Thornton
207. TO LAURENCE OLIVIER. TL (Copy)113 2 pp. Yale
HEADQUARTERS MEDITERRANEAN ALLIED AIR FORCES APO 650, U.S. Army
February 18, 1945
Laurence Olivier, Esq.
New Theatre,
London, England.
Dear Mr. Olivier:
It has been a great satisfaction to me to know that you and Miss Leigh are interested in putting on “The Skin of Our Teeth”. Through my sister Isabel’s letters I have followed the various negotiations including the preposterous deal Michael Myerberg got into with Miss Mannering. I hope that has been straightened out and that your title to it is completely clear.114 Isabel writes that your return to the service is due and that you will have time to direct but not to appear in the play. My admiration for your work is such that I am equally satisfied with this arrangement and hope that it can be put into effect.
I was delighted to hear that your idea was to caste the play with “unknowns” and to so direct them that the result would be a sort of half-way approach to an American manner. Such a procedure might improve on the one drawback I felt behind the New York presentation: the performances of the principals were excellent throughout, but they projected them with the studied precision one would look for in “The Wild Duck”. My idea is that the play could give practically the sense of improvisation, a free cartoon, “The History of the Human Race in Comic Strip”. At one time I hoped there would be a performance by negroes whose spirit of play, spontaneous emotions, musical voices and uncomplicated idealism (Rodin’s Adam!) would have captured this quality so well.
All negotiations about my plays have been handled from New York and New Haven to such an extent that I do not even know who is acting as my agent in London. Could I ask you therefore to see that the following appointment is offered to Lady Colefax, in the earnest hope that she will feel able to accept it, and that the appointment is understood and negotiated through that agent?
It is my hope that Lady Colefax will serve as the Author’s Representative and working very closely with the producer, will have full authority to answer for the author and represent him in the following ways:
The advisability of cutting certain lines and business or adding others necessary to the better understanding and effectiveness of the play.
Consultant on scenery and costumes. It is recommended that in deliberations on casting her opinion should carry considerable weight.
It is hoped that from time to time during rehearsals and performances she will circulate among the company and be accessible to the performers. It has been my experience that the author or his representative can adjust slight inconveniences and personal frictions in such a way as to aid the morale of the production out of all proportion to the apparent importance of such service.
For these services the Author’s Representative will receive 10% of the author’s royalities computed prior to the deduction of taxes.115
I hope the production will give you pleasure during its preparation and gratification with the results.116 Kindly convey my regard to Miss Leigh also.
Sincerely yours
208. TO HARRY J. TRAUGOTT.117 ALS 2 pp. Private
50 Deepwood Drive Hamden
14 Connecticut (Only lookit: AAF Redistribution Station No #2 1020 at<?> AAFBU
Squadron H, Flight 455-C Hotel Caribbean, Miami Beach, Fla)
May 20. 1945
Dear Harry:
Now hold your horses. This is what happens when you return for reassignment.
Within three or four hours of arriving at the post of debarkation (hold your hats, now) you’re en route to your home on a 21-day visit. (I waived that in order to expedite matters and God what a fool I was.) Then you report to a Redistribution Station.
You bring your wife, if you choose. You live in a luxury hotel at the seashore—Santa Monica, Calif., or Atlantic City, or here. For nine days you have about two appointments a day. Physical exam, or Classification test, or orientation lecture. (Are you following me?) This applies to Enlisted Men or Officers, because they’re all in this very hotel, wives, too; the only protection against reciprocal contagion being that we’re on different floors.
Then you have to wait, some a few days, some months for their orders.
I’m in such a mess of red tape as has never been seen. Some Authorities say it’ll be two months before I even get to the Separation Centre. Archie Macleish phoned down yesterday, saying he’d effected my separation from the War Dept, but the separation within the Air Force is a thing that’ll pretty much have to take its own course. Anyway, tomorrow noon I start being on Inactive Status, which is Step One. With that I can go home and do my waiting, but I travel at my own expense. Query: crazy to learn tomorrow whether Inactive Status gives me gas and shoe ration coupons. All the shoes I got are those I stand in, and my family is certainly going to look for gas coupons after the first hug has abated.
May 22. 1945—Continued over.
Okay. I go North tomorrow on thirty days’ leave while the Headquarters meditate on my forward application for separation from the service, with the State Dept’s appointment submitted as In closure #1.
Well, well, well, won’t it be funny to see the family again and the New Haven Green? I’ve been here over two weeks, but I don’t feel I’ve appraised the United States yet. This town is as bad as Los Angeles and I hope no one ever takes it as an index of what the country has to offer. It’s a honkytonk de luxe and always has been.
I still have that feeling of being a piker through my running off and leaving you and Bernie and Morrill118 on that … ship. I hope all goes well with you, that you get interesting jobs until its all over, and that you get the advancement that lies just ahead of you. When I spoke of that to Col. Burwell, he acted surprised to hear that there was a Tech. sergeantship on the T.O. I hope he’s keeping it in mind.
