The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  And so it goes in a vast and fascinating puzzle.

  The stay in Dover was not a success. The Lord Warden Hotel is no longer in operation. Friday it rained hourly and I did not make any trips beyond climbing to the castle and to all the nearby cliffs—and write letters—and read Mr. Sitwell’s book.

  But this long ‘rambling’ letter is merely to thank you for the delightful occasion last Thursday and to send my regard to yourself and to Sir John.

  Sincerely yours,

  Thornton Wilder

  231. TO AARON COPLAND.6 ALS 1 p. LofC

  St Jean de Luz Easter morning 1950

  Dear Aaron:

  You’ve got a short memory. We’ve been over all that before.

  I’m convinced I write a-musical plays; that my texts “swear at” music; that they’re after totally different effects; that they delight in the homeliest aspects of our daily life; that in them even the life of the emotions is expressed contra musicam.7

  Music and particularly opera is for the unlocked throat, the outgoing expressive “idea and essence” behind our daily life. I hope my play don’t lack that idea and essence but they singularly shrink from any explicit use of it. They are homely and not one bit lyrical.

  But I’m delighted that you are applying yourself to opera and the musical play and very proud that that born impresario, Dr. Bing has expressed this good opinion of me. Give him my regard. And you—find a suitable text—and all good courage and best wishes to you.

  Cordially ever

  Thornton

  P.S. Just got here from attending the Holy Week procesiones at Valladolid8—great theatre in the best sense—and all surrounded by the great motets of Victoria9 whose wonderfully plangent type of musical phrase just suits that week’s events

  232. TO VIVIEN LEIGH AND LAURENCE OLIVIER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery Embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) British Library

  July 19, 1950

  Dear Friends:

  You’re just about packing to come over.10

  I’m very glad of it.

  I’m of the same mind still: Come over and make a lot of dough; come over and get a lot of that Western sunshine; come out of England for a while—all so that you can go back and give England the renewed refreshed height of your gifts.

  To each of those clauses I could give further detailed developements (and how I’d enjoy it) but I’d soon sound even older than I am.

  You’ll find the U.S. in a State of Tension, but its a different kind of tension. You may even find it bracing.

  Last week I went to New York and saw two dress-rehearsals of Gar’s The Live Wire. It opened in Ogunquit, Maine, on Monday night and the NY Times reports that it was well received. It’s better than The Rat Race, but as I told Gar: Why is it that you who love your friends and are so generous-minded about praising them,—why is it that you don’t introduce likeable characters into your plays? This play exhibits two carefully elaborated portraits of the type heel—one male, one female. Curtain.11

  Ruthie is desolate that she must be away from Faraway Meadows12 just at the time that Vivien will be there. [This may all be changed, tho’: the paper announces the Michael Todd is bringing The Live Wire into New York on August first.] I suppose you know Ruth’s schedule for the summer, two big roles. And that they just sold two originals to the movies.13

  I, too, am desolate, for I must be away. I’m kinda ashamed to tell you where I shall be. I “open” on August first in “Our Town” at the Wellesley Summer Theatre—the twelfth company I’ve played it with. Every time I report one of these engagements to Sibyl she boils over with indignation,—all I can say is that I advise every playwright to get somehow somewhere that side of the footlights.

  x

  Nothing in New York to recommend to you except Shirley Booth’s performance in Come Home, Little Sheba.14 Wonderful.

  x

  I’ve decided to give my new play to Jed Harris. (But it’s still not finished!)

  Judith Anderson begs me to adapt Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale for her.15 She wants to play Jocasta and the idea is that I should so rewrite the last act that Jocasta and not Oedipus learns first the horrifying facts of the case. I reread the play and found it chic, pert, and anything but tragic.

  ¶ Letters from Sibyl from Rottingdean and Sissinghurst—so she can move about again. Praises be.

  ¶ At last I saw The Cocktail Party.16 Here it closes at 11:15. I (and a large audience) was grateful and absorbed until 11:00; and when the answers began to come through I was angry as a boil. No, sir, life is not restricted to two choices only—dreary inconsequentiality or absolute sainthood. No, sir. T. S. Eliot does not like people; he is in some stung quivering revulsion against our human nature and he retreats into that extreme position of Aut Christus aut nullus.17 Any fifty pages of War and Peace (also about “polite society” and about suffering struggling human beings) would sear his little play into the bloodless bowel-less thing it is.

