The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 27
Your friend
Thornton
122. TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Hollywood Aug 29 1933
c/o Edington-Vincent, Inc. Equitable Building
After Sept 10 at Laos, thank God.
Dear Mabel:
How kind and patient you are with my apparent vagueness. You know that it is not mere shilly-shallying. The central enthusiasm of my Spring this year was that I was to spend August and September at Taos, under your humorous and disciplinary eye. Then came a telegram from Hollywood offering a salary that sent all the Wilders into yells of derisive laughter. No one was worth that much, no one. A month of it would have been sufficient to save Keats and Mozart combined from malnutrition to a happy old age. The Wilders don’t understand money, but they understand the fantastic. This money meant a trip to her ancestral Hebrides for mother; a relief from anxiety (imaginary, but real; imaginary, therefore real) during a protracted invalidism for father; summer in biological research stations for Janet; and for me, many warming little odds and ends to do during the six months at the University this Fall. For me also out here was always the invitation to look at and get into this gigantic hard-working “folk” industry.
Sam Goldwyn (Jupiter) called me out to add words to a former silent picture of Ronald Coleman’s
Naturally I can hardly work because of the absorbing pressure of the contacts in town; imagine for instance my surprise and pleasure when Adrian76 showed us his movies of Taos.
So much to tell you.
I came here for four weeks, but Jupiter took up an option on two more, and implied that he would beg me to stay beyond. I work furiously to get it done so as to leave by the 8th. In the meantime the publishers press me to send the last unwritten chapter of my novel; and that must wait until I get into the glorious air of New Mexico.
I guess I’m the craziest most unstable least sérieux of your friends, but I
devotedly and affectionately yours
Thornton
TNW and Mabel Dodge Luhan.
TNW and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
123. TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT. ALS 2 pp. Harvard
Here
Today.
Dear Aleck:
Enclosed Mr. Knickerbocker’s letter. In the same mail I received Martha Dodd’s thoughts about him. La belle Still-Waters-Run-Deep looked at him hard, I assure you.77
What! Not one creditable letter from the whole ricksha fleet?
No, not one.
[Generalization deduced: There is one race that is not to the swift. We homely hunchbacks, phthisic and bespectacled, learn to write so that the invisible readers think that in life we must be “Pard-like spirits beautiful and swift.”—Parenthesis ended.]
Please write and thank Joe Foster (Temple University, Philadelphia—now Daggett Roller Chair Co, C. of P.) for his letter. I told him I’d ask you to. Probably you’ve done it already, in which case forgive my bossy tone.
Friday came around and you weren’t in the New Yorker. Five days’ anticipation is really stunned by such a disappointment and the thought that your strength had gone into “The Snake in the Grass” was not consolation enough; nor was the appearance of the September Cosmopolitan with some pages that fatten without enhancing my Big Treasured portfolio of your work.78 The Fridays are lately so surpassing one another that to miss one seems a loss that later regularity cannot repair.
Is your play going to be put on at the Music Box Theatre by Sam Harris with one of those smooth productions that smell of Valspar79 or is a bit of it here and there to be left to the imagination of the audience? My students (yes, in the Dante-Cervantes class) stop at the end of the hour to tell me how they loved “Dinner at Eight” and asking me to comment on it in class, and all I can think of is an Italianate chauffer hissing his jealousy to a lady’s maid up in the boudoir.80
I guess I’m cranky today.
Jed telegraphed me to meet him at the airport Saturday for a twenty-minute talk, but I was at Lake Geneva and missed him. I’m doubly sorry, because I’ve found the actor to play Mr. Dulcimer.81
Aleck, did I ever tell you about that American sixteen years old who stopped to see some friends in Dublin; the friends were helping make scenery at the Gate Theatre, so he helped swab a flat or two; when the part of the Duke in Jew Süss82 couldn’t be filled they persuaded him to take it and he was so wonderful that the whole town was staggered; so they had him play Othello and it was wonderful beyond belief: the Abbey then broke all tradition and asked him to play Lord Porteous in The Circle83 to continued consternation. He—still sixteen—was so confused and humiliated by all the praise and interest (It’s not hard to act: all you do is have fun putting on a make-up, then you go on the stage and say the lines) that he resolved to leave town and never act again. So he said goodbye to the Gate, playing both Hamlet’s father and stepfather and such power and authority and fascination had never been seen.
He left the stage to become a writer. He’s now eighteen; has a long play about John Brown. I gave him one of those galvanizing talks (that are really directed at myself) and now he wants to act again. Armed with my letters he is soon going to New York. Apparently its something daemonic: he is a rather pudgy-faced youngster with a wing of brown hair falling into his eyes and a vague Oxford epigrammatic manner; the pose is from his misery and soon drops under a responsible pair of eyes like mine. The name is Orson Wells84 and it’s going far. Are you interested?
