have been driven to make my own. I’ve been going to bed at quarter of ten, but for a week now I’ve gone to bed at ten: every night I write from eight to ten speeches in a new play, the several-times attempted and discarded one, The Alcestiad. The second Act (i.e. “play”) covers the same material as Euripides’, but from a different point of view; the First on the marriage of Alcestis turns on the wonderful legend of how Apollo came to live, disguised, as a sheppherd working for King Admetus for a year; the last act is the old age and “mysterium” of Alcestis. The whole is how Alcestis learned to hear Apollo speaking to her through circumstance,—Deus Reconditus.81 I have always wanted to dedicate The Skin of Our Teeth to you, and especially to you “in London”, because it represents my thoughts about endurance and fortitude in War; but maybe the elements of horseplay (i.e. my avoidance of pathos; and indirect approach to ‘elevation’) and perhaps the semi-chaotic jumblings of historic allusions render it unsympathetic to you. Perhaps, on principle, you don’t like dedications at all. Perhaps you would prefer “our” Arabian nights play,82 if I could ever see it as a whole, or The Alcestiad. The text goes to the printers in about five weeks. Unless I hear from you accepting the dedication. I shall send it to them undedicated. If you are willing I suggest the form “To Sibyl Colefax, in London.” Don’t let this be a moment’s worried bother to you: Your word is my law.83 ¶ Alec seems very high-spirited. Ruthie is finishing a movie before joining Kit Cornell for the Three Sisters.84 ¶ Apart from that I know nothing but my absorbing task and the engrossing communiqués in every morning’s paper.
Much love and constant thoughts
Thornton
195. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Isabel: Here’s the letter I wrote Michael: show it to Tallulah and Freddie and the two Florences and Gadget if you think fit.
Dear Michael:
Certainly something must be the matter.85
And I don’t want to hear the story from other people but from you.
What lines have been removed from the play that I or others would regard as integral?
What actors have been removed that would seem to so many people as essential?
And why couldn’t these things have been done without so much sincere alarm and regret?
Remember that no actor or co-worker ever worked with Reinhardt who didn’t long to work with him again.
Remember the same of Charles Frohman.86
Remember that no actor or co-worker ever worked with Sam Harris who wasn’t crazy to work with him again.
And remember that no one (except Ruth) ever worked with Jed without loathing the thought of ever working with him again.
The great manager is also the peak of consideration and tact, even when business considerations or decisions as to entertainment values require his doing difficult things.
And they deeply value actors and actors’ peace of mind and find ways to secure their undistracted concentration on the play.
Do, Michael, drop me a letter about all this and do everything to establish so fine a company into the harmonious working unit they have a right to be.
I want them to admire you and long to work for you in many future great productions.
Ever your old
Thornton
196. TO MICHAEL MYERBERG. ALS 3 pp. WisHist
New address:
329th Fighter Squadron
Hamilton Field, Calif.
Oct 27. 1942
Dear Michael:
Just returned to find your letter. Its what I’ve waited for—your acc’t, and I assure you that I haven’t let myself be pushed around by others accounts.
I won’t try to answer it fully, being punch-drunk with fatigue tonight, as so often.
Naturally I am astonished at the degree of Tallulah’s difficulty; but I am convinced by your description. So, conceding that the lion-tamer’s technique is necessary, I still hope for the day when such provocation of her hatred can be gradually transferred to something more paternalistic; that would be the real triumph. And such a triumph over the managers who’ve had to deal with her formerly.
A telegram from Isabel arrived at the same time as your letter saying the reviews in Philadelphia were uniformly favorable. My first thought was of your investment. I should hate to think that the results of the final performance would be that you had been clipped. I was flabbergasted to hear that you had raised only 10,000 dollars. O my God! Does that mean that no one, under any conditions you could accept, came forward with any more money than that!!
I’m sorry that Isabel has seemed to be drawn into the magnetic field of our stars agitations. They have almost a right to such agitations—being artists going through the throes of bringing to birth. I think she likes to frequent them. I know I do; but her letters to me don’t seem to be excitable. She loves to discuss the play in itself, and does it very well, giving me a clear and enthusiastic picture of long passages of the performance.
The Marchs have each written good “manly” letters and I have more and more admiration for them as persons. I hope you can find occasions to express your admiration for their work and to do them some kind of “favors” of regard. Actors and public speakers (I know!) and performers need such things, as dry soil needs rain.
As to the close of Act I: once they have established audience-relationship and effectiveness in the comic spirit, I hope they can gradually bring it around to the human-exciting, letting the comic merely enter by flashes. Sabina’s cry at the close should be one of the big significances of the play—whether the audience laughs or not, the idea should be planted at 9:30—“Save the human race” and the rest of the play can practically rest on it,—but its highest effectiveness comes from a background not of comic but of suspense-hope-effort-excitement in the scene that it springs from.
