The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 30
I have seen Dr. Modern from time to time and always with pleasure. And she has been very helpful in finding a room for my friend, Robert Davis.
If I return by London or Paris, I shall look forward to some good talks, and the pleasure of reading your MS.
Ever Sincerely
Thornton Wilder
143. TO GERTRUDE STEIN AND ALICE B. TOKLAS. ALS 4 pp. Yale
American Exp Co Kärmtnerring
Oct 14, 1935, a beautiful autumn afternoon.
Dear Friends:
So I shall see the Rue de Fleurus140 at last and my friends in it. And the pictures around them.
I still don’t know when. I beg you not to change your plans one jot—because I can come to you in either place perfectly well. I still haven’t the faintest notion when I’m leaving here. There’s so much in town here that vexes me, the kind assiduities of authors, playwrights and stage directors—such phone-calls, such<.> When can I talk to you about New York, and Perhaps you can tell me which are the best literary agents. Such meetings in café-houses. The way strangers call up and ask for an appointment is the limit. And even if I were hard as nails about putting them off what can I do, if at social gatherings every body wants to make an engagement for a good long talk, freighted with self-interest.
Excuse all this self-pity.
There are compensations. Prof Freud was told that I had expressed (under pressure, but certainly true) a wish to see him, and he asked me to go yesterday at 4:15 to his villa in Grinzing. I was all alone with him for an hour and a half, and it was fine. He’s seventy nine. He talked of many things: “I don’t do anything any more …. loss of interest … satiety … impotence.” “The poet we call Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford … the sonnets are addressed to Wriothesley who was about to marry Oxford’s daughter when Oxford fell in love with him himself.” “I could not read your latest book … I threw it away. Why should you treat of an American fanatic; that cannot be treated poetically.” “My sister-in law admires your Cabala the most; I do not think so.” (One of the characters makes a slighting reference to Freud in it!) “I am no seeker after God. I come of an unbroken line of infidel Jews. My father was a Voltairean. My mother was pious, and until 8 I was pious; but one day my father took me out for a walk in the Prater—I can remember it perfectly and explained to me that there was no way that we could
Really a beautiful old man.
What a lucky boy am I. My cup runneth over.
For my own help and for the pleasure of it I have begun a vast apparatus of pencilled glosses on the margin of your MS; but I shall erase it all before you can see it.143 That’s the way I close in on it and really digest. And the more I see, the more I see. ’Küss’ die Hand.144
Robert’s German goes on like wild fire. He has started at the University. He is reading the book, slowly, intensely and devotedly. I hope he’ll write you about it; but his awe of you and his distrust in himself have awful battles.
I have the courage to write, anyway—even if its such shifty, disorganized letters as these last. The trouble with me is that I can’t be soul-happy outside of my beloved U.S.A and that’s a fact. So I think I’m sailing from Havre or Southhampton on Nov. 2. But first I’ll have five days in Paris and every day I’m going to pay a call on two of my most loved Americans in the world. Oh, say can you see what I mean. So again Küss
144. TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT. ALS 8 pp. (Stationery embossed The Graduates Club / New Haven, Connecticut
50 Deepwood Drive
Dec 1. 1935
second snowfall of the season, Connecticut
very beautiful.
Dear Alick:
It was a great disappointment to find you gone, disappointment that practically ran to grievance.
Lot of things that happen to me take a sheen on them from the thought that they can someday be recounted to you.
Yes, my encounters with Picasso and my conversations with Freud and my idolatry of Daisy Fellowes and my account of Colette disciplining her cat, and certain confidentialissima about Gertrude Stein,—all these things have begun to fester within me for lack of your sardonic receptivity.145
Joe Hennessy146 tells me you’ll be back in January. I’m afraid that by that time they will
Max Beerbohm, Alexander Woollcott, TNW.
Max Beerbohm, Alexander Woollcott, TNW. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 305
Anyway I’m so devoted to you that I think the stuff will be shocked into its pristine state for you.
My father is in extremis, surrounded by nurses.
Amos and his bride spent Th-ks-ng Day with us. Very happy.
Thursday afternoon I have been asked to tea with Eleanora von Mendelssohn147 who has a project to propose.
I am writing a work of humor, and am rereading Frank Stockton.148 Is he an emerging American classier
G. Stein has written a very good book. I don’t know yet whether it’s a very great book. She does. Bennett Cerf149 says the rewards of her previous ones were so slender that he doesn’t dare publish this one (“The Geographical History of America, or the Relations between Human Nature and the Human Mind”.) Gertrude and Daisy Fellowes and P. Picasso (and Bennett Cerf) want it to be published with the text on one side and my explanatory marginalia on the other, reproduced in my own handwriting. I don’t want to do that. It’s true that I can clarify many an apparently willful inanity and (by the help of those wonderful conversations show it to be brilliant phrasing and thinking, but there are long stretches I cannot; and its those stretches where the pretentious explicator ought to be strong<)>.
