The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  In the meantime I have been “inhabited” by two compelling enthusiasms. An accident turned my attention to the problems connected with the chronology of the (circa) 500 extant plays of Lope de Vega. I hurled myself into scholarship, spending 10 hours a day in the University Library and making trips to libraries 100 miles away in search of further sources, and I discovered new data. I think that this passion was a useful therapy: pure research has nothing to do with human beings; it has little even to do with taste or aesthetic judgments. Finally I saw that the ground I was working in was a Life-work; wider and wider vistas opened. It was Escape, and finally I willed myself to quit it. Roland, if you want to prepare a thesis in the Spanish golden age, I’ll send you all my notes. There’s a beautiful thesis there, in a territory where all the Spanish and international scholars were in error. Ready for the asking.

  Lately, I have been absorbed by Existential philosophy and its literary diffusion, especially in France. Jean-Paul Sartre has been here, and I have seen him many times. Your London reviews are full of it. It is fascinating, not as nihilistic as it appears to be on the surface, and it is magnificent evidence that France remains a great power, whatever its political and economic situation.

  The Alcestiad is almost finished. It waits on one last clarification which I must clear up in my own head, philosophically, before I can project it into the web and woof of the lives of my characters. I have also begun that novel-in-letters about Julius caesar and the scandal of the profanation of the mysteries of the Bona Dea.127 I should say that the two works are racing in competition except that such slow work could scarcely be called a race.

  Now that I am out of my acedia128 sufficiently to write letters, I shall write Pank, and Vera and Mike Morgan and the Trolleys, but I’ve begun with you, dear Kinder. The silver mug is all engraved with Julian’s name, but we were told that it can’t be sent. My sister Isabel is going to London with the newly-formed “Our Town” co., and if she goes by boat she can bring it.129 That may be very soon. I may follow in the Autumn,—oh, what good talks. Oh, what dandling of babies. Oh, what insidious instruction in an American accent to say “Uncle Thornton!” Heartfelt blessings on you all—

  devotedly

  Thornton

  212. TO RUTH GORDON AND GARSON KANIN.130 ALS 2pp. (Stationery embossed The Viking / Newport, R.I.) Private

 

  Kinder, Kinder, dear Kinder:

  Excuse me if I sound smug, but I’m in a beautiful place under a beautiful sun and I haven’t a trouble in the world except that I’m pennilous, tubercular, and I’m not sure whether what I’m writing is worth a bean. Apart from that I haven’t a trouble in the world and am inanely happy.

  Now let’s hear about you.

  Kinder, do you read plays? Jean-Paul Sartre has given me the American disposition of a play he’s written that would freeze your gullets.131 Will any American manager produce it? Five French Maquis are variously tortured and raped by some Petain militiamen. But it’s not about the Resistance movement; it’s about the dignity of man and the freedom of the will. There’s not a cliché in it; its as bare as a bone in New Mexico; five characters wear handcuffs through the entire play; every agony in it must have been experienced in Europe a thousand time and yet no American manager would venture to present it and we’re not grown-up enough for it and we’re not worthy of the U.N.O.132 and so let’s think of other things.

  When are you two going to get a rest? Now, really; life’s short enough as it is. I’ll bet you Garson hasn’t had a 15-hour sleep for four years,—at least not without anxieties marching through his dreams like Hessians. I’ll begin to think that you two are bitten by the hornets of Ambition or the wasps of Competition. Swear to me on the Prayer-book and Talmud that you aren’t; that you’re sane, that your love for one another and the love that we extend to you is/are calmatives enough. You are successes, you are, because you’re loveable intelligent wonderchildren, but I’m beginning to think that there’s a slight admixture of Mexican jumping bean in you too. I wish to address the one nonchalant philosopher in the family and send my love to Jones.133

  I wouldn’t scold the Kanins, if I didn’t feel lots of love

  Thornton

  213. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Yale

  May 31 <1946>

  Dear Amy:

  Can’t believe it. Isabel’s was over twice that. Glad to see that it’s deference to the Cloth.134

  No, never heard of E. Rosenstock-Huessy.135 Glad to read anything you recommend and will return scrupulously.

  Had some hours with A Camus. Lord be praised, I didn’t like him as much as Sartre or I’d have committed my time away in translations, services, etc. But I respect him and Le Mythe de Sisyphe is fine romantic writing, though he’d hate to hear it called that.

