The one little tentacle our play contains that might arrest our French theatregoer is that there’s a certain amount of talk about money; and there is the Dolly-role as a femme forte.131 (You know my theories about the French admiration-hatred and capitulation before a femme forte)
But, Hell, from the point of view of the French infatuation about money, it’s downright incomprehensible about money. It’s full of a Protestant-Puritan condition of being “unimpressed” by money; and Dolly is a femme forte who is not at all proud of her qualities as a femme forte; she is neither vainglorious nor cruel (aren’t they fascinantes when they’re cruelles
What remains?
Ruth Gordon’s performance.
Ruth’s being able to see whether she can connect with an audience is unerring. Ruth knows Paris theatre-life. Does Ruth divine that she can express her powers in this role, in this play, among those factors?
I feel fairly certain that the play would expire every time she left the stage. Would Ruth wish to bear the burden of solely animating a play before which the audience was remote?
There is my main comment.
x x x x
SOME INCIDENTAL OBSERVATIONS-
Cornelius completely defeats M. Ducreux.
Cornelius doesn’t want to fly the millinery shop because Mrs Molloy would think him a mufle. No, no, no. Mufle means stupid pretentious bore,—naïve perhaps, but assertive bullheaded. Cornelius in the cupboard scents l’éternel féminin.133 Imagine. Cornelius asserts that Mrs Molloy est la plus jolie femme du monde.134
Very clever the way Ducreux removed all reminiscences of the Molière borrowings.
VANDERGELDER: Vous avez un amant que vous cachez dans les armoires.135
Exactly. That’s the way the play should sound in Paris. But unfortunately, the whole course of the play doesn’t sustain and support it. That’s the play that I sort of hoped Ducreux would furnish. Out of Feydeaux instead of out of Nestroy. Hélas.
Love to you and Gar—
Looking forward to seeing you when I’m well.
Thy
Thorny
Tell Gar I now own a Thunderbird.
262. TO LOUISE TALMA. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Yale
Marineland, Fla
Feb 8 <1957>136
Dear Louisa—
Things happen to me. Lord be praised. Often they might seem little to others, but they can be big to me. I arrived yesterday at the motel connected with this unused “aquarium”. Its restaurant is run by an old friend of mine Norton Baskin, widower of Marjorie Rawlings.137 I went to see again (through underwater peepholes) that world of sharks and great turtles and baleful moray eels and countless fishes; and then the trained porpoises. Any animal doing a quasi-human “trick” is at once moving and disturbing to me, but porpoises leaping high out of the water to ring bells and to catch and return footballs and to cast basketballs into high baskets fill me with a sort of troubled anguish. The tricks are so undignified; the effort is so sublime. All created things aspire to mind. Dinner that evening—yesterday—at Norton’s restaurant coincided with an alumni reunion—program enclosed—of an adjacent College for the Deaf.138 I was invited to dine with them; I was introduced to the guests by the toastmaster (in sign-language): thereafter I autographed scores of their programs, handed to me by them with such shining friendly faces. There were well over 90 there. Most remarkable of all was the “reading” of the college’s “hymn”. The deaf can spell out any word, letter by letter, but why spell out when you can find a gesture that can convey the word? When you can touch your forehead for “think” and your heart for “feel”? Notice in the hymn the words: <“>from sea to sea<.>” This became F - ~.~.~.~ - T - ~.~.~.~ : See those little waves for the sea? What this woman did with a sort of hieratic solemnity was a dance with her hands, but the dance was far nearer language than the dance generally chooses to go. Isadora Duncan would have been shaken: Delsarte would have felt himself, mistakenly, justified.139 For me, it was an evening in secret correspondence with the afternoon,—with the dolphins.
I picked up from the window of a tourist’s giftshop in Myrtle Beach (among “remainders” marked down) a not very good book about Mallarmé by Wallace Fowlie140—the man who lost his whole Guggenheim check in a Chicago bank, you remember the story. And at one place in it I was poignantly recalled to you, dear Louise—for I read that often when Mallarmé was writing he was visited by such palpitations of the heart that he could not continue. After a time he tried to dictate to his wife, but found no alleviation there. And then I was recalled to myself, with reproach, for I know I am not sufficiently sérieux to earn, to deserve such palpitations and such throbbing in my ears.—I’ll send you the Mallarmé book; it is enough that it is filled with citations of the full poems.
Tomorrow I push on. Monday night I am having dinner with my aunt in Winter Park.141 I can hear most that is said but there is too much humidity here for me to recover completely Soon I’ll be turning around and starting north again.
Love
Thorny
263. TO CASS CANFIELD. ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed Hotel Ambassador / (Krantz) / Wein I) Yale
October 28. 1957 [Play142 opens at the Burg here a week from tomorrow; then in Munich two days later.]
Dear Cass:
I’ve got a problem
And an idea.
Is the idea practical, feasible, profitable, and in good taste?
For two years now Louise Talma has been composing music for an opera, the book by me, based on the Alcestiad.