Sybil says that a number of Noël’s plays are very fine indeed.
I’ve been reading all your Reader, with great pleasure and your afterwords are happy as they can be, esp. the one about me.150
¶ Forgive me, but Lynne Fontaine is all wrong about Katharina.151 Slight as Shakespeare’s drawing may appear it has richer implications than that. (signed: Prof. Wilder.)
Give my best to Scrivener Brown;152 and come back to a great big bear’s hug from your unestrangeaballe
devoted
Thornton
145. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 2 pp. NYU
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven Conn.
Jan 23rd 1936
Dear Sybil:
Your letter was so good and interesting that I want to answer it at once.
I saw Aleck yesterday. He went off the air because his sponsors objected to his discussing �
�controversiable subjects,” meaning sundry polysyllabic slurs on Hitler and Mussolini.153 Aleck refused to promise to restrain himself and his contract was not renewed. He devoted his last broadcast to a fiery discussion of Free Speech. He became increasingly conscious of his vast audience (he let fall casually the words “eight million”) and was moving more and more into pathos, moral indignation and the righting of wrongs. He espoused the ‘Seeing Eye’ (training dogs for the blind); then a certain lady who collected cast off spectacles to distribute among the poor (his announcement of this good work practically crippled the postal service on Long Island); then poor Mr. Lampson, an administrator of Stanford University in California whose wife slipped and drowned herself in the bath, but who was sentenced to die for her murder.
His next book however will belie all this ethical responsibility. It will be called the Brotherhood of the French Poodle Owners, and will treat of Graham Robinson and his Mouton. Booth Tarkington and his Figaro, Gertrude Stein and her Basket, and himself and his Pip. He may be flying abroad in a few weeks to gather material for this work; if you see him, pretend that this is news to you.
The dejections of the Summer are all over, and he says that he never felt better in his life.
Two weeks ago I went to Philadelphia to be by at the opening of “Ethan Frome.” It was like a big three-day house party at the Hotel Ritz. Conversation until half past three every night. Pauline Lord, Ruth Gordon, Raymond Massey, Keith Winter, Helen Hayes’ mother, Guthrie McClintic (who staged it) and K. Cornell, vacationing between Juliet and Joan.154 The atmosphere was one of an assured success, since justified by the opening in New York two days ago. Ruth was sublime: every year sees the approach to final triumph of intelligence, will and character over a host of disadvantages. The disadvantages were voice, appearance, lack of a sense of “dress”, undependable taste arising from her environment when a girl, and the heart-wrenching and career-blocking association to Jed. All New York giggled fifteen years ago when she forced a doctor to break her knees in order to straighten her legs; well, it’s a sample, anyway, of the incredible determination. Fortunately, on top of it she has genius and intelligence. Within five years she’ll be the first actress here. Its Mrs Fiske, over again. It’s Rejane.155
I no longer get much pleasure from theatre-going but I never get tired of the atmosphere about theatres. The only other occasion that rivaled the Philadelphia visit was a hotel-house-party at Atlantic City surrounding the try-out of Mr. Gilhooly156 of Liam O’Flaherty: Helen Hayes, Charlie McArthur, Aleck Woollcott and Jed. Jed was then worth two million, insolent and brilliant. Charlie the greatest raconteur of dreadful long macabre stories of Chicago gangster death cells (and of the vie amoureuse157 of David Belasco); and all the while Aleck brilliant and waspish with envy of the only two better talkers than himself in America. Very funny.
In two weeks I say goodbye to the family for a long time: two months’ lecture-tour and then teaching at Chicago the whole Spring and Summer Quarters. The tour is an ignoble affair: I no longer believe what I say, no longer “hear” what I say. The only thing to my credit is that I manage to get through the tour without saying Capital I. The travelling involved is wonderful to me; I take endless long walks in the suburbs of the cities. This trip carries me all the way to Los Angeles and brings me two new cities, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Hutchins Christmas card: MPMH is Mrs Hutchin, Maude Phelps McVeigh. She comes of the McVeighs of Virginia, a line of thrilling distinction she often tells us. The angel on the card was colored by her daughter Franja, aetat circa VIII.
(Boston Jan. 28 1936. Up here a few days to see my brother and new sister; and to take long walks through old streets and to see the Museum which is incandescent with Van Der Weyden’s St. Luke painting the Virgin)
Thanks for the suggestion of Miss Bowen’s A House in Paris.158 I shall get to it right off.
Broadway theatre is being described by its admirers as being “at its best” this year. I havent seen many of its successes. At Helen Hayes’ Victoria the box office feels itself insulted if one asks for a ticket before April.159 The wonder child of promise, Clifford Odett’s looked long at Chekhov and confused the Russian diffuseness with Jewish nervous-system fever. He offers the tableau as a demonstration of the spiritual bankruptcy of the American Middle Class. Bankrupt we may be, but our symptoms aren’t the same as those in the Gordon Family of “Paradise Lost.”160 At the final curtain there is his customary motto-speech to the effect that none of the exhibited anguishes would be possible under the communist state. Well, Leopardi161 in his journals, after hearing some Utopians talk all night wrote: “I seemed to hear them claim that out of a million contented citizens they could be sure of a million happy souls.” (I thanked you before, I hope, for calling my attention to the Marchesa Origo’s book162 and the reading that flowed from it.)
