Old papers collect dust: asthmatic, choking, wearying, unclean, unorderly dust.
I’m coming to New York soon!!!!
Lotsa love
Thorny
243. TO AMOS TAPPAN WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Private
Please give the accompanying leaf to your Angel-Mother:
Dear Tappie
Greetings!
Greetings!
You sure wrote me the nicest nephew’s letter ever received in the History of Uncles.
You bet I’ll be at your house lots of the time.
I’m going to the Mountain Ash Inn66 for a lot of reasons:
So as not to crowd you in your cabin.
So as not to be in your mother’s way all the time.
Because writers love inns—there are so many strangers there to learn things from.
Because I know my bad character—when I work mornings I’m uuuugly—I bite and bark and snarl.
So as to have a place to invite YOU to come to.
Think this all over.
Aren’t I too heavy to go in a boat-race?67
WAVES OF LOVE
Uncle Thorny
244. TO AMOS N. AND CATHARINE K. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Yale
Veltin Studio Thurs. am
Dear Ones:
Lovely letter from Kay. Yes, the summer of 53 is over; right cold this morning—38° and lots of tomato plants spoiled, as I heard from local gossip when I was downtown getting early breakfast today. Yet only six days ago we were on the last day of 11 of woeful heat and humidity.
Yes, I went to see Charlotte. Amazing. Best she’s been since her first illness. Climbs up and downstairs like you or I; her conversation has lost those passages of irritation and suspicion. (“Why don’t those Italians and Jews go back to their own country”, “I used to like X on the radio very much, but the other day she said something so shocking. I wrote her that saying things like that could lose her her audience and her position”).
I saw Dr. Roller (head—I think—of the Medical part of Long Island Home… but maybe he’s co-head of the whole thing with Dr. Squires… on second thoughts I think he is a psychiatrist too… well, I don’t know). He said that there had been a radical change in charlotte’s attitude: she now acknowledges she did have a nervous breakdown and she is willing to concede that her family was acting for her own good and not merely maliciously restraining her liberty… etc. etc.
She talks of getting back as soon as possible to her New York apartment. No one ventures to tell her yet that it has been cleaned up and disposed of. If she went back would the disastrous cycle repeat itself? Cigarettes and coffee instead of food; mental instability because of malnutrition; new ulcers; constant vomiting; break down? Maybe not. At present she is not smoking. She can eat anything and retain it. But, of course, she is filled with the determination to get back to her apartment and her “work.”
Amos shouldn’t feel that he has to go: the secret of her cure is this all-inclusive bland self-centered self-sufficiency. There are two kinds of self-conten
I know you don’t like my tone about Charlotte, but you know me: my admiration for , who fought her way up and out of some appalling “conditioning” can only be maintained by dint of being indulgent toward who gave up the struggle. We don’t know all the facts about either x or y; but we must cling to the principle of freedom and responsibility. Poe—whom I have been re-studying for the Harvard book—destroyed himself—just as a part of Charlotte in her subconscious is out to destroy her—but Poe’s infantile conditioning was horrible and his fight for life was tremendous. When he was not drunk, Poe was unfailingly attentive to others. That is the criterion. Beatrice Kendall70 has broken down in much the same way as Charlotte, but Beatrice has always expended herself for others to the point of irritating officiousness.
I haven’t yet made up my mind where I shall live through the Fall. Nor even where I shall go October first. I’m tempted to try Washington D.C. I’m a Consultant or something like that at the Library of Congress and they’ll give me a cubicle in the stacks; and I’ve always liked the city. Shall I do that? Anyway, my uprootedness is a subject not of anxiety but of pleased reverie.
Lots of love to you all—I’d love to “follow” the steps of Dixie’s first weeks at the new school.71 (Don’t take too seriously my animadiversion on coeducation; I’m not a dogmatic man). It’ll be a very exciting year for Tappy, too,—any minute the “life-bent” may emerge.
Ever
Thorny
245. TO EDWARD ALBEE.72 ALS 2 pp. Private
As from: 50 Deepwood Drive Hamden Conn
Key West, Fla Nov. 22 <1953>
Dear Edward:
Greetings.
Delighted to receive your letter.
Yes, indeed, send me the play in couplets. I still have no fixed address down here so send it viâ Hamden.
You say that the answer to your finding acceptance by editors is: “Time and work”.
Yes, but. …
That’s not enough.
Cultivate also a deeper concentration of all yourself on the poetic act. one preparation for it is this: let me beg you not to read too much contemporary prose and poetry. Expand your imagination’s picture of what poetry does by withdrawing into yourself for a short time daily to read some of the great writing of the past. It’s often valuable to do this in some foreign language. It wouldn’t hurt if you made a sort of ceremony of it: quietly shut the door, sit down, relax, open the book, make your mind a serene blank cup for a minute: then slowly read Beaudelaire
Something like that.
