The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 55
Anyway books about living persons are inevitably porous—I helped Eliz Sergeant chapter by chapter through that book on Frost21 and a woeful task it was.
I’m going to Berlin next Saturday (I’ve always admired the Berliners) and shall give a reading (my LAST) at the Amerika Haus. Thereafter “I have one more river to cross Oh Lord”, I’ve go
THEN … Oh, Glory. … The cactus and the rattlesnakes. I’ll be away about 2 ½ years and then return 20 years younger and with a portfolio of stuff for Master Harpers.
All cordial best to the House.
Ihr alter Freund23
Sagebrush Thorni
282. TO IRENE WORTH. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel Steinplatz / Berlin-Charlottenburg 2) Yale
March 18 1962
Dear Irene:
Oh, it’s awful; oh, it’s shameful, I’ve owed dear Irene a letter for so long. FIRST, to thank her for the Empson book.24 I revel in it; I read it over and over. I don’t agree with every word; time after time he’s the outrageous enfant terrible. He gets Milton’s God mixed up with the God he revolted against in some Church of England he was forced to attend when he was 12. But he’s so full of ideas—of splendid digressions—of gallant crusades (for Dalilah, for example). It’s about time he settled down from all this flambouyant Don Quixotism and did another really focus’d book, but until then I’ll joyously follow him across heath and jungle slaying beasts real and imaginary.
Now—you’re to do Lady Macbeth “most of the year” in Stratford25—and what else? You shouldn’t pine to do his Cleopatra. It’s not grateful; it only looks grateful. The play should be called Antony and Octavius. Shakespeare was much more interested in that scene of the drunken triumvirates on the boat than in the amours in Egypt. With “Cleopatra” in the title no wonder directors have to scissor scissor the last act. Won’t they let you do A Woman Killed with Kindness? Or a restoration or Lady Teazle?26
I hope you got some pleasure out of the Elizabeth in Rome27 and that there are some passages in it where I can cry out “Theres Irene actin’ great.” And tho’ it’s incidental, I hope you had many a feast in Rome—of art and of knives-and-forks—and of good talk.
Maybe you’re in London now and Isabel has been seeing you. In which case you’ll know our news but I’ll sketch it lightly.
With our opera we had the damnedest experience. The House gave us all we could ask for: five singers (led by Inge Borkle)—a noble conductor—countless rehearsal hours (the score is devilishly difficult) and the première was followed by an unprecedented ovation—19 minutes—over 40 curtain calls. Naturally, Louise thought this was IT. Then in the next few day the region’s critics: cool to worse. To be expected we were told by the Director: an opera by an American! … by a woman! … by a composer of French background i.e. understatement of big situations instead of the Wagnerian-Straussian soaring-racket. Now the reviews have begun to come in from farther off—Zurich etc… much more favorable especially to the stature of the music. And the public is filling the house (I heard the first three) and the silence during the big scenes and the applause is very real.
But, damn’it, those reviews have so far prevented other opera houses from picking it up and a Publishing House from adopting it. Damn, damn, double damn. Anyway it is beautiful music and in time it will be rediscovered.
I shall soon be far away. Farewell, O world. Arizona desert—2½ years. A bum. Loaf, read, learn Russian, polish up my Greek, do Lope de Vega and Finnegans Wake … and finally start some writing of my own. Go for weeks without saying a word (oh blessing) except buying avocado pears and helping to close bars at 2:00 a.m.
But before I plunge into this long-delayed obscurity I’ve been splashing like a seal in its reverse. The Russians wouldnt dare encroach on Berlin while this publicity-mad hostage is here. I’m dining with General Clay28 tonight and reading from my works Tuesday to autograph-frantic maenads. I’ll bet you’re raising and lowering your chin and muttering “Old Thorny thinks he likes solitude and cactus, but just wait. … he’s the biggest popinjay in the puppet-cabinet; he’ll be back from his sandpile from
Any bets?
Berlin is fascinating in itself but oh the art treasures in the Kaiser Friederich-Museum, beginning with the Nefertite.
Lots of love
Thy
Sagebrush Thornt’
283. TO GLENWAY WESCOTT. ALS 2 pp. Yale
S.S. “Bremen” approaching New York, March 30. 1962
Dear Glenway:
I hope you felt sort of more free knowing that T.N. would postpone reading your words until they were freed from time and place—like those rooms which we once lived in and loved but into which other people have moved; they are ours in the truer if not in the literal sense.
Anyway, I knew you understood.
