The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  And the effect of it on the two daughters!

  The Wilders are fine. Isabel at last starts in this week on a job. She is to be assistant to the supervisor of the Connecticut branch of Federal Writers Project. Charlotte will have after many years a volume of prose ready this spring—Proust-like evocations of her childhood in Berkeley and China. Janet rec’d her PHD from the University of Chicago and is teaching at Mt. Holyoke. Amos’s Katharine is about to give us another baby.21 Mother is fine.

  Is it still possible you will be over this Spring. When I get back to New York I shall verify through Lee Keedick and Mr. McCullough how things are progressing.

  (Tuesday—back in New York)

  A letter came from you this morning. I deserve your reproaches, but shall mend my ways.

  I called up Lee Keedick today. He is out of town but his secretary (an old friend of mine—that demon of personalizing everything always sets me to wooing secretaries—yes. yes, it’s to take the curse off business transactions and to apologize for the exchange of moneys) tells me that some important decision on the matter of your tour is to be reached this week.

  Now I’m reading another splendid book: The letters of Madame du Deffand to H. Walpole.22 The absurdity, the agony, the dazzling crystalline French—“les grandes passions sont celles de quatre-vingt ans” said Disraeli.

  How I wish, dear sister-stars, that I could rush into your dear sitting room (amid barking) and kiss you on both cheeks and read the MS of Paris, France.23

  Ever thine

  Thornton

  176. TO SOL LESSER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) UCLA

  Easter night

  Dear Sol:

  Sure, I see what you mean.

  In the first place, I think Emily should live. I’ve always thought so. In a movie you see the people so close to that a different relation is established. In the theatre they are halfway abstractions in an allegory; in the movie they are very concrete. So in so far as the play is a Generalized Allegory she dies—we die—they die; in so far as it’s a Concrete Happening it’s not important that she die; it’s even disproportionately cruel that she die. Let her live—the idea will have been imparted anyway.

  But if she lives, I agree with you that after all that grave-yard material the survival may seem too arbitrary and abrupt and out of relation to the Stage-Manager presiding over the experience.

  Hence:

  Your first suggestion is fine.

  sick-in-bed we hear her say, faintly: I want to live! I want to live.

  Then the whole graveyard sequence and the return to the birthday and back to the sick bed; and a louder “I want to live.”

  This may give the impression that all the intervening material was a dream or hallucination that took place in a second of time—that is: between her second and third cries of “I want to live”—which is the right idea.24

  Now as to the stage-manager’s relation:

  I don’t think we have to ask whether Emily has told him her “dream”. I like to think that the audience even in this version, can accept that he knows everything.

  I suggest that in the place you mention, Frank says:

  “Out at Emily’s and George’s farm, though, they’re still up—talking over the new baby” then a moment’s pause, and a look straight into the audience: “—the new baby that Emily’s been able to live for.” Then the view of the room through the window, … and perhaps adding during it, a sort of grunt and: Its like one of those European fellas said: <“>Every child born into the world etc. etc.” That might send the audience home with a better taste in their mouth (if the implications of the return-to-the-birthday scene have given a repudiation-of-life sensation, as it did to so many during the stage-representations.)

  I’ve just laid this before the family and they like it; but if you still think we should look farther, drop my a card and I’ll fire back with some more.

  You know how delighted I am at the fine testimonies that have come in to you about the picture.

  Cordially ever

  Thornton

  177. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 4 pp. NYU

  The MacDowell Colony

  Peterborough, N.H.

  June 14 1940

  Dear, dear Sibyl:

  What times, what things to live through! The mind cannot grasp a small part of the agony undergone, and of the further disasters possible.

  Your word months ago that you were sure it would be a long war terrified me, but now I draw comfort from it. Long enough to sustain the best we know, and long enough for America to help.

  A few days ago I received a letter from Lynn and Alfred asking me to telegraph the President and my Senator in answer to President Conant’s (of Harvard) appeal to expedite the means whereby material could be sent abroad; I had already sent off the telegrams. All too slowly the formalities in Washington are unrolling to some effectiveness.

  The Middle West remains obstinately “isolationist”, but even that is thawing with a swiftness unprecedented among us—but can it be swift enough to match the acceleration of historical action as we see it taking place abroad.

  Each day seems more in crisis than the last—in a few minutes I go back to the “main house” to see what has happened today—and so, each night and each morning.

  June 17.

  Waiting. Waiting.

  And now the news of France’s capitulation.

  All I can do is send to you my love and a thousand thoughts you can divine, and over here to exert myself in every way I know to make people realize that our aid and participation is essential—to some I can put it (for it is no less true) as pure self-interest; to others and to myself I put it Humitarianism = Civilization. A civilization without instinctive brother-participation with the Thing-France and the Thing-England is no civilization.

  Let the thought of me enter as a whisper into your dejected moments and as a voice into your moments of courage, fortitude and hope.

  Ever affectionately

  Thornton

  178. TO RICHARD BEER-HOFMANN. ALS 4 pp. Harvard

  Returning Friday to 50 Deepwood Drive New Haven, Conn August 6. 1940

  (Cohasset, Mass.)

