excuse me saying that I waited six years beyond the time when the Gossip Fair assigned me a debut, and even now the real pleasure is in the insight of the few who could have read the stuff in MS anyway.
I wish you could have come in here for a weekend or so. I am almost an ardent son of old Nassau. Next year I will probably be tutoring a boy in Rochester. This Summer a month in Peterboro,102 I hope<,> and some time by Mother<?>. Perhaps here in this very building—living cheap, proximity of a great library, terrible weather but on a slight hill.
Don’t hesitate to write me your troubles, if I can act for you. Hope you have few. See you in Summer somehow, I hope. Thanks for the memento and comments.
Affectionately
Thornton
88. TO CHARLES H. A. WAGER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Graduate College / Princeton University) Yale
May 25 1926
Dear Dr. Wager,
If I deserved to be happy no letter could have made me happier than yours. But every time I am commended by persons I greatly value a real shame goes through me. I become aware of all the negligences and greennesses that I let by. I shall try again and keep in mind such readers as yourself. Try and remember that I kept adding bits to the book during all those years at Lawrenceville, but always with the sinking feeling that nowhere a publisher or friend would read it.
What emotion went through you as you discovered your influence turning up on every page? It is fairly speckled with your favorite quotations, and it is always aspiring after effects that you taught me to admire in others. How many hours I sat under your rostrum, burning with awe and emotion, while you unfolded the masterpieces. Dear Dr. Wager, like Alix103 you have “a form of genius that is seldom praised to its face” but which it is so satisfying to praise. I am an old-fashioned believer and when I assert that I believe that lives are planned out for us I am always thinking of the fact that my father, by the most unexplainable accident, sent his two sons to Oberlin where the younger could get the nourishment without which he would have remained a bright blundering trivial hysteric.
The book has been doing well; a second printing is ready (with all the twenty-eight errata corrected) and I hope to go in the Fall to the hills around Salzburg to write some plays.
Give my love to Mrs. Wager. I hope Italy does you both all the good in the world. Always remember me as your devoted and affectionate
Thornton
89. TO AMY WERTHEIMER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
June 21 1926
Princeton Grad College
until Thursday
Then 75 Mansfield
St. N.H. until July 1.
Dear Amy:
I must say I like your letters more and more, even though you don’t like my new reason for liking them: their serenity. Now I walk into the Commons Room, read them by the window overlooking a vast perspective of lawn and woodland; I smile here and there; your likeness floats up from the pages; I am reminded that I have a good friend and that in my queer unsound and almost secret life I have a sturdy last resource against the occasional conviction that “I don’t belong”, that there’s no room for me.
Wilder family at Mansfield Street. Left to right: Amos N., Isabel, Janet, TNW, Amos P.
Wilder family at Mansfield Street. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
That is one of the things then that should be making me very happy This very minute Andy is in taking one of his College Boards and my tutoring is practically over; the first flurry over the book is at an end, but I continue to get letters assuring me that friends and strangers are surprised and pleased by it; I am to be in Peterborough all July and am alive with wonderful little touches for the Peruvian novel.104 But I’m not very happy, and that’s all there is to be said. Perhaps it’s because through distraction and laziness I haven’t written a word for so long, i.e. denied my raison d’être.—however I mustn’t try and shadow you with my depressions. I shall be all right when I’m home; there is one place in the world I am really at peace and that is on the little cot up in the hall in Mansfield Street, with my Father and Mother and Isabel tiptoeing about their affairs.
