Work, work, work.
But it’s really good. For hours Hitchcock and I with glowing eyes and excited laughter plot out how the information—the dreadful information—is gradually revealed to the audience and the characters. And I will say I’ve written some scenes. And that old Wilder poignance about family life going on behind it.63
There’s no satisfaction like giving satisfaction to your employer. I hope I give it to the Army too. Satisfaction to yourself is fleeting, spite of what the moralists say. And satisfaction to the public does not interest me.
Last night and tonight I’ve worked, too. But this climate drives you early to bed.
Tomorrow night Bob drives Helen to the station. She’s going to Ardmore, Oklahoma, for a while to stay with her mother. The day after he goes to New York to do a government movie. Then they come back here in July to continue work on the play.64
I was at their house during the the ¾ hour blackout Sunday night. As they don’t have rehearsals here, it always means something. Usually a mistake by the Interceptor Command. No ack-ack fire, I’m sorry to say.
An air-raid warden was run down by a unlighted car and killed.
Rosalie fine.65
Hermann Weissman immature as ever.66 But rich. He says C. Chaplin wants to see me. I’ve offered next Mon. or Wed. evenings.
Friday morning, maybe, Mr. Skerball,67 Mr. Hitchcock and I fly up to San Francisco to visit the town of Santa Rosa, 50 m. N. of the Bay, scene of our movie. They return the same night. I stay on and moon about the place another day. Sic.
Tonight who should be going in the door of Villa Carlotta at the same moment as I but the MacMillans. I had a cigarette with them in their luxurious apartment. “What a coincidence! Who could believe it.”
He has a number of pupils. Yes, pupils. I’m in the best of health, thank you.
I drive better.
TNW and Alfred Hitchcock at work on Shadow of a Doubt.
TNW and Alfred Hitchcock at work on Shadow of a Doubt. Universal.
Will I ever get—during the five weeks—so that I won’t feel as though I ought to be home writing the script? I’ve done about 30 pages out of a hundred and thirty. Each step is complicated plotting and of course that gets denser and more complex as it goes on. But I like it.
And tomorrow we “pick up” the first cheque. Never did I love money more purely.
It’s 10:45<.> I can’t keep my eyes open.
Listen. My contract says I must be here until the 26th Rosalie says if the script is done, etc, I can ask for three days off earlier—pleading preparations for the Army. As there will be no more transcontinental civilian air passage, the most I can hope for is plane-passage to Kansas City. Then train to Chicago—Albany—Rutland. One night with Woollcott; pullman to Boston and home. Speriamo.68
Love
Thorn.
190. TO RUTH GORDON. ALS 2 pp. Yale
5959 Franklin Ave. Hollywood
June 11 <1942>
Dearest Ruthie:
Repeating my telegram:
Your letter blew like a high wind through the insipid airs of this town.
x
Enclosed a signed affidavit of homage. I’m delighted to send it to you and delighted to be able to send it to you.
x
I can never retreat from positions that have been ratified by reciprocal friendship. Gadgett’s to do the play.69
I’m now going to tell you an awful thing, but don’t tell anybody:
It’s very hard for me to take the slightest interest in any of my things once I’ve written them. There they are, and they can go their separate journeys amid success or failure, amid good or bad production—I’m already a thousand miles away. My première, my applause and my hisses (and my 300th performance) have already taken place at my writing desk.
Isn’t that awful?
So about Sabina. You were Sabina in Quebec; just as you were Mrs Levi in Tucson. I roared at you. I knelt before you. I carried home your flowers after the first performance. Never have I been so happy in the theatre.
I feel quite calm in the fact that you will some day be Mrs. Levi and Sabina in the future. You created the roles and you can resume the creation whenever you choose. Last year or this year doesn’t matter. Besides, it looks as though you were going to insinuate yourself into my future plays, too.
I have very little temporal sense. I’m not impatient.
So if the Natasha thing holds you, do that; and if that developes any difficulties, do come to us and let us know at once.70
x x
Captain Wilder reports for “special duty” at Miami on the 27th. So as to get every last minute out of me, Mr Skerball, Mr Hitchcock and I will probably fly to N.Y. about the 21st and continue work in a New York hotel room. Besides, Mr Hitchcock will be photographing the wastes of the Jersey marshes and the working-men’s roominghouses of Passaic for the prologue of our picture.
Honest, Ruth, the picture is good. At the end we descend to a little fee-fo-fi-fum, but for the most part its honest suspense and poignancy and terror. Today Hitch told me that he had had Little Foxes shown to him yesterday and that he’d picked Patricia Collinge for our mother. I told him you were en route and to hold his horses. I’ve asked him to look at the Magic Bullet.71
x x
Oh, Ruthie, I was never in better health. Never looking forward to anything more than the Next Chapter.
The only thing I lack is company.
I went to dinner at George Cukors. (with Barbara Hutton Revent-low and Cole Porter and some glamor-food). He’s very nice and we got on fine. But that’s not the company I want. And René Clair came to a cocktail party Sol Lesser gave for me. He’s fine; but he looked tired and harrassed, and slipped away back to his cutting-room.
