The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 24
In 1932, Wilder began the year teaching at the University of Chicago instead of lecturing on the road, and later in the spring he tried his hand at translating and adapting two plays. At the behest of Broadway producer Gilbert Miller, Wilder translated from the German and adapted Hungarian Otto Indig’s The Bride of Torozko. But when the production opened, Wilder’s translation was not used; the production closed quickly. The second was a translation from the French of André Obey’s Le Viol de Lucrèce for Katharine Cornell, a leading actress of the day The play, now entitled Lucrèce, received a lukewarm reception in New York when it premiered in December 1932, and it closed shortly thereafter.
While Wilder was working on these adaptations and translations at MacDowell in June 1932, he also began serious work on his new novel, Heaven’s My Destination, his first to be set in contemporary America. He hoped to finish it by April 1933, but it was not completed until the end of September 1934. Wilder’s royalty income had dropped precipitously, from over $40,000 in 1930 to $13,300 in 1931, $9,200 in 1932, and $6,700 in 1933; as a consequence, he spent a good part of 1933 earning money to support his family. He was on the road giving lectures in January, February, and part of March. On April 1, he began teaching his spring-quarter classes at Chicago, and he stayed on through the summer term, earning four thousand dollars. After a short visit home in Hamden, Wilder departed by train for Los Angeles at the end of October, then sailed for Hawaii, where he was engaged to lecture at the university in Honolulu for two and a half weeks. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he lectured at UCLA for five days; made a short rest stop to visit with his friend Mabel Dodge Luhan at her ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in early December; gave more lectures in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago on his way east; and arrived home in Hamden just before Christmas.
During the Depression, Hollywood was the one place where writers could earn large salaries. In Los Angeles during the fall of 1933, Wilder, who was genuinely interested in filmmaking as an art form, became acquainted with people in the movie industry. He spent approximately two weeks in Hollywood in March 1934, working on a screen treatment for a projected film about Joan of Arc. After Wilder taught in the spring at Chicago, he was invited back to Hollywood to work for Sam Goldwyn and RKO. When he returned to Chicago to teach for the fall quarter, he spent two weeks writing a film treatment for William Randolph Hearst’s production company. For approximately ten weeks of film work, Wilder earned $11,500, twice his teaching salary and five times more than he had earned lecturing.
On his way home from Hollywood before the fall 1934 teaching quarter at the University of Chicago, Wilder again stopped at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ranch in Taos and finished Heaven’s My Destination. The novel was published in England by Longmans, Green on December 3, 1934, and in the United States on January 2, 1935, by his new publisher Harper & Brothers, which bought the book from Boni and would henceforth be Wilder’s American publisher. This fourth novel was successful and restored Wilder’s bank account, earning approximately $27,000 during 1934-1935.
While he was teaching at the University of Chicago for the 1934-1935 academic year, Wilder met Gertrude Stein on November 25, 1934, when she spoke on campus. When Stein returned to Chicago for two weeks in March, Wilder lent her his apartment. Despite their difference in age (she was sixty-one and he thirty-seven at this time) and public renown (she was something of a literary curiosity, while he had been in the literary limelight for six years), they developed a friendship that became very important to both of them.
When Wilder finished his classes that spring, he spent some time in the Midwest, fulfilling speaking engagements, then returned east for much of May and June, visiting friends and joining family celebrations. That May, his sister Janet received an M.A. degree from Mount Holyoke, and in June, his brother married Catharine Kerlin, Thornton serving as best man. Shortly thereafter, he sailed for Europe for his first visit to the Continent in three years. He visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in France, went to Salzburg for the music festival (in the company of the political and literary hostess Sibyl Colefax, whom he had met in London in 1928 and who became a lifelong friend), walked in the Dolomites, and then spent time in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Paris. He returned to Connecticut for a somber family Thanksgiving: During October, Wilder’s father had suffered a series of strokes, which left him paralyzed on one side; his condition worsened when he was hospitalized and operated on for an intestinal blockage. In spite of a grim prognosis, however, Amos Parker Wilder recovered enough to be tended to at home by family and nursing help.
In 1936, Wilder’s grueling schedule of lecturing on both the East Coast and the West during the first three months of the year and teaching the spring and summer quarters at Chicago was interrupted by his father’s death on July 2, 1936. He returned to teach after his father’s funeral and concluded his classes. After six years of teaching, he resigned his position. He spent the summer of 1936 at home, and in early October, he left for new territory, sailing to the West Indies and stopping at several islands, where he searched for comfortable writing locales. Although he did not find an ideal place, he finished a writing project he had promised to do for Gertrude Stein—an introduction to her book The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, which was published in 1936. He had performed a similar service for her in March 1935, for Narration, a book of four lectures she had delivered at the University of Chicago.
