The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  95 Wilbur L. Cross (1862-1948) was dean of the Graduate School at Yale at this time.

  96 Ellie Jones Campbell was the daughter of Dean Frederick Scheetz Jones of Yale.

  97 Italian: gentleman-in-waiting.

  98 TNW’s brother had been writing poetry from boyhood. The first line TNW quotes is from his brother’s poem “Ode in a German Cemetery Where Many Victims of the Great War Were Interred,” and the second line is from “Lines by Arno.” Both poems were published in Amos N. Wilder’s Battle Retrospect (1923), a volume that was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

  99 The Wilder family now lived in a house at 75 Mansfield Street in New Haven.

  100 The errors in the first edition of The Cabala, alluded to by TNW, were corrected in the second edition: “heure de champagne” to “heure du champagne”; “exampla gratia” to “exempli gratia”; and “the conversation of France” to “the conversion of France.” In all, the first edition of The Cabala contained twenty-eight errors.

  101 A Monogram for Jesus Christ.

  102 TNW is referring to the MacDowell Colony, located in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

  103 Alix d’Espoli is a character in The Cabala.

  104 TNW tutored Andrew Townson in English and French from mid-April to mid-June, while he was completing his M.A. He began work on what would become his second novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), during his stay in the summer of 1926 at the MacDowell Colony.

  105 Alan Wilfred Cranbrook Menzies was a professor of chemistry at Princeton at this time. Sarah Morton Frantz was a resident of Princeton.

  106 There was a review of The Cabala in the Chicago Evening Post Literary Review on May 14, 1926, signed by Louise George.

  107 Abarbanell was an opera singer. Goldbeck’s review of The Cabala, “Real People Masquerade Behind Mask of Fiction in Story Laid in Rome,” appeared in the New York Evening Post Literary Review on May 15, 1926.

  108 Jean was one of Amy Wertheimer’s two daughters.

  109 A Yale classmate of TNW, Baer worked for Albert & Charles Boni and was responsible for soliciting The Cabala for the firm.

  110 TNW is referring to his “three-minute playlets for three persons,” most written at Oberlin and Yale and published in those schools’ literary magazines. Sixteen of these “playlets” were published by another New York publisher, Coward-McCann, in 1928 in The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays.

  111 The Century Magazine published a favorable brief review of The Cabala in its August 1926 issue.

  112 The first book mentioned is a novel (1921) by American writer Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne: the second is a novel (1925) by Elinor Wylie.

  113 TNW met American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1924 and tried to get him to switch publishers, although TNW was unsuccessful in this endeavor.

  114 TNW was accompanying Andrew Townson on a European tour and acting as his chaperone during the fall of 1926.

  115 This date is written in handwriting that may not be TNW’s.

  116 There is no evidence that American writer Jim Tully (1886-1947) collaborated on a play with Graves, but Tully did collaborate with Robert Nichols on Twenty Below (1927).

  117 Douglas C. Townson, Andrew’s father.

  118 Morgan, Harjes was a Paris bank where one could receive mail.

  119 Richard Boleslavsky agreed to produce TNW’s play The Trumpet Shall Sound in repertory at his American Laboratory Theatre in December 1926. Horace Dabney a character in the play is a former ship captain; he is a marked man because he deserted his sinking ship, leaving scores to drown.

  120 English publisher Longmans, Green & Co. had published The Cabala in October; TNW’s aunt Charlotte was living in London, working for the International YWCA.

  121 John Hadley Nicanor “Bumby” Hemingway was born on October 10, 1923.

  122 Bruce T. Simonds.

  123 Both French dramatist Jean Racine and Blaise Pascal are entombed in Paris’s Église Saint-Etienne-du-Mont.

  124 French poet, bookseller, and publisher (1892-1955) who founded the bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in Paris in 1915, across the street from where Sylvia Beach later opened her bookstore, Shakespeare and Company She and Beach became lifelong companions.

  125 Paris café that was a popular gathering place for writers.

  126 English novelist (1893-1940), whose Medal Without Bar (1930) was considered one of the best novels about World War I.

  127 Through intricate political and social maneuverings, Mrs. Roy, a character in The Cabala, attempts to obtain a divorce at the Vatican under the Pauline Privilege, an arcane procedure. Consuelo Vanderbilt obtained an annulment decree from the Catholic Church despite having been married to the duke of Marlborough for twenty-five years and bearing him two sons.

  128 On April 7, 1926, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was wounded in the face when he was shot by Violet Gibson; three other assassination attempts occurred between April and October 1926.

  129 The American Laboratory Theatre production of The Trumpet Shall Sound opened to negative reviews on December 10, 1926, but remained in their repertory for several months.

  130 TNW’s application for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship to study drama in Germany was unsuccessful, unlike that of Stephen Vincent Benét, who received one in 1926.

  131 TNW met Nichols (1902-1987) in 1921 or 1922 in New York, when he spotted him reading Keats in a restaurant, then met him again at Balliol College, Oxford, in October 1926, when TNW was touring England with Andrew Townson; he was also one of the Oxonians with whom TNW spent Christmas in December 1926. He and TNW remained friends and corresponded intermittently to the end of TNW’s life.

  132 Edward C. Aswell was assistant editor of The Forum magazine.

  133 The review appeared in the column “Our Booking-Office” in the January 19, 1927, issue.

  134 The role of Flora in The Trumpet Shall Sound was played in repertory by two actresses, Helen Coburn and Florence House.

  135 Ray Bridgman may be the husband or son of the Mrs. Bridgman whom TNW met during his Christmas on the Rviera in 1926.

  136 The Theatre Guild production of The Brothers Karamazov ran on Broadway in January and February 1927. Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre presented the first English-language production in the United States of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters in repertory between October 1926 and April 1927.

  137 According to a June 16, 1927, letter TNW sent to Roy Curtis at the University of Michigan, The Trumpet Shall Sound was presented for the first time outside New York by the Comedy Club at that university on March 30, 1927, revised and with a new fourth act not present in the New York production.

  138 This play (1926) by English dramatist and director Dane (1888-1965) played in repertory between February and April 1927 at the American Laboratory Theatre.

  139 The Elizabethan Club is a private but Yale-affiliated organization for faculty and students interested in literature. Abie’s Irish Rose (1922), a comedy by American dramatist Anne Nichols, ran on Broadway from May 1922 to October 1927.

  140 Josiah Royce (1855-1916), American philosopher. Both James and Royce taught at Harvard.

  141 Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) was an American patroness of the arts and was well known for her salons in Italy and New York. She settled in Taos, New Mexico, where she was the center of the art colony there, hosting such visitors as D. H. Lawrence, Carl Jung, Georgia O’Keeffe, Martha Graham, and, on several occasions, TNW.

  142 Jerry Hart was another of the Oxonians on the Riviera during Christmas 1926.

  143 TNW is referring to “Rhodes Scholars,” by O. B. Andrews, Jr., in the February 1927 issue of The American Mercury.

  144 Muriel McCormick, the granddaughter of both Standard Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, was a prominent socialite. After Muriel’s parents divorced, her father, Harold, married Ganna Waska, an aspiring opera singer
.

  145 In the original letter, the date appears at the end of the letter.

  146 Weeks was the associate editor of The Atlantic Monthly. This letter appears in a typescript of an essay on TNW that Weeks wrote; the original letter has not been located.

  147 J. C. Squire was editor of the monthly London Mercury an important outlet for new writers, from 1919 to 1934.

  148 Hemingway’s short story “Fifty Grand” appeared in the July 1927 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

  149 TNW met Glenn (1900-1976) when both were teaching at Lawrenceville School. Glenn left teaching to attend Virginia Theological Seminary and then became an ordained minister in the Episcopal Church. Glenn and TNW remained lifelong close friends.

  150 Edwin Clyde Foresman, housemaster of Davis House at Lawrenceville, died on July 14, 1927.

  151 German theologian and philosopher Otto (1869-1937) was the author of Das Heilige, or The Idea of the Holy (1917), one of the most important German theological books of the twentieth century.

  152 TNW is referring to the biblical Martha and Mary, thereby suggesting to Glenn that he should refresh himself and leave his work.

  153 Glenn was serving as an assistant in a church in Worcester, Massachusetts. Gibbs Sherrill was a Groton student TNW tutored for six weeks in Briarcliff, New York, in March and April 1927. Sir Wilfred Grenfell (1865-1940), an English physician and missionary, was famous for his work among the fishermen of Labrador.

  154 Widow of Edwin Clyde Foresman.

  155 TNW probably means Brearley a private school for girls in New York City where he apparently was offered a teaching position.

  156 The only child of Edwin Clyde and Grace Christy Foresman, Emily Foresman was two years old when TNW went to Davis House in September 1921.

  157 The Boni firm told TNW that they felt that The Bridge of San Luis Rey was too short to justify a price of $2.50 and suggested that they add several illustrations to the text. There was also a dispute over the handling of foreign rights.

  158 TNW was asked by his English publisher, Longmans, Green, to translate the notorious avant-garde French novel Paulina 1880 (1925) by Pierre-Jean Jouve (1887-1976). It is not known whether he completed the translation, and the manuscript has not survived.

  159 TNW spent a weekend on Cape Cod with Douglas and Marie Townson, Andy Townson’s parents, and planned to stop in Peterborough, New Hampshire, for supper with Marian MacDowell, widow of the American composer Edward Alexander MacDowell, before going on to visit Glenn. The MacDowells established the MacDowell Colony in 1907, and TNW had been there in July 1926, working on The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

  160 Amy Wertheimer, five years older than TNW wanted their relationship to be a more romantic one; TNW worked hard to maintain a platonic but close friendship.

  161 TNW may be using a name that he and Isabel used to refer to their sister Charlotte.

  162 Tinker apparently wrote TNW a letter praising The Bridge of San Luis Rey: which had been published the previous month.

  163 TNW had his appendix removed in New Haven in the fall of 1927 by Dr. William Francis Verdi, his father’s physician.

  164 In the original letter, the date appears at the end of the letter, as well as here.

  165 Fitzgerald, whose third novel, The Great Gatsby, had been published in 1925, apparently had written TNW a letter praising The Cabala.

  166 In 1925, when Fitzgerald began planning the novel that would become Tender is the Night, his protagonist was Francis Melarky, a twenty-one-year-old southerner. In this early version, Fitzgerald intended for Melarky to join the fashionable young crowd on the Rviera and, after an alcoholic breakdown, murder his overly protective mother. The Melarky version was later abandoned.

  167 Editor and publisher Cass Canfield (1897-1986) joined the publishing firm of Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row) in 1924. He served in a variety of positions there and became the president of the firm in 1931. He remained an editor at Harper until his death.

  168 This is a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original letter has not been located.

  169 In the copy of the letter, the date appears at the end of the letter.

  170 The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays was published by Coward-McCann on October 29, 1928.

  171 Unhappy with the Boni firm’s treatment, TNW signed a secret agreement committing to Harper upon the completion of his contractual obligations to Boni. In return, Harper agreed to give him a five-thousand-dollar annual subvention for three years, even while he worked on books still owed to Boni. Because of the financial success of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, TNW never called on these moneys. His contract with Boni covered his three books after The Cabala; the firm published The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), The Woman of Andros (1930), waived its right to The Angel That Troubled the Waters, and ultimately sold the third, Heaven’s My Destination (1935), to Harper.

  172 This date is written on the letter in another hand, probably TNW’s mother’s.

  These boys are going to drop in and out during the Summer and Gene Tunney in the Fall etc. If you don’t go over and choose it for me I shall have to ask Richard Blaker or Robert Longman to find it and they will overdo. And it must be started before June 20.

  173 Head of Longmans, Green, TNW’s English publisher.

  174 TNW signed a multi-year public lecturing contract with the well-known Lee Keedick Lecture Bureau to go on a lecture tour. Keedick also represented English writers Asquith, Chesterton, and Walpole. TNW lectured under the terms of this agreement until the spring of 1937.