Isabel thinks very highly of them and says there are some pages about the very nature of the novel that I am greedy to read.30
x
The older I get the more things I find funny. I really ought to grow a pot-belly and resemble those ribald drunken old poets that are pictured sitting under cliffs and waterfalls on Chinese wall-hangings.
x
For instance: I ask a woman to write an opera with me. This seems, after Dame Ethel Smythe,31 to be the second time in all history that a woman has set out to write a real “grand” opera. The sound sturdy musicians in the orchestra pit at Frankfurt took a sardonic view of all this. And they engaged in a furtive conspiracy—not to sabotage the work; that’s not German, that’s French and frequent there—but to test her out. But Louise Talma is métier to her fingertips (acquired under that terrible whiplasher Mlle Boulanger32). Louise stops the piccolo-player in the corridor: “You did that high trill on C splendidly but what was the matter with the G-sharp iterations?” “Gnädige Frau, it’s not playable.” And she showed him a fingering. Things like that get around. The conductor asked her to show Percussion a certain riffle on the snare-drum. And finally they were playing like angels. Why is it that I find such things funny?
x
And. So it gets around that I plan to go to Arizona to be a hermit—without shoe-laces necktie or telephone.33
Well, the realtors swamp me with offers of 20 room houses in 40 acres with swimming-pools. (The letters are full of facetious remarks to show that they know, too, the Bohemian side of life.) A woman offers me a ghost-town which she had won in a contest from the Saturday Evening Post. … This is absolutely true … It had been called Stanton but the Post changed the name to Ulcer Gulch and so it is called now on the map…. A woman offers me a house where she had been happy with the husband who designed it: it is in the form of a star for aspiration and a spider web, because the spiders are the greatest of all architects. There is no square room in the house, but there are four bathrooms.
It’s not hard to see why I find those returns funny.
x
Less amusing is that they stage a play of mine about St Francis … I wanted one almost blind, toothless, but a flame of happiness; and they give me a man who could be a full-back on the Indiana football team tomorrow and who has just risen from mountains of corned beef and cabbage.34
x
So you’re working on the Odyssey—that’s one of the things I’m to do in the desert: renew my Greek. The widow of Karl Reinhardt has just given me his posthumous book Die Ilias und ihr Dichter35…The conjectures of scholars about the layers… the growth of its structure… The lost epics which it reflects… This book all the richer because it is made up of notes written over many years which he did not live to re-shape into a stately volume.—the immediate insights of a great scholar. Not funny, but fun.
x
Please share this letter with Beulah36… under her grave glance is concealed a boundless capacity to find things funny—especially young chaps from Wisconsin
like
your devoted old friend
Thornton
284. TO LOUISE TALMA. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Yale
May 17. 1962
Dear Louise:
Delighted, delighted about the Colony. tho’ it would have been “fun” to think of you here in August, both Isabel and I were concerned about some of those crushing days that can descend on us here.37 (Yet, too, there can be halcyon days for a week on end, even in August.)
L. Bernstein,38 whom I recently met “in society” will be at the Colony. What do you think of that? Are you going to tell him right to his face that he’d better re-contemplate Beethoven?
Oh, I’ll betya he’ll be charmed by you—transported—and things will come of it that’ll almost persuade me to buy an air-ticket and fly east. Remember my prophecy.
x
So you want to know what the Washington “do” was like?39
What did I talk about with M. Malraux.
I talked about “good evening” and that was all—and not even in French.
Gracious sakes, there were 162 guests.
The high points for me were meeting Scott Fitzgerald’s beautiful “Shakespearean” daughter who remembered a walk we took in a rose-garden when she was eleven40 meeting Balanchine and telling him, plump, in his face all that I owed to him and the President in the handshake line saying: “I want to thank you, Mr. Wilder, for what you said about last week” (at my “reading” in the State Department.*)
The greeting line was alphabetical and we were a nice little contingent in “W”s: Penn Warrens,41 Wilder, Tennessee Williams.
I sat at the Vice President’s table with Alexis Léger, Mrs Lindbergh, Mrs Bohlen, Robert Lowell.42
The first Lady was glorious in a white and pale raspberry Dior.
The food (Vendredi, maigre43) was perfect.
TNW with Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff on April 30, 1962, at the State Department, where TNW read excerpts from his work to an invited audience.
TNW with Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Abraham Ribicoff on April 30, 1962, at the State Department, where TNW read excerpts from his work to an invited audience. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Stern-Rose-Istomin44 played the Schubert E-flat superbly but the audience, excited by all that glamor and a little tight, did not behave as it should. (I sat by Mrs Sam Behrman45—and a lovely person she is—who is Jascha Heifetz’s sister.<)> We listened. Lenny was the only musician there—they having been at the Casals night. I finished the evening at the Francis Biddles46 with the Edmund Wilsons, the Saul Bellows, Balanchine, and Lowell.
Fun?
A little contretemps took place involving our hosts which I will only tell you in confidence in 1965 (not involving me, deo gratiâ.)47
I start driving west Saturday. Don Quixote following his mission. Friday I go to Long Island to see Charlotte.
I love the Rumpelmeyer passacaglia.48 What a girl! I suppose that the surpassing difficulty is in allusion to my rusty old steps on the parquet. Oh, how often I shall think of those Frankfurt days in my new home and it’ll all get more and more lyrical. And all on the tide of the rich right flowing music.
love
Thornt’
285. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut) Yale
August 26. 1962
Dear lsa—
This letter’s for Aunt Charlotte,49 too, but prepare her for the insubstantial bulletins I’m reduced to.
