The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 23
Dec 6 1927
Dear Mr. Tinker:
You may imagine how exciting your letter was for me and how happy and fit-for-nothing it left me the rest of the day.162 It has decided me to fix on you as the judge in a new problem I have: more and more people are muttering to me that I must leave the little chicken-feed duties of the housemaster and teacher and go to Bermuda, for example, and write books as a cow gives milk. I do not know how to answer them, but I do feel (though with intervals of misgiving) that this life is valuable to me and, I dare presume, my very pleasure in my routine can make me useful to others. Anyway no one, except you and I, seems to believe any longer in the dignity of teaching. (Though to us even ‘dignity’ is an understatement.) Ach, you should see the Davis House and all the sincerity and contentment and application that keeps coming out of 32 potential roughnecks and Red Indians.
Well, you must think over this for me, though I don’t know when I can pin you down for it, for, Xmas I am going South. I’m not all well of Dr. Verdi’s adroit appendectomy and am finding some minor Florida beach to lie on for a few weeks.163 But that will only make a short postponement for New Haven rather than New York is still my week-end privilege.
As for your questions, oh, isn’t there a lot of New England in me; all that ignoble passion to be didactic that I have to fight with. All that bewilderment as to where Moral Attitude begins and where it shades off into mere Puritan Bossiness. My father is still pure Maine-1880 and I carry all that load of notions to examine and discard or assimilate.
No, I have never been to Peru. Why I chose to graft my thoughts about Luke 1¾ upon a delightful one-act play by Mérimée, Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement, I do not know. The Marquesa is my beloved Mme de Sévigné in a distorting mirror. The bridge is invented, the name borrowed from one of Junipero Serra’s missions in California.
It is right and fitting that you cried for a page of mine. How many a time I have cried with love or awe or pity while you talked of the Doctor, or Cowper, or Goldsmith.
Between the lines then you will find here all my thanks and joy at your letter
Ever
Thornton
104. TO F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Princeton
Jan 12 1928164
Dear Scott Fitzgerald:
I have been an admirer, not to say a student, of The Great Gatsby too long not to have got a great kick out of your letter.165 It gives me the grounds to hope that we may sometime have some long talks on what writing’s all about. As you see I am a provincial schoolmaster and have always worked alone. And yet nothing interests me more than thinking of our generation as a league and as a protest to the whole cardboard generation that precedes us from Wharton through Cabell and Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. I know Ernest Hemingway. Glen-way Westcott, I think, is coming down here for a few days soon. I’d like to think that you’d be around Princeton before long and ready for some long talks. I like teaching a lot and shall probably remain here for ages; a daily routine is necessary to me: I have no writing habits, am terribly lazy and write seldom. I’d be awfully proud if you arrived in my guestroom some time.
I spent last Xmas with a pack of Rhodes scholars (I’m not one) at Juan-les-Pins. The dentist-doctor-ex-sailor-adventurer on the plage told me you were working on a novel based upon a pathological situation seen in the hotel crowd.166 You’d do it wonderfully and to hell with Scribners. The new firm of Coward-McCann would do their share wonderfully well. I’m sending you my Second.
We’re looking for some more tremendous pages from you. Thanks a lot for writing me
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
Later: God, I write a bad letter. I hoped this was going to carry more conviction. Fill in with the energy I’d have had if I hadn’t just taught four classes in French. T.W.
105. TO CASS CANFIELD.167 TL (Copy)168 1 p. Yale
COPY THORNTON WILDER
DAVIS HOUSE
LAWRENCEVILLE, NEW JERSEY.
Jan. 16, 1928169
Dear Mr. Canfield:
I wish to commit myself to the house of Harpers by putting on paper the following conditions:
That if the House of Harpers will consent to subsidize me to the extent of five thousand a year for three years beginning June 1929 (even though it covers some of the time when I must be completing the two remaining books that I am required to give to Albert and Charles Boni) I shall agree to consider all further books thereafter as belonging to the House of Harpers.
This shall except the book of short plays published by Coward-McCann;170 and the money to be reimbursed if the time is consumed in writing plays or material of a specially limited type of interest.
The fifteen thousand dollars shall be considered as applying against the royalties of at least two novels of 50,000 words or more.
In the event that this guarantee arrangement is not necessary to me, I shall be willing to enter into a contract along the ordinary lines on terms satisfactory to both of us.171
Sincerely yours,
(Signed) THORNTON WILDER.
106. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Yale
Dearest of mamas:
I’m the worst of goofs. I write sixteen letters every two days but I never write the important ones! I haven’t answered E A Robinson yet, nor Robert Longman173 nor sent Amos the book I promised him. Instead I write the queerest little letters. Well: here are the items for today:
You and I and Isabel and Janet or everybody are taking a house near London (Oxford or the Thames-side) all Summer. And we, all or some or more, are staying there until March. Then I am coming back to lecture for two months under Lee Keedick (the best: Margot Asquith and G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole).174 You stay on if you like.