The lecture commitments Wilder had made in 1929 were the only contractual obligations left that competed with his freedom to roam and write at will. He was free of that obligation by the end of March 1937, after spending the first three months of the year on the speaking circuit. During April and May, with the aid primarily of German translations, he wrote a new stage version of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for a close friend, the actress Ruth Gordon. In June, after a five-year absence, he returned to the MacDowell Colony to concentrate on a new play, Our Town. During the summer, after serving as the first American delegate to the annual gathering in Paris of the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, an enterprise that was part of the League of Nations, calling on Gertrude Stein, and attending the Salzburg Festival, Wilder completed most of his new play in a hotel in a small town near Zurich, Switzerland. He returned to New York in December for rehearsals of both A Doll’s House and Our Town; the latter was to be directed by Jed Harris.
Wilder’s adaptation of A Doll’s House opened in New York on December 27, 1937. It was a great success and had a long run, closing in May 1938. When Our Town opened on February 4, 1938, and was similarly received, Wilder achieved the rare distinction of having two hits on Broadway simultaneously. In the spring of 1938, Our Town won Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize, this time in drama. At the end of March, Wilder left for Tucson, Arizona, to complete another play, a farce called The Merchant of Yonkers. It was to be directed by the Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt, whose career Wilder had followed for many years. Rehearsals began in November, and on December 28, 1938, The Merchant of Yonkers opened in New York. Wilder’s Broadway winning streak came to an end when the production received lukewarm reviews and then closed on January 28, 1939, after just thirty-nine performances. Despite this temporary setback, he now not only was internationally recognized as a novelist but, with Our Town, had established himself as an innovative major talent in the literary area that had dazzled and attracted him since childhood, the theater.
110. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 4 pp. NYU
The MacDowell Colony
Peterborough New Hampshire
July 24 1929
Dear Lady Colefax:
If this is a long letter in small writing and crowded with matter, will I be forgiven for my frailty and broken promises? The time I thought I was writing you a letter and telegraphed the news was on my lecture tour. And lecturers ought to be forgiven the delusions that visit them in the nineteenth story of some strange hotel. The moment I sat down to write the bespoken letter, Heaven only knows what Re
ception Committee called up on the ’phone, or what reporter, or what new cousin, or what former pupil. Similarly any cables you receive from me next January and February must be regarded as fantasies and wish-fulfilment idyls. So great is the dislocation caused by a Lecture Tour that it is not until July that Friendship, Admiration, Gratitude and Obligation begin to collect themselves in the wreckage of my faculties.
This is the place for such a revival. The music of Edward MacDowell is not wearing well, but this Colony that his widow has built up in his name is a sufficient memorial. Edwin Arlington Robinson, our best poet, has been here about fifteen summers; Elinor Wylie wrote a great deal of her work here; Porgy and Death Comes for the Arch-Bishop and The Bridge of S.L.R. and Scarlet Sister Mary and Tristram were, all or partly, written here. 1 At nine each Colonist drifts off to a studio, a little house quarter of a mile from most of the other studios, set in deep pine woods, with views of hills and mountains, and doesn’t see another human being until five o’clock. His lunch is brought by a cart and left on his doorstep without knocking. Naturally all that solitude is too austere a draught for me: I go walking or I play Patience or I go to the village to buy fountain-pen-ink. But finally one is caught by the contagion of concentration; a little routine is set up, and finally even I, the reluctant author, write a few pages daily.
It’s still the Woman of Andros, my hetaira who is developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson. 2 Her sayings and parables and her custom of adopting human strays is weighing down the book. But die she must, and with unhellenic overtones, an anima naturaliter christiana. 3 I love to think that Terence’s play on which, ever so inexcusably, I base the nouvelle was a favorite with Fénélon 4 and John Henry Newman. I’d love to introduce a strophe in salutation of those three lions with honey in their mouths. (As to Terence I don’t know, but Strachey was a fool when he compared Newman to a dove and my Fenelon I take from the gallery of Saint-Simon, the true book for the shipwrecked, a sufficient compensation, Heavens, for a lost leg.)
The last bit of writing I finished was a preface for Sir Philip’s book in its American edition.5 I did my best with a subject matter I know nothing about; I tried a wandering personal essay; it may be stupid and childish. I hope not. Now that my “strength” is returning I hope to write him in a few days, a long overdue answer. If you see him, tell him that my silences are not the meter of my regard and that (you may guess from all this latinity what author I have been reading) my instability is passing, has passed.
