The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 37
No sign of the Pres. Then Nelson Eddy! and Helen Gahagan and Melvyn Douglas! Georgiana seemed to know a great many of the women—her father having been head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce here. I lost the Glenns when I stepped in to see Madame R. again, and presently circa 2:45 came out and went back to the Lib. of Congress not having had tickets for the grandstands for the Parade.
Here, I’ve written that all very lifelessly but it’ll have to do.
¶ Wish I hadn’t double-promised old McCracken I’d come to N.Y.
¶ Guess who I saw lunching with a man at the Roger Smith today—and who saw me!—Guess.
Yes—Virg. Withington.48 Her mother’ll be here Thursday. I asked them to lunch Sat (I only “see” people at weekends) if her mother’s in town still. ¶ I’ve found a very good book by an Ecuadorian—so I won’t have to be insincere in Quito more soon
more soon
love Thornton
183. TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) Harvard
Popayán
Palm Sunday
Dear Alec.
Will this reach you?
In these countries you put the air mail letters into the hands of young ladies behind a grill and they put the stamps on. Rumor says that when your back is turned, they soak the stamps off, re-sell them to another foolish client, and destroy your letter and his.
That would make you angry? Dishonesty?
Not at all.
That is charming. Inconvenient, but charming.
It is an inconvenient by-product of their individualism
What are other people’s letters and other people’s postage stamps compared to one’s own fascinating and voracious life. With those resold and resold postage stamps one can buy for oneself such delicious things as a pair of shoes, for one’s lover such delicious things as a half-dozen Gilet
It is impossible to be angry at a colombian.
Besides I am more than half-Colombian.
I envy them that drop of Indian blood that would efface the passage of time and that would confer on me a patience as wide as the ocean, even if at times it would let me fall into a vacancy that’s like despair, and a paralysis of the will that’s like petrifaction.
And I envy them that drop of negro blood that would inure me against discomfort under the heat, and would set my blood circulating with a godlike well-being, even if it did bring with it a preoccupation with sex so obsessive that any other activity in life would seem like a boring automatism.
No, but I’m very Colombian. If anyone shows any sign of liking me I lay my heart in their hand without asking
When I left Bogota night before last my thirty friends-til-death arranged an event: a copy of the movie of “Our Town” was discovered in far-off Cartagena; it was air-posted to the capitol. We all saw it at 11:30 p.m. I spoke. They spoke. We separated at 1:30 with embraces and tears and promises of return. Cordell Hull has other things on his mind, but in one corner of his domain, his will had an unpredictable extension.
It’s a pity that this letter won’t reach you,—but its impossible to be angry at a Colombian.
Next week I embrace Ecuador.
your friend sea-changed
Thorny
184. TO RUTH GORDON. ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed Gran Hotel Bolivar / Lima / Peru) Private
LIMA
leaving Sat. by Plane—Miami, Sunday
night
Dearest Ruthie:
Everytime I was on the point of wishing you were here to share some of these persons and things I suppressed the wish: No, Ruthie doesn’t like mountains. You can’t enjoy these countries on any other terms. Everywhere mighty peaks. … eternal snow. … Cotopaxi. … Chinborazo. … El Misti. … Only at that price can you see the glittering baroque churches of Quito, dear, covered with gold leaf so thick that it could balance beggared Ecuador’s budget; or the melancholy dreamy Colombians, every one a poet, and everyone bursting into tears when you mention poetry; but living in a country divided by three great ranges so that you visit the other cities either in an hour by plane, or in a month by donkey back; or Peru, a handful of Spaniards or almost Spaniards driving Rolls Royces through a myriad Indians.
I’ve liked it. I’ve done pretty well what I was sent to do. I’ve made good friends with scores of writers and educators. They’ve all planned to come up and stay with me when the monetary exchange permits and Mama will be Señora for years to come to a procession of darker-skinned intellectuals.
I’m glad I made it clear to my committee that I wouldn’t write about this trip. Writing’s only fun when you can tell your truth, and my truth about these countries is winning, appealing, complex, aching, frustrated, hopeful and dejected.
I have been completely cut off. I do not know what you have been playing. I saw your name in electric lights on a movie theatre in Bogotá (I have no camera); but I hope to see you soon. I shall be teaching in Chicago all Summer—but with my car—so every Friday noon to Tuesday morning I shall be in some obscure hotel on the Michigan shore writing plays. Give Jed my love. Only Chinborazo can give an idea of how I admire and value and love you,
Ever
Thornton.
185. TO NOEL COWARD. ALS 3pp. Private
The Savoy 2:00 a.m
waiting for a 4:00 a.m.
broadcast. Oct 9-10, <1941>
Dear Noel:
First of all the title is genius: with spirit and blithe you already lay the ghost and shroud the death’s head.49
and then the whole treatment of Madame Arcati. What is genius but combining the unexpected and the self-evident,—so that at the same moment you are saying both: “How surprising!” and “How true that is!”