2. I am sailing on the Adriatic July 7 with 3 boys175 vaguely under my care. Their mamas would not let them have the Summer abroad without me being there. They are going to golf in Scotland and spend a week in Deaville with a friend, and are going to return to America as early as Aug. 20. (for college boards)
3. You are going over to England quite early in the Spring, probably alone to prepare the way. Find a house with a garden, please. Like Duff House in London; or somewhere very nice near it. And a big house.176
4. The book is going to go well above 100,000. Friday I was in NY. and the Bonis (who by the way have forgiven me) mentioned that on that day alone I had earned over 600 dollars (5,000 copies by telegraphic order).
5. You are to get the rental of a real house, big
6. So be a honey: think this over and come to a decision soon.
7. I don’t dare come home Easter. Three days in N.Y? or New Orleans: or Charleston; or Atlantic City. I’m tired, and good cause too. ¶ I am forwarding Father’s accident, left behinds when I can find paper and cord.177 ¶ love to all.
love
Thornton
107. TO F. SCOTT AND ZELDA FITZGERALD. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Princeton
Dear Scott, Dear, Zelda, dear Scott, Dear Zelda,
Why should I tear up three letters in an attempt at writing you. One was a long and over-literary catalogue of the things I enjoyed at your house,178 with delighted characterizations of all the guests and of yourselves (hurry, come and get it; it’s in my wastepaper basket here, Davis House), and one was a letter to little Scotty, the new planet. All I can say is that I filled my eyes with more than they can digest for a long while, and my affections with more than they can ever consent to lose. For instance I met the beautiful and wonderful Zelda and feel as though I’d been no-end awkward and inadequate beside her. Anyway I know that she understands that in my fashion I was happy and excitingly interested in everything.
And now I’m more than ever eager to live near you someday on some European beach with long lazy days for talking and just mooning about. Since I got back the routine has been more complicated than usual, but I have been collecting a little bundle of things to say to you, which I shall not take the trouble to link together or even to interspace. ¶ If you are staying long at Ellerslie you should get a piano for Scotty. She’s alive with some gift or other and that may be the one. Besides I can come down and give her piano-talks. (I went into Trenton on the streetcar yesterday with a little girl 8 yrs old and she wasn’t anywhere near Scotty, and yet Barbara Baker’s no slouch for brightness.) ¶ You, Scott, seemed to have the impression that I was restless under Miss Murphey,179 under “the banyan-tree of her tragedienne’s voice.” No, I was delighted; we discovered the same enthusiasms in French memoir literature and I could have got on as happily as that for years<?>. ¶ I started my phonograph agency searching for copies of the Rosenkavalier and Pavilion d’Armide waltzes for Zelda, so please don’t get them in the meantime. They’d make a deaconess’s<?> eyes droop, if you get what<?> I mean. ¶ Rex Lardner was here to lunch nailing an option on the serializ. of my next for Hearst-Cosmop.180 He says he knew you at Great Neck. I told him the opening of Scott’s next was stunning. I hope that’s all right, isn’t it? ¶ Next Sunday night (we are allowed a half-hour’s reading-recreation after House Prayers then) I am reading the boys: Rags and the Prince of Wales.181 Is it all right with you. Seven-twenty, Eastern Standard Time. ¶ Can you-alls ever come up here? Can’t I ever be hospitable to anybody? ¶ The ballet teacher at the American Laboratory Theatre 222 East 64th St. is Mme Irantzoff-Anderson and La Sylphe is retained for corrective gymnastics and something else; something new in sylphs.182 (10:15 p.m. Just turned off the house-lights. 3rd Floor kinda restless. Organized rough-house brewing? Heaven help us thru the Winter Term. Spring Term is Housemaster’s paradise.)
ever thine
Thornt.
108. TO JOHN A. TOWNLEY.183 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Lawrenceville
March 6 1928184
Dear John:
The book is not supposed to solve. A vague comfort is supposed to hover above the unanswered questions, but it is not a theorem with its Q.E.D. The book is supposed to be as puzzling and distressing as the news that five of your friends died in an automobile accident. I dare not claim that all sudden deaths are, in the last counting, triumphant. As you say, a little over half the situations seem to prove something and the rest escape, or even contradict. Chekhov said: <“>The business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly.” I claim that human affection contains a strange unanalizable consolation and that is all. People who are full of faith claim that the book is a vindication of their optimism; disillusioned people claim that it is a barely concealed “anatomy of despair.” I am nearer the second group than the first; though some days I discover myself shouting confidentally in the first group. Where will I be thirty years from now?—with Hardy or Cardinal Newman?
Thank you for your fine thoughtful letter. I am carrying your messages to Mrs. Abbott. May we see you before June?
A letter like yours does me lots of good. If you were here I would outline my Next185 to you.
Ever
Thornton W.
109. TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY. ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) JFK
June 20 1928186
Dear Ernest:
Wonderful to hear from you.
Talk about you all the time. I had weekend with Scott and Zelda this Spring. Scott read the opening chapter of his new book to us, perfectly fine. Your ghost crosses the stage everynow and then, but so it does in all of our books willy-nilly, mostly willy. You haven’t published anything, big or little, for ages. All agog about a novel plus a play.
