Now while writing this letter I’ve almost come around to wishing I could be at the Opening Night. There’s a right kind of nervousness and a wrong kind of nervousness. The right kind arises from our anxiety that everything should go right for us; the wrong kind from our anxiety that everything should go right for them. I love the right kind of nervousness; I had it at Newcastle and it was very heady and exciting. But big capitals engender the second kind,—now, well—there must be something wrong in my argument somewhere, because we’re certainly in this business to please: Garson sometime will point out my lost stitch to me.
oh, dear, its one-ten in the morning; and I want to go down and get tight; but in little compact adorable Aix they take in the sidewalks at ten-thirty (no street-walkers, either; tutt-tutt, provincial University town). Of course, there are the brilliant and raffish salles de jeu;85 but I don’t want to get tight under a thousand chandeliers, I want to sit on a terrace on the most beautiful street in the world, the cours Mirabeau, hearing those plashing fountains and staring with slowly glazing eyes into the falling beech leaves, and brood about how I love the Kanins and about all I owe to the Kanins, and then start weeping weeping about how wicked and unjust I am to the Kanins, and ungrateful and unworthy, happy happy tears, until the garçon wakes me up. In vino veritas. True, true, all true.
Thy
Thornt.
249. TO MARCIA NARDI. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Poste restante Aix-en-Provence Jan 10 1955
Dear Marcia—
Sorry about this delay in answering. I only found your two letters here when I returned from a holiday visit to my sister in Switzerland. I’d told them here only to forward telegrams and registered mail.
The chief thing that distresses and surprises me in your letters is the account you give of all those rejections of your poems by the very magazines which I feel should accept them gladly. Poems enter circulation through having aroused the active enthusiasm of a few readers—through such a reader I am happy to see that your book is to find a publisher.86 I hope—especially as I am to remain out of the country for a while—that you will find more such readers who will do battle for you.
But it’s hard to see how you can make personal relations with such championing admirers while your life goes on as it is,—and not only because you are cooped up in New York.
Now grab your hat because I’m going to talk to you in the tone of an old uncle:
You describe three “shattering emotional experiences that you have been through” that leave you “ill in both body and soul.” Now look, Marcia. I’ve known such experiences, and no week goes by but that some distraught friend writes me about such experiences—but I’m afraid you’re the kind of person that no one can help; you’re the person who likes ’em, who rushes toward ’em; who (worst of all) returns to ’em. I think you’ve got some foolish romantico-erotic notions mixed up in your head. Why should you be “shattered” that J.E. should return to his wife? You should have forseen it from the first day. One glance is enough to show you that he’s a very prudent middle-of-the road man. And you returned to this “monster” as you describe him, your former husband? I think you’re a sort of emotional goose; you read too many bad novels when you were a girl. You justify it by invoking the claims of the senses. Well, we all know about them; but in adults the claim of the senses is always linked with other claims—enrichment, tranquility, children, etc. But I’m afraid that with you its linked with a very appetite for suffering, and perhaps with an image of yourself as a grande amoureuse,87 as a noble wronged loving woman. THREE, Marcia? And one of them a Repetition?
Now, you sit down and have a good talk with yourself. You don’t sound like a woman out of the 20th Century—you sound like a “willing victim” out of bad French novels, 1901. And I should think it’d all have a bad effect on your poetry. These abused, spurned and abandoned women are out of date. Yes, I know they exist and I’ve just seen a lot of one of them—but they accept their sufferings differently. They have more resilience, more pride and dignity and resilience.
Formerly when I recommended that you get a job I grieved about it—because I regretted the time so diverted from the writing of poetry. But now I don’t grieve at all: I don’t think you’ll write any more superior poetry until you change your attitude. You’re not enough like Shakespeare’s heroines; you havent a strong enough spine; you have out-dated cobwebs in your head. You’re Greenwich-village-y, 1912.
Now, I always feel ashamed when I indulge in this kind of preaching. And my shame takes the form of sending a cheque. I can’t afford it, but here it goes.
I think you know that I write you this way because I believe that you will outgrow all these stages and write beautiful things,—searching beautiful truth things. You know that, don’t you?
Your old friend
Thornton
250. TO IRENE WORTH.88 ALS 2 pp. Yale
Paris Sunday —Jan 23. 1955
en route to
Hotel Sextius
Aix-en-Provence, (B. du R.)
Dear Miss Worth:
Never have I seen so many Parisians going to church. Even the most tepid are bounding along to fling themselves on their knees. Why? There’s only one subject of conversation in Paris—the alarming behavior of the Seine.89 All day (and at 4:00 in the morning when I was coming home) crowds stare, silenced and appalled, at that coiling flood. The French lose very little sleep over disorder in other countries; but the fact that disorder can take place in France leaves them speechless. (Dieu, est-il français?90) I wish some power the giftie’d gie’ ’em to see that they are introducing a similar disorder into international affairs.
