The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 59
Thanks again—and all best wishes. Love to Cheryl and Ruth.124
your devoted
Thornton
303. TO RICHARD GOLDSTONE. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) NYU
Oct 6 or 7 1966
Dear Richard:
Every few days I get a letter from some old friend or acquaintance asking me if he or she should show him
Some of them are from persons who knew me long before I met you.
That implies that you are writing a biography of me. But I’m still alive. I have not yet appointed a definitive biographer.
There were a number of books written about Robert Frost before he died—one was by my friend Elizabeth S. Sergeant and she drew me into the composition of it to the extent of at least 20 letters (which she bequeathed to the Yale Library.) Now Robert Frost made it very clear to her that she was not writing a biography. (He had already selected his biographer.125) He pulled her short many times. She was writing—he kept reminding her—a memoir of a friendship, together with a commentary on his work. She would not have dreamed of “circularizing” his friends.
What kind of book are you writing?
Please make it quite clear to yourself what you are doing.
It certainly appears to my friends (and even casual acquaintances merely that are now writing me!) that you are collecting materials toward a biography.
If I get many more letters from friends and acquaintances I shall explode. I regard it as “undignified” to disturb friends for a “character reference,” on the one hand, or “picturesque anecdotes” on the other.
Dr. Jones wrote me asking for recollections of Freud (for his Biography) and Lord David Cecil of Beerbohm (for his Biography<)>—when the subjects were dead. (Ditto Elizabeth Sprigge on Gertrude Stein)
If I get any more of these I shall reply that you are a well-meaning young scholar—but that you have more zeal than judgment.
I suggest that you give your attention primarily to the work. As is my custom, I have not read the short books that deal with me, but I presume there is ample room for ideas—favorable or unfavorable—I don’t care—as long as they are thoughtful—are good criticism.
Ever
Thornton
304. TO GRACE CHRISTY FORESMAN. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Yale
For a few months’ hideaway (before the “summer people” come<)>, at P.O. Box 862, Edgartown. Martha’s Vineyard, Mass
April 21. 1967
Dear Grace:
What a joy to hear from you
And to learn that you were not disappointed in the book.126
You probably saw that you were in mind in a portion of the book—there was a great hurlyburly of names and addresses when I sent out copies… I could not find your address in my “papers”—I still think of you as near Pittsburgh… or you would have been among the first to receive a copy.
You were married to one of the most honest and clearest-souled of men. As illness began to descend upon him I was filled with deep affectionate concern for you both. The experience made a deep impression on me—who had had at that time little experience of physical and spiritual suffering.
With no sense of intrusion, dear Grace, my imagination tried to understand the great ordeal you both underwent.
And many years later it reappeared in that book. But under what different aspects!
How different are Clyde Foresman and Breckenridge Lansing.
A greater part of Clyde’s suffering was the attempt to alleviate your pain. Poor Breckenridge is all egotism gradually “thawed” through Eustacia’s religious view of “love for the creature.”
In an odd way “St Kitts” is for a time Davis House and Breckenridge Lansing is—in reverse—a tribute to the brave and noble man you married and you are Eustacia bearing a no less—an even greater burden—because you knew and you knew that Clyde knew that an end was approaching that only love could transcend.
A number of correspondents have already told me that those scenes are lacerating—almost too painful to bear—only endurable because of Eustacia’s clairvoyance and largeness of soul. That is my tribute to you.
Give my love to Emily—and to Jack.127 My book has already told you that I see these storm-tossed lives as stages in a vast unfoldment.
Indeed, I know well that LIFE-TIME is a loveless juggernaught that grinds lives in an atmosphere of fear, competition, and seldom-rewarded ambition. It had its part in breaking up the first marriage of my cousin Wilder Hobson—who later went to “Newsweek”! We must take a long view or we must despair.
If you have time, will you write me a word about “those matters”—because your life-story was one of the turning-points in my life.
I have begun “another”—and always at the back of my mind is the hope that (this time) I shall succeed in amusing you. The only amusement that’s worth anything is that which is based upon a deep acceptance of the tragic background of life
With a world of affection
Ever
Thornton
305. TO JOHN K. TIBBY, JR. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Yale
P.O. 862 Edgartown, Mass. 02539
May 5 1967
Dear Jack:
Before I received your letter one arrived from Grace Foresman telling me of the divorce, of Emily’s and Bill’s interests. I’m glad to hear from you.
I hope for both of you that the new situation—since it had to be—is “working”, that you’re making a good thing of it.