And what a performance from Miss Rutherford—
and then. turning it all on Edith. By quarter of four I was saying: How the Hell can Noel get us out of this satisfactorily? And then you did—like that.
Elvira—perfect. That voice.
I wish you’d been Charles.
I thought Fay Compton was hitting pretty hard.
Tell the director how brilliant his work was. For instance, that moment when Elvira knows she has caused Ruth’s death. Oooo!
Only thing I didn’t like was the last three minutes. Hard, I call it. And a little longueur50 in the early part of Act II.
This play—and London Pride—and the Destroyer picture—falling from one sleeve within two years, and such years.51 That’s telling ’em. That’s England talking.
God bless you
Thornton
186. TO J. DWIGHT DANA. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) Private
Jan 29. 1942.
Dear Dwight:
Memo: re Michael Myerberg.52
Have known him about five years, first in Hollwood, where he had an office.
Principally, he is Leopold Stokowski’s manager. He put through Stokowski’s Tour of South America with the American Youth Orchestra, and the tours in this country; managed his relations with Walt Disney for “Fantasia”; and his business with the gramaphone companies.
Altho’ he’s only about 38 he has been in the entertainment business a long while, as promoter, sometimes manager. He began many years ago by being the first to place college-boy bands on ocean-liners; then he placed ballet-units in musical comedies; managed the Humph
For years he has mainta
ined an experiment studio for making movies with marionettes, which he claims will be the next new sensation in the movies to supercede cartoons. The only thing I know that he actually managed on Broadway was a Ballet-Drama on Voltaire’s Candide with Humph
He is married to the daughter of Margaret Matzenauer.54 His wife under the name Adrienne is a star in night club singing and has been appearing in the Rainbow Room and Féfé’s Monte Carlo, which are tops in the profession.
So you see it’s that part of the entertainment business that Anglo-Saxons don’t know about, vague but omnipresent, and that the French call cuisine, dickering, middleman, promotion. The thing that separates him from the fly-by-night adventurers in the profession is his matter of fact reticence, his absence of loud-mouth boasting, and his earnest desire these last years to get into things of high standard.
I feel sure he is honest, and that he is very effective and capable. He has a cordial letter of commendation from Cordell Hull on his conduct of the Symphony’s tour through Brazil, Argentina, etc, which was a very difficult thing to manage.
He is very enthusiastic about the play.
He has in mind engaging the young manager director, Shepard Traube, who has just struck a great success with Angel Street.55
My feeling is that though he may not be the best overseer on the production of so difficult a play (after Jed that would be Orson Welles, who is deeply engaged in a new movie) that nevertheless he is a person to whom I could best turn over all that overhead aspect of a production in perfect confidence, thus leaving one free to work out the artistic aspects. Given the troubled times, and the need for haste, if it is to go on this Spring, I think his enthusiasm, energy and command of resources are just what it needs. He feels the cast should have Big Names—which, given the peculiar state of the theatre business at this time, is right—and immediately began thinking of George M. Cohan and Fanny Brice. The first is wrong casting and the second is fine. He knows these stars’ managers (and themselves) and again relishes that kind of persuasion and dickering.
He is not a member of the Manager’s League, but I assume that that part will be conducted by Shepard Traube, who is. What is he then? He is the agent in the sense that Brandt and Brandt ought to be, but isn’t,—the live-wired activator, taking care of all those things that the layman can’t do.
I’ll be seeing him again this evening and will report further.
Cordially ever,
Thornton
187. TO LYNN FONTANNE AND ALFRED LUNT. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed The Century Association / 7 West Forty-Third Street / New York) WisHist
Week-ends: 50 Deepwood Drive, New Haven Otherwise: Columbia University Club, 4 West 43 St. NY
Feb. 5, 1942
Dear Friends:
I didn’t answer Lynn’s lovely letter, because I knew that I soon would have another matter to write you on. Jed with the manuscript was being silent week after week and I foresaw I would have the text back and be released of the promise to give it into his hands first.
Then I didn’t write you with the sending of the script because such letters—half deprecation—are so unnecessary.56
But now with Alfred’s telegram, of which—whatever happens—I shall always be proud, I shall write a letter about the play even before receiving Alfred’s letter.
x
Lately, my eyes have been opened with a shock to one aspect of it.
It’s struck some people as “defeatist.” I have only read it to a few friends, mostly in our academic group in New Haven. One distinguished doctor said that it haunted him for days but that “the government ought to prevent it’s being shown”; others variously said it was “anti-war” or “pacifistic.” And I suddenly remember that Sibyl, who heard the first two acts in London, said that the Second Act was “so cruel.”