I reproach myself for not having written Gadgett more frequently. The letters that began to come in from discriminating friends (with world theatre backgrounds) in New Haven and Baltimore87 agree that he has done a masterly job with such difficult material. I hope this brings him the recognition he deserves and that he is the director the American scene has been waiting for and that, God willing, I can call on him down the years for all kinds of plays.
x x
It’s late and I must turn in.
But one more word:
To felicitate you and Adrienne on the good news:
I hope it’s a girl this time—with her mothers voice and beauty, and with her father’s power of grasping situations.
I can keep both military and non-military secrets; I’m proud to know this one.
More soon
your old
Thornton
197. TO ROBERT FROST. ALS 2 pp. Virginia
As from: 50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven. Conn.
Thanksgiving Day
Los Angeles.
Dear Robert Frost:
Had it been possible you would indeed have received some tickets for the opening of the play.88 The reasons why it was impossible would make a long and complicated story, briefly: on the 15th I was in California; on the 16th I was on Long Island (on a military order that had no connection with the play); your telegram of the 17th was forwarded to the wrong address, and was received on the 18th when all the tickets had been disposed of. I did not go to the opening and left the next day for Spokane, Washington. As the Bible says: When they say unto a Centurion, go; he goeth.
But far more interesting to me than your seeing the play, would have been the chance of me seeing you. My days are spent in, on and about khaki. I’m starved for wider views.
But the work is fascinating. Until that order of the 15th I have been (after months of training) Intelligence Officer of the 328th Fighter Group, Hamilton Field, California; being knit into three squadrons of pursuit pilots being “activated” for combat duty. That Order pulled me out of that and put me on a committee that
is preparing a certain Air Force document that requires our visiting many of the Fields in the country. Whether I go back to my Group after this 60 days of Detached Service, I don’t know. I hope so.
I look forward to our next walk and talk, cher maître
Most sincerely
Thornton.
P.S. Half a year ago I gave Alex. Woollcott that ardent Vermonter, a collected edition of your poems.
Aleck has always said that he has a closed mind to poetry. “There’s nothing in poetry that couldn’t be said as well in prose.”
I begged him to read you “as though you were prose” and the poetry would arrive later.
He now asks me which of yours I would recommend for inclusion in an anthology he has been asked to prepare for men in the services.
I made my suggestions. I think he is consulting many persons.
Not long ago a Marine quoted to me “West-Running Brook,”89 but it was a more than usually literate Marine. The only reading I’ve seen in the hands of soldiers is pulp magazines.
And as for officers, myself included, they don’t read at all.
T.
198. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Private
Washington, D.C.
December 17. 194290
Isabel: Send this to the Saturday Review.91
First go upstairs and verify the fact that Finnegans Wake is 600 pages long. I think it is.
Then erase this note.
Love and giggles,
Thornton
To the Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature.
Dear Sir:
Many thanks for your telephone call and your request that I comment upon the article in the Review pointing out some real and some imagined resemblances between my play, “The Skin of Our Teeth”, and James Joyce’s novel, “Finnegans Wake”.
At the time that I was absorbed in deciphering Joyce’s novel the idea came to me that one aspect of it might be expressed in drama<:> the method of representing mankind’s long history through superimposing different epochs of time simultaneously. I even made sketches employing Joyce’s characters and locale, but soon abandoned the project. The slight element of plot in the novel is so dimly glimpsed amid the distortions of nightmare and the polyglot of distortions of language that any possibility of dramatization is out of the question. The notion of a play about mankind and the family viewed through several simultaneous layers of time, however, persisted and began to surround itself with many inventions of my own. If one’s subject is man and the family considered historically, the element of myth inevitably presents itself. It is not necessary to go to Joyce’s novel to find the motive of Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Lilith, and Noah.
From Joyce, however, I received the idea of presenting ancient man as an ever-present double to modern man. The four fundamental aspects of “Finnegans Wake” were not to my purpose and are not present in my play. Joyce’s novel is primarily a study of Original Sin and the role it plays in the life of the conscience. Its recurrent motto is St. Augustine’s “O felix culpa!” Nor could I use its secondary subject, the illustration of Vico’s theory of the cyclic seasonal repetitions of human culture.92 Nor could I find any place for its primary literary intention, the extraordinary means Joyce found for representing the thoughts of the mind while asleep, the famous “night-language”. Nor could I employ his secondary literary intention, the technical tours-de-force whereby through puns and slips of the tongue he was able to represent several layers of mental activity going on at the same time and often contradictory to one another. If I had been able to transfer to the stage several or any one of these four basic aspects of the book, wherein its greatness lies, I would have done it and would have gladly published the obligation at every step of the way.
The germ of my play, once started, began to collect about it many aspects which had nothing to do with Joyce. It fixed its thoughts on the War and the situation of the eternal family under successive catastrophes. It groped to find a way to express dramatically the thought that the great “unread” classics furnish daily support and stimulation even to people who do not read them. But principally the play moved into its own independent existence through its insistence on being theatre, and theatre to such an extent that content was continually in danger of being overwhelmed by sheer theatric contrivances. I can think of no novel in all literature that is farther removed from theatre than “Finnegans Wake”.