I skipped out of London leaving a number of matters unresolved. There’s going to be a clash between an irresistable force and an immovable object. Tony will urge powerfully that the play’s cast be recruited in Canada; and Binkie91 will ask how that can be subsidized. And Wilder, the most difficult and irrational of beings, will have left his deposition that he doesn’t want the Canadian forces to present the play in Edinburgh, unless Canadian audiences have had their just right to see it in their home base; and Mr. Hunter92 will insist that the play should not be seen prior to his unveiling in his own Festival. And Tony will say “I cannot adequately caste this play in Shaftsbury Avenue, and I wouldn’t have time to do it, if I could.” And Binkie and Hunter will say, “We have your commitment that you would put this play on in Edinburgh and—wind or high weather—you shall and will.” Whereupon I go blithely off to Paris which—as The Importance of Being Ernest
I hope, gracious lady, that you are not caught between the millstones of those differences.
I’m accustomed to a dim view of the success of my works on the part of those who must “promote” them. When I took The Bridge of San Luis Rey to my publishers, they shook their heads; they “liked” it, but they saw that it was for a restricted circle of readers and hoped that I would bear in mind a larger audience. They found so little of interest in Heaven’s My Destination that they resigned it to another publisher. Our Town went so badly in a Boston try-out that the manager cancelled a second week and almost did not bring it into New York. (He engaged the Henry Miller Theatre that was only available for a week and a half.) The Skin of Our Teeth received such crashingly bad notices that the manager was cancelling the New York opening, when he heard that Freddie March was asking his agent whether he had enough money to buy it.
So I’m almost braced by the fact that (reported to me in a letter by Mr. Hunter) Binkie does not feel that this play could ensure a Edinburgh-to-London removal (to say nothing of a trip around the provinces en route). So after all this writing of mine and after all these hopes (and all these ‘conferences’’) there is to be a two-week or hopefully a three-week presentation of the play and finis! I think that’s awfully funny. Is the play so off-beat as all that? so intimidatingly highbrow? If there had been no question of the Edinburgh Festival,
couldn’t I have found a West End manager to believe in it? Anyway, I’ve arranged that after the Edinburgh run, all the rights to the play return to me, so that I shall seek to place it with a New York manager.
Apparently you and I are the only persons who believe that the Suburbanite could become absorbed in this play and recommend it to his or her neighbors. When Binkie has given you a text, do select one or two friends whose judgment is sound also on “entertainment values” and see if they too think it is commercially hopeless. I love men and women so much—and the ordinary man and woman (to whom the play is a sort of hymn)—that I should be very confused, if I woke up at 57 to discover that I was writing works in which they were unable to see themselves reflected. Oh, Lord! have I become library-dusty and out-of-reach-cultured!!
I’m finishing this letter at Aix—and I wish I could wrap up some of this Provencal sunlight and send it to you… I’m now going to sign my first name and I want you to pull yourself together to meet the affront in my next letter, of my addressing you by your first—to which will be added the indignity of my (for a while) thinking it in two syllables. But since it means PEACE you cant be indignant for long.94 Its use will be, madam, just one of my ways of expressing my admiration, gratitude and
regard,
Thornton
251. TO THEW WRIGHT, JR. ALS 2 pp. Private
Feb 19 <1955>
Dear Thew—
Well now, what was I saying?
Oh, yes.
So I got back from Marseille, where I picked up my dough,95 and after a while I went to a dive where I often go. This is a University town and very controlled. I went to the only place that stays open almost all night. Certain people have warned me against it—its the gangster (that’s a French word) and sporting place, but I’m an old acquaintance. The dame that runs it, half Martinique negress, and her husband and boy—why, they’re old friends. She made me an aioli—a Provençale dish almost solid garlic, and was my guest when we all ate it together. I’m the American with horn-rimmed spectacles who speaks bad French, but they speak worse. I was a year in French North Africa, reportedly a hotbed of pickpockets, but I never lost a thing and here I havent lost a thing yet; but we’re a real worldly-wise crowd down there. Every now and then I meet there<?> my friend Régus Toussaint (translated: of the King-all Saints); he’s a pimp and hangs around all the bars getting customers for Madame Francia’s. I<’ve> been to Madame Francia’s. She’s only got three girls, and for years in Marseille (30 kilometres away) she had 25. But all France—even Paris—has closed down, institutionally, on such stuff. They allow her to operate here for an extraordinary reason. She showed me her medals. God damn it, France, England, and America had given her impressive citations and medals for her work in the French Resistance. She’d hidden aviators and transmitted messages and organized railway bombings, and she was an old whore and madame. Life’s bigger, wider, fuller than the deacons ever dreamed it was.
So I went tonight to this joint and had my oysters and my omelette and my bottle of wine and it was all less than a dollar; and everywhere else France is killingly expensive—so my advice to you is to stick to the half-world, and semi-criminal because its more interesting and more human and lots cheaper.
I got back from that week in Italy where I’d paid the bills for Isabel and the German translator and everywhere I’d asked people to come to dinner and you know how it is and when I got back it was more expensive than I’d thought. …. Hence my S.O.S. to you. I think they must have mislaid your remittance a while—but efficiency is not to be expected in this charming country—especially not of French employees working for an American firm.
