The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  Bob Hutchins spends much time in earnest talk with Pres. Roosevelt. What’s going to come of it, I don’t know. ¶ Good Alex Woollcott is in town and I’m going down to dinner with him. ¶ I love my classes, and my classes like me. ¶ I’ve given up worrying

  anxiety

  nail-biting

  and I hope you have too.

  I hope my twelve sons will one day remember me as smiling and serene. In my house no one will be permitted to mention MONEY. ¶ The view from my window is very beautiful,—mostly sky.

  yr. loving son

  Thornton

  135. TO J. DWIGHT DANA. TL (Copy)123 1 p. Private

  The University of Chicago

  December 9, 1934, a Sunday.

  Dear Dwight:

  This is your crazy client speaking.

  Sometime before Christmas you’ll get a long distance phone call from New York; a certain John Ely will want to make an appointment with you.

  He wants me to be the editor of a class woman’s magazine. Like Good Housekeeping, only with the new unstuffy realistic smartness that is coming across the urban mind and that has been developed by the New Yorker and Time. There have been countless disasters in the effort to bring out a new magazine; only two have succeeded since 1900, the two named above. All the rest, especially in the woman’s world, are old and are gradually slipping and getting out of touch with the new mentality. Mr Ely’s will be forwarded for a selected superior clientele, beginning gradually.

  Ely’s own business is selling advertising and promoting schemes. He claims to be the last word in the engineering power of space-selling to advertisers. He claims complete ignorance about the editorial end; but how he can sell space. We’ll make a million in no time; yes, sir.

  He has all the figures to show you, with the plans for selling stock and so on. He claims I would have to put no money in it myself, beyond buying one of the four hundred shares. All profits he divides equally with me. He has a complete staff of women under me experienced in food products, fashion adice etc. All I do is lend my name, build in ideas, select the fiction, and have an editorial talent in choice of illustrators, jokes, and so on.

  There’s no pressure on you or me to accept it. But I wish you’d listen to him and look over the diagrams.

  Why should I even consider it? For the same reason that I go to Hollywood: adventure, color, the exhilaration of even pretending that I have a part to play in the immense bright stream of Twentieth Century activities. These things have no relation to my midnight secret life of literary composition. I’m Jekyll and Hyde. With the side of me which is not Poet, and there’s lots of it, I like to do things, meet people, restlessly experiment in untouched tracts of my Self, be involved in things, make decisions, pretend that I’m a man of action.

  We have made no commitments. Listen to his story; see if its sound as business; the only thing we risk is its being dull.124

  (Thornton Wilder)125

  136. TO C. LESLIE GLENN. ALS 3 pp. Yale

 

 

  Dear and royal Les:

  What a louse I am.

  But the Bible commands you to forgive me 70 × 7 and I, the louse, greedily point to it and profit.

  “I think,” “as far as I know”, “probably” “very likely” I shall be back April first 1936 to teach the Spring Quarter. The University has now given me one year off—April to April. Maybe with plays on Broadway or something or other I shall not return. But I don’t know any reason now why I shouldn’t, except that I teach worse and worse in the classroom itself—tho’ if I do say it, I get better and better as a “campus character” in general circulation, accessible to all comers. Some mornings I rise up and swear that I shall never teach again, that I must go away and become a writer etc. Other days I rise up and love it, the everything, the classes, the tumult on the stairs of Cobb Hall.

  What a silly pathless creature I am.

  People are still writing to tell me of their contempt for my book “that I made fun of religion to earn money for myself.”126

  Amos had a kind of nervous breakdown. CONFIDENTIAL. Phobias and tics. Started off by intestinal flu. He feels much better now.