Jed was asked to the same party. I expect its too much to expect that he’d have come.
Anyway, soon or late, near or far,
somebody loves you:
Thornton
191. TO ROBERT MAYNARD HUTCHINS. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Universal Pictures Company, Inc. / Universal City, California) Chicago
June 16. 1942
Dear Bob:
It’s been a long time since I owed you an account of the fits and starts of my life. The trip to England was a great experience, but I was unequal to digesting and realizing very much of it.72 I am easily rendered insensible by too much to see, too many people to talk to. The days were crowded with inspections of ruins, of defense activities, airplane factories, bomber commands, luncheons, interviews with workers, journalists, Ministers, dinners, writers, and so on. A more scrupulous conscience than mine would be shadowed by the fact that British taxpayers paid out about a thousand dollars to transport me there and back; but it
I came back and finished my play. I am not ready to ask myself if its a very good play. It’s design is that of a very good play and maybe the design is actually present in the text.
Then I began moving toward the Army and the movement culminated this morning at 9:30 when I took the oath of office. I am Captain T.N.W, 0908587. I arrive the 27 at Miami for six weeks training in basic soldierly and then I go to Harrisburg for six weeks training in the Army Air Intelligence Officers Training School.
To put it briefly:
Only men between 19-24 can pilot the new bombers. At twenty-five the psychosomatic reflexes no longer respond.
But the young pilots are emotionally immature. Returning from raids where they have killed, or where their friends behind them, gunners etc have been killed, they approach the Interrogators Table in an inner turmoil. They do not wish to speak to a human being for 24 hours. The
The Army has sent out word that there must be a new kind of officer at the interrogators’ table. It’s not enough to know maps, read photographs and compute ballistics. There must be a psychologist, et
c. He must know with which pilots he must be hard as nails, with which he must be patient and indirect. Yes, all War is ugly, not less so when it tries to be humane.
So it was laid before me.
Entering the Army in wartime is like getting married: only the insecure feel called upon to give the reasons for their decision.
So I won’t go into them. But it’s a pleasure to describe the relieved rush with which I turn my back on civilian life. The level to which ‘society’ has fallen, the fine arts, the ‘public speech’, the talk one has to exchange. The Army, imagine, is a place where one no longer hears the War ‘intelligently discussed’.
In der Anfang war die TAT.74
And to think that Archie MacLeish first approached me with a view to entering his bureaus. I told him I didn’t want to write for my country and I didn’t want to sit in an office for my country—and instead of being antagonized, he helped me to this.
Well, this was being set in motion, and suddenly the invitation came from Hollywood to write a murder-script with Alfred Hitchcock, from whom murder and suspense have no secrets. With barely five weeks of liberty I decided to come out here. I wanted to make some more money for my dependents in the event of a long war. I came cynically, and what happened?
I’m fascinated. Our work is very good. It’s not literature. But the wrestling with sheer craft, the calculations in a mosaic of exposition is bracing.
It’s almost over.
x x
The Closing of the Door—that to Civilian Life—is almost pure joy and the anticipation of what’s ahead: being pure instrument, however modestly, in a movement-wave that’s so important to me is all joy; but looking backward I have one big regret: That in the last years of intermittent writing and intermittent ill-organized experiencing I have not made myself to rejoice myself enough in two friendships: you and Amos. It’s only secondary to say, though true, that you are one of the persons I admire the most in my whole life. For what I mean, it is more essential to say that you are you, and to the I that is I that is a great good real right Fact and Thing.
When Armistice Day comes among the many things it will mean, my God (to Greece and the Ghettos of Poland, and the paddy planters of China, Oh my God) I shall walk among the bonfires of celebration; I shall permit myself a luxury of cynicism about mankind and civilization, but I shall be thinking of you and Amos and Gertrude, and saying that The World may wag its way hither and yon but as for me I shall love my friends and do it much more wisely than “before the War.”
x x
I seem to have fallen into the mood of a Heroickal last farewell, so tell Maude to snip a piece of a ribbon from her hair or sash and I’ll wear it like a paladin on the field in her dear name. I ask that your three daughters stand on the battlements shading their eyes toward the West for me.
Anfang
und
Ende
Alt
und
neu75
affectionately
Thornton
192. TO ISABELLA N. AND ISABEL WILDER. APCS 1 p. Yale
Hotel Woffard
Monday Noon
Dear Ones
The more I suffer the more I like it. We’re on the drill field at 7:00 a.m and already dripping wet; and I love it. And scarcely a moment to think until six. In quarters absolutely at 8:00; lights out at 10:00. Packs of work and a sense of no time to do it, but I love it. ¶ Tomorrow (confidential) I am ordered to meet the Press for the first & last time with Capt Clark Gable and Capt Don Ameche. ¶ So far being in the Army is expensive—always new books, equipment etc to buy. Our first pay cheque contains an additional $150.00 for uniforms. ¶ Last night I hunted for Toby.77 He is not in the Hotel Royal. Janet is misinformed. But there is a hotel Royal Palm and a hotel Royalton. Tell Janet. Verify. Do not worry about my “sufferings”—I was never happier and seldom in better health. I live to make myself rewarded for diligence and alertness. No time for letters ¶ 600 of us. A nice roommate Lt. Powers of Fargo S.D. Love,
Thornton
193. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Hq. 328th Fighter Group
Hamilton Field
Calif.
