The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  Amos P. Wilder, journalist and lecturer and internationalist, commanded the household—often from a distance—with an iron hand, directing where his sons went to school and college and on what farms they were to spend their summers at hard democratic labor. With daughters Isabel and Charlotte and Janet, he was marginally less domineering, but all the children were expected to issue regular bulletins on their activities and accomplishments. Thornton’s were notably aesthetic in nature. From Thacher School in Ojai, California, on January 13, 1913, he reported that he was making progress on the piano and the violin, and noted that he’d received his “Chefoo [China] music prize and thank you for your part.” Nine months later, he announced that a “little one-act farce” he’d written had been chosen for a benefit performance at the Berkeley, California, high school he was then attending. In his sixteenth year Thornton was on his way toward becoming a playwright—a prospect that did not entirely satisfy his father, who had more lofty pursuits in mind. He likened his son’s writing to “carving cherry-stones.” When it came time for college, he enrolled the lad at Oberlin.

  With its compulsory chapel and mandatory scripture study, high-minded Oberlin had connections to the Wilder family in generations past, and his older brother Amos had just completed two years there before going on to Yale. But Thornton objected that “a boy—if possible—should have some say about the college he’s going to.” He would have chosen Yale or Harvard himself. Or have elected to travel and write, subsisting in European attics or in steerage on boats. Father decided otherwise, and dutifully Thornton spent two years at Oberlin, and three more at Yale, where he graduated in the class of 1920.

  College brought Wilder new friends, but he hardly needed classrooms to educate himself. All his life he was a perambulating autodidact, a perpetual graduate student in love with learning. His letters are full of fragments from the languages he mastered: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin. He read widely, driven by a “seemingly insatiable desire” to know more. Often he raided the masters for techniques and approaches—Dante for Our Town, Molière and Bacon for The Matchmaker, Joyce for The Skin of Our Teeth, the Marquise de Sévigné for The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He was like the woman caught for shoplifting in Los Angeles. “I only steal from the best department stores,” she said in defense, “and they don’t miss it,”

  Like any fervent researcher, Wilder sometimes got caught up in scholarly investigations that distracted him from his own work. He spent countless hours obsessively attempting to decipher Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He threw himself into the magnificently inconsequential project of dating the plays of Lope de Vega between 1595 and 1610, becoming the leading authority on a subject that, he knew, no more than twenty people in the world might conceivably be interested in. In other ways, too, Wilder sloughed off the discipline of the professional writer to pursue peripheral interests. “I’m Jekyll and Hyde,” he admitted in 1934. “With the side of me that’s not Poet, and there’s lots of it, I like to do things, meet people, restlessly experiment in untouched tracts of my Self, be involved in things, make decisions, pretend that I’m a man of action.” He was forever on the move, spending two hundred days a year away from the Hamden, Connecticut, home he’d built in 1930 on the proceeds from The Bridge, where sister Isabel kept house for him. He wrote aboard ships, and at “spas in off-season.” Late in life he escaped to the desert, yet even in Douglas, Arizona, found fresh distractions and new people to talk the night away with. Always there were too many things to do. In addition to novelist and playwright, Wilder functioned, the editors point out, as “translator, adapter, essayist, screenwriter, opera librettist, scholar, cultural emissary, lecturer, teacher, actor.”

  III

  A prolific correspondent, he turned out as many as 25 letters a day to friends, family, and professional associates. He also read a great many letters, including the correspondence of major writers of the past. He was interested in what distinguished the accomplished letter writer from run-of-the-mill correspondents. Only in letters, he thought, could people communicate one to one the “innumerable trifles” of everyday life, “that rain of trifling details, pleasing and vexatious, which falls upon the just and the unjust.” Successful letter writers, such as his friend Alexander Woollcott, could make such unpromising material engaging through “high vivacity”—a quality Wilder shared with Woollcott. But there was more to writing good letters than merely entertaining the recipient. For over a period of time, reading two or three hundred letters, one could conjure up a “profile of a personality” above and beyond the wit and the anecdotes. The personality that emerges from Wilder’s letters is that of the enthusiast, a man who “fizzed like champagne,” whose effervescence was like a force of nature.

