The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  157 French: love life.

  158 Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris (1935).

  159 Hayes appeared in Victoria Regina (1934), by Laurence Housman, from December 1935 to June 1936.

  160 Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost (1935) ran in New York from December 1935 to February 1936.

  161 Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), author of Pensieri (1845).

  162 Iris Origo (1902-1988), author of Leopardi: A Study in Solitude (1935).

  163 Harris did not produce Elizabeth la Femme Sans Homme, by André Josset.

  164 TNW may be referring to Guitry’s memoir If Memory Serves (1935).

  165 TNW is undoubtedly referring to the diary of the French cleric Abbé Arthur Mugnier (1853-1944). Mugnier’s diary covers the years 1879-1939 and offers portraits of such literary figures as Marcel Proust, Anatole France, and Jean Cocteau.

  166 Charlotte Wilder’s first book of poetry, Phases of the Moon, was published in 1936; it was the cowinner of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award.

  167 TNW did not return to Hollywood at this time. Norma Shearer never made a screen version of Pride and Prejudice; nor did Charles Laughton ever play Benjamin Franklin in a film.

  168 TNW had sailed for the Caribbean on October 9.

  169 TNW’s sister was studying for her Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Chicago.

  170 TNW was going to Berea College in Kentucky, where he had spent the summer of 1917 working on the farm there, to visit Robert Maynard Hutchins’s parents, William J. Hutchins, the president of Berea, and his wife. William J. Hutchins had been a professor of homiletics at Oberlin College when TNW and Robert Maynard Hutchins were students there, and TNW often visited the Hutchins’s home during that time.

  171 Gladys Campbell (1892-1992), a student of TNW’s in Chicago, was an educator and a poet, taught at the University of Chicago and at the University of Chicago Laboratory School, and presided over a poetry club in Chicago that TNW attended.

  172 Ralph S. and Helen M. Lillie (see letter number 116).

  173 TNW replaced Frederick Paul Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation, as the American delegate to the Second General Conference of National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, which met in Paris in July 1937. Edouard Herriot (1872-1957) had served three terms as premier of France, the last of which was in 1932.

  174 Spanish diplomat, historian, and writer Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo (1886-1978). French: “The President (Paul Valéry) hopes that you will speak after Mr. Madariaga.”

  175 Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), British classical scholar.

  176 French: the golden book of Paris (the official guest book in the City Hall).

  177 French: Foreign Affairs Ministry.

  178 French: lime-blossom tea.

  179 Romains (1885-1972) was a French novelist, dramatist, and poet; Duhamel (1884-1966) was a French dramatist, novelist, critic, and poet.

  180 French: I couldn’t care less.

  181 Marie-Louise Bousquet, a journalist famous for her artistic salon, was the editor of the French edition of Harper’s Bazaar Régnier (1864-1936) was a French Symbolist poet.

  182 TNW is referring to the unhappy end of a romance in which Isabel had been involved.

  183 When this letter was written, Isabel was thirty-seven, not thirty-six.

  184 TNW no doubt meant the Italian cosÎ cosÎ: so-so.

  185 Lucy Tal was the wife of TNW’s first German publisher.

  186 Stein’s and Toklas’s Chihuahua.

  187 German: Children.

  188 The enclosure has not survived.

  189 “Nestroy-Molière” refers to TNW’s reworking of Johann Nestroy’s play Einen Jux will er sich machen into his play The Merchant of Yonkers, which also included TNW’s reworking of a scene from French dramatist Molière’s 1668 play L’Avare (The Miser). “The Prince of Baghdad” refers to a play TNW worked on throughout the rest of the 1930s; it has not survived.

  190 At social gatherings, Lewis enjoyed impersonating people by performing mimicking monologues.

  191 As reflected in the play’s title, TNW considered Horace Vandergelder the most important character in The Merchant of Yonkers and Mrs. Levi the second most important.

  192 TNW’s translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, drawn heavily from German sources and starring Ruth Gordon, had its premiere performance at the Central City (Colorado) Opera House on July 17, 1937, followed in the fall by a successful thirteen-week pre—New York tour that ended in Chicago. During its run, it was described not as a translation or adaptation but as a “new acting version.” TNW was paid eventually.

