The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  In imagination I hear you quite clearly wondering reproachfully why Thornton—in the middle of great natural beauties, amid masterpieces, with a great deal of free time, well-housed and fed, among friends—shouldn’t at least be docile and simply grateful. My only answer is that the very complexity of things flays one’s peace of mind to the point of torment. You are haunted by the great vistas of learning to which you are unequal; continuous gazing at masterpieces leaves you torn by ineffectual conflicting aspirations; the social pleasures and cheap successes bring (against this antique and Rennaisance background) more immediate revulsions and satiety. A snowy walk in Mt. Carmel, Mother’s sewing and you with your pipe hold for me now all I hold of order and peace. Your queer “aesthetic” over-cerebral son may yet turn out to be your most fundamental New Englander and most appreciative of the sentiment of group; when Amos and Charlotte have set up independent self-centred institutions, I shall turn out to be a sort of male Cordelia!16

  Your enclosures give me the keenest pleasure. I miss only one sort; the “Alumni” and newspaper reports of your recent speeches. I am very pleased and proud of all these menu-cards and the letters that come in to you. I can’t have too many of these, and am jealous of every one you sort out into Amos’ or Charlotte’s mail: if I can’t claim a great part of the inheritance of your patience and sublime endurance (virtues you have consigned to my light-haired fellows) I can at least rush forward and stake out reflections of your animation and vitality and (hear, ye Heavens!) your eloquence.17 You will always turn to find my eyes bright with delight and admiration at your wit and charm, even if I am occasionally (Oh, for the last time!) thoughtless of your sacrifices. And I can already see Amos and I, whiteheaded at the age of eighty, disputing amicably as to which of us knew you best, Amos who could not take his eyes off of your labors, so beautifully and quietly sustained, or I who was always after cajoling you into those moods of quickness and inspiration that you were allowing to grow less frequent. Either aspect alone could make the reputation of a great father, but with both we have a right to feel a little bewildered and hide ourselves from the responsibility of standing up to so much privilege and love. Here I am, a sort of Arthur Pendennis,18 breaking down in front of you, and wishing old words unsaid and old silences forgotten, and remembering you so intensely as you were when you came to Litchfield, or to Mt. Hermon, or to the Duttons’. I hope this letter will get to you at about your birthday and if you sit down on that day to think us all over, I hope it may lift from my record some of the discredit left there by my last three letters.

  Much love

  Thornton

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

  Accad. Americana

  Roma: Aprile 13 1921

  Dear Mother:

  I have just sent off letters to Father and Amos, and feel so virtuous that I must write you two. I left you after my last, hung up in suspense over my luncheon at the De Bosis.19 It fell out almost as I anticipated, only twice as delightful. The reddish-yellow villa, hung with flowering wistaria at the end of a long avenue of trees; choked garden plots with various statues of Ezekiel glimpsed through foliage; the rooms of the house furnished in rather ugly Victorian manner—all modern Italian taste in music and art being deplorable, perhaps because they are so discriminating in literature. Some guests, a young Englishman named James; a Miss Steinman; the young Marchese di Viti whose sisters I had met, a beautifully bred discreet medical student. Signor de Bosis himself has a sort of abstracted gently humorous air, silent, that sits agreeably upon one who having so many over-intelligent children doesn’t have to descend into the arena of conversation very often, and then only to kill. These days—perhaps I told you—he is revising his verse translation of Shelley’s The Cenci for immediate performance by Italy’s foremost company now in Rome. He is one of the best Italian poets (conservative) and as such made an address in the Protestant Cemetary on the anniversary of Keats’ death last month. [Upstairs he showed me his recent discovery of the meaning of the first two lines of the Epipsychidion, and if you turn to the lines you will be glad two find that the Emilia Viviani’s sister spirit is not (as she herself thought and Ed. Garnett) Mary Wollstoncraft, but Shelley who puns here on his name Percy—in Italian “lost”—as Signor De B. found in a few casual lines where Shelley began translating his poem into Italian.]20 At table things went merrily in and out of both languages. Lauro—my friend—and the Arabic-Arimaic sister I admire, so began throwing at each other in latin and from memory the ridiculous list of beautiful books which Rabelais says Pantagruel found at the library of Saint-Victor.21