  I didn’t give Geo Brush enough of the intermittent moments of joy and reassurance. They are his due. The diagram of goodness was falsified by not exhibiting also its occasional inner reward. That was very bad of me; I was so intense about his troubles that I didn’t think of it. SO my next book won’t be harrowing: it will give pleasure. ADSIT DEUS.127

  At present I am the secretary, errand boy-companion of Gertrude Stein who is teaching here for two weeks—a great, sensible, gallant gal and a great treat.128

  Yes, yes, we’ve been narrowing religion. I’ve been reading Goethe.129 For a time we can go out among the vaguer theists and pan- theists and borrow for a while the Alpine airs of their cosmos-wide views; then come back to our personal aspects again without being harmed. It will be the right pendulum swing from the 19th century thing, that was so closely “God told me I should give up tobacco.”

  It’s twelve-thirty. I must lecture on the Antigone at 800 tomorrow. I must send you back to your spiritual exercize of “forgiving”. All my best to Georgie & the chillun.

  Love me beyond my desserts or however it’s spelled.

  Ever

  Thorny

  137. TO J. DWIGHT DANA. ALS 2 pp. Private

  University of Chicago

  April 9 1935

  Dear Dwight:

  Don’t be mad.

  I gotta do this.

  There’s a very brilliant student here, in philosophy and metaphysics.

  His father’s a superintendant in Swift’s, but he has a large family and can’t do very much for the young man who must go abroad for a year’s study rather than stew along in our Grad. School which is very poor in Philosophy.

  I would like you as soon as possible to send $60000 to

  Fred. R. Davis

  6827 Dante St

  Chicago

  with a word that you had been asked to do it by Wilder for the further education of his son Robert.

  Mr. Davis, Sr, and Mrs Davis have already talked this over with me and know that it is coming.

  I assure you this is a very brilliant investment in the future. Two of his profs have already told him that he has struck upon a developement in the theory of Time that seems extremely important and Gertrude Stein had a talk with him on it (metaphysics is one of her preoccupations, too) and she told me she thought he was remarkable.

  So concede me this.

  I’m sending you some other material on other matters, (royalties etc) tomorrow.

  Ever sincerely

  Thornton

  138. TO LEWIS STILES GANNETT.130 ALS 4 pp. Harvard

  University of Chicago

  April 16 1935

  Dear Mr. Gannett:

  I’ve had a minor nervous shake-down lately and dare not fling myself into a long letter about my enthusiasm for this university. I went to Yale and did graduate work at Princeton; through some friends I have seen a good deal of Harvard. The classical American education as viewed on the Eastern seaboard is really all wrong: it trains (in imitation of England) for a ruling class; America has no such thing. It trains for a 19th Century image of what is Important, True and Beautiful. Their very buildings as architecture educate badly. And the faint steam of money that rises from everything, (the Morgan Bros partners among the trustees—Yale spent 33,000<,>000 on buildings alone during the depression), the gentility tone, the dilettante radicalism, the unvital view of taste,—all 19th Century.

  We live in the 2nd most beautiful city in the world; and the city most characteristic of what the next 50 years will be like. We are very contemporaneous. Hutchins has drawn a curriculum directed squarely at his picture of a gifted, realist, excited student. North, West and South of us are great universities with over 10,000 students each—Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Illinois—we have 3,000 undergrads and 3,000 grads.—T
hey are free, famous for their football and fraternity racket-ting and for their laxity in class-grades. We cost 100 dollars a quarter; have long had lamentable football and have a reputation for being difficult in studies: so by natural selection only those students who have heard about the intellectual life come to us. We have had 5 Nobel prizemen on the faculty and the atmosphere of no-nonsense austerity in the Grad schools has drifted down through the whole mass. Hence we are a slightly cold-hearted university; of a laboratory unsentimentality.

  Think it over.

  We are bad for certain kinds of students, I confess; but hundreds of them thrive on it.

  Yours for the whistling high airs of the 20th Century.