Jed has sent me Elizabeth Femme sans Homme. I am to report with the speed of light whether I think he ought to produce it. Dull scenes up until 10:15 and then two very interesting scenes, too interesting, illegitimately interesting.163
Your description of Sacha Guitry’s collection of letters164 is enough to make one weep. And the abbé Mugnier, too.165
Forgive these loose jottings. I’ll hope to do better on the tour.
Ever devotedly
Thornton
146. TO CHARLOTTE E. WILDER. Wire 1 p. Yale
CHICAGO ILL MAR 22 <1936>
MISS CHARLOTTE WILDER=313 WEST 25 ST=
DEAR SHARLIE I THINK ITS SPLENDID POWERFUL AND GLORIOUSLY ORIGINAL HAVE NO QUALMS HOMAGE AND CONGRATULATIONS=166
THORNTON.
147. TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT. ALS 4 pp. Harvard
6020 Drexel
Aug 15 1936
Lost my fountain-pen
Dear Alick:
I love you.
Troubling and preposterous fact.
But human nature being what it is, candor compels me to add that I love you for what you can do for me.
The soul of man is a sink-hole of greed, self-interest and malice.
But let us at least confess it and by robbing it of its deceptions, so rob it of half its terrors
As Edmund Burke said.
Today, I love you wolfishly because I have just rec’d my royalties from the Woollcott Reader and they’re enormous.
Can I lend you some, by any chance? Can I put you under obligation—to me in anyway? Just write me—simply and without hesitation—if I can.
MGM says it won’t invite me unless I promise to come for more than six weeks. So I said until Dec 5.
What do you suppose it is? Pride and Prejudice for Norma Shearer? There are rumors of a Benjamin Franklin for Charles Laughton.167
Oh, Aleck. I suddenly remembered your jacket. I’ve got the string—and I’ll get the box and paper Monday. Don’t be mad. All will end well.
I was sublime on the two Oedipuses the other day—sublime.
These last months I’ve been as happy; what do you suppose it is? Do you suppose the approach of forty is bringing me to my natural age? All my friends are nail-biting, full of alarms and most of them have cause; Spain and England are in a bad way; Germany and Italy are enjoying the brutish state of cattle—but nothing casts me down. I even enjoy my thoughts. Chicago—the only oceanic city in the world—is very beautiful these days.
It just occured to me: Perhaps its God!
If I count you not among my chiefest joys may my right hand lose it’s cunning.
Yr. devoted and cunning
Thornton
148. TO JANET F. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Port Castries St. Lucia British West Indies168
Nov. 16 1936
Dear Janet:
It’s beautiful here. Tropics—mahogonany, banyan, iguanas, mangoes, volcanoes, beautiful seas, noble blacks.
So hot that I can’t take very many of my long-walks.
Everywhere ants. Millions of ’em.
Sea-b
athing is overrated; water so tepid. I yearn for the slap of a cold wave. Oh, to look at a snowflake.
How are you, sweetness?
At St Thomas in the Virgin Islands where I spent four weeks, there was a Miss Lilienfeld, official geneticist to the Emperor of Japan. She works on the exceptions to Mendel’s Law. Do you find her name in your learnéd journals?169
Dearie, in the Virgin Islands the early Danish planters introduced the Mongoose to kill the snakes, which they did. They also tormented the rats which promptly took to the trees and have ever since made their homes up among the coconuts. The mongooses also killed off most of the birds. On Dominica the planters introduced the fer-de-lance so that their slaves would not run away into the bush. Now the fer-de-lance abound and the planters’ children sitting in the public park with their governesses are bitten and die. MORAL: do not interfere in nature’s ecological equilibrium rashly.
I arrive in NY Nov. 30; Dec 6-10 at Berea; then Chicago.170 Save me a meal.
I miss Chicago and the campus, honey, and you in the middle of it. Whatjadooin? Are you well? Are you heart-whole? I feel a thousand miles away; I don’t even know if you’ve received yet the inheritance of your pa. Lordy, if you get much richer you’ll be wearing evening gowns by day. ¶ Give my best to Gladys;171 keep some of the Fine Arts ventilating your scientific life; when you’re hesitating as to whether to buy a new dress or hat, swallow hard and do it. ¶ My love to the Lillies.172
It won’t do any good to answer this letter because I’ll be there in no time and will wring more facts out of you than you would choose to put down on paper.
Be gentle as the serpent and wise as the dove. Like the Bible says.
Your
Thornton
149. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER AND ISABEL WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale