22 Lawrence’s prose translation of the Odyssey appeared in 1932.
23 The Burgtheater of Vienna, founded in 1776, is one of the earliest and most important theaters in Europe.
24 Haidee Wright (1868-1943) was an English stage and film actress.
25 Charlotte had been selected as a resident at Yadoo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she worked on her writing.
26 Mrs. Henry Seidel Canby, wife of the American critic and editor who was on the Yale faculty when TNW was an undergraduate.
27TNW’s brother would receive his Ph.D. from Yale in June 1933. TNW is referring to Mother and Four, Isabel Wilder’s first novel, which was published in 1933.
28 French: Finally I saw that he was preparing me for the delights of a farewell.
29 Ralph S. Lillie, a gifted pianist, was a professor of general physiology at the University of Chicago.
30 Stage producer and director Jed Harris (1900-1979) was romantically involved for many years with American stage and film actress and writer Ruth Gordon (1896-1985).
31 German: The beautiful Helena. TNW is referring to Max Reinhardts wife, German actress Helene Thimig (1889-1974).
32 32 TNW’s one-act play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, which was collected in his The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act (1931), is among the most performed of his shorter plays. In its use of such theatrical devices as the Stage Manager and the absence of realistic scenery it anticipates his later full-length plays.
33 The House of Connelly, by Paul Green.
34 Helen McAfee, the editor of the Yale Review; Phyliss Trask and Dr. Williams were New Haven friends. The Fultons were TNW’s next-door neighbors on Deepwood Drive. Bailey was professor of surgery at the University of Chicago.
35 Astrid may be a reference to a family pet or may just be TNW being whimsical.
36 As depicted by Dante in the Inferno, Ugolino della Gherardesca (ca. 1220-1289) was accused of being a traitor to the city of Pisa, arrested, imprisoned, and left to starve in a tower with his sons and grandsons.
37 Franja, the eldest daughter of Robert and Maude Hutchins, was born in 1926.
38 Skinner was performing at Chicago’s Studebaker Theater at the time. Andrews may have been a Wilder family friend.
39 Mrs. Philip F. La Follette, the wife of Wisconsin’s governor, was referring to the bed that popular Norwegian violinist Ole Bornemann Bull probably slept in when visiting the governor’s house in the 1870s; it was henceforth called “the Ole Bull bed.”
40 Laughton played Hercule Poirot in The Fatal Alibi, a play by Michael Morton, and also directed the production. The Fatal Alibi was apparently playing in New Haven before its New York opening on February 8, 1932. In 1928, Isabel Wilder had graduated from Yale’s Department of Playwriting and Production, a forerunner of the Yale School of Drama.
41 Austrian stage and film actress Elisabeth Bergner (1897-1986) was a favorite of Max Reinhardt.
42 TNW’s translation of André Obey’s Le Viol de Lucrèce was titled Lucrèce.
43 Katharine Cornell’s touring production of The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1931) by Rudolf Besier was apparently playing in Chicago at this time.
44 Freedman of Brandt & Brandt was TNW’s dramatic agent from 1932 until Freedman’s death in 1966. A. Conger Goodyear frequently served as Cornell’s business representative.
45 Lederer (1899-2000) was a Czech film and stage actor. He appeared in New York in 1932 in C. L. Anthony’s Autumn Crocus.
46 Composer and music critic Deems Taylor wrote incidental music for the production of Lucrèce: American set designer Jones did the sets.
47 At the request of Gilbert Miller, TNW did a second version of Indig’s play, but when The Bride of Torozko opened in New York in September 1934, the adaptation was credited to Ruth Langner and TNW’s name was not associated with the production.
48 German: big-city.
49 American dramatist (1886-1946).
50 American dramatist (1890-1980).
51 Draper was the fiancée/lover of Lauro de Bosis (see letter number 67).
52 French literary critic (1882-1939). The book on Nietzsche that TNW mentions was never published.
53 French: to appear.
54 Friedell (1878-1938) was an Austrian philosopher, theater critic, and actor.
55 English literary critic and poet F. L. Lucas (1894-1967) was the author of Tragedy (1927).
56 French: a red Indian.
57 German lyric poet Eduard Friedrich Mörike (1804-1875).
58 Italian historian, and philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952).
59 Austrian dramatists Johann Nestroy (1801-1862) and Ferdinand Raimund (1790-1836). Nestroy’s play Einen Jux will er sich machen (1842) was adapted by TNW as The Merchant of Yonkers (1938), which, in turn, he revised as The Matchmaker (1954).