  Dear Dr. Beer-Hofmann:

  How often during these months of vast and terrible events have I longed to sit with you and hear and feel your contemplation of them.

  I continue to receive letters—veiled by the exigencies of the censorship, but nevertheless very significant—from a friend in London, and from Miss Gertrude Stein who remained through a deluge of refugees and German soldiers in her house a few miles below Lyons.

  I don’t know whether Dr. Steiner25 has told you the story I told him: how that I drove a long distance across the state of Vermont, full of happy expectation of seeing you—to Woodstock, Vermont,—inquired for you at the Post Office, telephone office and telegraph office—only to realize finally that you were in the other Woodstock,—a kind of mistake that I make, alas, too often.

  During the six weeks in the deep green shade and solitude at the MacDowell Colony I at last found my subject for the new play and finished the first act, and on Friday I shall be back in New Haven again, for some months of uninterrupted work upon it. In this one it seems I call upon still free-er uses of the stage, as to scenery, time, abstraction and audience collaboration. This one is sub signo Aristophanis26—the subject is the ordeals that man has had to pass through, including the Ice Age (sic), and the method is buffoonery and lazzi.27 Difficult, difficult, but I hope I can “get it right.” It has all colors in it—violence, anguish, detailed realism of the contemporary American scene, and low comedy—but the color I have most difficulty in encompassing is that Aristophanic intermêde28 of pure dream-like lyric poetry.

  There has not been much application in my reading. I have read Lord Rosebery’s Napoleon: the Last Phase (not very good); Keyserling’s book on South America—a mixture of exalté theorizing and sharp observation; very curious
and often rewarding;29 rereading the little selection of Mozart’s Letters,—glorious stuff; and Kleist’s stories—the despair of narrators.

  Do tell me, dear and noble Doctor, if there is any book I can procure for you; any errand or service I can render. We are suffering many hot days, but I hope that your evenings are cool, and that you find much beauty in the place where you are. Are there some music-makers there? I have been starved of great music this last month and hope to replunge in it, even if only by gramaphone records. Give my devoted regards to Frau Czuczka-Beer-Hofmann, and accept the affectionate greetings and friendship of one

  Sincerely yours

  Thornton Wilder

  179. TO VAN WYCK BROOKS.30 ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed The Century Association / 7 West Forty-Third Street / New York) Pennsylvania

  As from: 50 Deepwood Drive

  New Haven, Conn.

  Sept 18 1940

  Dear Mr. Brooks

  James Joyce is in very straightened circumstances in the South of France. He has begun a new novel. Padraic Colum31 is collecting a few names to append to a letter to the Nobel Award Committee in Sweden. It will be brief and not make large claims for its nominee.

  The following have consented to sign it:

  Archie Mac Leish

  President Hutchins

  Mr. & Mrs Colum

  Eugene Jolas32

  Sinclair Lewis

  Dorothy Thompson.

  I have written Aldous Huxley and Edmund Wilson. If you would also consent to sign it I think I shall venture to approach President Conant. With these names the list would be closed.

  The letter is a purely private one to the chairman in Stockholm and every effort shall be made to prevent its getting into the press.

  Could you drop me a card with your yes or no. Should you feel it inadvisable, we will respect your decision and the matter will remain confidential.33

  Sincerely yours,

  Thornton Wilder

  180. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) NYU

  Sept. 26. 1940

  Dear Sibyl:

  Such thoughts go out to you day by day, and especially night by night, when the ordeal is most drastic. Each days report, the advance and the set-back, I read in the light of Lord North Street and its unquenchable spirit.34

  We have all the feeling that great new resources of confidence are permitted to us. Terrible though the ordeal may still be, you now know some of the things they haven’t been able to do.

  Our country is being rent by the coming election. There is something exhilarating about the very violence of the partisanship. I am fanatically for Roosevelt and of course a large part of my feeling is that more than any man in the country he sees all that we can and must do for the Allies and can put the measures into effect, skillfully driving through the oppositions.

  Last Sunday noon with a group of pro-Roosevelt writers I went to lunch with the President at Hyde Park,—and Sibyl, I looked about—your friends, so many of your friends! (I received an invitation to join the Pro-Willkie Writers Committee; and looking at all the names there was no one I admired except the aged Booth Tarkington, and no one I knew, or that you know, unless it be John Marquand.)

  But there on the lawn at Hyde Park were Alice Duer Miller, Marc Connolly, Beatrice Kaufman<,> Edna Ferber,—a letter from Bob Sherwood was read,—and a dozen others. We are all going on a nationwide broadcast tomorrow night, and may the rightness of our cause give us persuasion and conviction.35

  Woollcott would of course have been there, had he been able.

