The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  98 On April 18, 1955, TNW read the first two acts of The Alcestiad at the Library of Congress; on May 2, he gave a lecture/reading, “Culture and Confusion,” at the YM-YWHA in New York City.

  99 The Alcestiad.

  100 Wynn was known for his “Perfect Fool” character.

  101 This play (1896) by French dramatist and novelist Alfred Jarry is a stylized burlesque and had a great influence on Dada and surrealism.

  102 Bankhead played Sabina in the original 1942 production of The Skin of Our Teeth.

  103 TNW’s niece graduated from the Dana Hall School in June 1955 and entered Radcliffe College that fall. The date was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Catharine Dix Wilder.

  104 Link (1924-2001) was a leading German scholar of American literature during the postwar period.

  105 TNW was working with Louise Talma on an opera version of The Alcestiad.

  106 TNW went to Europe for the Paris production of The Skin of Our Teeth, which was partially funded by the State Department and by American Express.

  107 Schneider directed Beckett’s 1952 play. Produced by Michael Myerberg and starring Lahr and Ewell, it opened at the Cocoanut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida, in January 1956, to negative reviews. Wilder’s dictated translation was not used in the production and has not been located.

  108 The Matchmaker was scheduled to open in New York on December 5, 1955.

  109 Although TNW was always loyal to Ruth Gordon and pleased at the success she made with The Matchmaker, he appears to have favored an ensemble interpretation of the play, closer to the European farce tradition than to the more rambunctious, star-driven American version.

  110 Danda was Wright’s second wife, but whether TNW is referring to Wright’s children by his first wife or to daughters his second wife had from a previous marriage cannot be determined.

  111 Bentley had asked TNW to provide a translation of or an introduction to a Spanish play for the third volume, Six Spanish Plays (1959), of his four-volume The Classic Theatre (1958-1961).

  112 Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681).

  113 Spanish stage actress Margarita Xirgu (1888-1969) was a friend of and a frequent performer in the plays of Spanish dramatist and poet Federico García Lorca.

  114 German art historian and essayist Erwin Panofsky’s Norton Lectures were published as Early Netherlandish Painting (1953).

  115 Luce’s wife, editor, journalist, dramatist, and politician Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987), had been appointed U.S. ambassador to Italy in March 1953. In 1956 she was forced to resign because she contracted an illness diagnosed as arsenic poisoning, attributed to paint chips that had fallen from the decorative ceiling in the bedroom of her official residence.

  116 American novelist and journalist John Hersey was born in China to missionary parents and spent several years there. Hersey’s 1956 novel, A Single Pebble, deals with an American engineer who is sent to China in the 1920s and falls under the spell of Chinese culture.

  117 TNW is referring to his epistolary novel The Ides of March (1948).

  118 TNW’s reference to Wardour Street relates to archaic language used for effect. The expression derives from the London street where a large number of antique shops were once located.

  119 TNW is referring to Tallulah Bankhead, whose father, William Brockman Bankhead, was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and whose paternal grandfather, John H. Bankhead, was a U.S. senator.

  120 The date for this letter was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

  121 French: always equal to herself (by which TNW means she is always up to the task at hand).

  122 TNW salvaged Bernice from the scenario he sent to Vittorio de Sica in 1952. That scenario was based on Ben Hecht’s 1943 novel Miracle in the Rain, and TNW retained “the returned convict” and “the Negress as advisor” from the scenario in writing Bernice.

  123 German: Please do not let yourself be tortured by work, gracious and heavenly-gifted lady

  124 German: Your.

  125 In his Journal entries for December 2 and December 13, 1956 (The Journals of Thornton Wilder: 1939-1961, ed. Donald Gallup [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985] 257-259), TNW noted the dates of six one-act plays he had begun. On November 9, he began a play “reflecting my reading in Zen and Mahayana Buddhism” (this play may have turned up in another form); on November 12, what became The Drunken Sisters, the satyr play for The Alcestiad; on November 17, The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five; on November 23, Bernice; on December 2, “The Attic Play,” which he noted lacked an “all-shaping idea” and which was probably discarded; and on December 9, “Shakespeare and the Bible,” which was never completed to TNW’S satisfaction. Bernice and The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five premiered as part of a program of short American plays presented to dedicate the new Congress Hall in West Berlin in September 1957. The casts included TNW Ethel Waters, Lillian Gish, James Daly, Hiram Sherman, Cynthia Baxter, and John Becher; the director was Lamont Johnson. In 1958, TNW began working on a series of short plays based on the seven deadly sins, with Bernice representing the sin of pride. He did not complete the series, and Bernice was not staged again in his lifetime.

  126 Dr. Graham Francis was in charge of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary and was married to Roland Le Grand’s sister Noelle.

  127 TNW is referring to the French translation of The Matchmaker.

  128 Le Rosaire (1926), a play by André Bisson; La Bonheur de Jour (1926), a play by Edmond Guiraud; Mon Curé Chez les Riches (1925), a novel by Clément Vautel.