  April 14 1921

  I went with some of them last night to the last Symphony Concert conducted by Arthur Nikisch; the program was “popularissimmo” Beethoven’s Egmont and 5th; Lohengrin and Tristan and Tannhauser Overtures and the Liebstod, but I have never heard such conducting in my life. ¶ Signór de Bosis has sent me a book of his verses inscribed. ¶ I have found an Italian playwright whose plays I adore, the Sicilian Luigi Pirandello. Philosophical farces, actually,—strange contorted domestic situations illustrating some metaphysical proposition, with one eccentric raissoneur in the cast to point out the strangely suggestive implications of the action. The very titles evoke an idea of his method: “Se Non Cosí” “Cosí è (se vi pare)” “Il Piacere dell’ Onestà” “Ma non è una cosa seria.”

  ¶ One of our boys here is developing such serious hallucinations that he may have to be treated for madness. He is insanely in love with a lady more clever than considerate, and altho’ she is away fancies her arrival momently, prepares imaginary teas under the delusion that she is arriving, rushes out as each streetcar climbs the hill. He fancies also that she is just around the corner but refuses to come in, that she stands evening-long under the arc light opposite gazing at his window, or prowling about the iron fence of the Villino Bellacci. By an impossible chain of logic he fancies me in league with her, dictating letters for her to have mailed from Siena (where she is in fact) while she obscurely fixes her gaze upon him in Rome. I no longer try to reason with him; (as Freud will tell you) the idee fixe is only agravated by contradiction. The woman is a pure adventuress,—like the woman in my play strangely enough, a Bohemian countess.22 ¶ I had myself a strange little sentimental experience that made concrete the warnings that Continental women however impersonal, comradely and full of good sense they seem, cannot understand friendship that is without romantic concommittants, cannot, cannot. Queer!

  love Thornton

  68. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

  American Express Co. 11 Rue Scribe Paris

  June 27, 1920<1921> Sunday

  Dear Papa:

  A letter came from Mother dated June 1, Mt. Carmel, giving me directions to write her at the boat’s landing Southampton. But it only reached me on the 16th and I could never meet her then, so I await further addresses. People about here are full of the delays and losses of mail in the American Express Co; I hope I am missing no one’s letters altogether.

  Well, I have begun conducting a column in the Telegram called The Boulevards and the Latin Quarter. It takes no time to do it and I am already following up openings that lead to jobs to combine with it. But there is so much “call Thursday, if you can. Mr. Y will be here,” calling over and over. If I get enough of these, I hope you will approve of my staying until Xmas. I am making as little inroad as possible into the money that is understood to be my passage money. I have still over 1500 francs there, and if the readers and advisers of the new Telegram write in that the chatty theatrical column is an ornament I shall be taken on regularly and perhaps given more—interviewing and so on. In the meantime I am provided with addresses of American movie people who want someone to write cinema “titles” etc.23

  Don’t worry or think about me. I wear clean linen, brush my teeth, “hear Mass” and drink much certified water. Without sticking to Americans I meet many people you would like to feel near me in ambiguous Paris—Mrs. Sergeant Ke
ndall, for instance. Polly Comstock (of Trumbull St.) asked me to lunch at her pension the other day, and there was a Mr. Winslow of Madison who remember me as a baby. I couldn’t tell him that Mr. Cushing and himself were the two people always held up as object-lessons to avoid. Bill Douglas is here, too.24 Steve Benét returned to America, but will be back in October. I have met his fiancée here, a journalist on the Tribune.25 She has made him give up drinking so, or almost. Mrs. Wells is here, though I haven’t seen her yet. It seems quite true that Danford Barney26 is incredibly mean and brutal to his wife. I ran into Frank Brownell of Thacher and his mother the other day; and a young Mr. and Mrs. Holcomb York of New Haven. I don’t know what’s become of Amos and Charlotte since last I wrote you. Charlotte hasn’t even acknowledged the receipt of the twenty-eight dollars which vexes me: I have all the receipts however.