When I phoned my family they told me that a cable from Laurence Oliver and Vivien Leigh had just arrived congratulating me on a big success in London with the play. I hope it’s true, as much for their sake as mine, because that play will always have brickbats and indignant customers, whatever the critical reception is.
I’ve already written the Wing Commander; give my regard to Col. Alston and tell him I’ll write him soon. And do me one favor: I was prevented on that last day from running around to find Wilcox. Do look him up and tell him he has my lasting esteem and that I shall always be glad to hear from him. The opportunity to do him a favor of any kind would always tickle me. The same applies to you ten-fold, Harry and don’t forget it, Indianapolis.
Yours in war and peace
Thornton Wilder
209. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 4 pp. NYU
Back in a week or two at: 50 Deepwood Drive
Hamden 14, Connecticut
(AAFRS No. 2, Miami Beach, Florida)
August 20 1945
Dearest Sibyl:
Two letters from you, though written on the 2nd and the 11th, arrived this afternoon. ’Ate ’em up.
I’ll take up some of the agenda seriatim and then I’ll see what I’ve stored up to report.
RETREAT: We’ve just been released unlimited gasoline (but tires are hard to get). I’m thinking now of going, not to Colorado, but to Acapulco, Mexico. Driving there viâ Chicago (i.e. the Hutchi, Amos and my wunderkind nephew); down the Mississippi to New Orleans (Sibyl, what meals—): then to Texas, and down the great “new” road to Mexico City. Down SW past Cuernavaca (where I once went to work, but the work wouldn’t come), past Taxco with its famous little cathedral to Acapulco on the sea. It’s become very swank, unfortunately: Hollywood flies down there week-ends to marry and millionaires to fish for black marlins (having caught one, you sometimes have to “play it” for five hours). But there are many hotels strung along the black cliffs, a Mexican Town of 20,000, and I hope little subsidiary plages up and down the coast.
THE NEW PLAYS: (Thanks for asking.) For Alcestis I want Elizabeth Bergner. Who else? In the first act, a
n exaltée faintly “goose”-like young girl; in the second, the greatest golden young matron of all tradition; and in the last the agéd slave, water-bearer in her own palace, with scenes of tragic power and mystical elevation. Who else? And all to be played against that crazy atmosphere of the numenous that is possibly hoax and the charlatanism that may be the divine. And the preposterous-comic continually married to the shudder of Terror. When Heracles goes down to wrestle with the Guardian of the Dead for Alcestis, it’s no joke and yet the great generous demigod is terrified and very drunk. I sit here writing one big scene a day (awaiting orders in this luxury hotel, my window over the surf and the greenest ocean,—with next to nothing on, for its very hot and humid); the play is a chain of big scènes à faire.119 But oh, Sibyl, it’s very hard and every-other day it seems clear to me that it can’t be done. The whole play must be subtended by one idea, which is not an idea but a question (and the same question as the Bridge of San Luis Rey!); and each of these scenes must be balanced just so and not give a wrong impression about that idea. And no two minutes of it must be too romantic, and none too pedestrian, and none too comic, and none too grandiose. And the great temptation is “to just write it any old way” and trust that “no one will notice” anything but its dazzling theatrics. oh, dear.
“The Hell of Vizier Kâbaar”, that will be more difficult still, but in a different way. That will require the good old-fashioned plotcarpentry that I’ve never done; the joiner’s art that must be then rendered invisible, as though it were perfectly easy (like the last movement of the Jupiter, God save the mark.) The danger of the Alcestiad is that the effectiveness may be greater than the content (to which Jed replied, quoting an old Jewish exclamation: “May you have greater troubles!” but what greater trouble could an artist have?) The Hell of. …. can’t run into that danger. It’s content is not a hesitant though despairing question.120
THE OLIVIERS: Oh, dear. I’m afraid that I may have said something in one of my letters that hurt their feelings. I’ve never met them; but even to strangers in whom I have such confidence as I have in them, I run on so, I babble, as though I’d known them twenty years. I assume that they know me, that idiotic bundle of conceit and modesty, of dogmatic assertion and exasperating non-commital; of excessive intimacy and intermittent withdrawal. At a pinch I can write a formal letter. But I can’t write an almost-formal letter, and so I’m always getting the tone wrong. Anyway, I honor and admire them boundlessly. I hope they will dismiss me as crazy, rather than think me rude.
