The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

Uncle Thornton

  297. TO AMOS N. AND CATHARINE K. WILDER. ALS 1 p. Yale

  Last weeks at Americ. Exp. Co NICE

  April 21. 1964

  Dear Kith’n Kin:

  Many thanks for your greetings. Am enjoying my late sixties plus my existence en marge.95 Things that would have vexed me once I shrug off: have had a head cold virus since January—with intermittent deafness. Ishkabbible. The dream of finding a Douglas-in-Italy couldn’t work. Allez donc.96 Had a hotel reservation in Cannes to embark on the 9th. Hotel phones … regrets … mistake … there was an earlier booking. … The Film Festival. … i.e. some film tycoon has given them a big bonus to swipe the room. All right, go fly a kite. I’ll embark at Genoa.

  Nothing makes much difference to me except the hours at my desk. The number is getting on well. Will be longer than I had foreseen. I should be getting down to Southern Illinois to get a look at the locale and read their 1902-1905 newspapers. But I’ve had great fun inventing how a coal mine is run, how a murder trial is staged. I’m no slouch either at describing copper mining at 13,000 feet in Chile. As we heard in The Importance of Being Ernest at the Thacher School in 1912: “Ignorance is like a beautiful exotic flower; touch it, and the bloom is gone.”97

  So I sail from Genoa on the 7th—BARCELONA—TENARIFE—the port of CARACAS—CURAÇAO. (I’ve done this all before—Curaçao is a perfect 18th century Dutch town—better than Delft or Haärlem—only peopled by beautiful octoroon maidens with burdens on their head. It’ll be hot as blazes, but it’ll heal my cold.) Fly to Miami. Get a drive-yourself. Fool around Florida. Call on Aunt Charlotte. But always the daily working hours.

  ¶ Just read London Sunday literary reviews of Leslie Hotson’s “Mr. W.H.” 98 I’ve been very scared for him ever since he read me fragments of the book. Insufficient respect for the laws of evidence.

  ¶ Olivier opens tonight in Othello at “his” British National Theatre.99 He once told me he would never play Othello because it demanded a voice a full octave lower than his. The greatest living actor. I can believe that he’s superb. ¶ Have been reading (in French) HÉRODOTE: Histoires (love it): GOETHE: Les Affinités électives (I hoped for so much from this “old man’s” novel; I can only believe that I’ve missed the point, or the points.) STENDHAL: Oeuvres intimes, all 1500 pages of ’em. … droll, …. pathetic … often bracing.100

  Lots of Balzac. I hope it can said of me that I had at least a drop of his zest.

  Now I’ve got to go to lunch. I don’t really like French cooking—until suddenly some dish hits you in the eye. Day in, day out, the Italian is more my style.

  I’ll be terribly eager to know what Tappy’s plans are.

  I just wrote Dixie.

  Loads of love to everybody and thanks.

  Thy

  Thorny.

  298. TO JOHN O’HARA. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Rossini / “ITALIA” / Societá di Navigazione / Genova ) Penn State

  American Express Co. NICE (A-M)

  February 18 1965

  Dear John:

  It was very generous and helpful and bracing of you to write that letter to me about rereading The Cabala. It’s followed me around through several forwardings and has finally caught up with me here. It arrived when I was miserable, unable to shake off a cold (caught in the air-conditioning, a month before, in a Curaçao hotel—the big colds are caught in the tropics) and I was deaf and I was none too enthusiastic about the writing I was doing every day. Your letter galvanized me.

  Most of that book was written at Lawrenceville by the Assistant House Master of the “Davis House.” It was written after “lights out”—with interruptions (“Please, Mr. Wilder, I don’t feel very good; I think I’m sick.” “Please, Mr. Wilder, can I study downstairs for just half an hour, because I’m so worried about that exam tomorrow I can’t sleep?”) I had no problems about self-confidence and “enthusiasm” then. It didn’t seem possible that anyone would want to publish it. I just wrote on about all those rich highly colored people, like a boy trying his hand at science-fiction. (In Rome, I had had no entree into such coteries as that!) I haven’t looked at the book for years, but now—puffed up by your good opinion—I shall return to it.