Now let me talk about a thousand stray things so that you can see that I’m at least alive enough to be interested. ¶ Been reading Spengler’s Decline of the West with the greatest enthusiasm. I’m told a lot of it is wrong, I know that a lot of it is beyond my reach, but at least it’s absorbed me beyond the call of dinner bells and movie-going. ¶ Boni’s made me the following proposition: if I would turn back to them my royalties on the not-yet-sold first five thousand copies, twelve hundred and fifty dollars, they would add to it from their coffers the same amount, the whole sum to be used to plaster the country with adv’ts, to try and ram it down the public<’s> neck as one of the six best sellers of the Spring and perhaps recoup all that was invested. I replied no, thank you. In the first place I must eat. In the second, it would be absurd to make a little goldfish go through the antics of a whale. They’re loony, and every now and then a little ….. a little … As they get much more than I per copy, shouldn’t they have offered to contribute more than 50% of the advertising drive?—anyway, don’t mention this bit of publishing gossip to a soul. ¶ You notice I’m writing this to you on a Monday—that’s because Sunday is getting to be a little farcical—the telephones rings for dinners and teas. Now I’ve moved into another entry and phonecalls can’t reach me at all, and that’s how blasé I am. So I telepathed you for half-a-day’s delay on this letter and you made a moue and accorded me it. ¶ There’s no denying that music is the first of all the arts, that literature even cannot hold a candle to it. Well, did I tell you about my Thursday nights at Prof. Menzies (pendants to my Sunday nights at Mrs. Franz’s)? about our long sessions for two pianos eight-hands, hours with the Brandenberg concerti and the Brahms symphonies? with me being inept and requiring the other three proficients to go back to six bars before M, and to be reminded of the changes of key-signature.105 There are two maiden-ladies from the Princeton Conservatory of Music, super-sight-readers taking the passage work with a great rattle of bracelets & heaving of shoulders and, Mrs. Menzies of Edinburgh, a still pretty young woman with an accurate if a little pedestrian accomplishment. The Cabala lies guiltily on the center table and the author is humored along when he falls out of time and key; others hurry to take the blame and declare stoutly that the
float the sounds of heavy green trees brushed by a breeze, the sound (I insist) of sunlight on ivy and that of applause for the class day exercises are being held before a vast crowd a stone’s throw away. This may be my last letter to you from Princeton (I am still thinking of coming back here to work in August) and I should close with a majestic summary of what the whole chapter has meant, but you have known all the agitations and all the satisfactions and its not impossible that in the back of your mind lies a better evaluation of my year here than will ever lie in the back of mine. So, Madam, you draw the conclusions and add the column, mentioning always that changes of place and the completion of time-units have no power to alter my admiration for yourself.
So
Thornton.
90. TO LEWIS S. BAER.109 ALS 4 pp. Morgan
The Lake Sunapee Summer School
Blodgett’s Landing, N.H.
Aug 7 1926
Dear Lewie or Louie:
(Anyone who commits a shy message to a postal-card, as I did, deserves to be misunderstood.)
First, I haven’t submitted my plays to any publisher, except you.110
My thought was that they were so frail that even if you did bring them out during the next two years, it would probably be bad for my “booksellers” and even perhaps for most of “my readers.”
And yet I should love to get these little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey grows lengthier (in design) and can hardly be finished before Spring. Though it might be serializing from Jan. (The nice note in The Century encourages me to hope for them:111 they like costume pieces: Messer Marco Polo and The Venetian Glass Nephew112 (later Doran))
My thought then was that if they appeared for a few years in some obscure publisher’s lists (if they would even take them) just enough to make presents for a few special friends and to give me the feeling that those Juvenilia were once
However, as I say, its not anything I’m very het up about and if you think best, we’ll say no more about it. Anyway you are my one and only House, of course & I tried to get Robinson for you—we even had a long confab, of which I shall someday tell you the details, but he’s for MacMillan to his death.113
Ever Thine
Thornton
Next Day: Gee I’d love to send you some hunks of The Bridge of San Luis Rey—but I haven’t any copies and I couldn’t be sure you’d be able to “foresee” all the treatment a first draft can rec’ve later.
91. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. APCS 1 p. Yale
What the h— am I doing at Aix-les-bains, sleeping in royal chamber for ninety cents a night. Well, we’re going from Paris to Rome (French Lemons Co. Piazza di Spagna) by relays, so as to avoid the 3,360 francs for the Rome Express. Tomorrow night we sleep in Genoa, and then in Rome.114 Things are much brighter & cheerier than when I wrote you-alls last. ¶ Tell Isabel that stopping in at Shakespeare & Co, Miss Beach introduced me to Ernest Hemingway (one of the two other good novelists of my generation, the 3rd being Glenway Wistcott
Thornt.
92. TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel Bayerischer Hof / München) JFK
9th November 1926115
Dear Ernest:
This crazy journey is drawing to a close and I may show up in Paris one of these days and drag you out to help me find a room. I still think it would be best for me to go South and keep in the sunlight; but I need to hear a lot of good talk and be near some big libraries. This Munich is pretty wonderful; I keep imagining myself here. The theatres and the music put any other country in a green shade (quotation ended.)
Crazy journey is right. Andy hates all Europe. If he could he’d like to park all day in his hotel rooming (reading the Paris Herald and smoking Chesterfields) and never put foot in Paris, or Rome or Naples or Florence. He’s not even got ordinary vitality for he hates to walk more than two block and yet among those dozens
So you can imagine sitting through long blank meals with him. Naturally he thinks I’m as much of a mess as I think he is. But I know that any other kind of tutor would have been as poor a companion. Even if he had had a snappy nightclub collegiate tutor, he would have been left at home more and more, for Andy looks irresistably like a lonesome but conceited little boy when he’s on a party. His whisky goes straight to his egotism and he will boast for three hours on end of what he regards as his achievements in polo, heavy drinking, cards and love. An ordinary common-sense tutor would have given him up because of his curious dependence, his inability to say where, what, why, how. He can complain afterwards, but he can never propose before.
However you see I can almost work myself up into a pathological state over my companion. Most
I’m awfully eager to read The Sun Also. I shall have by the time you see me. Don’t be harsh to me about mine: I’m rapidly deculturing. Be patient with me and there’ll be less fooling with inessentials etc. Give my best to Miss Beach.
Ever
Thornton Wilder
93. TO ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 6 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel Édouard VII / 39 Avenue de L’Opéra / Paris) Yale
November 28 1926
Sunday
Dear girls:
Andy sails Wednesday and the farce is over.
Three more nights in this vulgar hotel (one hundred francs a night. ‘magine! I protested all I could. But as he remarks so often: It’s his money; and it’s less than the Plaza!)
Then I’m either going over to live with Ernest Hemingway or else going to the pension de la Schola Cantorum for a month, or going straight South.
I’d love to go into the studio with Ernest, but there are no meals with it. He eats around with the enormous and flamboyant Rotonde cro
wd. And his wife is about to divorce him and his new wife is about to arrive from America, so I think I’d better not try. But he’s wonderful. Its the first time I’ve met someone of my own generation whom I respected as an artist. Neither Steve nor Edna Millay inspired one tenth the confidence that he does, as a writer.
The pension Schola costs 800 francs a month for everything and I’ll have Wednesday morning (I’ll explain why I’m putting it Wedn. morning.) about 3,500 francs. You love money matters so I’ll explain all. I have still one hundred dollars of mine. And (this will give you the staggers) I have still one hundred dollars of my expense account. Nine hundred dollars seems a horrible amount to have spent from Sept 25 to December 1, but even that was kept down with great adroitness. Andy must easily have spent two thousand, not counting a lot of tailoring in London and gifts everywhere. When Wednesday morning I pay my bill for this week’s hotel (that will be 7 nights: 700 francs, a couple of breakfasts and baths and mineral waters & tips = 1000) I will have 1500 francs expense money left.
As Doug.117 said that of course he would pay me the value of a return ticket, instead of returning the Expense Money left over after the hotel is paid, I shall keep it and tell him to deduct it from the Return Ship money.
The exchange today was 27 fr. to a dollar which brings my capital up still further: even 4,400 francs.
If that’s all true I really should go right South, but these telegrams and anxious letters make me think I ought to stay for a while.
But I love your letters!! I just have a glorious time collecting them at Morgan Harjes118 and strolling off to a cafe and reading them 12 times. Between you and me I don’t like Paris. I never did. If I had somewhere to go in America I’d come straight home, but I don’t want New York and I couldn’t park on you adorable people in New Haven and that’s that.
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 20