And remember: don’t only write poetry; be a poet.
I like the poem you have sent me. The mood is admirably conveyed. But wasn’t the poem on its way to a greater intensity? Before you used the title: Letter from Florence. This too has something of the “letter” quality—that is, talking. The talking cries out to pass to the next stage of singing, of praying, of bursting. …
Something like that.
Give my best to Bill
Cordially ever
246. TO MARCIA NARDI.73 ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Yale
Feb 25 <1954>
Dear Marcia—
Found your special delivery when I returned last night.
x
Enclosed find … etc. Do not think of repaying it.
x
Deeply interested by all you say about women in work and love.
The only thing I wish to say about it now is that the financial-security anxiety under which you live is greatly coloring your thoughts on the matter. Any secondary or a
dditional anxiety in a woman’s life (her conviction that she is ugly; or her fear of imminent illness; or the vicinity of someone who she thinks hates her;)—all such anxieties translate themselves promptly into a basic vague monstrous thing that one can only call “the humiliation of being a woman”. [Centuries-old; Christianity-fostered, alas; in large part men (i.e. male) constructed and emphasized.]
In my opinion there is no such thing as the humiliation in being a woman, but billions have felt there is and feel so still. I hope that someday your work will be one more step toward removing that old-old prisonhouse. In the meantime, fight its shadows and its threats when they tend to “frighten” your mind. Femelle de l’homme74 is a splendid blow against it. Keep up that proud, courageous, attitude,—that striking back at those who wish to remake woman into their condescending, minifying image of woman.
x
Through all this difficult time, please take good sensible care of your health. Let me be a stuffy old uncle: every day, preferably morning, take a half-hour walk—standing very straight, (from the frieze of the Parthenon), not looking at the passersby), breathing deeply but effortlessly, and thinking of the high and excellent and of your true proud relationship to it. Eat the simplest things and eat them slowly.
I hope to come to N.Y. before long. I will give you warning and hope that I shall find you free for dinner.
Eugene Davidson head of the Yale Univ. Press wants you to submit your poems for the “Yale Series of Younger Poets” whose editor is Auden. Does that seem too parochial-cliquey for you? Would you be ready? I recited some of yours to him (and to Sir Herbert Read75) and they were greatly struck.
Affectionate regards ever
Thornton
P.S. Neither Virginia Wolf
247. TO MICHAELA O’HARRA.76 TL (Copy) 2 pp. New Dramatists
April 2, 1954
Dear Miss O’Harra:
In a way I ought to be ashamed of having asked that you give up so much time to write me a letter—but the letter’s such an admirable piece of exposition that I’m going to hold it—or lend it back to you—in order to enlighten others also.
I have no skill nor practice in the form of exposition that you do so well. Let me just try a few jottings.
*
Older I grow I see that playwrights (in the early stages) discover and nourish themselves in only one way: being in the theatre, hanging around theatres. Fifty hours backstage are worth a thousand in audience-seats.
So I think very little of playwriting classes. (Prof. Baker was a magnet only; potential dramatists went to him; but his two most gifted, O’Neill and Wolfe, left after a short time—In his nine years at Yale, he “made” no playwrights, except Paul Osborne and Paul didn’t even finish his one year).77 Discussion groups—workshops in which they read to one another—are a little better—but only for courage, not for content.
Think of all our masters who worked backstage first. They don’t even have to have been associated with good plays, (Ibsen at Bergen,78 wasn’t); it’s enough they smell the paint and the audience and the working from that side of the curtain. (Composers don’t go to concerts!)
Next best is attendance at rehearsals. (You note I put very little faith in attendance at performance—as a member of the public.) You kindly refer to me: let me state my youthful formation. In the grammar school and high school of Berkeley, California, it would seem that I’d have little chance to know backstage theatre; but no: Margaret Anglin, and Maude Adams, and Edith Wynne Matheson
When painters and composers get together they don’t talk about content (in content, no one can help you and you don’t want anyone to help you), they talk about fabric, about medium, and all those things that go under the head of technical resources.
So much for the formation.
Now the plays are being written.
Is silence and solitude and isolation and leisure necessary for playwriting? It certainly is for poetry and musical composition. It is probably desirable for all artistic work. But most dramatists we read about seemed to have lived in a city turmoil—Goldoni and Congreve and Shaw and Beaumarchais and Sheridan, to name some in the second rank.