There is a very fine novel by Ernest Hemingway (of “Fiesta”) now running serially in Scribner’s Magazine.6 It caused the magazine to be barred in Boston and I hear that 1500 indignant subscribers cancelled their subscriptions, but it is very fine work. ¶ Have you met Alfred Lunt and Lynne John: if they want another tell them that Rosa Lewis in one of her apartments at the Cavendish has that wonderful head of Euphemia Lamb9 (you promised one day to tell me all about Euphemia Lamb) and everything in the Cavendish is for sale except rest and privacy.
So: forgive me, believe me and recognize one still ever
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
As from: 75 Mansfield St., New Haven Conn.
111. TO NORMAN FITTS.10 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Mitre Hotel / Oxford) Princeton
Oct 15 1929
Dear Norm:
Forgive my haste and everything.
It seems to me that my books are about: what is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose to it.
In other words: when a human being is made to bear more than human being can bear—what then?
The Cabala was about these “extremities.” Ones “nervous breakdowns.”
The Bridge asked the question whether the intuition that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living.
The Woman of Andros asks whether Paganism had any solution for the hopeful enquiring sufferer and—by anticipation—whether the handful of maxims about how to live that entered the world with the message of Christ were sufficient to guide one through the maze of experience.
The Trumpet Shall Sound was given Dec. 1926 or 1927 at the American Laboratory Theatre in NY. About 35 performances in repertorie. Apart from the Lit never published<.> Now withheld for purposes of rewriting the close.
Yes a minor lit. editor.
No,—single,—no wife nor chillun.
The W. of A. (out late next Spring perhaps) is based on the action recounted that took place before the curtain rises on the first act of Terence’s play.
Again forgive brevity etc
Ever yours
Thornt.
112. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. TLS 2 pp. Yale
The Biltmore
January 2nd, 1930
Dear Mom:
Sunlight, honey. Just terrible. Poinsettias and palms, everywhere. They haven’t had any rain since July except a drop and a half in September. It’s getting serious and everybody says they have a cough from the dust, but the dust isn’t so bad as that and the sun is worth it. One day I went out to the beach at Santa Monica and just baked.
This city is getting near to two million people and has got to be seen to be believed. It’s very American, only more so. I thought I had seen the limit of this kind of thing in Miami, but I spoke to
The first night I was here I went to see La Argentina dance.11 Charlie Chaplin was in the front row, the present-day poverello;12 and right behind me was Steve Benét and a young couple I knew in Juanles-Pins. Argentina was wonderful, Oh!
I’ve been typing all afternoon and am wore out, so I can’t think connectedly. The script will be done by tomorrow noon and sent to Isa by air mail and let’s hope the English copy will reach Longman by the fifteenth.13
Mr. Keedick’s Western agent is taking me to dinner at the Ambassador tomorrow night. He’s a nice sort of Frank-Walls called Ainslie MacDougall. Apparently there are no new dates for me yet, so I can just lie on beaches and later sit in the Greek Theatre. At one of these lectures, he says, they are expecting two thousand people; count that off your abacus, yes, at a dollar and a half an admission. He says that last year at Toronto I pleased a number of people by my lecture and a number of others (on the committee) by making them four hundred dollars clear.
After this: No thousand, no speechy.
Never, mind, honig, next year I don’t lecture nor teach nor trav
el. I just sit up on Dewberry Road,14 or whatever it’s called, and write play after play for Edith Evans.15
Just read a novel you’d better read if you want to know how terrible it is to run a boardinghouse in a small southern town. The novel is called Look Homward Angel16 and is full of prose poetry and bursts of tears and every now and then it’s even more sordid than the book about Andros.
It’s true that this town is full of fungus religions and fungus medicine. Every apartment house window on the ground floor has a little card in the corner saying: “Mrs. Whoosiz: spiritual healing and advice.” or “Naturotherapy Institute.” There’s a lot of Bible reading done in public by strollers with moving lips, or all a-dream on park benches; and you know I always felt that Bible reading in public or in the home was one of the less significant wrestlings with the angel.
Got Isabel’s first batch of forwarded mail; and answered everything that had to be answered at once, at once.
I’ve lost my appetite for some reason. I walk twelve miles a day. My teeth are perfect; my appendix is out. Yet I don’t approach any plate with a ghost of interest. (Well, there’s a symphony tonight with Horowitz, that’s something.) I guess I’m just homesick as usual. Or else I’m alone all the time, or else with some people that leave my pulse unhurried. Anyway I miss you-all a lot.