The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  I take every measure however to fence off the week-end from the routine. Sat. afternoon I walk as many miles to the east or west as I dare. I don’t go to the football games. Sunday I walk again; I don’t go to Church very often<;> if I do I go in the evening or Vespers in the afternoon. Monday morning I take my walk again.

  I am getting to dread the week. I put off a serious consideration of my studies until Wednesday morning; and I take liberties with study requirements on Friday.

  But I have really done a good deal of original writing this year. The best has been the Saint Story in the Magazine and a 3-minute playlet called “Proserpina and the Devil” for Marionettes. And a “Masque of the Bright Haired” for the Red Headed Club = “Order of the Golden Fleece” they call themselves.150 I shall send this Masque to Percy MacKaye since it is his line—reminding him of the ridiculous urchin during the rehearsals of Antigone.151

  I have collaborated with Miss Marion Tyler the brightest and most charming girl in College (slim and great dark eyes with quaint embroidered things on her dark dresses; shy but vivid.) in writing two essays and a one-act play for the market. I supply some purple patches and general ideas, she adds some more ideas and reduces the whole to structure. One of these is a curious mystico-religious fantasy, the other, called “Stones at Nell Gwyn” is a defense of Nell and Catullus and Earnest Dowson and Villon etc—that kind of person! The Play is for the Washington Square Players and is unique. It is about the China coast!152

  Lots of Love

  Thornton.

  Mention me regularly to Janet; speak cheer of me to Father; let Isabel think me not unromantic; bless me when the westerly wind blows.

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

  Men’s Bldg, Oberlin, O.

 

  Dear Papa,

  I received your money. $16 of it will have to go out immediately in Room-rent. With the $4 which I have now I imagine I can last ’til the new year. You have a way of not being open about money matters that is perfectly harrowing for us. With great solemnity you hope that we can do the college year under $550 and then express delight that we were able to; of course you didn’t expect we could. You ask me to get a coat between sixteen and eighteen dollars, but in your heart of hearts you expect it will be twenty-two. Just because Amos and I have been so minutely brought up we comply to the letter when our whole life and thought would be happier if we could feel proud of working out our own economies on our own money. Money and money-matters will be the last end of our family anyway. Poor mother has almost been robbed of her mind by worry over money; she can get so wrought up over the price of a pair of shoes that she is intellectually nil for a week. You are secretive and furtive about it; you may sometime become suspicious and injured. I hate to ask for money or talk about it, and so I drag on for weeks without soap or equally absurd details just because I feel that money is such an oppressive difficult thing.

  The first thing St. Francis of Assisi thought about was poverty. When he changed from his old life to the new he ran naked out of his father’s house. A lovely girl at about the time of the reformation had mystical visions and was in terror of the integrity of her soul because her parents were forcing a distasteful marriage upon her. So she planned to run away. She took up a penny saying “This will buy me bread at noonday.” But she felt hindered as she ran. At last she threw it away and was happy. When money grips you at the throat the only thing to do is to read these old stories. We cannot give up everything for the comforts of poverty in our home We have been so settled in respectability. You must retain “position”, mother must retain “appearance” and at college we must “appear well.” The position of a farmer is only happy in this way. But not today. He must send his daughter to school; his sense of emulation pushes him to vie with the passersby. Besides no farmer ever recognized himself that he had at hand opportunities for a perfect spiritual life; they long to take on the cares we trudge about with. A missionary in chinese clothes in remotest Szechuen province is the free-est state I can imagine. But very likely his religious beliefs there are anything, but spiritual. They are full of the ten commandments, and the Christian austerities.

  When you say with your sober manner “I hope that no Wilder will fail in class” you are saying more than you feel again. You were surprised that I did not fail last year. You honestly expected it. How much happier and free-er it would be for me if I only had to live up to what you really expected, instead of what you professed. I suppose I should be thankful that you’re not as demanding and exacting as you sometimes sound. You like to make little German drives against chance evidences of impracticality that I leave around, but you know that if I weren’t that way I wouldn’t love you with the kind of love I love you with. I don’t love you with a patriarchal bond like Amos, or like a rebel, secretly in eternal debt to your patience, like Charlotte or Isabel’s shy acknowledgement of your felicity in talking to her best nature. I don’t know how I do love you, but I know the edges of the ocean, the impatience with your solicitousness, your overemphasis of the rigid necessity of being moral and “good”; when there’s really such licence allowed to personality to do honorably such unspeakably un-moral things. Now do confess that to be glad and aspiring and intimate makes “being a Christian” and doing one’s iron duty and “weeping over the unsaved” negligable. So don’t ask me to pass all my classes; cultivate oneself like a rose-tree and poverty—the end—will burn you in the end with the greater trees—But you were a rose-tree. Well its probably not clear, but never mind. Its well meant

  Thornton

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

  Oberlin O—

  Jan 11, <19>’17.