  I buy little penny paper copies of the great French classics and read indefatigably, but I am increasingly at a loss how to find opportunities to speak French at stretch. I go often to the clubrooms of the American University Union and there are some notices hung up there of students wishing to exchange hours with an American but inquiry at the desk reveals that the notices are months old and the requests long filled. This is something to worry about for me—since you must—and also about the difficulty of keeping one’s stomach working regularly. And the distastefulness of having to go to public baths for one’s shower; a vulgar practice that I resent, universal and respectable though they are over here. I am often homesick for America or Italy. The Frenchmen are not so immediately “sympathetic” as the Italians, and I am eager for letters from you and mother. I should like to know if the Mt Carmel house is given up, and if you are left to the depressing emptiness of Taylor Hall.27 I hope you have made a homely room in the Graduate Club,28 with your photographs, Thoreau, and the neckties (from which Amos and I long since rifled the best) about you—I remember against the wall, too, long envelopes bursting with matter that I have always supposed to be your notes on the years in China. They will be in your new room. A cup or two of Amos’s.29 You may feel quite free to smoke, too, for even if it’s example should penetrate to me, it would do little harm for I don’t finish a cigarette a week. An arrangement so that you can read in bed, read Walpole and Burke and Mrs. Montague and Swift—all the inexhaustible standards that wait for me someday when I have lost both legs in a streetcar accident, and need stout trenchant reading. Copies of The Literary Digest and other sources to transmute into public reflection.

  You see I wish you happy. When you have counted your troubles with a certain Puritan satisfaction in the reflection that the Inexplicable Disposer of Things has thought you worthy of trials beyond the endurance or even sympathy of most men—leave me out. Consider me as some other man’s son, strange and remote, loving you at that distance prodigiously and unaccountably.

  Thornton

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

  269 Rue St. Jacques.

  Thurs.

  Dear Mother:

  I’m so amazed I don’t know what to do! All the millions of French books I’ve read this last year haven’t helped me the slightest in speaking or in grammar? However I am bold to bluff. I rushed right out to take a lesson every day with a certain lady who has been taking my fellow-pensionairres; she will supplement my forced marches through grammars at home.

  I shall come over and see you very soon but not until the day before my mois30 is up here—money must be saved at every corner, and although its worth a hundred dollars that I should see you again before going back, it is hardly worth ten that I should see you seven days instead of six. So I shall probably come over—following your directions—the night of the 26th of August. More later.

  Let Isabel be very cautious about her movie course. The magazines are flooded with inducements to take courses. Let us talk over.31

  I shall try and see Aunt Charlotte tomorrow morning, although I have heard no word of her.32

  I have not cashed the money yet but am sure it will go through as quietly as the other did. ¶ A letter from father Aug. 1. in which from what he says he seems not to have received my cable YES nor my S.O.S!

  Lawrenceville you know is the smart prep. school for Princeton and entertains only big husky team material. Oh, how well dressed I must be! I’d better grow a moustache for maturity.

  Well, well, I’m as excited as a decapitated goose. Will see you soon. I might perhaps get a later sailing but I’d rather not and I dont think Father’d mind, since my stay has been a month prolonged as it is.

  None of you say how you like London. It has finally broken into Rain here and the whole world seems better. You must polish up your French and find a neighbor or two, a French maid perhaps who will sit on the area steps with me gently exchanging subjunctives.

  Isn’t it perfectly mad of Father; but it’ll be awfully good for me in the long run.