I burst out laughing at your mention of p. 327 of my book. Old writing-hand though I am, it still comes as a surprise (even a shock) to me that readers find anything “usable” in my ruminations. I am so little of a dogmatic type that my first impulse is to exclaim “Oh, I didn’t mean to be taken as seriously at that,—I was just kicking the subject around.”
My sister Isabel will forward the Life-Time Tributes to Harry Luce soon. I just received a reply from Mrs Luce (Tempe, Arizona). She thought I was still living the “hermit” in Arizona and wished I would come up and spend a day with her: she wanted to learn about those early years of Harry that she had never understood. (Incidentally, she described herself to my sister as very lonesome.)128
Harry Luce, Bob Hutchins, my brother Amos and I (all near classmates in New Haven) are a very special breed of cats. Our fathers were very religious, very dogmatic Patriarchs. They preached and talked cant from morning til night—not because they were hypocritical but because they knew no other language. They were forceful men. They thought they were “spiritual”—damn it, they should have been in industry. They had no insight into the lives of others—least of all their families. They had an Old Testament view (sentimentalized around the edges) of what a WIFE, DAUGHTER, SON, CITIZEN should be. We’re the product of those (finally bewildered and unhappy) Worthies. In Harry it took the shape of a shy joyless power-drive. And like so many he intermittently longed to be loved, enjoyed, laughed with. But he didn’t understand give-and-take. Bob and Amos and I—bottom of p. 148!
I wish you’d known Brit Hadden.129
I wonder what school you’ll select for Bill. Largely approve of your avoiding the big ones—but such decisions are closely related to the nature of the student.
Martha’s Vineyard is my hideaway now—until the “summer people” come. Bad weather, seagulls and I.
If you feel like it some rainy Sunday afternoon open a beer and write me. (God, you typewrite elegantly.) Oh, I forgot, on Sunday afternoon you’re on your boat,—well, Sunday night. Where were you born? Where did you school?—Are you making most of your own meals, like me? Since the divorce are you more of a convivial or less? Do you do a lot of reading? What are you reading?
Your
loyal
Uncle Thornton
P.S. I gathered, between the lines, that Grace admires you very much. TNW.
306. TO WILLIAM I. NICHOLS. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) LofC
Passing through N.Y. to see my sister Charlotte in the sanatorium on Long Island
Friday
Dear Bill:
Many thanks for sending me your “talk.”
The larger part of it is finely organized and phrased.
I think it’s a very important movement (for good or ill) and not likely to be drowned out by civil rights riots.
I think you can very much count on its CONTINUING to change it form:
The Beats were vagrant (few women; you can’t wander about with women); picked up occasional jobs (no begging) and little said about “smoking”, etc. Lots of poetry-readings; quasi-religious via the Orient.
x
Hippies—sedentary community. Totally drug-oriented. Hence—as you point out—the atrophy of the “will”. Debasement into panhandling and begging (very un-American.) Debasement of the ideological rationales—don’t know anything about their Hindu chants or Zen disciplines. Omnipresence of women, but “pot” is very much a sex-substitute: “you pursue your beatitude; I’ll pursue mine.”
x
The Diggers: I wish I knew more about them (including the history of their name and their hats—a sect in England—deported as convicts to Australia—the altruistic mission of the sect survives all those vicissitudes and reappears in the Hippie movement.)
The Diggers show us all the admiral
x
The sad thing about youth is that it doesn’t know anything.
The admirable thing about youth is that it truly desires to live correctly and to use sincerity—not convention—as the criticism of the “correct.”
After the First World War German youth broke away from the German home,—and what a “home” it was: “if Paul-Jurgen and Grete do their homework every night of the week they can go for a walk in the hills with Papa and Mama on Sunday!”
To the consternation of all decent-minded people, the youth left the house and wandered over the world. Literary influences, also: they sang mediaeval latin songs to the zither; a certain amount of shocking free-love also, but a strong askesis: they repudiated beer as identified with the “fat” generation that had lost the war. They were emancipated—free, vocal, happy in “nature” and intensely hopeful. The Wandervogel movement.
And Hitler seized all that promise and adopted it to his own purposes—just as “drugs” have betrayed this movement. Because the young don’t know anything.
Everybody blames the American home, but that’s only part of the injustice to the young.
There’s the school. The American School (and the German before it) have failed to render knowledge and the exercise of the mind attractive.
There’s a terrible line in an old play by Thomas Corneille—brother of the great Corneille: Combien de virtus vous me faîtes haïr130
The American home can’t help the young becomes
Children love to learn. But they’re fed “canned facts”. The schools, outside the cities, look more and more like country clubs—which is all right—but English and History and Math still resemble punishments.