  ¶ There! I went and got angry and now there is little room to tell you how I love you, how I rejoice that you’re going to have a change; that you’re going both to have lots of fun and do lots of brilliant work. Oh, oh, oh, I wish I could be in Hollywood and we could all have supper at Ciro’s and eat enormously and drink lots and talk, talk, talk. About the Abbey18 (I love every inch of it); about you; and about

  your devoted old

  Thorny

  233. TO ROBERT W. STALLMAN.19 ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed J-31 Dunster House - Harvard University - Cambridge 38, Massachusetts) Virginia

 

  last days at

  August 17. <1951>

  Dear Bob:

  There are a number of questions involved in your letter—some of them mutually exclusive:

  1. Steve was a wonderful fellow. Did he express himself saliently in letters? I don’t know. I must have some from him in my files, but I suspect that—like my letters from Hemingway, etc.—they are always about plans to meet, or about some piece of business. “Our generation” seldom wrote letters of analysis or theory to one another. Our key was the jocose. The justification for publishing letters are historical—data relating to social implications of a period or a natural gift for letter-writing—a mysterious endowment not necessarily a concommitent of literary genius or even of intelligence. For instance, E. A. Robinson and Willa Cather seemed to have lacked it. It is very possible that Steve had it, too,—but before you launch out on this venture, get hold of several hundred and weigh the matter.

  2. One of the finest things about Steve and Bill20 was their generosity to younger writers. Whether from such letters of guidence you could assemble an art poétique is a possibility. There your problem would be: have you enough material and does the material—like Rilke’s—build itself up into rich generalized lessons. Or does it spread itself into repetitions of injunctions, and into hundreds of specific suggestions about individual poems (which would require the printing of the younger poets’ poems).

  3. Letters of the Benét-Brothers’ Circle.

  Would they be interesting enough?

  As I say, it seems to me that that generation was self-conscious about letter writing and much given to the casual wise-crack. Consider it thoroughly.

  Down the years I have written scores of recommendations for Henry Moe.21 Every year at least half a dozen applicants ask me to speak for them. I have resolved to limit my calls on his attention to two a year. If in your application you can affirm that the Benét Letters are of constant high interest and/or offer a wealth of suggestions on the practice of poetry, I should be delighted to further your application.

  Thanks for the invitation to Storrs. After this over-loquacious year I am taking a long vacation from speaking.

  Isabel and I sail for Europe on Sept 14. I may have to return almost at once to continue my work in the vicinity of one of our great libraries; but its going to be a Trappist year.

  All cordi
al best wishes

  to you both

  Thornton

  234. TO HOWARD LOWRY.22 ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Wooster

  S.S. Saturnia—in Halifax, NS harbour—arriving NY Monday

  Nov. 4 1951

  Dear Howard:

  You wrote me a good richly packed long letter over a year ago. Vous me pardonnerez; c’est votre métier.23

  The year at Cambridge was the hardest I ever spent; but that was entirely my fault. I broke down with a sacroiliac dislocation (real but psychogenic) and spent 4 weeks in Mass. Gen.—the best hospital in the world, I guess. I enjoyed my illness, very much, but emerged from it to resume the hard work. The Chas Eliot Norton professor gets a lot of dough for merely giving 6 lectures and being in residence with a faint implication of being accessible to a select portion of the student body. Well, with that old Maine-inherited conscience of mine I’m always in servitude when I’m paid for something. So every time the phone rang I said ‘yes’’—not to ‘social’ events (I made the rule never to cross the River Charles) but to speak; and the forums and discussions group and hospital benefit committees and Harvard Dames clubs and so on are legion.

  I suppose the ground cause is this: I am an observer and an onlooker; so I fear and dread lest I look like an observer and an onlooker. I make every possible motion to appear to belong, to be in and off a community. Well, by the time I left I knew every third person I passed on the street—I sure was a citizen of Cambridge—but it was the most difficult year of my life.

  The Norton lectures have to be published. I think I’d have refused the invitation, if I had realized to the full extent what that meant. I’m not an essayist; I’m not a critic; I’m not a “non-fiction” man. I don’t mind casting forth generalizations and sententious dicta from a plat-form—but those are not dogmatic but merely tentative discardings from one’s “personality.” And of course my discourses cant be printed as spoken. The Germans have a proverb: Schön gesprochen, schlect gedrückt.”24 So now I’m rewriting the lectures for the eye. Much of it is an expansion of the remarks I made at the Convocation when you did me so much honor.25 But now I derive my observations on the American temper from my findings in Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Poe.26 (Many of the ideas I got from Gertrude Stein.) So all Summer I worked worked worked and every day since. This brief trip to Europe—thirty days was partly to call on my aged friends Alice Toklas and Max Beerbohm and partly for the never failing restoratives which are for me slow-crossings. Much restored I am. I leave my sister Isabel in Rome where she will spend the winter; our Deepwood Drive home is rented to friends (but serves as my address); I go to live in a few rooms over a drugstore in New Hope, Pa.—easy driving distance to the Princeton Univ. library (but not to live in Princeton—for we know what that would lead to.)

  I resolve for a year to be a bear; an unsociable boor; a recluse. Each sunrise I shall feel free to devote the day to the Nortons; or to the Lope studies; or to the Palestrina work; or to Finnegan’s Wake; or to my new comedy.27 To be sure, I am not cutting myself off from humankind; but my acquaintances are of the sort that one makes in bars—illiterates, analphabetics, who don’t know anything about Culture and who don’t wanta.

