The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 56
Sept. 12. 1962
Dear Elizabeth:
Delighted to receive your letter. You dont mention when you are going home so I assume that you will stay on in Peterborough through September.
Yes, it must be “costing” to recall in writing (which is a higher concentration than reverie or conversation) the days of early childhood.55 Gertrude Stein said: “Communists are people who fancy they had an unhappy childhood” i.e. the same people who can imagine themselves in a social order where nothing is ever ever wrong are the same people who can rewrite their past and declare that they went through years when nothing was ever ever right. It seems to me that the early years can be interpreted both ways: since neither memory nor prevision has begun to operate<,> the heavens and hells alternate without relation to one another.
I recently read the two volumes of Lawrence letters56 (sent me by their editor Harry Thornton Moore—a pupil of mine at the University of Chicago.) I read the second volume first, partly because it contained reference to many people I have known, and because I assumed that the maturer letters would be of greater interest. But later I was to find that the first volume was far superior. How I envied that youthful bull-in-a china shop way of talking straight truth. (Oh, how often I should have done that—even though my view might have been wrong: the honesty in intention would have saved the venture; and from time to time I would have been, valuably, both honest and right.)
D.H.L was in those early novels a great novelist; but there was one serious dead-weight they had to carry. English women—through their situation—have not been “interesting” for a century and a half. They can’t be; their bringing up has been so stifling. I’ve always said that English actresses always behave like vicar’s daughters at a garden-party where the Duchess is expected. The only actresses that count over there from Mrs Patrick Campbell, Meggie Albanesi;57 to Edith Evans have had the redeeming drops of Jewish Italian or Celtic-Welsh blood. Women in Love is a fine novel—, but those two girls (Miriam?) are constantly reflecting Nanny-training. And I bet they were physically cumbrous. Any way all you have to do is to think of Anna K—or Emma B—or Natasha R—or to go back
There’s little to say about me except that I should have done this long ago. From time to time I get a pang for friends and conversation and music, but all I have to do is to take a late afternoon drive into this glorious desert and the velléité58 abates. It’s taken several months for the cobwebs to dissipate, but they’re going—and little steady excited work-hours are beginning.
Since you don’t mention your health I hope I can gladly assume that you’re much better.
Will portions of the work you’re on appear in periodicals? I’m to have something in The Hudson59—way off next January; but it’s the University of Texas Review that pays—well, Texanly—and for sheer disinterested belles-lettres,—with a special interest however in that South West.
¶ Now that I’m housekeeping a whole new field of curiosities has swung into view. The fact that I don’t know a thing about cooking is a positive advantage: I improvise; I make advantage of ignorance. My deep regards to the Kendalls. Blessings to you and to your working hours
love ever
Thornton
288. TO EILEEN AND ROLAND LE GRAND. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17 Connecticut) Private
As from: 757 12th St. Douglas, Arizona.
[Tucson, Arizona]
Dec. 10. 1962
¶ I told you, didn’t I, that I found an allusion to Peperharow in the new edition of Boswell’s Journal etc of Dr. Johnson in the Hebrides?60
Dear Les Grands:
Selah!
Lobet den Herrn!
I’m up in the big city for a few days to buy Christmas presents and—gee whillikers!—for a practicing hermit the ado of a city of 200,000 is abrutissant.61 I return to my cactus stretches tomorrow. And, Eileen, to my own housekeeping, because my cooking though still modest, is improving.
There’s not much I miss in The East (“civilization”) but I do have other hankerings. I found myself with a longing for the sea and I drove for a day to reach Guaymas, in Mexico on the Gulf of Lower California, known to the Mexicans as El Mar de Cortéz. I was there almost two weeks and never grew tired of watching the waves come in as they did “before there were any of us around.” And now (you’ll think I’m frivolously restless) I pine to stand amid falling snowflakes.
x
Roland! You’re going to stage The Matchmaker! (I wrote most of it in this very Tucson under the name of The Merchant of Yonkers some 24 years ago.<)>
Well, here are some reflections.
You may find it too long. I wouldn’t know where to cut it, but don’t cut it by racing the three main dialogues between Dolly and the Miser (Heavens! I’ve forgotten his name!) Especially, not the dinner scene: it may give the effect of being rapid but an actress would lose her grip on it without calculated pauses followed by fresh attacks and changes of tone.
The longest laugh in the play has to be artfully watched. It’s where Cornelius creeps on hands and knees into the “armoire”. Have Dolly Levi perfectly motionless as she watches him; that builds up the “comedy” of I’m-going-so-self-effacingly-that-I’m-invisible. Don’t get worried if the audience doesn’t laugh at first and don’t hurry it. The laugh should build and last until he’s completely hidden in the cupboard.
The other big laugh requires a most expert actor: it precedes Melchior’s monologue. He starts to return the newly found purse to Cornelius. … Then half-way across the stage, turns and says to the audience “You’re surprised?” The audience falls apart—partly, I think, surprise at being addressed directly—so that actor must do it very real, sin cere … Implication: “you thought I was a low bum who’d certainly keep any money I found in public places.”