I
You see I haven’t much to say, but I’m strong for you and wish we could sit down to some long talks. Honest. I’m more flexible than I was. And you modified me lots. If I can do any errands for you note the Ship’s Date.
Ever thine
Thornt
TNW and Gene Tunney hiking at the Mer de Glace in the French Alps, October 1928.
TNW and Gene Tunney hiking at the Mer de Glace in the French Alps, October 1928. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Part Three
RÔLES: 1929-1939
BECAUSE OF THE LITERARY SUCCESS AND FINANCIAL REWARDS of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder’s way of life had changed radically by the time he returned from Europe in mid-January 1929. He had resigned his job at Lawrenceville, and that decision freed him to relinquish the delicate balance he had maintained between his teaching and writing routines. Now he had to establish a new regimen.
Before he had left for Europe in the midst of his growing renown, he had signed a multiyear contract with the Lee Keedick Agency, a nationally known speakers’ bureau, contracting for what turned out to be 144 lectures over several years’ time. In mid-February 1929, he began his first series of lectures, traveling throughout the Midwest until May. On his return, he entered another writing residency at the MacDowell Colony, where he remained through June. While there, he began The Woman of Andros, a new novel and the third of the four books he had contracted to do for Albert & Charles Boni. Much of the rest of Wilder’s summer was filled with social engagements and lectures, but he did manage to spend two weeks at his old tutoring camp on Lake Sunapee.
In September 1929, Wilder was off to Europe again, this time with his mother. They visited Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Munich, Paris, London, and Oxford, and returned to the United States in November. Wilder finished his new novel in October, and The Woman of Andros was published by Boni at the end of February 1930. In 1928, after the success of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder had acceded to his father’s recommendation that he retain a local New Haven attorney, J. Dwight Dana, to represent him in his business affairs. Dana’s representation gave Wilder control over the format and presentation of his new novel, a control he had not had previously.
The Woman of Andros was one of the top ten best-selling novels of 1930, although it was not the phenomenon that The Bridge of San Luis Rey had been. Reviewers admired his style and craftsmanship, but several of them had reservations about the relevance of this novel set in pagan times on an obscure Greek island because it was so removed from the practical experiences beginning to affect his reading public. The specter of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, already haunted the American public, including the audience for literary novels.
Wilder’s royalty income of approximately forty thousand dollars was not an insignificant sum in 1930. It was, however, an income subject to wide vacillations, a circumstance that had to be taken into account, because he had become the sole support of his parents and two younger sisters. His other siblings were self-supporting, with Amos teaching at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and Charlotte at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and later at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Wilder had invested a portion of his royalties from The Bridge of San Luis Rey in land in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven, and in 1929 he built a house there for his family. In the late spring of 1930, after he returned from a two-month lecture tour, Wilder, his parents, and his younger sisters moved into their newly built home, a resid
ence referred to by the family as “The House The Bridge Built.” The financial resources for running this household had to come from Wilder’s earnings, because his father could no longer contribute to his family’s economic needs; after several mild strokes, he was gently but firmly asked to retire from the associate editorship at the Journal-Courier in 1929. Wilder’s sister Isabel, who remained at home, had begun to assist him with his voluminous mail, particularly when he was off lecturing or traveling abroad. His youngest sister, Janet, was a student at Mount Holyoke College, her tuition paid by Wilder.
Robert M. Hutchins, Wilder’s friend from Oberlin and Yale, became president of the University of Chicago in 1929 and invited Wilder to teach there for two quarters a year, at a salary of four thousand dollars. Because he enjoyed teaching but also because he wanted the extra income, he agreed to begin his first quarter in April 1930. He taught a course in advanced English composition to a small class of students selected by him, as well as a larger lecture course on classic literature in translation. After classes ended in June, Wilder spent a month at the MacDowell Colony, working on six one-act plays. In September, he returned briefly to work in his new study in Hamden before going back to Chicago to teach in the fall quarter.
By 1931, Wilder seemed to have established a schedule that was flexible enough to accommodate his lecturing and teaching obligations without compromising his ability to travel and write. He began the year with a speaking tour that lasted through February, embarked for Europe in late March, returned in July, spent August and September socializing and writing, and then returned to Chicago in October to teach until the end of December.
The six one-act plays Wilder had completed at MacDowell were published in November 1931 by Yale University Press and Coward-McCann as The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. The Boni firm was interested only in his novels, and Coward-McCann had published Wilder’s first volume of his short plays, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, in 1928. It had sold well, coming, as it did, on the heels of the successful The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Two of the new plays in the 1931 volume, The Long Christmas Dinner and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, had premieres at the Yale University Theater and the University of Chicago Dramatic Association in late November and early December 1931, respectively. Both of these, as well as another one-act in the collection, Pullman Car Hiawatha, anticipated ideas and stage techniques that would blossom in Wilder’s full-length dramas at the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s.