Tonight, having eaten without break six of my own meals I drove over to the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee for dinner. I went all that way to get the sirloin steak and the salad. I don’t like steak or lettuce (who can?) but a little voice kept saying I ought to, I should.
Now that I’m housekeeping I’m getting to be really like that smalltown eccentric that I envisaged, and described to you in Patagonia. To get the paper—the mail—a little food-shopping is the only thing that takes me out of my room. That’s not right.—oh, I go out to drive—and glorious drives they are; I meant: to walk.
x
Girls<,> enough has not been said about the dangers of the kitchen. Several times I’ve almost lost an eye from far-spitting fat; and that lifting hot water from one place to another. I think a campaign should be made to warn us beginners. When I eat out, Sammy’s or The Embers at Buena Vista and see all these brides (nicely nurtured girls who’ve married engineers in the hush hush Establishment—three children by the age of 25 but still brides) were they warned about this. Don’t I remember our own mother—in Manfield Street days, and maybe in Mont Carmel—always having accidents and cicatrices? Aren’t I right about that? Please reply.
x
What do I like most about cooking? The various ways of doing eggs.
What do I hate most? Washing and drying drinking glasses. (That’s because I inherited from both the Wilder and Niven side a compulsive perfectionism. I can never believe that the glass is clean and dry.)
What do I hate most about my kitchen as a work-place? Damn it, the four pilot lights. They’re not, as in Deepwood Drive, unobtrusive little beacons; they’re actual flames. At night they’re four big eyes. And—in this weather—they’re enough to heat the kitchen in themselves. You could fry an egg on them in 10 minutes—pfui!
What do I like most about my kitchen as a work-place? Why, the frigidaire. I moon about it. I dream about it. I think of all the workers for 10,000 years to whom it would have been a miracle. You remember my feeling about the obtuseness of Delia Bacon50 (noble Christian woman) letting her Noras and Hilda’s deform their bodies by stooping over those damnable washing troughs—so I think of the labor saved now … let’s not talk about it. Let’s just be grateful. And the money saved—when every dime meant so much in the mid-west and in these states.
x
Dear Aunt Charlotte I wonder what it’ll be like when this letter reaches Hamden. The social interchange won’t have begun (thank you, I don’t miss it yet); I hope the weather won’t be oppressive still; (it’s accablant,51here). I wish I could show you the acres of houses for retired people, like you and me, under the shade of these great mountains—acres, yet they in no sense crowd the landscape—the Biblical desert remains as on the day when Jacob worked for Leban and his two beautiful daughters.
x
I’m saving this letter to mail it when it will arrive when you do. Lots of love to both of you, from your vagrant
Thornt
286. TO CHARLOTTE TAPPAN NIVEN. ALS 2 pp. Yale General Delivery, Douglas, Arizona
Sat’dy Sept. 8. 1962
Dear Aunt Charlotte =
Sunday’s my day for writing to Isabel, so I don’t have to work until tomorrow.
One of the first things to know about a hermit is that he hasn’t much to say. I’m perfectly content in my thébiade
This is a very nice town of a little over 5000. Wide streets; one and a half with shops. We’re right on the Mexican border and we’re at least 50% Mexican descent ourselves. The Junior High School is catty-corner from where I live and the several hundred children who collect at 8:30 under my window are at least that per-cent of Mexican descent. There is no hoodlumism here among the working class; that’s only at the top. The head of one of our chief banks has just had to go to prison for peculation.
The signs of frontier are all around us. Ready courtesy and much reserve. A real deference for women, immediately recognizable as different from big city politeness. As frontier, very church-going. A leaflet was giving
ormons. You would go to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.
We’ve just lived through July and August which I’ll try not to do again. It’s the rainy season—very little rain but mighty thunder and lightning every day—and humidity with the great heat.
But on the whole, I chose better than I knew. As far as I know only 4 people in town know “who I am” and they don’t spread it. About once a month I go to Tucson (250,000) for a few days, partly to visit the University library.
Im “getting well” so fast that maybe my retirement from civilization may not be as long as I first thought it would be.
I am very eager to look over your retreat.53 It’s certainly much prettier than mine which just escapes looking like a barracks or even a tenement. But we have two tall Lombardy pines at our door like sentinals. I’m just getting to brief-chat relations with some of my neighbors,—an arthritic lady on the first floor who’s reading W. Wilkie’s One World54 and a retired engineer who can only walk from the porch to his room. We have young couples too, teachers in the schools here. But I’ve made a resolution not to “get friends” with anybody for a year; so to my own surprise, I’m curbing my natural tendancy to expand. Have a good time in New England, dear Aunt Charlotte,—and when you rejoin your car—drive carefully.
I wish you could see the Y here—its the busiest place in town and the YWCA in nearby Bisbee is the second most imposing building in town. The town used to be much bigger than it is now—the fortunes of mining have made and unmade regular cities out here.
Lots of love
always
Thornt
287. TO ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT. ALS 2 pp. Yale
General Delivery Douglas, Arizona—