  This gift made him an excellent teacher. Fresh out of Yale, Wilder earned his keep as an instructor in French and assistant housemaster at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. “People said to me Never teach school. You will be so unhappy. It will deaden you,” he wrote from his post at Davis House in November 1921. “But what happy surprises you find here; how delightful the relations of the teacher and an interested class; casual encounters with retiring boys on the campus, and at lights-out the strange big protective feeling, locking the doors against dark principalities and powers and thrones, and the great lamp-eyed whales that walk ashore in New Jersey.”

  To amuse his mother and poke fun at himself, Wilder composed a wonderful letter to her supposedly written by one of his students. “We get on very well with [Mr. Wilder] in the house. … He doesn’t come out and watch our football much, but perhaps if he were the kind that did he wouldn’t be able to help us in Latin etcetera. In class he talks so fast and jumps on you so sudden for recitations that often you don’t know a thing. Please write him for his own good to speak slowlier, as it would be for his own good. … Can you explain why he hasn’t any pictures of girls in his room, nor even of you, everybody has pictures of women in their room, can you explain this?”

  Humor pervades these letters. Wilder declared a classroom triumph fifteen years later, when he was teaching at the University of Chicago under the aegis of President Robert Maynard Hutchins. “I was sublime on the two Oedipuses the other day—sublime,” he wrote Woollcott. As Hutchins himself reported at Wilder’s memorial service, Thornton had once described to him the humiliations of receiving a bad review: “My barber lost his tongue and cut my hair in silence. The waitress at my stammtisch at Howard Johnson’s murmured, ‘Never mind, dear. Maybe you’ll do better next time. You’ll be wanting the eighty-five cent blue-plate lunch. It’s hash today.’ My dog hid behind the woodpile when I called him, and when I spoke to the little girl next door, her mother called through the window, ‘Come inside, Marguerite. I think it is going to rain.’ “

  Then there was the American Academy of Arts and Letters awards ceremony when Arthur Miller and Dorothy Parker were honored, with Mrs. Miller (Marilyn Monroe) in the audience applauding. “So who did they place me between at lunch?” Not between Dottie and Marilyn, but between novelists Carson McCullers and Djuna Barnes. McCullers neglected her roast beef until Wilder, “synchronizing with the television cameras,” cut it for her “very nicely.” He attempted to engage Barnes in conversation. “I just saw that exhibit of your work in the Paris show about American-Expatriates-in-the-Twenties, Miss Barnes.” “Must’ve been horrible.” “No—very attractive. I went with Miss Toklas.” “Never liked her!” “Really—and Miss Stein.” “Loathed her.” “I was especially interested also in the Joyce exhibit.” “Detestable man.”

  Another dimension comes to light when Wilder is moved to high dudgeon. In a 1955 letter, he scolded the poet Marcia Nardi for too readily succumbing to sorrow. She’d told him about “shattering emotional experiences” that left her “ill in both body and soul.” Well, Wilder knew about such experiences, but he was afraid that Nardi cultivated and actually enjoyed them. She sounded like a willing victim in a bad French novel, he told her. She sounded “Greenwich-village-y, 1912.” H
e doubted she’d write any poetry worth reading until she shook out of it. And then, to take the curse off, he finished with “I think you know that I write you this way because I believe that you will outgrow all these stages and write beautiful things…. You know that, don’t you?” And enclosed a check.