  Selah!131

  Sincerely yours

  Thornton Wilder

  139. TO WILLIAM FRAZIER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed On board the / Cunard / R.M.S. “Ascania” ) Rice

  July 5 1935

  c/o American Express Co

  Rue Scribe

  Paris, France

  Dear Mr. Frazier:

  Please forgive my delay in answering your letter. My teaching schedule all Spring at the University of Chicago was so hard that I finally got a little shaken in health because of it. I obtained a year’s leave of absence and am now sufficiently recovered to take up my correspondence again.

  Your letter interested me very much and on the whole I am sympathetic with your & George Brush’s position. I hope that in a rereading of the book you have been able to see that I am not making fun of the hero. His instinctive goodness and his instinctive view of what is essential in living is far superior to the groups among which he moves. But I hold that he has been badly educated—badly educated even in religion. The fundamentalist tradition in American protestantism has made into fixed hard unimaginative laws the substance of the Gospel. All that is censorious, literal and joyless in the Calvinistic-Methodist-Baptist tradition is based upon a misreading of the New Testament and a failure to see that most of that tone in the Old Testament is expressly superceded in the New.

  However I meant George Brush to be seen as learning in episode and episode better how to render his instinctive goodness and unworldliness effective. It’s an Education Novel. I didn’t write the close clearly enough, I see now: I meant to show George Brush disappearing into the distance still doing many things that are absurd in the eyes of the average hardboiled citizen, but nevertheless exhibiting the advance he had made over the position he held in the opening pages.

  I intended that everyone should find something of his or her self in George Brush,—and of the best of themselves, too. I know that much of my father and my brother and myself is there, and many people recognize themselves in him. I was very glad to get your word to the same effect, and hope a second reading will remove your feeling that I wrote it to make fun of great and good qualities

  Sincerely yours

  Thornton Wilder

  140. TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  Salzburg Austria. Sept. 13. <1935>

  Next Tuesday (and then until Xmas) c/o

  American Express Co.

  Vienna.

  Dear Mabel:

  I’m not only a silly fellow; I am downright crazy.

  How could I have written you the enclosed letter and then never mailed it.

  Now you will have reams of letter and that is no favorable light for any letter writer.

  Paris was no more lovable than I had expected; but the Italian Art Show132 was very wonderful indeed.

  I stayed eight days with Gertrude Stein at Bilignin. Automobile trips in the environs; an intense preoccupation with two dogs; Alice B Toklas’s sublime housekeeping; and Gertrude Stein’s difficult magnificent and occasionally too abstract and faintly disillusioned alpine wisdom about the Human Mind, identity, the sense of time and How we Know. I am devoted to both of them, but in the presence of Gertrude’s gifts one must occasionally scramble pretty hard to realize one’s self, collect it, encourage it, and trust it. (All that is of course, very confidential.)

  The Salzburg Festival was an unprecedented success this year. The tiny streets rocked with Rolls-Royce’s and English accents. The central point was the incredibly elegant tense and diamond-sharp figure of Toscanini calling out the horns. Time after Time Heaven was taken by violence and capitulated. Bruno Walter alternated on the Mozart evenings and wooed the ensemble, like a gentle and grieving father, begging the musicians to give him the next ten bars quite perfectly, please.

  Reinhardt’s production of Faust has ghosts of circus and Ziegfeld, but commits the mistakes that it requires genius to commit.133 And at the heart of it there is a little simple wonderful Gretchen who grows from gentleness to terror and madness and builds the greatest performance I have ever seen.

  My philosopher-friend and I have hiked through scores of vallies between Dolomites and peaks and passes and glaciers.134 But at last I am very restless to settle down and work—horrified that so much of my vacation has gone by

  “And my late Spring no bud nor blossom sheweth.”135

  Vienna is very gossipy—intriguing—personality immersed capital and already from contacts made at the Festival its networks of hospitality-cum-self-interest have begun to stifle me.

