The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

her heart’s soreness and brooding and before long they are laughing and playing together in a kind of warm affection, like two young animals,—youth again.112

  I don’t know whether I have entirely misrepresented the thing to you or not. I wish I had you here to give it word for word. I got to go now to lunch!

  Lovingly

  Thornton

  How are you? You’re dear old photograph accidentally got a smudge on it. I must take it and have a photografer remove it. Hein?113

  29. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  221 N. Prof

 

  Sunday night May ’6 <1916>114

  Dear Family,

  Nothing especial has happened. I’m being dragged through the trigonometry book. Tues. night comes the very first performance of any serious dramatic work by T.N.W. when “The Last Word about Burglars” and “A Fable for Those who Plague” will be produced before Dascomb Family and friends at a quarter-before-seven. We’ve been rehearsing our heads off. The next week comes the May Festival. We’ve been rehearsing our heads off again.—Such is Life

  Tomorrow morning I have to get up before six and take breakfast out at the Arboretum with the New England Club. I couldnt refuse. I had waived going to their dinner about a month ago because I could afford to go alone—to say nothing of asking a New Englander—in. But this is only twenty-cents.

  I have grown very fond of Grandmothers present—The Giorgone “Concert”115 and now I have temporarily traded it with another boy for a Corot landscape. This is not a permanent swap. We just want to live with a new picture for a change.

  The green fern is doing very well. We’re thinking of getting it a bigger dish. I never was so happy as when I got the photos. Now that I think of it, I’m struck by the fact that I’ve never mentioned receiving these—to say nothing of enjoying them. Isabel’s pastel shows great advance. Try and afford to take her to good exhibitions. We’ve just finished one her with a splendid canvas by Mother’s favorite George Bellow’s.116

  Papa’s money I am still carrying around in my mind as open to profitable investment. I think it is just as well if I put it into the daily round of New England Breakfasts, Latin Plays (25c), Church Collections, and Class dues.

  I probably told you that I had sworn off sending anything more to the Magazine this . It is atrociously bad taste to have so many things in succession—a Freshman, too—but Miss Martin came all the way to my boarding-house to beg me for “that little thing about St. Francis of Assisi, that I read to her and her guests once.” I fought fearfully but at last gave in—“Brother Fire: A Comedy for Saints. Three Minute Playlets for Three Persons, No V.” One of the few short things I’ve written while in Oberlin.

  The Big One is almost done.117 One conversation at the end of the Fourth and last Act is left and then I’ll be glad. I have no regrets at parting with these people’s company. The typiste has begun already. I’ve suddenly discovered that she’s too expensive and I’m going to shake her off at the end of the Second Act.

  Lots of love to Everybody

  Thorntony

  30. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  You know where

 

  May 14—<19>’16.

  Dear Papa,

  The majestic contract for my valuable labor I return signed.118 I suppose its what’s called an efficiency document. I really am very glad to have my work organized. With the Dutton housework it was—“You can do this next if you want to.” and all my work was an extravagant favor to the family. But this admirable paper says I’m to get up at this dot and report to work at this dot, and submit myself to Mr. Dot this; and refrain from profanity on this dot. I hope my Mr. Dot isn’t the pretentious, upright reformer that got up the sheet.

  Did you know that you were doing what the psychologists call “infringing on my personality” when you ask me to sign a blank agreement in which you fill in the details. You have impaired my self:consciousness when I am told that you bound me over to 9 hours a day; made inroads on my “mental acceptance of conditions of living” when I see that my term of labor is ten weeks.

  So Watch Your Step

  I really think you’ve solved the problem very well for yourself but as for the men who want me to milk Mt. Hermon cows, or stack Northfield Hay, or “carry on the work which Mr. Moody began”119—well, I suppose your attitude is They Should Worry.

  I don’t like the idea of getting money. And I don’t believe in your speaking of it “as a work I have had some experience in”. If you don’t be very careful—and you know I’m going to major in Psychology at Oberlin—you’ll find that the Spirit of Wishing on been painting pictures on the unstained Walls of Truth, in your mind.

  So Watch Your Step

  I’ve got a room mate for next year. Mr. Walter Smith of Dascomb. I’ve always liked him for a quiet concientious and clever-minded boy. He’s no Alexander like Mr. Spore, but he’s very good solidity for daily wear. He just beat our religiously-sentimental, chaplain all to nothing in a gloriously funny argument on whether God underwent change at all. The chaplain had a vague idea that God underwent everything, so he would relinquish his right to a change (not-withstanding the old text.) But Walter Smith proved something like Time is fluid change, embodied in the super-intellect—of course I can’t carry it any further, and I haven’t even got the subject of the debate right, but you’re impressed anyway. Walter Smith is the one I exchange pictures with so you can see he has taste. He both teaches Geometry at the Academy and urges me to borrow his beloved copy of Theocritus.

  Lots of love

  Thorny Bush.