That’s not the only wunderkind either. The just-graduated Senior John Pratt85 who did the wall decoration in the Tap Room of Alpha Delta Phi (did I show you those) came in last night with two portfolios of wonderful witty macabre drawings that would throw you into an ecstacy. There’s one of a Greek candy store with a soda-fountain in fake marble and a trellis full of paper roses and a stack of candy boxes with red silk ribbons that would throw you into an (—I said that before). And an Ascension in which some very odd angels are heaving a soul up to Heaven with the greatest difficulty.
Harvard and Yale and Princeton stew in their sad defeatist juice. These boys matured from inside outward instead of vice versa. They come from Wisconsin and Indiana respectively. And in ten years the United States will be the most stirring, comic, gay and truthful country in the world. ¶ Have a happy time working, and every now and then look out of the window in a sudden abstraction and remember that I am devoted to you and my name is
Thornton
124. TO J. DWIGHT DANA.86 ALS 2 pp. Private
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven Conn
January 18 1933<1934>
Dear Dwight:
This is a belated report. I am back from Hawaii. They paid me on the spot, though it required some special transaction on their part to prevent my being paid in script or something.
Boni knows that I expect to put most or all of my MS in their hands by April first; but they also know me well enough not to go forging ahead with promotion until they’re sure I’ve finished.
Cass Canfield of Harpers’ moans about, hoping that something will happen that will bring the text to him. If Boni’s can’t pay a just advance etc.
You’ll be horrified to know the money I have been turning down. The Chicago Herald Examiner wanted me to come out and do a daily report of the Wynkoop Murder Trial.87 The Holliday Tours want me to go on a very de luxe yacht trip of the Greek Islands—seven weeks from New York to New York. The Spring Tour has Mrs Astor and Dowager Vanderbilt—that kind of tour—me to give half an hour talk every morning in the lounge on things Greek. Expenses and.
Now telegrams are passing to the effect that
I go to Hollywood and write up Joan of Arc for Katherine Hepburn (Merion Cooper-George Cukor set-up—very choice, the group that did “Little Women”.)88 Rosalie Stewart agent, very superior, will get the money she thinks I deserve and a three months guarantee. Presumably Mid-June to Mid-Sept. I shall take that if it’s offered to me.
Lee Keedick will send you in a few days the money from the St. Louis lecture. Enclosed (sep. cover) divers chicken-feed, forgive my delay. I have five hundred dollars in the Chicago Bank, if you need any of it to ciment the cracks in the New Haven Bank.
If the movie plan doesn’t turn out, Mabel Dodge Luhan of Taos, New Mexico, has offered me a house for the summer near her, with the invitation to meals up at her ranch.
Isabel’s novel will also and more certainly be done April first.89
Greetings etc.
Sincerely yours
Thornton
125. TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) Private
Railroad: approaching Lamy
May 15 1934
After April 2, Univ. of Chicago
Dear Mabel:
Here I am again, hanging out of the window, looking at the country I already claim as “well-known” to me. I wish I could stop, but I’m off on one of those loony unsoundly-motivated errands of mine. I’ve been called to Hollywood for two weeks of “conversations” about Joan of Arc (Jeannette D’ay, to her). We’re to assemble a movie about her for the use of Katherine Hepburn. Then I take train again and rush from the station to take up my first classes. I’m craw-crammed with lore about the Maid; she certainly was wonderful beyond words, but I don’t know whether I’m very excited about the projected movie. I accepted the call because it appealed to all that’s worst in me, I suppose,—the love of
If the forty page outline of the movie which I am required to prepare after these conversations, inspires the Powers with any confidence that I have a knack for such things I am to be recalled in the early summer to write the picture and be present during its shooting. And that news came just as I was on the point of writing you that I was willing to override my feeling of obligation to the MacDowell Colony, and was asking you to let me come to Taos.
It still seems likely that I may. During these two weeks they can pick my brains and throw me away like a squeezed orange. I’m willing. Then some other hands can come in and show Jeanne falling in love with the Due d’Alençon (Percy MacKaye) or Dunois (Schiller), doing what neither the British goddams nor Cauchon himself ventured to believe.91
This leaves my coming to Taos in doubt, but do not let it inconvenience you in the matter of the disposition of the guest-house. All I will ask of you, if it will be possible for me, will be your encouragement to come to the town.
Very little has happened since I saw you. For the most part I sat up in my study playing solitaire, keeping strict the statistics of the Viennese theatres and writing my novel. I took one “unsoundly-motivated” trip to an adventurous little college in North Carolina. (22 students and 14 faculty members, none of the latter receiving a cent of salary. The college broke away from Henry Holt’s in Florida with a loud academic scandal.)92 Every now and then I sallied into New York for a few days among the New York wits (Alex Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Marc Connolly) or the theatre people (Jed Harris, Ruth Gordon).
Muriel93 had lunch with me one day, but I had something contrary on my mind that day and I must have been a wretched companion. She seemed very well and full of life, though in suspense about the publisher’s opinion of her book.