The writers of the article in the Review list a long series of resemblances. Only those who have pored over the novel can realize how patiently the authors must have searched through that amorphous dream-texture to assemble them and how surprising it is to find them confronting the concrete theatrical material they are supposed to parallel. Maggie Earwicker’s letter buried in the rubbish heap behind her house becomes the letter of proud and indignant self-justification that Maggie Antrobus throws into the sea over the heads of the audience? Well, all the Margarets in the world can be presumed to have written letters that were important to them. In the most wonderful chapter in the novel, Anna Livia Plurabelle, river and woman, looks for a match to search for some peat to warm her husband’s supper. The authors of the article quote this passage and tell your readers it resembles Mrs Antrobus and Sabina asking for fuel to warm the household against the approaching glacier. By such devices your authors could derive “Junior Miss” from “Lady Chatterly’s Lover”. The ant-like industry of pedants, collecting isolated fragments, has mistaken the nature of literary influence since the first critics arose to regard books as a branch of merchandise instead of as expressions of energy.
Should a group of men of letters represent to me that the dependance of my play on Joyce’s novel is so close as to justify adding a note of acknowledgement to the theatre program, I would willingly accede to their opinion. I have placed such a note twice before; once in The Women of Andros, though Terence’s riotous farce had been changed into a reflective tragedy, and once in “The Merchant of Yonkers”, though its principal personage did not appear in the Austrian prototype at all. The first of the credentials of my advisers in this matter, however, would be that they had decoded all six hundred pages of Joyce’s crowded and mighty novel and realized how great were its differences from my three act comedy.
Sincerely yours,
Thornton Wilder
199. TO MONTGOMERY CLIFT. TL (Copy)93 1 p. Billy Rose
March 23, 1943
Dear Montgomery Clift:
My sister has only just told me of your ill health. As grateful author I have the best of reasons for regretting your withdrawal from the play,94 but the important thing is that you restore your health before you have overtaxed it and that you restore it for a long and triumphant career in the theatre.
I hope you are going somewhere for a long rest under wise care. Do not trouble to answer this letter now, but when the convalescence is well on its way, I should be very interested to know what you are thinking about, what you are reading, and what you are seeing; (this last shows that I hope you are considering our Western desert country where most of the invalids I’ve known have got ringingly well—“seeing” means the profile of mountains around Tucson.)
Be patient in your resting. Give in to resting. Put the present agon of the world out of your mind—with the invalid’s legitimate permitted selfishness.—Read and think over only the works from which the stress has been removed by the author’s art—about suffering but not of it—Sophocles not Euripides; Mozart not Beethoven; late Shakespeare not middle.
Think of yourself as surrounded by the grateful thoughts of your friends—among whom i hope you count
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
200. TO MICHAEL MYERBERG. TL (Copy)95 2 pp. Private
Last hours at the Billetting office, Air Base,
Presque Isle, Maine.
Hereafter: APO # 4002, c/o The Postmaster, N.Y.
May 21, 1943.
Dear Michael:
Try and remember at what moment you arrived
at the point when you were unable to discuss the production with anybody.
It would teach you a lot about yourself, your past and your future.
What was the moment when you locked up your mind in a steel brace.—and transferred the operations of the reason over to sheer blocked unlistening will?
From that moment you talked like a hysterical madman,—building up exaggerations; contradicting yourself hit or miss; substituting wish-fantasies for arguments.
Notice our last conversation:
I said in a spirit of sheer discussion, and with your interest in mind, that the decisions you were making were all gambling (i.e. taking a chance on Tallulah’s returning to the part; taking a chance on the public’s finding any interest in the play with Hopkins and Nagel in it) and you answered that you’d never made a wrong move yet.96
What kind of answer is that?
In the first place, it’s untrue; a manager whose 3 stars abandon a successful play the minute their contracts run out has bungled his managerial function in a way that would make Charles Frohman, Belasco, Sam Harris and Max Gordon97 laugh with contempt.
In the second place, it’s a wishful fantasy. It’s a little venture at prophecy. Business isn’t conducted by boasts and predictions; neither is war.
In the third place, it shows how completely emotional your whole relation to the production has become. Your answer shows that for you the whole production is staked on your self-consciousness.
The moment that happened your ears became closed to discussion; you dried up any approach of friendship that I could make toward you; and you became a tiresome bore.
Through emotional self-justification you began raving about how Conrad Nagel and Miriam Hopkins would give better performances than Freddie and Tallulah; and how Tallulah’s record in THE LITTLE FOXES98 proved that there’d be no audiences for her in this play,—you knew in your gizzard that that was all eye-wash, but you were deaf and dumb and thought that Harold99 and I were infants.
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 39