  So you’ll soon be sixty! I hope you’ll enjoy each succeeding decade as much as I have. Thank God I was never tormented by that panic over the passing of youth that beset Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. I think if you welcome each new decade you’re allowed to keep all the past one’s green inside you. Nothing ages a man or woman like clinging to an image of themselves that’s gone by. It snowed in Nice last evening—unheard of!—and golly, how chipper I felt,—simply bucketed along.

  I was delighted to hear of your Gold Medal.101 Late, but all the solider for that.

  Well, back to my drawing-board—and feeling fine as a result of a mighty kind salute from you.

  Ever cordially,

  Thornton

  299. TO PHYLLIS McGINLEY.102 ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed Verdi / “ITALIA” / Societá di Navigazione / Genova) Syracuse

  As from 50 Deepwood Drive, Hamden 17, Conn

  April 2. 1965

  Dear Miss McGinley:

  I got a beautiful, generous letter from you.

  I set it aside, as children do the biggest chocolate cream in the box. Moving from hotel to hotel with my four pieces of hand-luggage—packed like rats’ nests, I lost it. At intervals I’d search for it among the letters, bills (membership in the Tombstone, Arizona, Preservation Society), summonses (to my 45th Class Reunion), old ship’s passenger lists (an “x” denotes a friendship sealed for life), vaccination certificate (two weeks to run), clippings (“Canadian doctor declares babies suffer acutely from boredom”, “Robert Graves modernizes 300 words and phrases for London production of Much Ado About Nothing”), snapshots, menus. …

  Twice I wrote my sister Isabel: urgent, send Miss McGinley’s address. Finally, I’m on a slow slow ship—two weeks from Genoa to Curaçao—I really unpack. And there’s your letter, plain as day.

  It not only gave me the pleasure of its kindness, it arrived as a talisman and a sign. I’m at work on another; it looks as though it wanted to be long, I’m sorry to say. So I’m going through hopes and fears, and feverish spurts and arid spells. Hence, your message came at a real right helpful moment.

  You mention “War and Peace”. I bought it in French, for a change, to read on this slow-crossing. (French not a good idea; but it shows that Mrs Garnett103 didn’t even try to cope the slang of the soldiers and the working people.) So I was on two oceans. Funny thing: in Anna Karenina I can see the architecture, the recurrent themes, designs (and even symbols—that abused word). But in War and Peace I can’t isolate them; I know they’re there because of the wonderful assurance—the freedom from anything approaching diffuseness or the merely episodic. But I can’t yet see how it’s done,—not that it matters. ¶ I hope you know that fragment that Tolstoi wrote—the beginning of a sequel to War and Peace—opens with a picture of Natasha as a staid matron—I think a grandmother. I can see why he didn’t carry it further.

  Also I’ve travelled with another vast novel—said to be twice as long as War and Peace and Brothers Karamazov and Don Quixote. The only longer novel is Proust’s. Have you guessed it? Written by a woman, about 1000 A.D.? (A whole long chapter has been dropped out in our version of it.) Well, I’m not a Japanese scholar, but I read much in the oriental religions; and I have the impudence to say that Arthur Waley—judging by his preface—hasn’t a glimmer of what the true theme of the The Tale of Genji .104 An Englishman wouldn’t. We love our English cousins—oh, yes,—and we’re in eternal debt to their literature—but no Englishman after the 17th Century could have any “windows open” to the oriental view of THE WAY. It’s not a very large island. The islander can develop no apprehension of multitude—of the billions who have lived and died … billions and billions, which is warp and weft of the oriental consciousness. Genji dies
about half way through the book (the novel gets better and better as it goes on) but the subject is the persistance and continuity of souls—in good and evil—not as biological heredity, but as the accumulation of good and bad karma—Lady Rokiyo’s tormented jealousy in operation 50 years after her death is the clearest illustration. … but Genji—anything but a heedless Don Juan, he’s a sort of saint manqué … who will arrive at felicity after a couple of thousand lifetimes,—a completely un-British notion. ¶ You mention Pride and Prejudice. I love Miss Austen but I have one little skunner against her: women exasperate her. The only women she can like (as in Colette) are those avatars of herself in the middle of the book. Lady Murasaki has none of this exasperation and none of this self-regarding. she’s rather neutral about women—but, then, she’s mad about the fellas, and what a fella! ¶ You’ve got to go to Shakespeare and Tolstoi for a clear statement: women are just as good as men (and even a little better.) ¶ Genji was handsome as all get out—wasn’t it great of Tolstoi to make that other suffering moral hero Pierre—uncouth, fat, and bespectacled? Everybody loves Levine, too.105 I must go back and find out what he looked like—I forget.