  I should have thanked you long ago for The Matthew Arnold—from which I have derived many hours of lofty, serene though slightly tristful pleasure. Your apparatus is exemplary: just what we need and never too much and never im-pertinent. The book in higher education and the role of religion is in a field where I flag.28 I’m only happy close to the specific and the individual. This is a reflection on me, not on your handling of the subject: I never could read far in Bob Hutchins’ pages on higher education, either. Question of temperament and what the French call “formation”.

  In a few minutes I go ashore and stroll about the dreariest town in the hemisphere.

  This slow crossing has been brightened by a most interesting new friendship: Alma Mahler Werfel. Wife of four remarkable men each in a different art—Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoshka, Gropius and Franz Werfel, and mistress of as many more.29 The Egeria30 of high format. Vestiges of her great beauty and more than vestiges of extraordinary galvanic femininity.

  Yes, Howard, after I’ve finished by bearish year, I dream of descending on your community again. Wooster has coalesced with Oberlin in my associational field and emerged on top. Give my regards to your mother, and to that woman whose name I have forgotten but of whom I remember such grace of mind and person, and to all the friends, especially Bill Craig and Myron Peyton.31

  Flag not in your splendid work; but don’t overdo.

  Lots of regard

  Thornton

  P.S. Tinker’s better than he’s been for years.32

  PS II The El Greco book is a continuing joy.33

  P.S. III Want to hear about your findings re South American colleges.

  P.S. IV Delighted that Bob Shaw went to you again. Do you see how many daemonic elements pull him in many directions?

  235. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Holland-America Line) Yale

  The Col. Club

  Wed. noon—train to New Haven at 3

 

  Dear Isa—

  So I had lunch with Sharlie.34 She’s most definitely better in every way. Hat and dress downright smart. She’s now forbidden liquor and smokes only some expensive de-nicotined cigarettes. Her diet seems to have been much relaxed or enlarged or whatever you call it. Her color’s good.

  But the fact that she’s almost completely well merely means that there’s less and less to be interested in while she’s talking.

  I thought that at one point the conversation was going to reveal an alarming angle, but no, it turned out to be merely tiresome; here it is.

  “The other day I did an awful thing. Perhaps, I oughtn’t to tell you. …. But there’s a movie house nearby where they show good pictures and there’s a man who takes your tickets and tears them in half. …. and maybe I oughtn’t to tell you this… he has a friend who he says has written a great play and he doesnt know what to do with it next. And he asked me if I knew anybody who was in the theatre and wrote plays. And I told him about you but I said that you were away in Europe… And that maybe when you come back. …”

  I sat silent.

  I wouldn’t mind reading a 2,000th play, but the picture of getting her and me in fine chatty relationship with the ticket-taker.

  So she only sighed and said. “Well, I guess I can’t go back to that theatre for a while yet.”

  Her conversation is full of these people she falls into conversation with.

  And that’s bound to be. That’s Greenwich Village anyway, and one can only hope that something doesn’t flare up.

  Dinner last night with Monty, Mira35 and Elizabeth Taylor. He and Eliz did a lot of tender cheek to cheek, but that’s all. He says she’s been given a fright about men and about her own emotions as a result of her brief marriage to Billionaire Hilton.36 She’s a very lovely 19-year old and I can’t know whether she’ll develope strongminded or gentle, or knowing or negative or what. And she doesnt know either.

  You can imagine the craning necks wherever we went, ending up at the St Regis bar at two in the morning.

  My cold has almost entirely disappeared now.

  In a few minutes I gotta transport my luggage to the Grand Central: oh what a chore!

  Well, now I’m crazy to read your first letter from Rome. So much hangs on the weather.

  Happened to pick up a book at the Century—a bereaved family had privately printed the verses and letters of a Mrs Laurence Peck [aunt incidentally of the Pierson Underwoods].37 They had a villa in Rapallo about 1927 and some letters from there are about how in March the weather was alternately divine and dreadful—rain and cold.

  Well, you can think of me most of this week deep in the Yale Library. I’ll deliver the trinkets to Rose; call on Catherine Coffin and Helen; learn the latest about the
Withingtons,38 but I’m not going to “eat” in homes, if I can help it. Just pass through ’em. I’m going to begin my life as a bear.

  Note for Gallup: “Gabrielle was scheduled to take her departure on 1 November, and I devoutly hope that she has done so.”39

  Love (to both!)

  Thorny

  236. TO THEW WRIGHT, JR.40 ALS 2 pp. Private

  1440 North Atlantic Avenue. Daytona Beach Fla Sunday night

  Dear Thew:

  Was that suspense terrible?

  I mean: did you expect an SOS every minute?

  Well, I have yet to see a house in that 7-mile built up area along the beach which is called Daytona Beach that hasn’t a sign on it saying Vacancy. Like a chatty waitress said: I think it’s overbuilt itself.

  Well, I got a little bungalow and the window I sit at sees the surf between two houses<.> Another man has an apartment in the same bungalow, but by a separate entrance and I haven’t seen him yet.

  Weather just wonderful. Girls were standing in the breakers today surf-fishing.

  And I’m doing just what I came for: being silent; and working.

  I haven’t a single appointment in the world until that Oberlin one in June.41

  I’ve only taken this for a month.