  Love to the whole caboodle.

  Thorny—soon

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

  Oct. 3 1921

  Lawrenceville

  Dear Father:

  I didn’t realize until I got your letter, on returning from Trenton that the suit and the other obligations were to be separate. I didn’t send you enough, of course. So I am enclosing the first of my checks. Will send on more whenever you say.

  I hope they can cash this for you without delay; otherwise let me know by card and I will send you the same thing by postal money-order.

  The work goes on by strange ups-and-downs. The heart of the matter is that no amount of good intentions or mental coercion can really bring my interests into our table conversation, our discussions of verbs, of athletics. I am still in Europe. I especially cannot forget Italy. The boys see instinctively that I am not the collegiate live-wire.

  But then again—especially mornings before I am tired by the awful excitement of dragging a class through the iron teeth of an assignment—I seem to be irresponsible and “good fellow” and we exchange the expected breakfast remarks with all the spontaneity in the world. There are a number of boys in the house for whom Mr. Wilder is quite an adequate Assistant House Master. I get on well with Mr. Foresman too, but I suspect he regrets not have the vigorous snorter assigned to him.

  There are times of great pleasure in the class-room when I know I’m not merely adequate, but really good. It only took me a day to reach perfect composure; I usually stroll about if a class is reciting well directing olympianally now from the side now from the back. With my older class—we are reading a French classic—quite unconsciously I get drawn into some exposition of idea or technical expression—and I suddenly think that that art of holding twenty intelligences in hushed attention is going to justify my coming down here in the capacity of unprepared teacher and unsuitable companion

  —afftly

  Thorny

  Davis House, Lawrenceville School.

  Davis House, Lawrenceville School. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 151

  71. TO CHARLES H. A. WAGER. ALS 1 p. Oberlin

 

  Nov. 4 1921

  Dear Dr. Wager:

  Four evenings a week I sit up in my study from seven until ten while my thirty-two boys do their preparation for the morrow. They begin to drop in, a difficult phrase in Caesar, a little Trig, “Please, sir, what does mendacity mean?” some French, a little chat, “would you like some fudge my sister made, sir?” Every now and then there is a sound of scuffling on one of the three floors. I rise, and descend the stairs with majestic and perfectly audible advance, dispensing awe and order like fragrance. Finally fifteen minutes freedom before lights-out; sudden activity, four Victrolas play, rushings to the bathroom, four-part harmony. Then the last bell and I lower the lights. An expensive benevolent peace invests us; my heavy reconnoitring footsteps flower into symbolic significance as I lock the backdoors and try the windows. Follows about t
en minutes of furtive whisperings from bed to bed, and they fall off to sleep—most of them having sustained the incessant impacts of football practice throughout three hours of the afternoon. People said to me Never teach school, You will be so unhappy, It will deaden you. 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—

  Thornton

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

  Davis House

  March 4 <19>’22

  night

  Dear Father:

  I wish I wrote you often. My natural inertia is now fortified by my professional lack of quiet time, and I write even less often than before. ¶ It is agreed that I am to stay on here another year. I had no way of knowing whether I “suited” or not,—at times it seemed to me that the Headmaster loathed me, my housemaster longed for a change of assistant, and the boys on the point of petitioning my removal. But these must have been phantoms of an (at times) overworked nervous system, for the day, March 1, when you must announce your decision about next year, and when—so says the contract—the H’dmaster must announce his objection to you, if such there be, has gone by. Mr. Foresman was amazed when I told him that I had expected to be called into the Foundation House, told that I was an entertaining guest but that they required a more athletic type. He told me that I was considered a pearl of great price, that he for the first time felt secure about the house when he was absent, and that if the vote of the boys counted for anything I had reason to feel signally pleased. There is a considerable amount of double-reading in all this that mitigates its flattery, but on the whole I feel like one who has come out of a perplexed bad dream into a more confident waking.