  175 The three boys, Henry Noy, Clark Anderson, and Duff McCullough, were Lawrenceville students.

  176 TNW’s mother and youngest sister eventually rented Axeland House, near Horley, Sussex, for the summer.

  177 TNW is referring to some items his father accidentally left behind during a visit to Lawrenceville.

  178 TNW spent the weekend of February 25 and 26, 1928, at the Fitzgeralds’ rented house, Ellerslie, outside Wilmington, Delaware, where he met for the first time Fitzgerald, his wife, Zelda, and their only child, Frances Scott, who was called “Scottie.”

  179 Among the guests at Ellerslie was Esther Murphy, sister of Gerald Murphy, the Fitzgeralds’ friend from their time in Paris and the Rviera.

  180 Reginald “Rex” Lardner, brother of American writer and journalist Ringgold “Ring” Lardner, was, like his brother, a neighbor of the Fitzgeralds when the latter lived in Great Neck, New York, and was an editor for Hearst’s International-Cosmopolitan magazine.

  181 Fitzgerald’s story “Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr-nce of W-les” (1924) was reprinted in his collection All The Sad Young Men (1926).

  182 TNW no doubt mentioned this because of Zelda’s interest in ballet. She began to take ballet lessons in Paris in the summer of 1925 and, while they were at Ellerslie, took classes with the director of the Philadelphia Opera ballet.

  183 Townley graduated from Lawrenceville in 1923 and from Princeton in 1927.

  184 In the original letter, the date appeared at the end of the letter.

  185 The Woman of Andros.

  186 In the original letter, the date appeared at the end of the letter.

  187 Latin: see the press here and there.

  Chapter 3

  1 Porgy (1925), a novel by DuBose Heyward; Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), a novel by Willa Cather; Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), a Pulitzer Prize—winning novel by Julia Peterkin; Tristram (1927), a Pulitzer Prize—winning narrative poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

  2 The heroine of The Woman of Andros, Chrysis, was a hetaera, one of a class of highly cultivated courtesans in ancient Greece.

  3 Latin: a naturally Christian soul.

  4 TNW noted before the opening lines of his novel: “The first part of this novel is based upon the Andria, a comedy of Terence who in turn based his work upon two Greek plays, now lost to us, by Menander.” Fénelon (1651-1715) was a French prelate and writer.

  5 TNW had wri
tten a preface for Philip Sassoon’s nonfiction book The Third Route, published in the United States in 1929.

  6 Hemingway’s second novel, The Sun Also Rises, was published as Fiesta in England. A Farewell to Arms (1929) was published in six issues of Scribner’s magazine, from May through October 1929.

  7 English publisher James Hamish Hamilton. The full Latin phrase is quorum magna pars fui, meaning “in which I played a great part.”

  8 TNW may be referring to “The Breaking of Exile,” which survives as an incomplete manuscript and as a typescript carbon in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

  9 9 Lewis was a society caterer and the owner of the raffish and idiosyncratic Cavendish Hotel on Jermyn Street in London. TNW may be referring to a bronze bust (1908) by sculptor Jacob Epstein. The subject, Nina Forrest, was an artist’s model and the wife of English painter Henry Lamb. Epstein called her Euphemia because she reminded him of the woman in Andrea Mantegna’s painting of Saint Euphemia.

  10 Fitts was in the class of 1919 at Yale and edited the monthly literary journal S4N, which was founded in 1919 and to which TNW contributed frequently before it ceased publication in 1925.

  11 Argentine dancer Antonia Merce (1888-1936), whose stage name was La Argentina.

  12 Italian: poor little person (this was an obvious reference to Chaplin’s role as the Little Tramp).

  13 TNW is referring to the manuscript of The Woman of Andros.

  14 TNW is referring to his family’s new home on Deepwood Drive in Hamden, Connecticut, then under construction.

  15 TNW never wrote a play for English actress Edith Evans, and there is no record of her having appeared in any of his plays.

  16 Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe.

  17 Grace was the second wife of TNW’s uncle Thornton MacNess Niven III.

  18 TNW owned stock in the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway.

  19 The Hannas were Wilder family friends in Berkeley.

  20 TNW is probably referring to the letter he received from T.E. Lawrence (see letter number 113).

  21 Lawrence wrote TNW a letter on December 12, 1929, praising his two novels but criticizing him for “aiming a little below your strength, to convey a sense of ease,” in The Bridge of San Luis Rey.