  The date I signed that thing was the 14th. I didn’t know whether to leave it to the next signer or not

  31. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  221 N. Prof St Oberlin

  May 18—<19>’16

  Dear Old Isabel,

  This is to thank you in person for the pastel of Lac Leman120—and its really all kinds of improvement—and to enclose to more Oberlin poster stamps. You might be interested in the program, too; I know the boy quite well, he can’t compose worth a bean but he can argue and argue as long as I want.

  I’m glad you’re going to Chataqua.121 I’m getting afraid that your being kept at the same age as you look, and that would never do. I advise you to do two things to make yourself feel more grown up: open your mouth wide when you talk, and let the words be long and full of real grown-up bluff-talk without wrinkling your forehead, or lisping or smiling—just stare mother in the face, and say “Did they guarantee the poppy seeds?” or “I’ve just discovered that my stationary has a translucent water-mark.”

  Always know more than you’re saying. When you tell Janet to put on a shall over her head you must be thinking to yourself “Now I’m using the imitative instinct; and when I make her walk in step, I’ve got her attention just that much more because I’m using her sense of rhythm.” It’s really time you felt terribly conscious of your towering height over Janet. I say again I’m getting terribly afraid that your getting into the kind of girl, who is so behind hand that when she’s with people she’s so busy just wondering and being bewildered that she’s no time to slap other people’s faces and generally make herself felt.

  I like your letters very much. Next time tho, don’t even stop to form the letters. A young lady just runs across the polished floor to her shining desk, throws it open and dashes off a note, as tho she were drawing a cartoon; then she licks it, pounds it to make it stick and calmly places it in the mail-box and the thing—the little chance trifling thing is over.

  I’ll be home soon; and then I’ll have to act wilder than I feel like doing, so I can scare you, and push you and worry into a real modern storming young woman.

  Maybe you are after all, tho’.

  What?

  Thorny Bush.

  32. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 8 pp. Yale

  May 20—<19
>16

  221 N. Prof St.

 

  Dear Mother only—122

  There are lots of things to tell—stark stiff things—but I have a mood to communicate first and the things need not be too sure of an appearance;—for when one has disclosed a mood, a feeling one is so proud that one goes to bed and snores with an undercurrent of brazen triumph.

  There is a senior at Dascomb named Ruth Keller. She is majoring in Latin, and knows the latin poets very well. She is taking Italian and reads Dante. But she does not mix with the other girls very well, partly because she has a reserve of her own and partly because she spends so much time studying hard,—a grind. But I have come to know her very well, and I am the only one that really knows what a delightful, colored personality she has. I try to explain it to Mr. Spore—who is too nice to demand of me why I “sit out” with that large old grind—but he can’t see it. And I ask Miss Tritschler whether she sees ever—just a glimpse of it.

  But they’d see it alright if Miss Keller were pretty. But she is not. I must be remorseless in describing her. She is “large”—I used to think that her face looked a vulgar italian—the kind with little curls greasily fringeing the forehead. But now I know she is like a handsome Roman matron. Part of her air of reserve comes from the height at which she holds her head, and the classic severity of her mouth. But to give the public’s opinion of her I must return to the remorseless details. When she has an evening dress on, in charity one must refuse to notice the large arms, and the unbalanced neck. She maintains an upright retirement at table—she will not laugh at the foolish teasing that is the greater part of table conversation here,—she busies her self conscientiously in seeing that the waiters bring enough for the boys to eat, but apart from that she refuses to enter into the hilarity. Except when I am there—and Miss Parker places me at her table very often, since I am the only person she is at home with. Then we two exclude the whole table and talk about anything we darn please.

  But when we are together she is like a little girl; we’re both willing to laugh at the humblest and most ridiculous joke in the world. Or else we’re as sober as reformers. The other day we had a long walk in which we discussed what she was going to do next year and then on. She’s going to teach Latin in the High School of her hometown, New Kensington, Penn. She’ll do it alright, of course, but she needs a lot more than that to keep her living. She gets great fits of perfect despair with herself—her not being able to be one girl among many, and her not being at least on ordinary friendly terms with the boys;—its all the tragedy of not being pleasing and beautiful. I told her that she had to find something to do hard out of school times. She can’t just live at home in her flat with her mother talking and sewing and gossiping. And I was thinking so hard of the awful folly of Miss Hanna and Miss Day123 that I must have been little short of eloquent. I told her she must always be forcing herself to read good things she didn’t want to read and join Women’s Clubs she didn’t want to join and spending money on concerts and plays she didn’t want to spend just to keep herself from thinking that she was living a full life, as a teacher. I took as an example the concert of the May Festival the night before, where we had sung the “Nuova Vita” of Dante. She had gone—altho she hardly ever goes to “anything” and had thot it very beautiful. She saw that if she kept seeing and reading things like that she would feel different than if she just stayed in a rut.

  The next morning she said with a little laugh that she’d hardly been able to sleep at all.

  Wouldn’t it have been a wonderful thing if I had really at least put a disturbing influence into a potential Miss Hanna?