Oct 7 1942
Dear Mom: Here I am under another duty. Last Friday, never to be forgotten, I was Officer of the Day for the whole Post. I told you about that. Tonight, I’m merely Officer of the Day in the 328th Group. That means I sit in the great echoing barracks of an Office between 12 and 1 at noon and from 5-10 in the evening. I’ve fortified myself with peanuts and milk chocolate and at ten o’clock I shall go to one of the most fascinating all-night lunch stands in the world—the one maintained in Hangar 9 for all night aircraft repair workers and for whatever flyers may descend on us from A—ia and A—ka, and God knows where else.
I’ve got to point out to you again that these extra duties (I’ve also just finished my 3rd Investigator’s report on a Court-Martial case) are not imposed on me because of my splendid soldierly capacity; all new officers are saddled with them; they’re supposed to be the corvées78 of the service.
Do you want to know a secret,—a non-military secret?
Well, I always knew that a large part of my reluctance to write was due to my cramming myself with reading. The impulse to write arose from a spring very near the appetite to read and the latter could easily quench or substitute itself for the former. Well, I haven’t read a book since I’ve been to Miami, except one detective story and Giraudoux’s Bella79 which I picked up at home during my delicious long week-end. There was no thought of reading nights at Miami or Harrisburg; but here—altho’ there is no end to study I could do on enemy planes, artillery etc—on the whole my evenings are free. I get up at 6:15 by bugle call and go to bed at 9:45, but that time after dinner is free. I feel the need of literature; but (a) I’m in no position to get it and (b) I wouldn’t even like to read if I had it. (I was surprised at how less-good “Bella” seemed)<.> SO—as simply as falling off a log I found—a solution: I started making my own. I began the Alcestiad. I write only about 10 speeches an evening. If I find that it moves into the center of my interest, or keeps me awake at night, I’ll have to give it up. But so far it contributes its fragment tranquilly every night. And on Sundays I can do a larger portion.—As I see it now its very Helen Hayes. Anyway, so far its still a secret.
Isabel writes me that you’re about to be thrown into the throes of a great decision. I shan’t push.
Another letter from Aunt Grace; they’re going up to San Francisco to see an eye specialist for Uncle Thornton. But I don’t get to San Francisco alternate weekends as I hoped. My chief’s wife is there, so my days off will come in the middle of the week, if at all. Fortunately the Army believes in leaves, tho several day furloughs are only extended in war-time for convincingly stated reasons. It is impossible that I could come East for the opening of the plays.
Lots of love, honey, early and lately.
Thorny
194. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 2 pp. NYU
Captain Thornton Wilder, A.C.
To Lady Colefax, 19 Lord North St.
Westminster, London.
Hq. 328th Fighter Group. Hamilton Field, Calif
Oct 9. 1942
Dearest Sibyl:
After those months of training I am at my first job, and what I’d like to talk about are all those stirring and moving things about me.
It’s no secret, however, to say every corner of the place is directed to the great end and that some of the corners are very near the crucial places. I’m still healthier than I’ve ever been and as happy.
For change I can go every two weeks and spend some thirty hours in San Francisco. I kept wondering last Saturday whether you had ever seen it. I spent a part of my childhood on the Bay; its as beautiful as ever, especially toward late afternoon.
On the way here I stopped and had a Sunday breakfast with the Hutchins. Maude has again shifted her medium and has done
some brilliant watercolors. She has also printed some verses in “Poetry”.80 If I transcribed some, it would only give you an access of anger, for they canalize perfectly that aspect of her which irritates, that cool narcissistic impudence. Bob “missed the train” of public leadership, once
Others are wrestling with the rehearsals of my play. I can scarcely believe it myself, but it opens in New Haven next Thursday, a week from last night. We have a brilliant cast: Fredric March; Florence El-dridge, his wife; Tallulah Bankhead and Florence Reed (as the FortuneTeller.) A cast of 40 and an investment (not mine!) of $40,000. It will tour outside of New York for six weeks, being licked into shape. Isabel is serving as my proxy and says that rehearsals have gone swimmingly as far as the text is concerned, though there have been many clashes of personalities. Tallulah has tried to show all the other actresses how to do their job and when they have not taken her advice she has flounced off to her hotel and resigned. So far she has returned almost penitently each time. She loves her role (Sabina) as well she might, and is very acute about the whole play when the demon is not possessing her. The text is almost established. My last week at Harrisburg I wrote them a new close to Act II and some crowning motto lines for Mr. Antrobus in Act III. Last Sunday from San Francisco I sent them a new treatment of a middle portion in Act I (eliminating the Ancestors scene which had turned out to be unclear in rehearsals) and heightening the atmosphere of impending cold and danger.
But now I’ll tell you a secret, a non-military one. During the four months I’ve been in the Army I’ve not read a book nor felt that I wanted to; nor is what one would call reading possible. But literature I must have about me, and
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 38