  Well, I’m wasting your time. And it’s like a conversation in which I don’t let you get a word in.

  But, anyway, it’s my frustrated way of telling you how indebted to you I am and how I shall always be

  devotedly yours, Thornton Wilder

  300. TO CATHARINE DIX WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Yale

  June 3. 1965

  Dear Dixiana:

  Many thanks, querida sobrina,106 for your birthday greetings. On that day—Easter Eve—I had just arrived in West Palm Beach, Florida, had paid a months rent for a small apartment, had gone to a supermarket and laid in bread, butter, milk, eggs and CANNED SOUPS. It wasn’t until noon that I remembered “what day it was” and I burst out laughing. Weeks later I happened to read that the days of the week in 1965 happen to fall on the same days in the calendar as they did in 1897,—so I learned for the first time that I (and my twin brother) was born on the day that the old English church used to call The Raking of Hell—when Christ, just before the resurrection descended into hell and redeemed the noble pagans who died before the Advent. There are old pictures of Him pulling up large throngs of them in a net. I’ve been trying to see if there’s any symbolism, for me, in all this.

  So now you’re going to learn the great Spanish language—el lenguaje de los Reyes.107 It’s resemblance to Italian and French is merely historical; its “inner feeling” is very different from theirs. As I had occasion to write your father a few years ago, it has no elisions. Every syllable stands alone, like the Spanish character. One of the first words you’ll meet shows its firm concreteness: I HAVE = YO TENgO. Get that T and that hard G. Italian: io ho French: j’ai. How weak, how unsubstantial. (The Spaniards ruled Naples for centuries, and in the Neapolitan dialect they rightly retained this Tengo and have long since forgotten that it’s from the Spanish.)

  I know what you mean about bogging down in La Vida es Sueño.108 When you will have read a number of Spanish plays you’ll have got used to their theatrical conventions—just as you’re now used to Shakespeare’s girls going around disguised as boys—and you wont “notice” them. The way Calderón works out the magnificent image of Sigismundo brought up in a tower with no contact with the world except one old guardian is very fine. I hope you’ll teach it some day!

  It’s hard to realize that your school goes on until June 25th.109 As I remember it the last mile’s the hardest,—grading the students. Heigh-ho!

  In an hour Tappie will be here for lunch—its Archie Hobson’s birthday and he and his mother will be here, too.110 Then at 2:30 I have to go to a doctor’s appointment, made 8 months ago—a check-up “look see” at the scar on my face.111 As far as I can see it’s all right. Then tomorrow I go to the Red Lion Inn at Stockbridge to work in seclusion until I come back here for a day or two at my 45th Class reunion. How we senior-citizens will scan one another for signs of general delapidation! I entertained the notion of going to the Beau Brummel Beauty Parlor and taking the “budget treatment”

  Pour réparer des ans l’irréparable outrage,112

  (do you spot where that verse comes from?) but no! I’ve resigned myself. I’ll be the same old laughing bottle-hugging Silenus.113

  If you’re in Cambridge most of the summer, I may drop by—is dinner as good as ever at the Vendôme (or Lockobers?) and of course I love cocktails on the revolving carousel bar in Copley Square. If there is any fellow around that you’re weighing in the balance you’d better bring him along. I’ll try not to scare the daylights out of him. Am I formidable? I don’t mean to be, but I’ve been told that I am.

  Con mucho amor, mi niña

  Tu tio114

  Torntón.

  301. TO AMY WERTHEIMER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Yale

 

  A few days in St Augustine soon at Triton Motel Sarasota Fla

  April 7 1966

  Dear Amy:

  Thank you.

  Thank you in advance of the day.

  x

  You’re quite right, you haven’t found my death in the papers nor any signs of my life.