  Dear Papa,

  You are often urging me to devote myself to my studies, but you do not say how far. Beyond a certain point I could gain nothing by close study. What I won in discipline would be balanced by what I lost in “integrity of temperament.” There are higher goods in pursuits consistent to oneself than in reaping iron flowers in a foreign field. Should I by a (hypothetical) self-control force myself after hours of work into a student I should be like those whom Pascal describes as going to Mass, and going to Mass, until they at last find themselves Christians, “making animals of themselves.”153 ¶ I do not pretend yet to have reached the point where the equilibrium of gain through discipline and loss through integrity balances itself, but I have at times overleaped it, and been wretched.

  Why we should go to College at this time of our life it is hard to see. Our minds are in a ferment; we cannot realize an idea; or imagine a conviction. Art, sex and religion are driving us mad, and time or mood for reflection we have none. There are long periods, sometimes a whole week when I am so miserable because I cannot think of a beautiful thing to write that I seem to beating my head in despair again a stone wall. Sometimes when the din and voices of these years of my life become too insistent, I say:

  “Come, I’ll stop all this. I’ll not try to answer anything, or right anything or aspire anything. I will be an ordinary boy; I will eat and study and wash and be full of polite attentions to other people. Then after a few months I will come back to this inner room, and perhaps I being older can put it in order.”

  But within a few hours something has happened: someone has spoken, or glanced or snow has fallen and I am up in the air again.

  I cannot tell whether I suffer from this restlessness more than other boys or not. We all conceal it, and from our parents first of all. But College is not an answer to it—not Oberlin with its fat Christian optimism.

  I want either to go to Harvard next year where life is handled in the idiom of art instead of YMCA. I am sick of Affirmations.

  Or else I want to go and live on Monhegan. Even during the winter. Perhaps a year until all this fever is over, and I have grown up, or grown stiff or whatever it is that allows one to accept the world, and be content with a life of Houses and dinners lived on a life of Dreams and Cries. Why should there be such
a tremendous and pressing apparatus of Bricks and Vegetables and Clothes and Calling-Cards on what they insist is a life only for the Spirit?

  Lovingly

  Thornton

  44. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  Men’s Building Oberlin O

  Jan 11 <19>17

  Dear Isabel,

  I hear that you are becoming reconciled to N.H.H.S.154 and see that your letters are improving. There is a very nice man here who taught in a summer-camp where some boys from your school were staying. He said that some were all right, but that there were others he couldn’t say much for. So look sharp, petite, and carry your own books. The girl who insists on carrying her own books will surprise the boys who like a girl to be surprising. You avoid too that akward moment when he piles them back into your arms. Even if he is nice about it.

  There is a greater difference between High School and Grammar School than between High School and College. You would enjoy being in one of these girls’ Dormitories like Dascomb, but you would hate some of the rules such as all Freshman girls must be in their rooms by 7:30.

  So Mother is going to New York. So father casually noted tho why the lady or yourself did not mention the Why and When I cannot imagine. Whenever any of the family want to go to New York and there are any slight chances of their going to the theatre I want them to ask my advice. I know altogether too much about what is going on at the New York Theatres as it is, but since I have the knowledge I want to put it to some use if I can and prevent such awful mistakes as Amos going to see “Hush” when there were such stunning thing as “Pierrot the Prodigal” and “The Yellow Jacket” in town. Tell Mother to go to either “A Kiss for Cinderella” or “Shirley Kaye” with Elsie Ferguson or Nazimona or Getting Married of Shaw and to send the Bill to me; and I’ll abstain from shoestrings and clean linen in order to pay it.155 Tell her too that she must for this send me an exact account of the whole performance. But if she goes to “Turn to the Right” or “Cheating Cheaters” or “Nothing But the Truth” let her never see a footlight again.156

  And you, Isabel, might even ask my advice about the movies because for Wilders to spend a dime and be disappointed is a crime, when there is a censor of censors born right in the family

  Lovingly,

  Thornton.

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

  Feb. 14—<19>17

  Men’s Bldg. Oberlin.

  Dear Papa,

  I want to go away to Italy but not to relieve suffering—tho’ while I am there by all means let me do it.

  —not to see pictures and Classical landscapes

  —not to get away from the uninspired complacency of Oberlin.

  Let me go to have some time to myself. Not just a day, or a weekend, or a week—but half a year.

  There always seems to be a thot waiting for me to find it out, just around the corner of my mind.

  And I know that when I have dropped the net I both hold and am held by, that I can dig out a most lovely play or story. Everything I have done so far has had to be turned out during other things. Let me have liesure to examine the thing fully, (as I had in part during the “Tragedy” in my one week! at Monhegan) and I will give you something which not only cheer you by it’s achievement but not vex you by its imperfections.

  Barrie brings forth a major work every three years! A student could not hammer at a thing for three years; he is too feverish about getting his thing before his teachers, father’s or judge’s eye. He lets it go by unbrushed. He’d rather receive acknowledgement for its promise that lurk without appreciation in the hope of finally submitting an unquestionable achievement.

  A person like me has got to keep writing things or it irks us to pain; when we think we have written a good thing we feel as tho’ it had justified our existance and we don’t know what “plain people” satisfy that self-demand with.