60 Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968).
61 Internationally renowned theatrical company established in Paris in 1930 by French actor and director Michel Saint-Denis, who produced a number of plays by André Obey.
62 Italian dramatist Carlo Goldoni and Giacomo Casanova were both born in Venice in the 1700s.
63 TNW is referring to Alexander Woollcott, Katharine Cornell, and Gertrude Macy (Cornell’s general manager) and their upcoming trip to the home of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin.
64 American director, producer, and actor Guthrie McClintic (1893—1961), who was married to Katharine Cornell from 1921 until his death, coproduced (with Cornell) and directed Davis’s Jezebel in New York from December 1933 to January 1934, but Tallulah Bankhead was not in the cast.
65 American dramatist, novelist, and short story writer Margaret Ayer “Peggy” Barnes (1886-1967).
66 The Chicago World’s Fair of 1933-1934, known as “A Century of Progress,” was located on 424 acres of lakefront, close to downtown Chicago.
67 TNW’s youngest sister graduated from Mount Holyoke in June 1933. His brother received an honorary D.D. from Hamilton College, where he taught from 1930 to 1933. Isabel Wilder gave lectures during 1933-1934 on “Novel Reading and Novel Writing” and “The Modern Stage in America and Europe” under contract to the Lee Keedick Agency.
68 Ruth Gordon’s father, former sea captain Clifton Jones, had retired in Hawaii.
69 Jed Harris produced and directed The Lake, by Dorothy Massingham and Murray MacDonald, in New York between December 1933 and February 1934. Katharine Hepburn appeared in a starring role. He also produced and directed The Green Bay Tree, by Mordaunt Shairp, between October 1933 and March 1934.
70 French: our friend.
71 American dramatist Sidney Howard’s Alien Corn, directed by Guthrie McClintic and produced by and starring Katharine Cornell, was playing for a month in Chicago.
72 TNW is referring to Noël Coward, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and possibly prominent American physician Dr. Emanuel Libman.
73 American author and suffragette Janet Ayer Fairbank was Margaret Ayer Barnes’s older sister.
74 Mary Louise Cecilia “Texas” Guinan (1884-1933) was an American stage and film actress. During Prohibition, she had become a speakeasy hostess and was known for floor shows that consisted of scantily clad female dancers, whom she often took on the road.
75 Goldwyn produced We Live Again (1934), starring Russian-born film and stage actress Sten (1908-1993), whom Goldwyn had brought to the United States.
76 Film costume designer and couturier Gilbert Adrian (1903-1959), known simply as Adrian, designed costumes for many famous films; he also designed clothes for numerous wealthy women, including Mabel Dodge Luhan.
77 H. R. Knickerbocker, a well-known American journalist, was an international correspondent for Hearst’s International News Service. Martha Eccles Dodd (1908—1990) met TNW at the University of Chicago, where she studied for three and a half years before becoming assistant literary editor of the Chicago Tribune.
78 Woollcott’s “
The Sage of Fountain Inn” appeared in the September 1933 issue of Cosmopolitan.
79 A brand of wood stain and paint.
80 The Dark Tower, written and directed by Woollcott and George S. Kaufman and produced by Sam H. Harris, ran in New York from November 1933 to January 1934. Harris also produced Dinner at Eight, by Kaufman and Edna Ferber, which ran in New York from October 1932 to May 1933.
81 A character in The Green Bay Tree, who was played by James Dale when Jed Harris’s production opened in October 1933.
82 Play (1929) by English dramatist Ashley Dukes.
83 Play (1921) by Somerset Maugham.
84 TNW is credited with being instrumental in introducing Orson Welles to the American stage.
85 John Thomas Pratt (1912-1986) became a costumer and set designer. He worked especially for African-American dancer and choreographer Katherine Dunham, whom he married in 1941.