  129 French: fade, bland; plat, dull; niais, vacuous.

  130 Louis Ducreux was the French translator of The Matchmaker.

  131 French: strong woman.

  132 French: fascinantes, fascinating; crueles, cruel.

  133 French: the eternal feminine.

  134 French: is the most beautiful woman in the world.

  135 French: You have a lover whom you hide in the closets.

  136 The year was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

  137 Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

  138 TNW enclosed with this letter the program for the Edward M. Gallaudet Memorial Dinner of the St. Augustine Chapter of the Gallaudet College Alumni Association, held at the Dolphin Restaurant in Marineland, Florida, on February 7. Gallaudet (which is now a university) in Washington, D.C., is the only institution of higher learning in the United States devoted exclusively to the education of hearing-impaired students. The “adjacent College for the Deaf” to which TNW refers is the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, but it was not their alumni who were meeting.

  139 François Delsarte (1811-1871), a French acting and voice instructor, emphasized the importance of gestures and poses to the act of expressing oneself.

  140 Fowlie’s Mallarmé was published in 1953.

  141 Charlotte Tappan Niven had retired in Winter Park, Florida.

  142 The Alcestiad.

  143 This project was never realized.

  144 Because no U.S. company would produce it, Albee’s play premiered at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in September 1959 on a double bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. It was produced in New York, again with Krapp’s Last Tape, in January 1960, at the Off-Broadway Provincetown Playhouse.

  145 American writer Kay Boyle (1902-1992) had written TNW to enlist his support in getting Samuel Beckett elected to honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  146 Cross was the author of The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (1909) and The History of Henry Fielding (1918). Tinker was the author of Young Boswell (1922) and the editor of the two-volume Letters of James Boswell (1924). TNW’S point is that Sterne, Fielding, and Boswell were all recognized for the earthiness of their writing.

  147 Georges Simenon’s novel Le Fils was published in 1957. The passage quoted from his book deals with the fact that any couple comprises two distinct individuals
, both of whom bring to the relationship their own history and way of life, and thus the nature of the relationship is always one of compromise.

  148 American journalist, humorist, and author Sullivan (1910-1972) lived in Saratoga Springs, New York. He wrote humorous articles for The NewYorker for many years and was a member of the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s.

  149 At the annual ceremony of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters on May 20, 1959, Dorothy “Dottie” Parker was inducted as an academician; Truman Capote received a Grant in Literature; and Arthur Miller received the Gold Medal in Drama. Miller’s then wife was actress Marilyn Monroe.

  150 The Colonial Tavern in Saratoga Springs, which Sullivan wrote about in his collection Through the Looking Glass (1970).

  151 Hungarian goulash.

  152 The year was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

  153 German: To whom are you saying that?!

  154 Talma indicated in a handwritten footnote appended to the letter that this referred to Elizabeth Goodman Freiman.

  155 The Troxells lived on Lincoln Street in New Haven and were part of a group to which TNW often read his plays in progress.

  156 The date was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

  157 In a note appended to this letter, Louise Talma indicated that Rudolf Bing had asked TNW to lunch to discuss The Alcestiad.

  158 The New York City Center of Music and Drama on West Fifty-fifth Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues opened in 1943. From 1944 until 1964, it was the home of the New York City Opera.

  159 Eleanor Robson Belmont (1878-1979) was a major patroness of the Metropolitan Opera and the founder of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. TNW attempted to get her to intercede with Rudolf Bing on behalf of The Alcestiad opera.

  160 Vanessa, an opera by Samuel Barber, with a libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti, was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera in January 1958.

  161 French: birth.

  162 Gertrude Hindemith, the wife of composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), had written to TNW to express her husband’s interest in composing an opera version of TNW’s one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner. The opera, with score and German libretto by Hindemith (translated from TNW’s English version of the libretto), had its world premiere in Mannheim, Germany, in December 1961.

  163 The wife of Richard Donovan, who was on the faculty of the Yale School of Music at the time.

  164 English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).

  165 German: grunt work.

  166 Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Swiss historian of art and culture.

  167 German: Praise the Lord!

  168 TNW is referring to his brother-in-law’s hobby of sketching in pencil and ink.

  169 This was the germ of TNW’S novel The Eighth Day (1967).

  170 Bonnie and Jingle were his sister’s Morgan horses; Brava and Grey-y were the Dakins’ cats.

  171 Olivier had apparently asked TNW whether a stage version of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel would be feasible. The project was never realized.

  172 Do Re Mi, a musical for which Garson Kanin wrote the book and which he directed, ran in New York from December 1960 to January 1962.

  173 Famous New Orleans restaurant.

  174 In 1959, TNW had started, but then put aside, a libretto for a second short opera, titled “July August September.” It was never completed; holograph manuscript fragments survive in the Beinecke Library at Yale Library.

  175 Probably English stage and film actress Joan Plowright, whom Olivier would marry in 1961; he and Vivien Leigh were divorced in 1960.

  176 TNW went to see Olivier in the New York production of Jean Anouilh’s Becket (1959), which ran from October 1960 to March 1961. It was produced by David Merrick, who may be the “Mr. M.” referred to in the letter.

  177 The University of Basel was founded in 1459, and thus was celebrating its five- hundredth anniversary.

  178 The last words of William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), spoken by Quentin Compson (who is also a character in Faulkner’s 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury) in response to the question “Why do you hate the South?”: “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”

  179 The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (2 vols., 1960), edited by Jay Leyda, who also edited The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951).

  180 Lawrenceville School English teacher Thomas H. Johnson edited the three-volume The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955); wrote Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (1955); and edited The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958).

  181 French: semantic portion.

  182 Italian: fearfulness.

  183 Susan Gilbert (1830-1913), Emily Dickinson’s closest friend, married Emily’s brother, William Austin Dickinson (1829-1895), in 1856. Susan and Austin lived next door to Emily for the rest of the poet’s life.

  184 In a note appended to this letter, Louise Talma indicated that this referred to the full score of acts 2 and 3 of The Alcestiad.

  Chapter 6

  1 American composer and diarist Rorem wrote TNW to ask permission to set to music some of TNW’s three-minute plays; this project was never realized. In March 2006, Rorem’s opera version of Our Town, with a libretto by American poet and librettist J. D. McClatchy, premiered at Indiana University in Bloomington.

  2 Verse play (1919) by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  3 Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama (1932) was an uncompleted experimental verse play.

  4 At this time, Niemoeller was a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, writing an M.A. thesis on the influence of Noh plays on some modern authors.

  5 After the death of American art historian, author, educator, and Orientalist Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908), his wife gave his notes and papers to Ezra Pound, asking him to be her late husband’s literary executor. Pound published two books of Noh plays based on Fenollosa’s manuscripts: Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916) and a study of Japanese classical drama, Noh, Or Accomplishment (1917).

  6 Mei Lan-Fang (1894-1961), the best-known singer, actor, and dancer of the Beijing Opera, toured the United States in 1930.

  7 Paul Claudel’s L’Oiseau noir dans le Soleil Levant (1927) was a collection of essays and prose poems written during his tenure as ambassador to Japan (1921-1927).

  8 French director, producer, and theater critic Jacques Copeau (1879-1949) was a founder in 1913 of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, which introduced such innovative techniques as the use of minimal, suggestive set designs.

  9 TNW was reminiscing about earlier times spent at the Hotel Taft in New Haven, where the Schubert Theater was a major venue for pre—New York tryouts. Among the productions he remembered were Saturday’s Children (1927), a play by Maxwell Anderson that starred Gordon; Born Yesterday (1946), a play written and directed by Kanin that featured Holliday in a role that had been intended for Jean Arthur, who had to leave the out-of-town tryouts due to illness; The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), TNW’S play starring Tallulah Bankhead and produced by Myerberg; The Eagle Has Two Heads (1947) by Jean Cocteau, starring Bankhead, who insisted that Marlon Brando be fired from the production before it went to New York; and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Brando.

  12 Gustav Eckstein was a professor of physiology and psychiatry at the university of Cincinnati; “Kit” refers to Katherine Cornell.

  10 “Alec” refers to Woollcott; American illustrator Neysa McMein; English novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford; English literary scholar and biographer David Cecil; English novelist E. M. Forster; and French academic Bernard Fäy, who was head of the Bibliothéque Nationale during the Pétain era and was imprisoned after the war for his role as a collaborationist.

  11 The main character in TNW’s novel Heaven’s My Destination (1935).

  13 French: d
ry.

  14 This letter was printed in facsimile in the program of the Würtemburgische Landesbühne 1961/62; the program was for a production of André Obey’s play Vom Jenseits Zunuck. TNW’S letter was in answer to a letter from Helmensdorfer, who was a director at that theater and had written TNW to tell of the production and to request a statement from him about Obey and the latter’s influence on his work.

  15 In addition to Obey’s Noé, the Compagnie des Quinzes staged his play Le Viol de Lucrèce (which TNW translated in 1932).

  16 In his “Notes for the Producer” in the 1934 acting edition of The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, TNW wrote, “Although the speech, manner and business of the actors is colloquial and realistic, the production should stimulate the imagination and be implied and suggestive.” These short plays, written in 1930-1931, eschewed conventional scenery, used pantomime to simulate activities without the use of props, and, in The Happy Journey, introduced a Stage Manager, TNW’s version of “the two commentators” about which he had read.

  17 TNW was on the S.S. Ryndam, on his way to Europe to meet Louise Talma for the Frankfurt production of The Alcestiad opera.

  18 In Puccini’s opera, the principal male character is Lieutenant Pinkerton.

  19 The Japanese Sandman was a 1920 song.

  20 In 1942, TNW met Richard Goldstone during officers’ training in Miami. Goldstone became an academic; in December 1956, to help him with his career, TNW arranged for Goldstone to interview him for The Paris Review. The interview appeared in the Winter 1956 issue.

  21 Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (1960).

  22 TNW is referring to the Kennedy administration—sponsored program “An Evening with Thornton Wilder,” which would take place the following month in Washington.

  23 German: Your old Friend.

  24 William Empson’s Milton’s God (1961).

  25 Worth played in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth during the 1962 season at Stratford-on-Avon.

  26 A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), a play by Thomas Heywood; Lady Teazle is the leading female character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (1777).