¶ When Jeanne was assembling her armor she told some of her company that they would find her sword behind the altar of the Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois at Tours. And sure enough there it was covered with dust. They asked her if she had ever seen it: she said no, but that her Voices had told her about
As a person she was certainly a saint; as a historical phenomen
Well, I wish I could stop off here and talk to you all evening about her, you knitting beside the fire of piñon wood. Perhaps late Summer we can climb into the car and go down and see it.
Give my regard to Tony; and count me among your happiest and most devoted visitors.
Sincerely yours
Thornton
126. TO J. DWIGHT DANA. ALS 1 p. Private
University of Chicago
May 16 1934
Dear Dwight:
Thank you for the annual statement. Contents noted.
Enclosed find FIRST MOVIE contract. I submitted the treatment within the date indicated. Telegram rec’d from head of Agency Firm (Edington, Vincent, Inc. Equitable Bldg. Hollywood.) “Entire office enthusiastic about your magnificent treatment of Joan of Arc.” They passed it on in twenty mimeographed copies to the firm of RKO which is now, under Clause 4, ¶ 2, required to notify me as to whether they liked it enough to call me back under the option. If they rec’d the treatment, say on May 5th, they must get word to me within two weeks—that is: by Sunday. Then I have ten days to decide whether I want to go back and work on it for a measely $13,500. And I guess I will. It will be a good picture.
Clause 4 troubles me a little. I must furnish completed work within sixty days of their notifying me. I meant: within sixty days of my being at liberty from University work. However if by the letter of the contract I could do it by July 18, although I would prefer doing it by 60 days from June 17. Anyway they’re a very friendly and enlightened firm (Merion C. Cooper, Lawrenceville School, is King; and 1st Lieut. is Kenneth MacGowan,94 long one of the best dramatic critics in N.Y.)
I sent Bonis and Longman’s the first six chapters of my novel and am now polishing off the next six; after that two more to follow.
Many thanks as ever
Sincerely yours
Thornton.
P.S. Last week Ickes offered Bob H. the post of Commissioner for Education for the U.S.A. Bob refused, partly because the salary was insufficient even to pay his insurance. N.B. He ought to have a J. Dwight Dana in his life to give him the sensation of having private means. ¶ P.S. 2: my regards to your partner and my best wishes for the new firm.95 P.S. 3: Last week I turned down Thousands. Sixty four of the greatest banks in the country have taken a nation-wide radio-hook-up hour. Music—Tibbett, Bori etc.96 and talks to persuade a singed public that the banks are nice kind institutions that love their depositors. I was to deliver pocket sermons and tabloid success stories of farmers’ boys who ROSE. I felt I had your permission to refuse that “opportunity for usefulness.”
T.
127. TO JOSEF ALBERS.97 ALS 4 pp. Albers Foundation
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven Conn.
July 1 1934
Dear Mr. Albers:
It was fine to hear from you and to know that your work goes on (and now in oil and in wood carving!) and that you have been finding continual audiences for the work here and abroad.
I am very ashamed of not having written you before. My delay was due to the fact that so far my efforts had been met with disappointment. The approaches I made to introduce your work in Chicago (The Arts Club and a dealer of modern art) were met always with the greatest interest, but with the word that one must wait: all the long difficult fight to persuade people to learn abstract painting has been done in the French school; and that they are not ready yet to adjust their
eyes to that wholly new series of approaches which is the German abstract. Braque, Picasso and Gris and Léger have only recently become “classics” in Chicago, and the “Governors of the Public Taste” are going to consolid
Similarly, I have talked with Daniel Rich of the Art Institute School of your distinguished teaching gifts. I shall have an opportunity to repeat and insist during the Summer for I hear that he will be in New Mexico when I am there.
However I am very happy to help you approach Mr. Harshe.98 I don’t remember ever having met him, but I probably must have at one time for a minute at some function or other.
It is only a matter of time and patience until you find the audiences and appreciation over here that your gifts have found in Europe. I shall continue to work on the matter in such ways as my contacts permit and hope someday to have a small share in the pride of having been useful to you.
Please give my regard to Mrs Albers and receive my thanks again for the help your methods and your work gave me in understanding the modes of art that lie ahead of us in the next century.
Sincerely yours
Thornton
128. TO ISABELLA N. AND ISABEL WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Aug. 25 1934
Dear Gairls
Suddenly there was a flurry Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Goldwyn wanted Paul Green and me to see the just finished “We Live Again”99 (Tolstoi’s Resurrection). Something was wrong with it; and we were to tell him what it was. Well, we told him,—the ending was suddenly, cheaply unpreparedly happy. “Gentlemen, I throw myself on your mercy. I want you each” (including Praskins the original author of the script) “to write a big closing scene. We have only one day to shoot it—Friday, because Fredric March” (who plays Dmitri) “is going to Tahiti and can only give us one day’s work.”