country62 I still hope that I may be near you in some continental town where we can have long walks and talks. You too are among my day dream enthusiasms: most people live haphazard, but you have been able to apply the same sense of form and style to your life that artists apply to the most secret and dedicated work of their midnight vigils: you apply direction and continuity and preparation and immediately effaced labor; and now look at your rewards: learning and great connaisseurship and friendships and immense usefulness.
Most sincerely yours
Thornton
120. TO RUTH GORDON. ALS 3 pp. Private
The Faculty Exchange
University of Chicago
June 18 1933
Dear Ruth: Aleck arrived after this was written. He tells me you are back in this country. Wish that you were here or would at least pass through here en route to Calif. Weather to Aleck’s intense surprise is temperate and even cool. ¶ Mary Pickford wants me to write a play with her! ¶ Saturday Aleck, Kit, Gert and I are going to Genesee to sleep on army cots.63 Ever Thornton
Dear Ruth:
A few weeks ago—one night—I telephoned to a whole series of addresses in New York trying to speak to you. I upset the Barbizon and the Barbizon-Plaza and the office downtown and finally all I could reach was your Banker’s Address.
I hope the difficulty meant that you had slipped quietly abroad and that this will find you in some delightful French or Swiss hotel,—and with a contract for some big part lying in the desk drawer.
There’s nothing to tell about me. I became very discouraged about my university connection 2 week ago. I decided to tell Bob H that I couldn’t come back for my two quarters next year after all. I teach worse and worse, instead of better. I talk awful rubbish. My days are dissipated amid so many types of activity that I cease to be anybody. Nothing I do has been sufficiently prepared. I go through life postponing thinking.
However I have been able to make some changes in the details of my life—place of residence, meals, hours etc and shall try again next year April to September. [I need the money for the running of Deep-wood Drive. I get $4,000 for a half-year, which i
s pretty good, considering that I can live here pretty cheaply myself. To be sure, if I settled down to write consistently I could make a good deal more than that, but I hate to feel any necessity-money aspect to my writing.]
Kit is in town; two weeks run has been extended to four. Friday night she let me escort her to a big flashy party for George Gershwin that the Byfield’s gave in the cottage on top of the Sherman. The papers will have the announcement of her plans next Monday. November to April first repertory tour of all the one night stands of the middle west—Candida, Barrett’s, Romeo. Opens with Romeo in Buffalo. Imagine. Then New York City in April. Guthrie rehearses Sept. in New York. Owen Davis’s Jezebel, probably with Bankhead.64
Last Sunday afternoon Mrs Barnes65 and I drove up to see Alfred and Lynn. Gardening and painting their house. They were lovely and cordial.
Alex is coming this week to see the Fair.66 I am putting him up at our Quad Club Wed Thurs and Friday nights; then he goes to Genesee Depot. All this New York air suddenly blows through my academic round.
The Fair is not serious; but its fun. Artistically its one big lapse of taste, but on such a big scale that it becomes somehow important. I love it; I trudge all over those bright awkward acres, staring at my fellow-citizens. I see the back side of it: the immense personnel a little frantically earning a living, because scores of my students are selling hotdogs and pushing jin-rickshas and holding Information booths.
Janet graduated Phi B K and magna cum laude. The only Wilder to make the big grades. Amos got an honorary degree. Isabel has a lecture contract with Lee Keedick.67 Ma has been through a long protracted alarming cold (fatigue—monotony) but is better. Father is vague and may become a trained-nurse problem.
I go to fulfil the engagement at the University of Hawaii in the middle of November, so be sure and let me have your father’s address.68 All September I shall be in New Haven resuming work on Heaven’s my Destination and I hope slipping in to New York to see Jed rehearsing. Katherine Hepburn passed thru town the other day and talked to Mrs Barnes enthusiastically about Jed and The Lake. Jed’s happiness is one of the ingrediants of my happiness, and every hint of these plans gives me a good warming afternoon’s meditation. It seems to me that The Green Bay Tree will come wonderfully out of his hands.69
I shall be here through August. If there are any errands I can do for you in this country, please let me. Give all my best to Jed and if the mood should strike him some midnight to write me a letter I should be knocked over with joy. Give my regards also (French or English) to notre ami.70
And as for yourself a ton of admiration and deep regard.
Ever
Thornton
121. TO EDWARD SHELDON. ALS 4 pp. Harvard
The University
Aug 7 1933
Dear Ned:
In asking to be forgiven for so long a silence, I can simply hurl myself on two things: your magnimminity and THIS LONG LETTER which is at once a request to be reinstated in your good books, and a mark of the joy that does lie in writing letters to you once one can get started.
Now I’m started. The joy has begun; and I make so bold as to feel the first steps of my forgiveness.
Yes, the Summer Quarter goes on and on. The students are now on an average of fifteen years older than my usual pupils. These Summer students take notes furiously; one ventures a harmless sally and a hundred pairs of owl’s eyes gaze, surprised and troubled, then bend over their notes and put it down.
That’s the Eight O’Clock Class (The Inferno and the Don Quixote); in the Composition Class (ten o’clock) they are no less earnest, only very timid about speaking up in class. There I wish I were back among the twenty-year-olds who write better stories and discuss them more spiritedly.