  I shall probably have to go to that hill forty-five minutes away to live. I dont pretend that the temptation to waste the weeks in going and seeing and grouping comes entirely from without; its within too, and I must manage it. At all events, it very unlike the wonderful lucid hours in your valley, when the hours fall one after another, invitations to one’s best expectations of one’s self and enhanced not interrupted by your splendid self.

  All my best to you both.

  Ever

  Thornton

  141. TO AMOS N. AND CATHARINE K. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

  American Express Co.

  14 Kärtnerring Vienna1

  Sept 22 1935

  My dear Brother and Sister:

  A thousand greetings.

  Selah!

  Just a word to you before the war breaks out and before I have to slip across borders by night dressed as a Rumanien jewelry peddler.

  I think of you as having everything I haven’t got. You have a home, a continuity, a job. I’ve loved my European trip, yes’mam, the boat; the stay at Fontainbleau, the walks in those woods, the stay with the wise and kind G. Stein, and the hikes through the Tyrol, and The Festival at Salzburg with the giant activities of Toscanini and Reinhardt, and now Vienna with its bewildering hospitality—but I’m longing to settle down, as you have, and start a routine of working and reading and of quiet evenings at home. I think I can begin it about next week, but until then I remain a hotel-room boy surrounded by cracked and overflowing suitcases.

  My German, anyway, is coming on apace, and the Hong Kong-Shanghai beginning apparently placed the vowels and consonants correctly in my mouth. My reading-German has likewise so far improved that I can tear up and down Goethe and Thomas Mann and Freud like they was English.

  I guess there’s going to be a War soon. Italy had 500,000 men in manoevres in their northernmost mountains when I was there and now your Geneva136 is on pins and needles. How you two must be watching that: the immense gain in prestige that is possible; the irreperable loss that is possible. Amputated, strangled Austria hasn’t money enough to buy a cannon even, so the Austrians sit in cafés all day over one mokka and wax witty about dictators and empires. Delightful people with something both oriental and mediterranean in their attitude to leisure.

  So you see there is no real news to tell you, but I send you my cordialest fraternal affection.

  Ever

  Thorny

  142. TO HILDA DOOLITTLE.137 ALS 4 pp. Yale

  American Express Co.

  Kärntnerring 14

  Vienna1

  Oct 2. 1935

  Dear H. D.:

  I am a contrary erratic urchin. Scarcely had I arrived in town, (after some splendid Tyrolian hik
ing and some great music at Salzburg) and been given the heaping schlagobers138 of Viennese hospitality, when I suddenly became a surly hermit and retired up here at the Hotel Cobenzl to work. It’s not really to work, yet, but it’s a mood, long walks in the autumnal woods, desultory reading of the Austrian classics—Grillparzer, Nestroy, Stifter139—and a pleasant non-dejected brooding. So I have not presented yet the letters you so thoughtfully enclosed. When in this solitude my inner monologue gets too loud and wants group-life again I shall descend from the hill and knock at doors again.

  You ask which Greek plays America has had a look at in the last few years:

  Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—bad productions every few years. Sophocles’ Electra (Mrs Pat Campbell as Clytemnestra. Also Eugene O’Neils Mourning Becomes Electra which was immensely successful rehashed the whole Agamemnon subject-matter.)

  Euripides’ Medea, given by both Blanche Yurka and Margaret Anglin. It is about to be revived with a fine negro actress as the wild woman from Colchis.

  Euripides’ Trojan Women was given a few matinées by a Peace Propaganda Society. The Yale University Dramatic Society with a woman guest-star gave Hyppolitus (G. Murray) so well that there is talk of reviving it in New York but perhaps not.

  The public must by now have forgotten Granville Barker’s immense stadium productions (New York, Yale and Harvard) of The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris.

  The Bacchae was a great success in two of the girls’ colleges, but has not been seen in New York. The Lysistrata of Aristophanes ran for two years all over the country.

  So: how about the Alcestis? or the Iphigenia in Aulus? or perhaps a new Hyppolitus.