CHURCHILL: Do you still have the feeling that the election could be described as showing ingratitude to the Prime Minister? Or that, the first week past, he would interpret it so? Never did he have a better press than the valedictory one, over here. But I’m like to get beyond my depths in your politics or ours.121
KIERKEGAARD: Strange things happen when I start raving about S.K. I blew a blast of him, over some cocktails, at Cheryl Crawford. She couldn’t wait until Brentano’s opened next morning and marched off with Either/Or (a vast mixed dish) and The Theory of Dread (the first half of it, uncharacteristic metaphysics). I recommend starting with two little volumes Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Scraps122 (or Remnants as sometimes translated.) Anyone
I must go or I’ll miss mess. All my colleagues are ex-PW from Germany. Stories!
Sibyl dear, (as brides say: “I want you to be among the first to know”) I have been awarded the Order of the British Empire. That with my Legion of Merit brings my three years of the war to a happy close. There are few satisfactions greater than knowing you have the approval of your superiors in a job which involved their responsibility as well as your own. When I heard of this, I thought of my favorite Britisher in the world: “Sibyl will be pleased,<”> I said; <“>Sibyl, who’s done so much for me, who’s worked over me.<”> There’s a part of my heart that is forever England and over it is a little band of pink and grey ribbon.
(Mess call.)
Lots of love
Thornton
210. TO BYRON FARWELL.123 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Private
Jan 2. 1946
Dear Byron:
Fine.
Fine.
x
Delighted that you both met the Chief.124 Though I’m concerned about his being x-ray’d.
x
Emmet Rogers.125
A nice enough fellow—but, believe me, acting is not a profession for adults. It is mostly entered into by the kind of person who has no intention of being an adult, and once in it the very exercise of the profession breaks down most of the traits that make for being-the-master-of-one self.
Think of how extra bad it is for a man:
You must say words which are not your own.
You must assume emotions—which are not spontaneously prompted.
You must be aware, down to the finest shade, of what you look like.
You live to please, impress, or gratify strangers.
I’ve known many actors and Larry Olivier is the only one who has not been trivialized and soften
x
Your paragraph on the U.S. and your idea of a livelihood is written as though you expected me to disagree with it word by word.
x
No, no. Since these things are real to you it’s important you do them live outside the U.S. teach English to support yourself. deliberately set your marks for a very limited income.
All I say is do not concretely or mentally pour your thought into that as a life-long picture. Because:
one falls into the danger of confusing one’s impatience with one’s fellow-countrymen and one’s impatience with human beings. The trouble with America is that its full of Americans, that’s certainly true, but it’s not a more pleasing thought when one reflects that (in the mass) England’s full of the English; and so on. I have known many expatriots (this does not include refugees) and I swear to you that I’ve only known one who was not devitalized by it, and that was Gertrude Stein. Aldous Huxley is palpably thinned out by it; the American “artists” in Rome; the worldlings and the couples with jobs in Paris (“Oh, we adore Paris; we wouldn’t think of going back to Baltimore!!<”>) whom I knew; such people at Capri; at Taxco; at Oxford. Without realizing it one has been made American by living here the first 15 years of one’s life; to slip away from coping with it is to injure oneself.
All right—one teaches a subject 5 or 8 hours a day in order to make the livelihood by which one exists. But isn’t that a second prize? Isn’t the first prize to make one’s livelihood with joy, as well as one’s leisure? Five hours to drudgery in order to have 8 in which one “lives”—but the happiest lives are those in which there is no division between “working” and “enjoying”.
Money. Through the Grace of God you happen to have the finest wife in the world.126 Never forget, however, that straightened means bear down on the wife twenty times harder than on the husband. However, clever she is in running up meals “by magic”, in cleaning and dusting as tho’ it were “fun”—they pay. They pay not only by work, but by preoccupation; it literally and inevitably takes their mind. Women live and love to serve us; it’s part of our business to prevent them doing it beyond a certain point. ¶ Money has three dignified uses (and they do not include owning beautiful things or providing recreation)
Saving time
Reducing drudgery
Furthering the health and education of
children. Well—never did I feel so like an uncle, nor so devoted to my nepotes
Ever
Thornt.
211. TO EILEEN AND ROLAND LE GRAND. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Private
March 9. 1946
Dear Friends:
It is not only work which has kept me silent and interrupted my correspondence with even my best friends. It is a sort of post-war malaise which I won’t go into further lest I give the impression of self-pity or misanthropy or melancholia. It’s none of those things. Call it out-of-jointness, and forgive me. I think I’ve recovered now. Whatever it was it didn’t overcloud the fact that I love the Le Grands, old and new, and always shall.
As I think I told you, red tape delayed my demobilization from May to September. The papers must have been lost in some officers in/out baskets. I didn’t greatly mind; some of the time I was allowed to wait at home; the rest I spent in the hotels of Miami Beach which had been turned into “redistribution” quarters; but waiting-time is not conducive to work, and perhaps what I wanted was a good excuse not to settle down to work. Finally out I took a trip to Florida and Georgia and did begin work, but its been slow, reacquiring habits of concentration and perserverance.
The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 41