And three or four days ago my eyes were opened, and I could see with amazement how I had given so wrong an impression of what I had meant.
It’s that old thing again: that New England shame-facedness and shyness of the didactic, the dread of moralizing, the assumption that the aspirational side of life can be taken for granted.
I had omitted (through thinking it self-evident!) any scene of conjugal love and trust between Mr. and Mrs Antrobus; and any speech that would give open voice to her and to his confidence, through discouragement, in the unshakable sense that work and home and society move on towards great good things.
Now with a sort of eagerness I have set to rendering more explicit all things which for me were always there and which I now feel to be urgent for expression. With what mortification I now see that the Second Act—vindication of the unit of the family—exhibits only the exasperating side of children and the “nagging” side of Mrs Antrobus; and how especially I shirked Mr. Antrobus’s broadcast to the Natural World; and how the positive affirmative elements of Act Three are muted and evaded to the point of spiritual thinness.
x
Jed’s objections which he says apply only to the second and third Acts have to do with theatrical contrivances and “tricks.” He doesn’t specify which ones he objects to; but the ones I have resolved to modify are in the last act.
I have tried writing the Third Act straight through, without the interruption of the Rehearsal of the Hours-as-Philosophers, and am preparing some less obstrusive way of giving the impression of the overarching world of time, weather and natural history that surrounds the Antrobus family.—But the chief thing is to inform all that with the tone of warmth and courage and confidence about the human adventure which I had too much “taken for granted.”
x
I don’t have to tell you what hopes I keep in relation to you both.
But it’s enough for the present that Alfred’s telegram tells me of his warm interest in the text itself. And any suggestions from that comprehensive God-given understanding of what the theatre is in heights and depths are reward enough for me.
With devoted affection
Thornton
Post-script:
This Michael Myerberg whose association with the play was published as manager, is an old friend who is really serving in the capacity of what Brandt and Brandt never really has done. He is not a member of the Manager’s Association; there is no contract between us; and his enthusiasm led him to “do something about it” as inspirator and friend.
T.
188. TO HAROLD FREEDMAN. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) Private
Feb 20. 1942
Dear Harold:
Your letter is so kind and helpful that I am going to reply to it in very confidential terms—just for you and Janet,57 and Mrs. Freedman, if she is interested.
First: the history
Back of that is the Unsatisfactoriness of Jed, the Ideal Director and the Atrocious Manager.
My life-long feeling that plays should represent a series, and a developement, not each an isolated New York package-ing.
Hence, the resort to Reinhardt.
Since we have no Manager-plus-director units in this country (the formula that has been behind every great theatre manifestation in Russia, Germany, Austria and France) I still continue gropeing to help set one up.
I am still believing in M. Myerberg, even though he is making some brash flighty mistakes according to the promotion ideas that he brings with him from the aspects of the entertainment business that he has been associated with hitherto. Apparently my successive scripts are floating in and out of all sorts of unlikely offices, etc, etc. But he is very alive. A fresh air blows through all the plans. The only thing I don’t like is that it’s still indistinct as to whether he is promoter or manager. When we approached the Lunts and discussed approaching Orson Welles, he seemed perfectly ready to retire from manager-activities and give it over.
Today, I’m going to insist that he e
nroll among the managers or return the scripts to me (since it looks as though we cannot produce until next Fall) wait and begin all over again from the beginning later. In which case he can be Manager, if he wants, but a real Manager with contracts and everything.
x
Most confidential:
I think Kazan is the director I’ve been hunting for. Fine comedy; superb stage movement; and dry economy in emotion.
He is very enthusiastic about the play. But is committed to the Paul V. Carroll for the next two months.58
Frederic March is eager to play it. And I’d settle for Mrs March, but only as the Mother, and with the proviso that she and ourselves might find her unsuited as rehearsals advance. (F. March shows signs of being willing to seek his career alone!)
Kazan’s and March’s commitments would only permit us a hurried late Spring try-out; and this is not an out-of-town tryout play.59
x
Since then it resumes in the Fall, maybe we’d better begin from scratch and try for Orson who is an old friend of mine and never forgets that I “discovered” him.
x
Anyway, I’m not downcast. Except for one thing: I’m always forgetting that I’m the head of a household and am presumed to be earning my living by my pen. Jed used to foster that notion that I’m a gentleman of vast private means; I’m damned if I’ll fall in with that role forever.
All cordial regards, Harold, and now I return to the government movie I’m working on, also—practically gratis!60
your old friend
Thornton
189. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Tuesday night, May 26 <1942>
Dear Isabel:
Many thanks for your letter and clippings. Latter better than I expected.
Got a really sensible letter from Michael about. Very harsh on Kazan’s work, but still confident of his powers au fond.61 “For Sabina I think we need a big theatre personality, and I don’t think she’s a big theatre personality.” But he sent her the script last week.62