  193 TNW completed the manuscript of Our Town on Long Island, but he continued rewrites during rehearsals in New York.

  194 Craven played the lead role of the Stage Manager in the premiere production of Our Town, produced and directed by Jed Harris, which played in New York for 336 performances between February and November 1938. TNW signed the production contract on January 12, 1938, ten days before the play opened at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey.

  195 TNW’s version of A Doll’s House opened in New York on December 27 and played for 144 performances, closing in May 1938.

  196 Catharine Dix Wilder was born on January 31, 1937.

  197 Charlotte Wilder’s novel was never published and it has not survived. Isabel Wilder’s third novel, Let Winter Go, was published in September 1937.

  198 TNW frequently changed the titles of his play projects as well as the numbering of them when he referred to them in his correspondence. Play “#3” may be the one variously referred to as “Haroun al-Raschid,” “Arabian Nights,” “The Diamond of Baghdad,” “The Prince of Baghdad,” and “The Hell of the Vizier Kabäar.” The latter survives as an incomplete holograph manuscript, dated 1937. Play “#4” may refer to “Homage to P. G. Wodehouse,” act 1 of which survives in two versions in holograph manuscript, dated 1952-1953; or it may refer to an early outline of what became The Alcestiad, or A Life in the Sun (1955). The evolution of this latter play can be traced from undated fragments in holograph notebooks to the corrected typescripts (dated 1955), all of which survive in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, as do all the other manuscript materials mentioned above.

  199 This limited edition of Our Town was never published.

  200 Mrs. Gibbs was played by Evelyn Varden; Mrs. Webb was played by Helen Carew.

  201 TNW made slight revisions in the text of Our Town before publishing it.

  202 TNW probably meant the French raissonable: reasonable.

  203 The tarantella that Ruth Gordon, playing Nora, performed in act 3 of the 1937-1938 production of A Doll’s House was choreographed by Martha Graham.

  204 S. N. Behrman’s Wine of Choice, starring Woollcott, ran in New York in February and March 1938, but Hopkins did not appear in the New York cast.

  205 German: brilliant.

  206 TNW may be referring to Having Wonderful Time, produced and directed by Marc Connelly which was running in New York at the time.

  207 Edward P. Goodnow was the production stage manager of Our Town.

  208 Professor Willard was played by Arthur Allen; Mr. Webb was played by Thomas W. Ross.

  209 In the early morning of January 24, 1938, Pinchot, who was Jed Harris’s personal assistant and lover and who had designed some of the costumes for Our Town, committed suicide.

  210 Scott made her Broadway debut in the role of Emily Webb.

  211 The production of Wine of Choice, in which Woollcott starred, opened in New York without playing in New Haven.

  212 Edward Sheldon.

  213 French: sorcerer’s apprentice.

  214 The Variety review of the January 22, 1938, performance of Our Town in Princeton, signed Rosen and titled “Plays Out of Town: Our Town,” appeared on January 26 and called TNW’s play “not only disappointing but hopelessly slow” and predicted that it “will probably go down as the season’s
most extravagant waste of fine talent.”

  215 The Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar, produced by Orson Welles, was playing in Boston at the time.

  216 Codman was a Boston Brahmin, who later became well-known as an aide to General Patton in World War II.

  217 At one point, Jed Harris had taken an option on Hemingway’s play The Fifth Column, but eventually he bowed out of the project. The play was adapted and heavily altered by Benjamin Glazer for a Broadway production in the spring of 1940.

  218 Captain Rollin Dart, a former Loyalist officer in Spain, was appointed by Hemingway to represent him in negotiating for stage productions of The Fifth Column while Hemingway was in Spain covering the Spanish Civil War.

  219 Widow of George Pierce Baker, who, after teaching playwriting at Harvard, moved to Yale in 1925 and helped found the Yale School of Drama.

  220 Jed Harris’s business manager. The money was apparently stolen by a member of Harris’s staff; Harris made good on the loss.