I hope you remember Ruth Gordon’s wonderful reading
I don’t know what sweet old-fashioned melody you’ll use for “Tenting Tonight” in the Cafe scene, but be sure that it’s a real little pool of simplicity and aural beauty not without a touch of pathos.
Cast your Cornelius for true naive idealistic. A touch of worldly-wise “knowingness” and the role is ruined. He is wide-eyed and bedazzled by woman and love. …
And even more so his young companion: I hope you have an engaging young irrepressible.
Tell Dolly to advance on her monologue in Act IV with a meditative pause … The room empties; she alone on the sopha … change of mood … lost in thought, her eyes on the ground … collects the audience’s attention for her first words.
Please give my THANKS to all the players and to the Technical Staff (who so seldom get thanked) and my cordial best wishes for a happy preparation and a happy issue. Tell them the way to combat nervousness before entering on the scene is to stand at the entrance and breathe evenly and serenely—not too deep—but smilingly. Acting’s fun when the body is completely relaxed.
NOW I have almost no space left to wish you all a happy holiday. I sent on a little momento through the postal authorities today; I hope it gets through all right—it has to go through some kind of red tape in New York. … SPERIAMO as they say in Caserta. ¶ A world of affection to you Eileen; this letter has been taken up disproportionately with the strains and stresses of Show Biz. ¶ I wish I could SEE Julian. Is he in his last year at Eton? (All Americans believe firmly that there is a great deal of cruelty at Eton—I hope that’s no longer true!) ¶ And to you Roland
lots of old old friendship Ever Thornton
289. TO CATHERINE COFFIN. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Yale
757 12th S
t. Douglas, Arizona
On or about Dec 11. 1962
Dear Catherine:
The Indians here used to communicate with one another over a distance by puffs of smoke; and that’s what my letters are reduced to. As the months go by I have less and less to recount, but more and more in the way of affection and regard to express. I don’t miss the centers of civilization, but I do miss the occasion to express affection and regard. Lord knows, one of the principal reasons I fled civilization was that I had to pretend such occasions so wearisomely often (all Americans play-act a social ecstacy—I more than others); now “society” is taking its revenge on me. Please accept the smoke and the bonfire under it; it says in papago language: bonjour chère Catherine.
It will require all your charity to understand me when I say that though I would be entranced to call on you this evening, and though it was always a happiness to come to dinner in East Rock Road,—an invitation to dinner with you tonight with the same friends would frighten me. I learned this on Thanksgiving Night at the seaport of Guaymas in Mexico. A friend had asked me to her house for the “rest of the turkey”; there were present two American couples, a Mexican couple and various children between 10 and 15. How quickly one becomes dishabituated. A dozen “personalities” in the room; two and three conversations going on; a distraction of lighting cigarettes and moving chairs and passing dishes and remembering names and being asked questions in non-sequitur.
And it can’t be denied that people wear a different face when there are more than three in a room.
When you live in isolation, as I do, you read more attentively. I pick up paperback novels in bus-stations. Ordeal of Richard Feverel62—doesn’t hold up. Return of the Native—doesn’t hold up. Jane Austen: incomparable. How seldom readers seem to remark on all that contempt for the whole human scene that lies just under the surface,—oh, more than that: a desespoir contenu, une rage déguisée63….. but by her art her spirit has been saved from mere spinster’s waspishness and from cholor. In Moliere the same contempt became aggressive. A man of religious mind believes the human race is correctable. There is not a hope of that in these two. Jane Austen’s only resource and consolation is the pleasure of the mind in observing absurdities.
¶ Word from Italy has given me great pleasure. In Milan the director staging the Assisi play found that actor after actor turned down the rôle of St. Francis—as blasphemous? non-canonical?—finally he engaged one of the finest of all Italian actors, Renzo Ricci (and his distinguished wife Anna Magni)64 and report is that all three plays are a great success. I did not express aloud my disappointment at the playing in New York or my chagrin at the spiritless reception. … all a dramatist can do is to murmur: “Some day. ….”
¶ The other day in Tucson I looked up an old Yale friend Jack Speiden, Yale ’22, in the hope he was still running his dude ranch where I might go for a few days around Christmas and imbibe martinis in front of a great log fire. Well, he’s retired; his wife is a grievous invalid with three nurses around the clock—a fall from a horse. Jack tried to persuade me to stay and dine with them Wednesday with the Paul Chavadjadzies—you know the spelling—I presume the parents of Bill’s friend. But I returned to Douglas.
Instead I am driving I think to Taos. Mabel and Tony are no more.65 Mabel rests and others are given a measure of rest. But I shall take Dorothy Brett out to dinner and ask her again of those old days—young D. H. Lawrence, Bertie Russell, Lady Ottoline, Katherine Mansfield … and about Mabel. It will be cold—it’s about 8,000 feet high—I hope I have cold’s compensation,—the beauty of snow.
Today (the 15th) I bought myself a Christmas present: a record player. I have three records, The Bach Magnificat; the Lotte Lehmann Lieder Recital; and the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante (Heifetz and Primrose).