She had a Fulbright to the American Academy in Rome; summers she’s at the MacDowell Colony; now she’s at “Yaddo”, Saratoga Springs, in January she goes to the Huntington Hartford Colony, in S. California. She’s writing wonderful music. She’s widely admired and esteemed.
And all this time is taken away from her teaching post as Professor at Hunter College.
In other words, she’s getting no salary.
Every year I put a thousand dollars to her account—to pay the mechanics of copyists when the time comes—music paper etc. But she wont accept any money for herself, not could I afford to give her money comparable to her Hunter College salary.
Rumors reach me that she is living on very narrow means.
How, how, how—to get money to her—across the barrier of her pride and independence?
Now—naturally an enormous correspondence has taken place between Louise and me about OPERA, about our Opera; about other people’s operas. About all these stage performance of the Alcestiad in Edinburgh, Zurich, Frankfurt, and now in Vienna. But also there are letters to and from Ruth Gordon about the Matchmaker (Edinburgh, London, U.S.)<.> Letters to and from Sibyl Colefax about London and New York theatre. Max Reinhardt about the Merchant of Yonkers. Jed Harris etc about Our Town. Olivier about Skin of our Teeth. Even Gertrude Stein.
Could you see a book:
LETTERS ABOUT THE THEATER: By and to THORNTON WILDER
Word has reached me that I’m supposed to be a very droll fellow, especially about the theatre. (Some of the vivacity would have to be toned down in fact) and Lord knows, Ruth Gordon writes hum-dingers. The letters wouldn’t have to be solely about the theatre, either. At least we wouldn’t cut out a description of Acapulco or from Sibyl’s letters an account of England in wartime….. or from Alec Woollcott’s an account of a visit to Booth Tarkington, etc. I think it would be a practically uproarious book.
Query: Would it be bad taste to publish one’s own letters in one’s lifetime?
SUGGESTION: my sister Isabel to edit it.
PURPOSE: Dough. Solely Dough. I think that Louise—many of whose letters would be included—would accept the royalties from this work seeing that they go to subsidize our common project, the opera.
Think it over. Take it to the Lord in prayer.
If there’s any difficulty about �
�permissions” we could limit it to Woollcott; Colefax; Ned Sheldon; Ruth Gordon; and Louise Talma. Ruth and Garson Kanin arrive here tomorrow for a week. I feel sure that they’d love it—there’s 20 copies sold already.143
Cordially ever
Harper’s Problem Child
Thornton
I liked your son enormously. If I live long, and if you hand over the reins to him—have you sufficiently prepared him for the fact that Wilder is the House-Trial,—that he combines the worst features of a grasshopper, a gnat, a sloth, and a jay-bird? Start induring him now.
TNW.
264. TO EDWARD ALBEE. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Private
August 17 <1958>
Dear Albee:
[Forgive pencil. Late at night. Hellishly hot. Don’t want to go around the place hunting for ink, if any.]
Much impressed by The Zoo Story.144 Many far-plunging insights. Much focusing on the speaking and the carrying image.
Congratulations.
I don’t think it would play half as well as it reads. The men—the concrete men there—would get in the way. Not a matter of acting talent: a matter of how.
The trouble is that your content is real, inner, and your own, and your form is tired old grandpa’s.
[I couldn’t stand this. I did go and get some ink. Connecticut,—very hot.]
The number of plays I’ve had to read (Obliging Wilder, judging contests) about chance encounters—Central Park benches. Whimsy or stark or dear Romance. “Do you mind if I talk to you?”
It may well be that someday a Kafka or a Becket
Why does your sense of form, your vision of the how lag so far behind your vision of the what? It’s as tho you were frozen very young into the American “little theatre” movement. Because this gulf between the stage-mode and the inner gift means that finally you have no style. You don’t even have a slightly ironic play on the kind of theatre you are employing—as I think I remember you having had before. [Just as Kafka’s style is a constant play on very matter of fact bureaucratic documents.]
Anyway, I wish you well. I think you have much to say. And I have one recommendation which I urgently bring before you: write much, write many things. only that way will your imagine
Give my regard to Mr. Flanagan and he can illustrate my point, I’m sure, for the principles of musical composition.
And many thanks
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
265. TO KAY BOYLE.145 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut)Yale
August 29 1958
Dear Kay—
Your letter was forwarded to me at the end of March when I was driving to the Pacific Coast, reached me in New Mexico, and in that life of successive motels, fell into the wrong hamper of papers—certain notes and projects which I have only now reopened.
I humbly humbly beg your pardon.
Yes, indeed, I would wish to join all those who express appreciation for Samuel Beckett (I saw Godot twice in Paris; once in London: once in New York). And I read and reread the other plays and novels, and eagerly wait for more.
If the wretched mistake of misplacing your letter has not put me out of the running, except as enthusiastic supporter, I should be happy to join you in sponsoring him.