86 Dana became TNW’s lawyer in early 1928; and he continued to represent him until 1951, the year Dana died.
87 TNW is referring to the trial of Dr. Alice Wynekoop, who had been accused of murdering her daughter-in-law, Rheta, in 1933.
88 TNW’s treatment of the Joan of Arc story for George Cukor and Merian C. Cooper was not used, but the script is in the George Cukor Collection at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California, as well as in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. It was published in the October 2003 issue of the Yale Review.
89 Isabel Wilder’s second novel, Heart Be Still, was published in 1934.
90 French: customs.
91 TNW is referring to two other fictional treatments of the Joan of Arc story: Friedrich Schiller’s play Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801) and Percy MacKaye’s play Jeanne d’Arc (1906). The “British goddams” refers to English soldiers, and Cauchon was the bishop in charge of Joan of Arc’s trial.
92 TNW is referring to Black Mountain College, which opened in 1933. Its founder, John A. Rice, had been fired by Hamilton Holt, who was president of Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, at the time. Some of the faculty and students at Rollins followed Rice to Black Mountain.
93 American writer Muriel Draper.
94 After a successful career as a drama critic and as the director of New York’s Provincetown Playhouse, Macgowan had gone to Hollywood as a story editor.
95 Harold Ickes, who offered Robert Maynard Hutchins the post, was secretary of the interior at the time. Dana’s partner was Frederick H. “Fritz” Wiggin. The firm was henceforth called Wiggin and Dana.
96 American opera singer Lawrence Tibbett and Spanish opera singer Lucrezia Bori.
97 German artist and former Bauhaus professor Albers (1888-1976) emigrated to the United States in 1933. He became a member of the faculty at Black Mountain College.
98 Robert B. Harshe was director of the Art Institute of Chicago at the time.
99 When We Live Again was released in 1934, screenwriting credit was given to Leonard Praskins, Maxwell Anderson, and Preston Sturges.
100 Ruth Gordon played three roles in the Theatre Guild’s production of James Bridie’s A Sleeping Clergyman (1933), which ran in New York from October to November 1934.
101 French: stronger than I.
102 Raimu was the stage name of French stage and film actor Jules-Auguste Muraire (1883-1946).
103 When the film Marie Antoinette, based on Zweig’s 1932 biography, appeared in 1938, Norma Shearer played the title role, but Laughton was not in the cast. He had declined the role, which was played by Robert Morley.
104 Laughton was in the films The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).
105 The film TNW refers to in parentheses is Devil and the Deep (1932).
106 Ruth Gordon and Helen Hayes.
107 Elsa Lanchester, Laughton’s wife.
108 This appears to be a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original letter has not been located.
109 Harper & Brothers acquired the rights from A. & C. Boni for four thousand dollars on August 29, 1934, for TNW’s new novel, Heaven’s My Destination, the third and last novel he had contracted to write for the Boni firm, and he was now free to become a Harper & Brothers author.
110 The National Recovery Administration, designed to help rebuild and strengthen the nation’s economy Hutchins did not take the job.
111 French: It’s beautiful! It’s very beautiful!
112 Hearst and Davies never made a film of Twelfth Night.
113 Uncle Pio, a character in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, is the actor-manager of “La Périchole,” a young girl he found singing in a tavern. Chrysis, a beautiful courtesan, is the major character in The Woman of Andros.
114 A Sleeping Clergyman opened on October 8, 1934.
115 Leonard C. Hanna, Jr., was an art patron and an important benefactor of the Cleveland Museum of Art.
116 American poet Witter Bynner (1881-1968) lived in Santa Fe for many years.
117 American photographer Ernest Knee (1907-1982); his wife, American painter Gina Knee (1898-1982); and, probably, American poet Daniel Clifford McCarthy, who in 1936 purchased Santa Fe’sVillagra Book Shop.
118 Boles was an American stage and film actor. Shields was an internationally ranked amateur tennis player who appeared in small film roles.