A revolt (and an understandable revolt) has been led into the wilderness by drugs.
But—as you say—it’s discovering its own dead-end and bankruptcy.
But the movement goes on. And new young people are reaching 17 every day and will repudiate this generation.
I’m eager to see what’s coming.
Damn it, I didn’t mean to run on like this.
But, Lord!—I’ve battered your poor ear off before.
Again thanks for your fine address.
My regards to Gnädige Frau.
Your old friend
Thornt.
307. TO JAMES LEO HERLIHY.131 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Norddeutscher Lloyd Bremen an Bord
until after Christmas at, or near, American Express Co. 11 rue Scribe, Paris.
Middle of the Atlantic
November 10 <1967>
Dear Mr. Herlihy:
Your letter gave me much pleasure
Forgive my being so long in answering. I was living all alone on Martha’s Vineyard. SUMMER people gone, most of the eating places and bars closed—just us natives and the seagulls.
I was enjoying a breakdown—not a nervous breakdown, or a mental one—just a breakdown of the will. Nothing tragic, nothing even pathetic—merely dreary and unmanly—very Russian,—but deeper than mere laziness and sloth.
So much for apology. I’ve shaken off the condition on shipboard.
I knew your name—and with lively esteem—but I couldn’t recall where I knew it. When suddenly I found in the local stationery shop a copy of ALL FALL DOWN. I’d never read it, but I remembered the movie well—not only for three striking performances132 but for an overall searching honesty in all that suffering and a rich illustration of the world in which those persons lived. I’d made a mental note to get hold of the book, but other things intervened.
Well, I read it and the pleasure I got from it multiplied the pleasure your letter gave me.
Yes, you and I are Middle Westerners.133 (I left my birthplace Madison Wisc. at the age of nine, but returned for two years at Oberlin—and then for six years teaching in Chicago.) But more than that we have a feeling about the Middle West’s non-prosperous middle class that is not often found. We don’t hate or mock it or sentimentalize it (Booth Tarkington) or condescend to it (Sinclair Lewis). It is, as it were, <“>romantic” for us: we rejoice in the whole gamut from farce to tragedy. (For my part, I’m including not only The Eighth Day but the “road” and the Kansas City of Heavens My Destination.) Gertrude Stein has a very fine passage about how every writer should have the country he lives in and knows and the country he—in no trivial sense—romant
But oh! that Seminary Street, and that Florida!
And Clinton’s suicide letter!135 And lots and lots of pages.
Belatedly
but with
plenty of
sincere thanks and regards
Thornton Wilder
I wish you could see your way to the theatre again,136 but the trouble with the theatre (now days) is that you’ve got not only to tell your story, but you’ve got to devise some novel element in the manner of telling it,—to innovate in form, damn it.
308. TO SCHUYLER CHAPIN.137 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel Continental / 3, Rue de Castiglione / Paris) Yale
American Express Co. 11 rue Scribe Paris
Nov 29 1967
Dear Mr. Chapin:
Many thanks for your letter. I follow closely the work at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and am delighted that it has gained its stride and is doing fine things. All cont
inued success to it.
The thing that prevents my wishing to see my play in the Lincoln Center might seem to many a small idiosyncratic difficulty, but to me it’s important.
That 30-year-old play has been done over and over again in school auditoriums, Sunday School halls, gymnasiums and theaters-in-the-round. I have seldom heard of its being performed in the theater for which it was intended: the conventional box-set stage with the brick wall at the back, the heating-system pipes, etc. I have always felt certain that a large part of the effectiveness of the original production came from the emergence of Grovers Corners—not from an abstract “non-place”, but from that homely even ugly “rehearsal stage”. (The same is true of “Seven
I was confirmed in this conviction when I read the reviews (and received letters from friends and strangers) of William Ball’s revival last year in San Francisco.139 They were surprised that the play had such meat in it; they had seen it often (usually with relatives in the cast) and remembered it as pretty and pathetic and easily forgetable.
So when I—at the age of 70—was approached on the matter of a “serious” anniversary revival, I was filled with the hope that we could have either of the two theaters of the first run: the Henry Miller or the Morosco,—or certainly one like them. There’s poetry in Our Town—those crickets, the toot of the train’s whistle approaching Contookuk; but its not the same kind of poetry as in the dramas of the Elizabethan age and the Spanish Golden Age—which rejoices in an abstract scenery-less setting. My “poetry” rises from little homely objects; it must win its poetry from steampipes and back stage ladders.
[This is odd coming from me, who later went all out for the arena stage.]