  221 TNW’s Hollywood agent.

  222 Abraham Sofaer played Shylock.

  223 De Cordoba was in the original cast of TNW’s Lucrèce in 1932-1933.

  224 The Blue Bird (1908), a play by Maurice Maeterlinck; TNW helped Reinhardt touch up his production of the play in California.

  225 TNW played the Stage Manager in Our Town in New York for two weeks in September 1938.

  226 Actor and film director Otto Preminger, who began his career working with Max Reinhardt in Vienna.

  227 Golden Boy and Union Pacific were both released in 1939; TNW did not appear in the screen-writing credits for either film.

  228 Anna English Dana was J. Dwight Dana’s wife.

  229 Einstein had written TNW a letter, in which he praised Our Town.

  230 Figaro, Leporello, and Papageno are characters in Mozart operas.

  231 Cowl played Mrs. Levi in the premiere production of The Merchant of Yonkers.

  Chapter 4

  1 TNW misquotes the Latin phrase ad majorem Dei gloriam: to the greater glory of God.

  2 The Merchant of Yonkers opened in New York on December 28, 1938, ran for thirty-nine performances, and then closed in January 1939. The Merchant of Yonkers: A Farce in Four Acts was published on April 13, 1939, by Harper & Brothers in an edition of fifteen hundred copies. Alexander Woollcott’s prediction came true when the rewritten version of the play, now called The Matchmaker, ran in New York from December 1955 to February 2, 1957, a total of 486 performances. The musical comedy version of the latter—Hello, Dolly!—ran in New York from January 16, 1964, to December 27, 1970, a total of 2,844 performances.

  3 TNW wrestled with The Alcestiad for many years. In the summer of 1938, he had written to his dramatic agent Harold Freedman of his “dream” of having the play finished the next summer for presentation at Max Reinhardt’s festival in Hollywood, but that did not happen.

  4 Italian: ideas (in this context, the word style would be a closer approximation of TNW’s meaning).

  5 Beverly Nichols (1898-1983) was an English novelist and dramatist; he is best known today for his books on gardening.

  6 Storrs (1881-1955) was a British colonial official and a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs.

  7 Josephine Porter Boardman Crane (1873-1972) was a well-known patron of the arts and a founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; she was the widow of former Massachusetts governor Winthrop M. Crane.

  8 Chicago philanthropist Elizabeth Paepcke (1902-1994) was involved in many cultural activities both in Chicago and, later, Colorado. In 1950, she founded the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival with her husband, Walter.

  9 TNW is probably responding to Paepcke’s invitation to attend the performance on March 31 by the drama group at the Woman’s University Club of Chicago of his one-act play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.

  10 Day, a New Haven attorney, was a partner in Wiggin & Dana, the law firm that represented TNW

  11 Film producer Sol Lesser had proposed a movie version of Our Town.

  12 On October 5, Lesser sent TNW a “First Rough Draft” for an Our Town film; the draft was prepared by Frank Craven (the actor who originated the role of the Stage Manager) and screenwriter Harry Chandlee. A typescript carbon is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

  13 The first of the three films mentioned is titled Smilin’ Through; the play TNW refers to is titled The Bride the Sun Shines On.

  14 Lehr graduated from the Yale Drama School in 1939; he later taught theater at Brooklyn College.

  15 Hellman did not work on the script of Our Town, but Wood did direct the film.

  16 TNW had begun work on The Beaux’ Stratagem in September, but he stopped in December, having completed only about half the adaptation. Holograph and typed versions are in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. TNW’s adaptation was completed in 2005 by American dramatist Ken Ludwig and was directed by Michael Kahn for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., in 2006.

  17 Belley was the town where Stein and Toklas received their mail when they were at their house in Bilignin in the Rhone Valley.

  18 Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress was published in Paris in 1925 and was reprinted in an abridged edition in the United States in 1934.

  19 Haas was a graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley. After he heard Stein lecture there, he began corresponding with her about her work and wrote his master’s thesis, which was titled “An Analysis of the Present as an Aesthetic Process in the Critical Writings of Gertrude Stein.” Davis was the University of Chicago graduate to whom TNW introduced Stein and Toklas when TNW and Davis traveled to Europe together in the summer of 1935.

  20 Sir Francis Rose was a twentieth-century English painter.

  21 Charlotte Wilder’s second book of poetry had been published the previous year. TNW’s nephew, Amos Tappan Wilder, was born on February 6, 1940, in Boston.

  22 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Madame du Deffand and Wiart, edited by W.S. Lewis and Warren Hunting Smith, had been published the previous year.

  23 Both the English and American editions of Stein’s Paris France were published in 1940.

  24 In the film version of Our Town, Emily Webb lived.

  25 Austrian writer, poet, and editor Herbert Steiner.

  26 Latin: under the sign of Aristophanes (that is, comedy). The new play became The Skin of Our Teeth.

  27 Italian: jokes.

  28 French: interlude (French is intermède).

  29 Alexander Keyserling’s South American Meditations. French: exalted.

  30 American critic and biographer (1886-1963).

  31 Irish poet and dramatist Padraic Colum (1881-1972). His wife, Mary (1884-1957), mentioned below, was a literary critic.

  32 Jolas (1894-1952) was a poet, journalist, and founder of the literary magazine transition.

  33 James Joyce never received the Nobel Prize.

  34 Lady Colefax’s house on Lord North Street in London, where she was living during the German air raids.

  35 On September 27, 1940, TNW participated in a radio program on the NBC Blue Network, moderated by Eleanor Roosevelt and presented under the auspices of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. He was one of eleven prominent writers and stage performers who discussed their support for Roosevelt in the upcoming election.

  36 American journalist and political columnist Walter Lippmann.

  37 French: muffled (French is sourd).

  38 French: underworld.

  39 Zoë Akins (1886-1958) was an American dramatist and screenwriter.

  40 Akins’s play The Furies (1928).

  41 TNW was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was invited to the White House reception.

  42 Carl A. Lohman and his wife were New Haven friends.

  43 Head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department at that time.

  44 Glenn
was the minister of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, opposite the White House.

  45 Sara Delano Roosevelt, the president’s mother.

  46 Julius W. Atwood was the former Episcopal bishop of Arizona.

  47 Georgiana was the wife of C. Leslie Glenn.

  48 Withington was a Wilder family friend from New Haven.

  49 Coward’s play Blithe Spirit had opened in London in June 1941, with Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, Kay Hammond as Elvira, Fay Compton as Ruth, Cecil Parker as Charles, and Ruth Reeves as Edith.

  50 French: length (TNW no doubt meant it was a bit lengthy).

  51 “London Pride” is a song Coward wrote in 1941. The “Destroyer picture” refers to In Which We Serve, which Coward wrote, codirected, and acted in. It was not released until 1942, but the British press had begun discussing the film in late August 1941.

  52 TNW had met Myerberg at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos home in 1938. When Jed Harris declined to produce TNW’s new play, he turned to Myerberg.

  53 In 1928, dancers Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman had established a school as a dance company, which toured the United States in 1938. In 1933, the company performed Candide, choreographed by Weidman.

  54 Matzenauer was an opera singer.

  55 American producer, director, and writer Shepard Traube produced and directed Angel Street, which ran in New York from December 1941 to December 1944.

  56 TNW had sent Lunt and Fontanne a completed script of The Skin of Our Teeth in January, hoping to convince them to play Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus and perhaps to convince Lunt to direct it. Lunt, who at first reserved judgment, ultimately found the play “very obscure” and declined the opportunity for both of them.

  57 Janet Cohn, Harold Freedman’s assistant.

  58 Elia Kazan did direct The Skin of Our Teeth, but at the time TNW wrote this letter, Kazan was scheduled to direct Paul Vincent Carroll’s The Strings, My Lord, Are False in May 1942.

  59 Fredric March and his wife, actress Florence Eldridge, who frequently acted together, did originate the roles of Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus; but at this time, March was committed to star in the film I Married a Witch (1942).