  There’s a good reason for that: I’m not “news.”

  x

  I never read Albee’s The Sand Box<.> I hope the role of the Grandmother is not like that in his The American Dream

  You’re quite right,—Our Town is given less and less, but are you sure that it’s been outpaced by No Exit? Anyway, they bear a partial resemblance to one another: the last act of my play suggests that life—viewed directly—is damned near Hell; his play says that the proximity of other people renders life a Hell—“L’enfer—c’est les autres.”115 Sartre told me that at the time of the first production he received scores of protests—They found that line too cruel “You are your life”—(i.e. there are no alibis.) It’s a savage play. I hope you’ve got three remarkable actors for it.

  x

  I have to stay away from New England most of the year. When I catch a cold it fastens on me for months and makes me deaf.

  x

  Your letter sounds doleful: twice you refer to your imminent death, and once to mine; your hands are too weak to work, you say, on those heavy Bibles and geneologies.116 One of the greatest charms of the Amy of Blodgett’s Landing was her beautiful laughter (in addition to her beautiful speaking voice). Don’t lose that.

  In the long novel that I’ve almost finished I assert roundly that life is not an image of hell. You will receive a copy from your

  devoted

  old

  friend

  Thornton

  302. TO CHERYL CRAWFORD. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Houston

 

  Returning soon to Triton Motel, Lido Beach, Sarasota.

  Wrote this weeks ago—then lost it—now add the clipping from England. Sorry

  T.N.W.

  St. Augustine Fla Maundy Thursday 1966

  Dear Cheryl:

  I love to get a letter from you.

  I love to think of you.

  x

  I’ve had to stay away from the North because when I catch a cold it lodges in my ear. Blindness is an affliction; deafness is a humiliation.

  x

  The theme of your play makes me nervous.117 Milieu, however exotic, cannot pull us into a theatre by itself. Jews in China, Mormons in Uruguay, Yankees at King Arthur’s Court. In fact milieu is dangerous. We don’t “believe in” the theatrical presentation of background unless it’s subtended by things nearer to us: love (preferably young love); courage to survive, etc THE PASSIONS. Watch that script.

  x

  We are in a phase of the culture-climate of the Jews. A great jet-fuel of the human race. Thank God I have some d
rops of Jewish blood. But after centuries of contempt they are emerging into estimation and not only estimation but the goyim’s expectation of greatness. First there was the condescending tolerance (Abie’s Irish Rose), the admiring relish in the foreigness (Awake and Sing.) But they’re bewildered and self-conscious (there’s nothing worse in the world than being self-conscious—a teen-age agony.) and flustered (Herzog.)118 Chagal (and Buber) have made it with charm, but only one has made it with the true note of the Jew—nobility, nobility athirst for the absolute: KAFKA. There, too, is the greatness of your Actor’s Studio and its power to capture the gifted young. “Only those who are humble enough to strive for a difficult truth can enter this house.” Do find some passage in your play to sound that note.

  x

  You know that you and I have never seen eye to eye about Bert Brecht.

  Well, I’ve been getting some low reprehensible pleasures out of the reports of Günther Glass’s play in Berlin.119 (I’ve just come from Miami where I could buy German newspapers and read lengthy accounts.) I’m ready to go along with a true Marxist. I love the literary criticism of Georg Lukács.120 The world is furthered by passionate conviction, right or wrong, not primarily by judicious appraisal. Least of all by political dilletanti. Brecht wobbled, finally posed, finally played the opportunist.

  x

  Have you been reading the Shaw letters?121 There’s the preparation for the British elections last month. How astounding and right to find that his future wife’s money founded The London School of Economics and the magazine The Economist.122 You’ve read about the English musical comedy The Matchgirls—how instructive it is to learn that those dauntless girls were aided by a penniless Irish music critic and by Mrs Besant, the “muddle-headed” but fiery proponent of the Occult.123 Civilization is furthered by lunatic fringe.

  x

  LATER: April 17. Today’s my birthday. I’m 69. I’ve put my foot into my 70th year and intend to enjoy it. Isabel’s here to see me and our aged Aunt Charlotte who’s not well, in St Petersburg.