119 American poet and journalist Walter Willard “Spud” Johnson (1897-1968), who founded the small-press magazine Laughing Horse, also worked for a time as a secretary to both Witter Bynner and Mabel Dodge Luhan.
120 English artist Dorothy Brett (1883-1977), along with D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, went to Taos, New Mexico, in 1924 and became an integral part of the art colony there.
121 A friend from TNW’s days at Princeton in 1925-1926 (see letter number 89).
122 Because TNW’s father was ill, he was using private secretarial help.
123 This copy appears to be a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original letter has not been located.
124 Nothing came of this possible position for TNW
125 This is handwritten, presumably by a secretary in Dana’s office.
126 TNW is referring to Heaven’s My Destination, whose protagonist is George Brush.
127 Latin: God be with me.
128 TNW met American poet, novelist, and critic Gertrude Stein on November 25, 1934, when she spoke at the University of Chicago while on a lecture tour of the United States. President Hutchins invited her to return in March 1935 to teach a special course, with TNW to select her students.
129 Goethe was one of TNW’s lifelong intellectual heroes.
130 American journalist and writer (1891-1966). What prompted TNW’s letter to Gannett could not be determined.
131 Hebrew: “Pause and reflect!” (This word recurs frequently in TNW’s letters.)
132 The 1935 Exposition of Italian Art from Cimabue to Tiepolo, held at the Petit Palais in Paris.
133 Max Reinhardt’s lavish production of Goethe’s Faust was one of his most famous. TNW consulted with him on the script for this production.
134 TNW was traveling in Europe with Robert Frederick Davis, the young undergraduate student whose foreign study TNW supported (see letter number 137). TNW had arranged for Davis to study philosophy in Vienna.
135 TNW slightly misquoted John Milton’s “On His Being Arrived at the Age of 23”: “But my late spring no bud or blossom sheweth.”
136 Catherine Kerlin Wilder (1906-2006) lived in Geneva from 1929 until 1933. She worked summers for the American Committee for the League of Nations and taught at the International School there. She met TNW’s brother in Geneva.
137 Full name of American poet Doolittle (1886-1961), who used the pen name H. D. and was known for her interest in the Greek classics.
138 Viennese dialect: whipped cream.
139 Austrian dramatists Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872) and Johann Nestroy (1807-1862) and Austrian novelist Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868)
.
140 The rue de Fleurus is where Stein and Toklas lived in Paris.
141 German: formulation.
142 Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913).
143 The manuscript was Stein’s The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind (1936), for which TNW wrote the introduction.
144 German: I kiss your hand.
145 Singer sewing machine heiress Daisy Fellowes (1890-1962) was a well-known fashionable socialite, and TNW is referring to Colette’s novel La Chatte (1933).
146 Joseph Hennessey was Woollcott’s adviser, manager, and closest friend.
147 Eleanora von Mendelssohn (1899-1951) was a German-born American actress.
148 Stockton (1834-1902) was an American novelist, short story writer, and editor.
149 Cerf (1898-1971) was the cofounder of Random House, Stein’s U.S. publisher.
150 The Woollcott Reader: Bypaths in the Realms of Gold (1935), a literary anthology, included TNW’s The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.
151 Lynn Fontanne played Katharina in a production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that ran in New York between September 1935 and January 1936.
152 H. Leggett Brown was Woollcott’s secretary.
153 From 1929 to 1942, Alexander Woollcott hosted “Town Crier,” a fifteen-minute weekly CBS radio show. When Cream of Wheat, Woollcott’s sponsor, did not renew his contract because of his criticism of Hitler and Mussolini, CBS persuaded Woollcott to stay on until they found another sponsor.
154 Ethan Frome had been in tryouts in Philadelphia before opening in New York on January 21. Lord, Gordon, and Massey were in the cast. Katharine Cornell had just appeared in Romeo and Juliet in New York and would star in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, scheduled to open in March.
155 Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865-1932) was one of the leading American actresses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Gabrielle Réjane (1857-1920) was an equally famous actress on the French stage in the same era.
156 Mr. Gilhooley, a play by Frank B. Elser, based on O’Flaherty’s 1926 novel, had been in tryouts before opening in New York in October 1930.
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 73