Which is related to my third proposition:
They all coped with the theatre, the commercial theatre of their day. To be sure, Shaw had that quasi-suburban venture the Vedremo
At present our off-Broadway theatres are our most hopeful market for gifted young playwrights—but there’s a kind of danger in it, too. In the theatre one writes for PEOPLE,—not for people-of-a-certain-taste. Off-Broadway theatre tends to please other interests before basic theatre storytelling: sociological tendency; a poetic-literary spinning. (Wasn’t CAMINO REAL a perfect off-Broadway field-day in this sense?81)
So I suggest:
(1) Divert playwrights to be stage managers. Use funds, if necessary to buy them jobs as assistant stage managers in summer theatres.
(2) See if Broadway shows won’t let them sit backstage on the electrician’s bench.
(3) For their “time to write”, arrange to select your most promising playwrights and apply for their admission to MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Huntington, Hartford; or buy a shack at Cape Hatteras.82 (The poet St. Jean-Perse
Do not be too tender-hearted about their careers. What poets we admire have earned their living by their pen? Marianne Moore, a librarian; William Carlos Williams, a Pediatrician; Wallace Stevens, an insurance executive. Dozens of us have been teachers. It’s too bad. It’s probably hurt us, but it’s only killed a few of us. But the one thing “we” didn’t do was to write rubbish in order to earn the money to write literature.
A dramatist will be helped by doing a man’s task of earning a living, but he will only be harmed by using his faculties as a dramatist in writing what he cannot respect. I have seen it over and over again in my pupils and young friends who have done routine Hollywood or routine radio and advertising writing.
Well, now, I haven’t been much use to you. I’m sorry. We are all impatient for the next crop of playwrights who will bring some quality into the Broadway scene. But that is a matter of authentic endowment and no means has ever been found to produce that. Thousands of plays are being written by young people (and the postman certainly brings me a lot of them.) Their principal shortcoming—(that they aren’t superior writing)—we can do nothing about. Their next shortcoming—that they lack basic stage-movement—can only be improved by extended frequentation of theatre-in-production. Not advice; not guidance; not round-table discussion; not theatre-attendance; not (and here you’ll be angry with me) not primarily a production of their own plays, (in productions of one’s own plays, so much anxiety and ego-susceptibility, and hopes ’n fears, and impulsive advice from Tom, Dick and Harry are involved; that there’s little clear mind left to learn anything).
Lots of best wishes—
Sincerely yours,
SIGNED: Thornton Wilder
248. TO RUTH GORDON AND GARSON KANIN. ALS 2 pp. Private
Poste restante Aix en Provence
or Hotel Thermes Sextius
All Souls Day
Très-bons et très chers—83
All the time I’ve been sort of on my knees praying that Ruthie’ll be able to say: why, that opening wasn’t any strain at all!—that the deep rewards of all that wonderful selfless devotion to her task of these ten weeks will have that happy issue—an effortless, oh, a buoyant opening.84
On that phonecall from
Birmingham the other night all I wanted to ask, and did ask, was: was Ruthie well and did she feel well in the rôle; and then I could have used £5 of phonebill asking was the finale of Act III back in place and a thousand other questions. Now I’m crazy to know if the dressingroom at the Haymarket is magical for both comfort and tradition. (I called on John Gielgud for a moment there, in September; it looked like a drawingroom to me.)
TNW, Garson Kanin, and Ruth Gordon in Berlin for the pre-London tryout of The Matchmaker, September 1954.
TNW, Garson Kanin, and Ruth Gordon in Berlin for the pre-London tryout of The Matchmaker, September 1954. Courtesy Berlin Tourist Office, 1954.
I’m longing to be there for the Second Night; but—you know me—I haven’t the faintest desire to be there at the First.
I am, however, represented in the First Night audience, and by one of the finest fellows I ever knew—Air Vice Marshal Pankhurst. He was my boss during the year in N. Africa and the year in Italy. No one, they say, ever liked an employer since business began; but that’s not true. Pank was so tensely unsmilingly a conscientious leader that the other officers didn’t like him very much; but I loved him and he knew it and he was very fond of me in that emotion-bound English way (the finest dogs, too, would give anything to be able to talk). He was so conscientious (outwitting those Germans) that he could almost never laugh. But I was able to make him laugh, and often. Those conversations in front of the Mess Bar after midnight. … under straye stars. … “Well… uh… Wilder, how do you think things are going?” “How do you mean, sir?” Mrs Pankhurst will be there, too; I never met her, but as a result of the appalling candors of exile and homesickness, I learned more about her than I shall ever know of Anna Karenina or Isabel Wilder. I used to be able to make him laugh and I now pass on that worthwhile task to dear Ruthie.
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 48