I doubt that we would have success at the first try; it will take persistance. “Honorary membership” is as strongly contested as membership. Many years ago several of us tried to get Faulkner into the Academy. I called in my neighbors Dean Wilbur Cross and Prof C. B. Tinker—both declared that they would never vote for such a coarse writer (their expressions were variously stronger.) And Cross was the biographer of Sterne and Fielding, and Tinker’s early work had been largely devoted to Boswell.146 For them, only two-hundred year-old “candor” can be condoned and even admired as “humanity.” Can’t professional intellectuals be ti - i - i -resome?
Command me, dear Kay. (and forgive me.)
With a world of
regard to you both
Thornton
266. TO AMOS TAPPAN WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed m/n “Vulcania” / “ITALIA” / Societa di Navigazione / Genova) Yale
CONFIDENTIAL.
Stopping 16 hours at Lisbon tomorrow
Nov. 20. <1958>
Dear Tappers:
When you were raking the leaves that afternoon and asked me how you should understand your Aunt Isabel’s varying reactions in regard to the visiting young lady, I “ran away” from the explanation. It is difficult to make because it seems to reflect disparagingly on someone we love and to whom we are indebted. But Uncles must answer their Nephews questions. That’s what uncles are for, God help them.
x
When Saints do a kind act for their fellowmen we can be sure that they never mention it, complainingly or with self-gratulation, and they don’t want to hear a word of thanks. But there are very very few saints. Now women and especially spinsters live to serve, and they find a large measure of self-justification from serving. And all except the saints are often given to dramatising their kind services—sometimes as martyrdoms, or as heroic achievements and nothing makes them feel so good as to
Now you’re both a Kerlin and a Wilder. That will make a very unhappy life for you unless you keep reminding yourself of it, and so understanding it and above all laughing at it. For instance, the Wilders scarcely know what a home-life is. A home-life is a house in which there are, as a matter of course, three meals a day; where there’s a guestroom in which it’s a pleasure to house a guest. There’s no home-life at Deepwood Drive. There are no meals at Deepwood Drive unless there are guests (then the meals are rather elaborate and very very good). Wilders aren’t interested in meals, are not interested in the mechanics of life, it’s time-worn customs and routines. To have a guest in the house rather frightens us: we’ve lost the habit of a well-run house; it’s not lack of money or lack of good-will; it’s sheer loss of know-how. You’ve noticed that Aunt Isabel doesn’t get up until 9:30.
I’ve just been reading a novel “Le Fils”, probably the 411th by my friend George Simenon.147 I read: “Chaque couple, quoi qu’on fasse, n’est pas seulement formé de deux individus, mais de deux familles, de deux clans. Son espirit, son mode de vie, n’est jamais qu’un compromis entre deux esprits, deux modes de vie differents, et il est fatal que l’un ou l’autre l’emporte. C’est une bataille, avec un vainquer et un vaincu, et il est naturel que cela provoque des ressentiments.” That goes also for individuals, and for you. The Kerlins are sure of themselves and are quick to establish an order in the daily life they lead. The Wilders are turned in on themselves; they are self-sufficient but not through strength but through insecurity; they do not like others to make inroads upon their personality; they have no basically congenial or willing relation to the community around them. This shut-in-ness infuriates those who as
All this is going to come out in you. Here in your letter to me you reproach yourself for being “absent-minded, forgetful, and undiplomatic.” That’s the Wilder in you. The Kerlins don’t waste time reproaching themselves. They’re very fine folk and know as everyone must that they occasionally fall short of what they would expect of themselves; but they don’t torment themselves.
A third element in Aunt Isabel’s attitude to the week
-end guest was her sense that the girl had “put it over on you” by inviting herself for two nights. Isabel’s very quick to judge women severely. It was from her fondness for you that she took up arms against this demoiselle. On the way to New York I heard a good deal also about the fact that the young lady had not yet written her a note. That was not so much because Wilders are “formal” and cling to old-fashioned conventions as that my sister wanted credit for the inconvenience of returning from New York to receive her. Et cetera. Et cetera.
The chief thing I want you to learn to do is to laugh—to understand these things with laughter. otherwise the Wilders can barely survive. The over-independent gypsy-self-sufficient side of them is so out of step with the majority of men and the self-reproachful self-condemning side is so constant that only laughter and constant work of some kind can keep them healthy.
Many thanks (but we decided that thanks can be taken for granted) for your letter. Write me some more, especially when you’re very happy or very depressed.
lots of love
Uncle Thornton
267. TO FRANK SULLIVAN.148 ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Cornell
a Thursday
Dear Frank =
Was on the road by 6:30 a.m.
Got into the Algonquin well before 11:00, followed by a cloud of State Troopers, like Keystone Cops
Saw Dotty at the Academy session (where she and Capote and Arthur Miller were honored). Never did I more wish for a mind-reading radar than when she stood up and bowed to the assembly. Mrs Arthur Miller was in the eighth row applauding.149
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 51