  Another thing is that there is a young man, a Mr. Howard, who writes to her very often. He came down to see her the other day and I happened to see them. He was a spruce young man, very attentive to her. I don’t pretend to understand it, but I know for one thing that he’s not attentive to her because he sees her charm too. She says he doesn’t do anything—he just drifts—he’s quite wealthy. I asked her why she didn’t make him get down to something like work. Oh—she was vague about it—“it couldn’t be done, he was just born that way.”

  “Oh well,” I told her, “you’re just the kind that would work and slave yourself to death, just so such a man wouldn’t have to lift a finger.”

  She repudiated the idea with indignant laughter.—But today she told me that she had changed her mind<.> She wasn’t going to send him an invitation to her graduation after all. Now imagine what it means to a neglected girl like her to hold off a nice young . ¶ won’t say the whole affair is a case for Strindberg—poor girl.124

  This afternoon almost all the rest of Dascomb was down to the lake. I talked it over with her, and said I was afraid I couldn’t afford to go. If I didn’t go it meant that she didn’t go for there’s no one else in the house who couples off with her. “She was glad she wasn’t going—she had to study.”

  We went to the library to study for an hour and a half and then we were to go out

  Wilder men in New Haven, 1915 or 1916. Left to right: Amos N., Amos P (sitting), and TNW.

  Wilder men in New Haven, 1915 or 1916. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  33. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  c/o The Mt. Hermon

  School, Mass

  July 2—<19>’16.

  Dear Mother,

  By tomorrow evening I will have completed two weeks of work. I am becoming used to the deeficulty of the work—used that is not so much to doing it physically as to accepting it with resignation mentally; my fatalism increases with my blisters.

  I suppose father has told you that I earn 15 cents an hour and work ten hours a day, and sixty a week. I was a little pleased at the thought of nine dollars a week (although that is very low wages), when suddenly a Portia125 stretched out her hand and announed with or without blood four dollars was to be deducted from my living wage to cover board, room, light and laundry. I now see that the earning of money is degrading to the spirit of man; such avarice and greed is growing in me that I can plainly see that before long I will be getting up early with some of the other “workers” in order to grind out a few more fifteen cent’s before the sun rises. I hope to come home Saturday, July the twenty-ninth, or else go up to the Duttons for that weekend.

  I get in about an hour and a half of reading every evening. By that time I am so tired that everything that I read which is beautiful or impressive finds tears in my eyes! This phenomenon in turn reacts to even deeper emotion; farm life would make the weeping philosopher of Syracuse out of me.126 So far I have endamped the pages of “Hedda Gabler” “The Master Builder” “Boswell’s etc” and the “Religio Medici.”127 There is a very interesting paper on “My Street” by that Earnest Poole in the July Century.128

  You will be surprised to hear that the boy I often hay beside is a cousin of Miss Eleanor Hague. He is a freshman from Washington and Jefferson College, Penn. quondam Mt. Hermon.

  Amos telephoned my boss from Northfield this noon with orders for me to stay in my room since he is bring over a “cousin” of mine. I suspect its Mr. Peabody. It can’t be Max! can it?129¶ You ought to be glad that I can only write to you on these slow resty Sundays. Father gets the frantic mid-week ones; tho’ I must say they don’t seem to disturb at all—he’s positively pleased by them, the complacent one!—Tell Isabel to assume this duty on her heart: Find somewhere to hand in my room the packet of my bookplates. Enclose one to me. The waiter at my table is going to start putting himself thru Harvard next year with a printing press, and I want to show him something in his line that he never heard of—something Harvardiensian, too.

  Affty Thornton.

  34. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  July 11 <1916> c/o Mt. Hermon School,

  Mass.

  Dear Amos,

  I am very sorry to find you in so low a mind and I don’t
know what to do. I agree with you that the prospect of the time involved, the weeks and days, is more discourageing than the separate duties. I myself however can see how I came to my present attitude of philosophical stoicism from positive frenzy and I hope that you will come, too. The principal alleviations of my life have been the evenings, my reading and my thoughts. I am sure that you have as beautiful a place as this, altho’ you may not have the last hours of the day free to enjoy it as I have. But steal an hour from sleep if necessary and walk along the sides of some pond or brook. And try to get a little reading in.

  I will send you the “Religio Medici” which is a “devotional” book but written in the most exquisite style. The marks are father’s and refer to the sentiments not the style. The discussions of the supernatural especially are written in the most stunning eloquence I ever read. My chief interest here however has been Boswell’s Life of Johnson which I read every hour I can. I’d send it to you—only it weighs a ton. I am often able to be by myself “hoeing a row” or “turning the hay” and look forward to such jobs as chances to think over everything and anything.

  Please do not think me any the less sincere because of the frightful wording of this letter. All this stiffness is the sign that Boswell has me all over. I see myself writing down a archaism, or latin construction and I have to howl at myself, but I cannot help it. My style will either come out from this ordeal saved or ruined. Wash out your eyes, remember that life’s a kind of illusion and this pain and dis-ease is merely funny—and that you are tenderly loved by