From Tucson I sent a little <“>something for your breakfast tray,” just a pensee,66 a puff of smoke but laden. To all, all the Coffins and the-in-laws much affection
devotedly
Thornton
290. TO AMOS TAPPAN WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Private
757 12th St. Douglas Arizona
Dec 19 1962
Dear Tappie:
So you’re a New Yorker.67
A New Yorker is like nothing else in the world.
I was once one, for about three months.68 I took an apartment in Irving Place. Morning after morning I’d get up at dawn, or before, and walk to the Battery, each day by a different route—through Chinatown, Polish Town, Italian Greenwich Village, the Jewish acres around Grand Street. At the Battery I’d feel myself nearer Europe toward which I suppose I strained.
The sense of the multitude of human souls affects every man in a different way. It renders some cynical; it frightens many; it made Wordsworth sad; me it exhilarates. I must go back and submerge myself in it from time to time or I go spiritually sluggish. What I have fled to the desert from is not the multitude but the coterie.
The sense of the multitude of souls is not the same thing as that of the diversity of souls—Shakespeare is the writer of their diversity: an island-dweller could not apprehend the millions of millions. The Old Testament is the work most freighted with realization of generations and generations.
As a New Yorker open your imagination to it.
I was delighted to hear from your mother on the telephone that you’re finding your classes absorbing: getting a good professor is a matter of sheer luck. In Oberlin I had one; in Yale I had none (but I had Tinker, though I was not registered in his course.) To be sure, I was not an assiduous student but any born teacher could have caught me—as Baitsell almost did in Biology and Lull in Geology—mighty remote from my daily preoccupations. (But they have left their mark in a tireless curiosity about science.)69
A little Christmas present has fallen to me in my literary life. That short play about St. Francis had a cool reception in New York. Divers friends and unshakeable judges let me know that I had not really finished it, or thought it through, that it was not thoroughly cooked. And I—o so deferentially—agreed with them. But something inside of me said: “Wait, just wait.” The three plays have just gone on in Milan. At first I was told that the director could find no actor who would consent to play Il Poverello. Did the role seem blasphemous or tasteless? or merely a colorless acting part? Finally the manager offered the play to a couple who are among the foremost in Italy, and the whole program is now a sensational success. MORAL: Pay no attention to the weather.
Now, Tappie, if you have to do an extended paper for one of your professors, and if you have to type it with carbon copies—please lend me one copy for one week. I not only want to read it because it’s yours, but because I want to see the kind of material and approach that the school expects, and because, as your father knows, I have a wide-ranging appetite to read anything in the field of humanities (except Old Goodenough on Josephus and T.S. Eliot on the theory of college education70).
I hope you take some exercise. Do you go to a gym? I hope you take some girls out dancing. And I hope that 1963 is your best year yet.
Lots of love
Uncle Thornton
291. TO THEW WRIGHT, JR. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Private
P.O. Box 144 Douglas Arizona
Jan 11. 1963
Dear Thew:
Oh, I’m a skunk.
I meant to write you at once when I heard you were in the hospital.
I guess—from my proximity to Mexico—I’m catching the mañanas; I know I am.
Have you been a difficult patient? Throwing dishes at the wall, and turning up the TV full blast?
It must have been interesting having that other veteran of the Pacific Islands there; because you never talk about your war experiences. Does he, Kit?71 (And I go around ranting and raving about how I saved Europe—)
It turns out here that I’m not a 100% hermit. Once a month I have to go away. Usually to three or four days
in TUCSON. But just as I went to Guaymas in Mexico over Thanksgiving to see the SEA, so I went to Santa Fe and Taos over Christmas to see the SNOW—and how I got it. My toes and ears darn near fell off. After 8 months here I’m a softie.
But I like it here completely.
I now have a considerable acquaintance but they are
Tallulah is playing in Phoenix this week and I was half tempted to go up and sit up til four in the morning hearing four-letter words; but no! I’ve put all that kind of interest-curiosity behind. I’ve ’ad actors, I’ve really ’ad em.
I’ve been very pleased that the one-acters are getting a good reception in Milan—especially the Assisi one that left people cold in N.Y. They go on in Munich this month.
La Gordon writes that Gower Champion says that the plans for the musical Matchmaker are coming along great. Ruthie has been taking singing lessons (she told her teacher that she didn’t want to sing half-talk half-sing like most actors do; no, she wanted to learn to sing LOUD, and she says she is singing LOUD.) Didn’t I read that the role was being designed for Ethel Merman? (There’s LOUD, for you.) Anyway Ruthie feels she has a lien on that role for life.72
When your knee’s better I suppose you’ll be going down with Kit (choose the baby-sitter wisely) to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Ed. Albee has been telling interviewers that a conversation with me long ago made him turn playwright. If so I’m very proud. He sent me a copy of the text. Gee whillikers. Steel yourself. Its a blockbuster; but I admire it enormously.73 And isn’t it fine to have a new dramatist who speaks in his own voice?
Tell Kit that a score of expectant mothers have taken my advice: gaze at drawings by Raphael; listen to music by Mozart; float through the Parthenon and stroll about the Taj Mahal. Honest,—they’ve written me about it afterwards.