  Make a business arrangement with me. Give me three or four months on Monhegan, or a year alone somewhere, and I will give you something final and convincing.

  And yet I do not need your faith in me. I know by what Catholics call their “vocation” that I can now, with time, “trespass among superlatives.” This elation and confidence follows the completion of “The Little Turtle a play in five scenes”157 brooded upon for years, but written in a month of chemistry lessons; imperfect and skimpy to the point of tears; but authentic in parts and in birds-eye view as an axe

  T.N.W. Letter to follow.

  46. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 5 pp. Yale

  Men’s Bldg.

  March 14 <1917>

  Dear Mother,

  I can write you a letter (now that the appraising eyes are in Chicago),158 as full of everyday small-talk as ordinary common speech is.

  Besides you are home alone and the empty mail-box has a hol-lower ring.

  I have at last read “Ghosts.” This does not mean that your influence over me has at last totally dissapeared. It only means that I imagine you as giving me your consent, since our Classics in Translation class is about to read Oedipus Rex. Oedipus makes Oswald sweet and sane in comparison! Besides I’m reading “Evelyn Innes”159 and after that there is no pathology. I confess to being a little disgusted with “Evelyn,” but I must go on. George Moore and I are twin-knit. We are what—before they found a better term—were called Affinities by the Movie-makers.

  George Moore spends half of his time—the better half—dropping aphorisms, reflections and phrases; and they so suit me that I cannot miss any one in the most obscure of his books. Besides his tone! his mood!

  When I told Granville Barker that our mutual friend Rudolph Kommer (of Monhegan) was collaborating with George Moore on a play, Mr. Barker smiled wryly—“I’m about the only person he hasn’t collaborated with,” he said. And the quaint impudent personality of George M. was reflected in his eyes and smile.

  You remember that the only other author who has engrossed me this way is Barrie. And always will. But the side issue with George Moore, his interest in the forms and spirit of the Catholic Church and his Cadence—his great contribution to the English sentence borrowed by him from the Anglo-irish, intrigue me as greatly as do the stage-direction of the Scotsman.

  You will be appalled to hear that I am preparing two of the “Affairs of Anatol”160 for local benefit performance. Fear not, I will brush away the highest flashes of sophistication and no one need ever know more than that a charming man happened for a quarter-of-an-hour to share the umbrella of Mrs. Gabrielle Somebody on Christmas in Vienna. There they stood, witty and whimsically tender, and then she goes off saying that she might have been happy with him and sending her greetings to her sucessor. The things would seem ridiculously inconsequential and rubbishy if we did not have four sensitive actors who could at least approach the wit and irony of the perfect things.

  I got into a little difficulty yesterday. I take a nice interest in two High school boys who are literarily inclined and yesterday one of them came to me and asked me whether I could go up to Cleveland to see Leo Dietrichstein161 or not. I said that I had better not; I had been up so often (four times) and I always felt as tho’ I were taking the clothes off my family’s back…etc. Oh, he said, he would provide the tickets. I had never heard of such a thing. I laughed and said that if we went at all we had better be democratic with it. I walked down the hall with my arm around his shoulder, and pleasantly repeated the democracy of it. When I spoke to Mr. Carr he said it was perfectly proper and accepted for one boy to go as the guest of another, and that I’d probably hurt Baird’s feelings. Mr. Wager said of course it was perfectly natural and that I should have thanked him and gone. “But” I said ruefully “I never heard of it before.” “Oh” said Mr. Wager disappearing behind a door, “There are lots of things you’ve never heard of.”

  So I’m in a fix.

  And mind you, lady, I lay it at your door. You with your money-obsession brought us up to feel continually self-conscious about
the transfer of coin … you have made us desperately afraid of putting ourselves under obligations to anyone …. we seem no longer able to tell when a person is trying to be kind to us … we suspect them of endeavoring to put us at a disadvantage.

  And the moral is: Never think about the dirty shining pieces. Fret not yourselves with bills and loans

  Etc. Etc.

  Love

  Thornton.

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

  The Square Tower

  The First Day of Spring

  The Third Year of the War.

 

  Dear Papa,

  and I am tired again tonight. A long day, full of a hundred distressing interruptions: today I have wished to contemplate peace and religious repose, as the sun with constancy contemplates the tender earth.

  Two dull classes: Miss Fitch on Evidences of Gnosticism in the Letters to Collossae; Harold King on Wages.

  An organ lesson wherein I play my first hymn “Holy Holy Holy” and am introduced to rules governing the repitition of notes.

  I write some rhymed jokes for the College annual.

  I go to Laboratory and fail to get results from some dismal experiments with Antimony and Bismuth. But the errant gases from sixty students’ experiments pass through my dried and coated lungs.

  Then to rehearsal of the French Play. I remember myself as merry there, but there was no reason for it that I remember, so we must have been fools together.

  Through all of this I was waiting for the dark. When people are tired in the day the thought of dusk is present in the back of their mind, not only because it brings sleep, but because it hides one face in the shadow. A tired person is a wounded person, and his eyes are his wounds;—to them night brings a balsam.