Nevertheless I’m enjoying the Summer term. I expected to be vexed and woeful because of the weather; but I find it not so bad after all. I enjoy the Fair, great silly American thing that it is; and I enjoy the visitors. Scarcely a day goes by without a letter or phone call to the effect that some old friend of mine (or my father’s<,> brother’s<,> sisters’) from China, California, Oberlin, Princeton, Lawrenceville, Yale, etc… is in town. I can’t take ’em all to the Fair, but I take some. And I enjoy it all.
Even Ruthie showed up.
(Gordon that is. 25 minutes between planes at the Air Field—two in the morning.
The finest girl in the world—sic—and the drollest and most original.)
Kit was here four weeks and Guthrie a day or two. Kit was finer than ever, but I had to see the play again—fifth time. I have the sensation of looking into the soul of Sidney Howard: just what he thinks about things; what he thinks about Art, and Love, and Men.71 That’s what repetition shows to me.
And if that is a very uncharitable remark on my part, please forgive it and put it down to the fact that my nerves are exacerbated by teaching for four months without one week’s intermission.
Aleck stayed for three days at our Quadrangle Club under my protection and was a great joy. After classes I would go over to his room and find him, immense and jocular, writing letters to his immense circle, reading in proofs all the books of his friends, doing this and doing that, perfectly happy and quite ready to tell some stories prodigiously well. Soon we would start off to the Fair and there in a Ricksha, his genial stomach pointing to heaven, he would weave about the grounds. He began by not liking the Exposition, but pretty soon it began to creep about his bones and he ended up loving it squarely to the square inch.
He and I went up to spend the weekend with the Lunts, and found them rested and busy and absorbed in little domestic momentous activities. Lynn learning French off gramaphone records—for what part?—and Alfred, rising at six to water the garden and weed it and simply to examine it judiciously. We lived practically Nudist, eating wonderful things playing anagrams and falling on the floor in coils over Aleck’s grave deliberations about Jed or Noel or Mrs Campbell or Dr Libmann or himself.72
I went up for another week-end at Janet Fairbank’s.73 Peggy Barnes was there and told me that you spent the Summers of your boyhood there, and I asked just where and took a walk toward it; and this, dear and incomparable Ned, is why I was so particularly moved:
The first weekend I spent at Lake Geneva I rose early Sunday morning and slipped out of the house for a long walk before breakfast. I took the path that ran along beside the lake at the bottom of the lawns. It was beautiful, of course, with early mist and horizontal sunlight and dew on the cobwebs, but I wondered why it was poignantly beautiful: and then suddenly I knew. It was more than that; it was the lake’s smell, and the particular seaweed moss on the stones at the water’s edge and the cray-fish holes beside the piers: that was my boyhood, too. Until the age of nine I lived in Madison Wisconsin and spent my Summers at Maple Bluffs on Lake Mendota, less than a hundred miles away. And though since then I have known lakes in England and China and Ohio—Carnegie Pond in Princeton and Lake Whitney and Lake Sunapee (very treasured, that one) and Lake Como and the Austrian lakes, none of them have that particular bundle of smells, nor those effects of light and air. My joy was an atavistic rediscovery.
And now to it has been added the news that you and I have the same standards for lakes; there we first heard waves lapping on shores with a sound that other lakes never quite repeat.
So call
We’re related through the Lakes.
A great many grotesque things happen in my life.
One day I was working quietly away in my tower room when the phone rang.
“Thornton, darling, this is Texas. Thornton, I want you to do me a favor. But you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to—it won’t make any difference in our friendship; but if you feel you can, it would be a great favor to me.”
“Why, Texas, I’d be proud….”
“Well, lissen, do you know Colonel Moulton?”
[A former professor at the University, professor of ast
ronomy, who went into business and finally became Director of Concessions at the World’s Fair—hot dog stands and Morrocan village etc.] I allowed I knew him slightly.
“Well, Thornton, I’m thinking of taking over the Dance Ship on the Midway, I and my Gang, and so, Thornton, he wants to know if I’m all right, if I keep an eye on my girls—and you know, Thornton, if they were my own daughters I couldn’t take better care of them. And all he knows is the worst about me, the headlines and all that ….. Now if you could write him a letter….”
So I wrote him a letter, making an honest woman of Texas Guinan74 and she got the job.
One day I found a telegram: “Have been trying to reach you by phone all day …. could you come to the Blackstone … Mary Pickford.”
There she was short, dumpy, speaking bad Kansas vowels, but still young and beautiful and inspiring tremendous confidence. Would I write a play with her; for Lillian Gish; a second part for her, if Miss Gish and I thought she could do it.
Then she told me the plot. The one kind of plot I couldn’t do anything with. She, whose sense of the theatre is sound as a bell in every department save one: now she must begin to be a heavy thinker and go in for theosophies and heavy-isms.
Contrast of the Orient and Ourselves. Two sisters in China. One goes to Paris and becomes “sophisticated.” We Westerners live nervous artificial lives; we drink too many cocktails.
And so on.
I went away very sad, but devoted to her.
September’s not far off. Save me an evening, Sir, about the 7th or 8th, because through all this diversity and spottiness and intermittence, I need to count more and more on the fixed and constant and unshakable friends of which rare community you are the Prince and high Example. And it is with that kind of dependence I sign myself