  Roosevelt will probably win. The relapse of the New York Times from his support and the coolness of Lipman36 and Dorothy Thompson are incomprehensible to me. The opponents’ charges that he is usurping autocratic powers, that he is “conceited”, that he is buying the peoples’ votes with public works, that he is inciting to class-warfare, that he is corrupting the American character by creating a dole population—each of these can be answered so easily. It looks to me like merely the irruption which all political thinkers ascribe to so much political activity—from Plato to Montesquieu—the “sourde”37 deep visceral resentment envy-grudge against the Superior Man. Roosevelt is not a great man, but he’s disinterested, tireless, and so instinctively active and creative that his bravery about it does not look like bravery; free from fanaticism; without spite or retaliation (some anecdotes Bob Hutchins told me: FDR laughs at the discomfiture of his opponents, like a boy who has played a practical joke—not like the snarl of an injured brooder). The great thing is that he’s always doing things and most of them are good.

  There in the shadow of your great war and linked to it is our little one.

  God give you strength, dear Sibyl, and an occasional serenity. My imagination falls short of conceiving a small part of the strain you are under and the thousands of concerns that must pass through your mind every day. From time to time I allow myself to dream of the day when these struggles will be over and we can sit on some beautiful hill-top and turn it all over in silence. May it be in our time that Satan hears again, emerging from his bas-fonds,38 Heaven’s recurrent NO.

  With such love,

  Thornton

  181. TO ZOË AKINS RUMBOLD.39 ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed Chateau Frontenac / Quebec) Huntington

  As from: 50 Deepwood Drive

  New Haven, Conn.

  Nov. 18 1940

  Dear Mrs Rumbold:

  Your kind letter made me walk on air and fills me with pleasure every time I think of it.

  I wish I could come into that beautiful house I remember so well and have a talk with you about The Merchant and its troubles in New York and the modest second wind it’s acquiring in the Little Theatres around the country.

  Since you are a friend of the play I like to tell you about two thefts in it, from very high quarters: in the First Act, the scene where Mrs Levi tries to interest the Merchant in an imaginary young girl Enestina Simple, is stolen—five pages almost verbatim—from the scene between the Marriage Broker Frosine and Harpagon in Molière’s The Miser (no one’s ever noticed it); and Mrs Levi’s epigram about money: “Pardon my expression, but money’s like manure,—it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread about encouraging young things to grow,” is from Bacon’s Essays (“for money is like unto compost which is of little worth save that. ……”).

  I’m like a woman I heard about who was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. Her defense was “I only steal from the best department stores, and they don’t miss it.”

  I wonder if you guessed that your writing to me would give me particular pleasure,—could you see that your opening in The Furies40 made me say to myself: yes, that’s right, the monologue is one of the theatre’s most telling devices.

  For that, and for so many vital things in your plays, and for this kind and thoughtful letter,—many thanks.

  Sincerely yours,

  Thornton Wilder

  182. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) Yale

  41

  Tues. night. Jan 21 <1941>

  Dear Mom:

  Telegraphed you two hours ago.

  Drove in from Baltimore this a.m; worked in my cubby hole (where I am now; 8:30 p.m), then at 4 or 5 drove to Alexandria and was accepted by the hotel that had to turn me down last Friday, the George Mason.

  You saw it—it’s on the main street (the Country’s main street, U.S. I<)>—so that’s settled.

  I found a garage 3 blocks away.

  Most days I shall bus or train into town.

  x

  Tomorrow I must come to N.Y. four hours each way, for that old Committee on Relations between Xians and Jews. But I can study Spanish going and coming so that’s all right.

  My train leaves here at 8.

  x

  Yesterday was fine and fun & as far as my participation went as rapid and superficial and incons
equential as a tea at the Lohmans.42

  I picked up a taxi about 1:20 and thought that with my special card “to be placed on the windshield of the automobile” could get anywhere. But the crowds were so thick that one couldn’t even get to a policeman to ask the permission to drive through. So I walked and finally after trampling on piccaninnies and grinding down grandmothers, I got to cop & was admitted onto the Ave that was cleared for the parade due 2 ½ hours later. Long semi circular awning on the East front. Gave up hat and coat, and joined a long slowly moving line passing thru “basement” corridors hung with portraits of former presidents and their ladies. I looked about among my fellow guests and decided I was among campaign-debts. A voice said: “Dontcha know: we used to see him in Little Rock.” The long line mounted some stairs and suddenly was at the front door of the W. H. Band playing. And Mrs R, alone, shaking every hand. She did not recognize, but smiled nicely. There were no presentations. So I strolled into the East Room crowded with people eating cold meats in vegetable salad. Yes, I said: tycoons, ward heelers. Then I suddenly recognized from her fotos the former Mrs Vincent Astor; then I saw Thurman Arnold;43 then the Les Glenns. (The President had done the traditional visit to Les’s church that morning at 10:30).44 With them we strolled into the Dining Room. At the left old Mrs R45 was rec’ing in the Red Room. Cordell Hull passed. I shook hands with Raymond & Doro Massey and Madeleine Sherwood (Bob with influenza at his hotel). Happy greeting with D. Thompson. Then Elmer Rice! Then in the Dining Room, I can’t remember them all: Bishop Atwood,46 Doug Fairbanks Jr.<;> the Frankfurters; Georgiana47 for some reason knew both Wallace and Chaplin, and we talked quite a while with each (Wallace—nicest face in the world): Chaplin lectured us on the Brotherhood of Man. I was both very impressed with him, and yet dying of boredom at what he said.