  Unsympathetic to ostentatious self-pity in others, Wilder allowed no trace of it in himself. In 1968, Richard Goldstone commiserated with him after he’d undergone a hernia operation. Each year he understood Wilder better, Goldstone maintained: “I understand that your life has been difficult, filled with profound disappointments, with strivings and struggles, that the rewards have not been many.” “Where the hell do you get that?” an outraged Wilder asked, and immediately answered, “You get that out of your own damp self-dramatizing nature.” He was damned if he would feel sorry for himself: “Struggles? Disappointments? Just out of college I got a good job at Lawrenceville and enjoyed it. I made a resounding success with my second book. The years at Chicago were among the happiest in my life. I got a Pulitzer Prize with my first play. What friendships—Bob Hutchins, Sibyl Colefax,… Gertrude Stein, Ruth Gordon….” Obviously angry, he advised Goldstone to leave him alone. Goldstone, undeterred, went on to commit the first biography of Wilder.

  Outbursts like these take us beyond Wilder’s bubbling personality into the territory he called “News from Within,” inner views only to be glimpsed in the finest letter writers. His intolerance of any display of unhappiness and unwillingness to court the sympathy of others bespeaks a withholding of the self more characteristic of his Maine ancestors than his midwestern roots. Yet, between the lines of his letters, we begin distantly to know him. Wilder was a bachelor all his life, with a series of young male protégés. Did he love this one, or that? There are only hints here, as when he signs off a 1927 letter to William I. Nichols. “Letter-writing bridges next to nothing. Goodbye my dear Bill. Is my affection some help to you when you are depressed and restless?” In his understated way Wilder was forever reaching out to others. He thought of himself as an observer and onlooker, with “an interest in human beings so intense and unremitting that it approaches and resembles love.” He stood at the opposite pole from Nick Carraway, the unwilling confidant who in the opening pages of The Great Gatsby deplores having to listen to the confessions of “veteran bores.” People did not bore Wilder.

  Little as we know of Wilder’s emotional life, his letters reveal ample evidence of his genius for making and maintaining friendships. Good letters, he believed, resulted from friendship plus absence, with absence supplying the tension that “raise[d] them above even good talk.” His correspondence with the elegant and charming Sybil Cole-fax, the English interior designer, may serve as a case in point. Wilder was only rarely in London, and Colefax rarely left the continent, so they kept in touch through letters—four hundred of them, he estimated. Here, encapsulated, are the contents of but one of them: his May 15, 1949, letter from Washington, D.C. He began mundanely with an account of recent activities. He was getting some work done, his only distractions “being visits to great poets—Ezra Pound, Alexis Léger, and Czeslaw Milosz.” Upcoming was a trip to the Goethe Bicentennial Celebration in Aspen, where he was to deliver the opening talk to a gathering that included Albert Schweitzer and José Ortega y Gasset. The moving force behind the Goethe festival was his friend Robert Hutchins, the controversial educator. Colefax had heard charges that Hutchins was “an enemy of humanism,” and Wilder defended him vigorously.

  His letters were all about people—usually celebrated people—and in this case one dog. Wilder asked Colefax to grieve with him over the illness of Basket III, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s French poodle, and reminded her that Basket I had been a gift to Stein from Picasso. Next he did a characteristically thoughtful thing: he told Colefax about a talented young artist—Robert Shaw, “the wunderkind of choral directing”—whom he was sending to see her. He was afraid that Shaw might shrink from presenting the letter of introduction, for the lad was shy. He often thought, Wilder added, that the people “we would most wish to see walk three times around the block and then decide not to call on us, fearing that they have nothing which could interest.” In a closing burst of rhetoric, Wilder addressed the issue of when he and Colefax might next meet. Could she come to Arizona in the fall? If not, he would cross to see her. He had “100,000 irremoveable marks in Germany,” so they could go to Bad Homburg or Bad Nauheim or Baden-Baden and she “could lie in the mud-filled copper baths where [her] sovreign, Edward VII, renewed his youth like an eagle.”