It’s time we invented a Cable code name for you, and I’ve a good mind to register THEWIGDAN.
But I know I won’t have any occasion to S.O.S. you again.
I’m just bent double with the kind of jobs I hate most—“preparing” the definit
I’m afraid that I’ve hurt Isabel’s feelings: I gently suggested that I didn’t see why she had to spend all that money to return to Europe again to see the new play at the Edinburgh Festival. I didn’t tell her (but she might have seen it long ago) that—during those harrassed times—it not only adds to “the things I have to think about”, to be “nice” about, but it also reduces the occasions when I can have a little deserved recreation. A sister is not a wife; and although some brothers in literature or the arts, have had sisters who were as omnipresent and “necessary” as wives, I’m not one of them; in fact, I’m one of the most extreme goers-alone I ever came across. Even from Isabel’s point of view—in my eyes—I am constantly aware of the fact that she does not sufficiently see that it is
If I get my present chores in hand, I hope to set down an itemized bill of some of these business trips… for income tax.
Yet all the time a new play is trying to move into my consciousness. Hell, it’s hard to organize my life… but at least I’m doing it a little better in France than in the U.S.
But oh I’m getting ready to come home
Ever
252. TO ALAN SCHNEIDER.97 ALS 2 pp. Yale
Gibraltar—sailing tomorrow for U.S April fool’s Day 1955
Dear Schneider—
Fine!
Great!
Scores told me how good your Catholic U. production was.
Yes, the unframed stage is getting to be self-evident,—what promise for a new Theatre age.
Don’t come to Washington to hear the damn lecture. Anyway, I repeat it at the YWHA on May 2.98
Maybe you hate hearing authors read their plays: I’d understand it. But I think I’m reading the new one99 to a few friends in my sitting room at the Algonquin on Sat. night April 9—verify by phone. Bring wife and baby unless author’s readings revolt them, too.
In Europe don’t go to theatre much—saw nothing arresting.
There are 20 ways of doing Skin. I have no idea how it should be done. When I began it I saw it as comic strip—Fanny Brice and Ed Wynn100—giant Punch and Judy with balloon-speeches coming out of their mouths—and Sabina tearing around serving breakfast on roller-skates—sort of Ubu Roi.101 Then as I wrote on that old Wilder pathos-about-family-life began to get into the act. The characters lost a lot of their out-size.
I used to think the climax and core-kernel was “We’re all as wicked as we can be and that’s the God’s Truth”—a line Tallulah102 hated and used to mumble (“But it doesn’t mean anything”)
L. Olivier never played Antrobus in London but he did on the Australian tour—I saw a rough dress rehearsal in London before they sailed. He was wonderful in each act—but in the last what a picture of brutilised war-fatigue gradually assembling a few things to cling to. I’ve never seen a Mrs A that I’d buy. I’ve seen school-marms and injured tragedy-queens, and agitated hens (peacock-hen; in Milan).
I always cry when sabina declares that from time to time she’s got to go to the movies.
see you soon.
All best to all three of you.
Cordially
Thornton Wilder
And lots of regards to
Robert Whitehead; tell him I’m ashamed I wrote a play with so big a cast and so many technical problems. (But the new one’s worse.) Am writing Mary and Helen.
An example of TNW’s multicolored decorative letters. The word “DEAREST” is written in blue pencil, “SWEETEST” in red pencil, and the design under “DIXIE” in blue pencil.
An example of TNW’s multicolored decorative letters. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
253. TO CATHARINE DIX WILDER. ALS 1 p. Yale
DEAREST SWEETEST
GIRLGRADUATE103
DIXIE
I want to go out and buy you something.
As a present.
For having made all those wonderful high marks.
So that All The Best Colleges are clamoring for you.
But I have a reputation for being such a bad shopper.
I get misled—I get browbeaten by shop-girls—and I get enthusiastic about the wrong things: I bring home horrors—all beautifully wrapped, but horrors.
So I’m sending you a cheque instead and you buy yourself something that is the Real Right Thing.
So here’s the cheque in this envelope (and I hope I’ve spelled your name right)
and with it a big kiss
and hug
from your proud and
devoted uncle
Thornton
254. TO FRANZ LINK.104 ALS 2 pp. Private
50 Deepwood Drive Hamden, Connecticut USA
Nov. 7. 1955
Dear Herr Link:
Many thanks for your letter and for your very perceptive comments on The Bridge of San Luis Rey. I read them with great interest, and intellectual pleasure, and gratitude for your generosity; but I hesitate to comment in return. I distrust bringing upward to the conscious analytical level, in myself (in relation to my own works) the various processes, and influences which enter my novels and plays. I have always assumed that every artist is a tireless critic—a selector, a rejector, a discriminator—but that those operations take place—as it were—“in the dark.” The practice of writing seems to me to be the gradual acquisition of ever increased experience, in the organization of such thought and material,—an experience which frees him from the consciousness of “fabrication” and opens his mind more and more to the appearance of spontaneous and “lyric” expression.
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 49