  IV

  Some of Wilder’s most interesting letters, unsurprisingly, were addressed to or commented on prominent figures in the literary and theatrical worlds. He met Gertrude Stein—“a great, sensible, gallant gal and a great treat”—when she came to Chicago in 1934 and he was pressed into service as her “secretary, errand boy-companion.” The next year he stayed with Stein and Toklas for eight days in Bilignin, coming away feeling rather daunted by Stein’s “difficult magnificent and occasionally too abstract and faintly disillusioned alpine wisdom.” He never doubted her genius, though, and other happy meetings ensued. When she died in 1946, he wrote Toklas offering to serve as literary executor of her works. “[L]ong after you and I are dead,” he said, “she will be becoming clearer and clearer as the great thinker and the great soul of our time.”

  If he admired Stein, Wilder was quite swept away by Hemingway. The two men met in Paris in the autumn of 1926, each at the beginning of their careers. Hemingway was living alone at the time, separated from his first wife, Hadley. On November 9, Wilder wrote him from Munich, waxing enthusiastic about the city and deploring the dullness of the youth he was accompanying as chaperone-companion. He hadn’t read The Sun Also Rises yet, Wilder said, but would have by the time they saw each other. He suggested that Hemingway write a play for Richard Boleslavsky and his Laboratory Theatre in New York, and in closing asked Hemingway to give his regards to Sylvia Beach.

  This letter constitutes at least a minor discovery in Hemingway studies. It has not been cited in the several biographies of Hemingway, nor has any mention appeared of a meeting of the two writers. That there was such a meeting, quite possibly at Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookstore, and subsequent encounters as well, marking at least the beginning of a friendship, is borne out by Wilder’s November 28 letter to his three sisters, written in Paris. He was considering “going over to live with Ernest Hemingway” in his studio apartment, he reported, but “[Ernest’s] wife is about to divorce him, and his new wife is about to arrive from America, so I think I’d better not try.” Hemingway himself, he thought “wonderful” in his devotion to his work. He was the only writer of his generation he had met who inspired his respect as an artist.

  Ten days later Wilder wrote his mother that Hemingway “remains the hot sketch of all time, bursting with self-confidence and a sort of little-boy impudence.” Hemingway was at work on a play about Mussolini, he wrote—again, a revelation, if true. Its accuracy seems doubtful, though, for Wilder goes on to report that Hemingway in yarning mode claimed to have dabbled in secret service and to have certain knowledge that most of the attempts on Mussolini’s life were orchestrated by Il Duce himself in order to create a martyr-legend. His mother could judge, Wilder dryly observed, “how full of astonishments” Ernest’s conversation was.

  Stagestruck since boyhood, Thornton Wilder took immense pleasure in his contacts with prominent men and women of the theatre. “Mary Pickford wants me to write a play with her!” And on Saturday, “Aleck, Kit, Gert (Alexander Woollcott, Katharine Cornell, Gertrude Macy) and [he]” were going to the summer home of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne “to sleep on army cots.” So he announced excitedly in a letter of June 1933 to actress Ruth Gordon—“best of all Ruthies”—who with her husband, the writer and director Garson Kanin, became his lifelong friends. Two months later he alerted Woollcott to look out for an eighteen-year-old actor coming to New York and armed with letters of r
ecommendation from Wilder. He was “a rather pudgy-faced youngster with a wing of brown hair … and a vague Oxford epigrammatic manner.” The name, he added, was “Orson Welles,” and he was going far.

  Wilder’s profound understanding of the stage is demonstrated in letters of advice to aspiring actors and playwrights. An actress, he warned Rosemary Ames, must expect to be regarded socially as a freak. She would be too busy to pay calls, and people would cast “their curious and fascinated gaze” upon her. Ames should beware of the temptation “for praise and lively suppers” that followed a performance. It was not easy “to go soberly to bed at eleven after a superb climax.” Best friends were likely to seem dull; the actress required bright new admirers instead. Eventually, though, if she were good enough, she would become “something more than a lady: an artist.”