  Isabel heard Dylan Thomas read some of his poems in London (she sat two yards from the Queen!), fine self-forgetting projection she says. He dresses “non-gentleman”. The distrust and unkindness of Englishman to Englishman along those hair-fine social categories has to be seen within the military framework to be believed; in what century did this profound evil enter English life? The infiltrations of vulgarians into the Serenissimi136 circles during the Industrial Revolution? That is just what Proust describes in his world, but there it didn’t result in the fear, nay panic, in an Englishman’s heart lest he be addressed cordially by some one! So of course Dylan Thomas wears colored wool shirts. How wonderful that the Scots lack any shade of it and move in and out. English life, not imitated and not catalytic, but unaffected.

  The Achilles’ heel of the French is property and avarice (not luxuria137); of the British “Racha, thou fool”;138 of the Americans, self-righteousness—and here I am displaying it.

  Our girls here are fine.

  Our house is honored this week-end by two Golden Guests, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Larry, the greatest English actor in 200 years, says he is using the drive down here to study Lear which he brings to London in the Fall!139

  Love to you and your Loved-ones

  Thorny.

  214. TO RUTH GORDON AND GARSON KANIN. ALS 2 pp. Private

  Last days at Nantucket.

  As from: 50 Deepwood Drive Hamden 14 Conn.

  July 23. 1946

  Dear Ones:

  At the end all her dear traits became clear to us again but in a new light: her self-effacement in loving and serving; her Scots independence and desire to endure whatever she had to endure, alone; her distress at “putting people out”; and finally one we had never seen before,—the call for help.140

  Isabel has been wonderful throughout.

  I dread writing Vivien, Binkie,141 Sibyl, etc. that I am not going abroad, after all. I shall be at Deepwood Drive until Christmas, finishing the novel and sort-of re-establishing a home. Important for Isabel is the feeling that she is needed and useful somewhere; otherwise—you can see—she seems to hang in mid-air. ……

  My hard work begins next Monday. I’m looking forward to those five weeks. Summer theatre’s so damned occupying. Carol Stone is to be our Sabina at Cohasset; the other productions will be full of old friends. Doro Merande, Coolidge, Tom Coley, etc.142

  The novel’s full of glitter now that Cleopatra has arrived in Rome, but its also getting deeper, wider, and more preposterous,—yes, that’s the word for the burden of vast implications I’ve assigned myself.

  We’ve been reading about the March’s possibly taking part in Miss Jones.143 I’m sure that under Garson’s hand they’d be fine; but I’ll have to hover about in the last row disguised. Florence was very incensed by a moderate letter I wrote her and I doubt that she’ll ever consent to speak to me.

  Monty Clift writes me that Garson was a wonderful help to him in the tangles of Hollywood negotiation. I’m afraid that fellow’s going to get caught in delays, re-tests, refusals of scripts, and a whole season will go by without his having played anything or en
ding up as the Young Man rejected by Barbara Stanwyck’s daughter.

  TNW as George Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth.

  TNW as George Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  Garson, William Layton writes me that there is talk of his being asked to read for the part of the New Republic Editor in one of your companies.144 At his request and in dutiful memory of Woollcott who’s secretary he was, I hereby put in a word for him. He’s just come back from the London “Our Town”; was the Radio Operator in a year of “The Man who came to Dinner”; a Marine in the Pacific for years; a trained actor, with a steady unvarying authority that was a benefit to the whole London venture, and a fine fellow. To be reached through Joe Magee of the Wm Morris office.

  Try and remain modest and unspoiled, dears, in spite of the fact that you’re the best, brightest, sturdiest, most gifted and most lovable urchins in the world.

  your old

  Thornton

  215. TO ALICE B. TOKLAS. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Yale

  October 8 1946

  Dear Alice:

  These last weeks, in whatever company I’ve been in, I’ve silenced the aimless talk that goes on in order to tell them about Gertrude, about the several Gertrudes, the Gertrude who with zest and vitality could make so much out of every moment of the daily life, the Gertrude who listened to each new person with such attention and could make out of her listening such rich reinforcing friendship, the Gertrude of intellectual combat who couldn’t let any nonsense or sentimentality or easy generalization go by unpunished, and finally the greatest Gertrude of all, the inspired giant-Gertrude who knew, and who discovered and who broke the milestones behind her.145

  Oh, miserable me, I lost my mother this summer. I havent a right sense of time. I’ve lived as though I assumed that we’d have these infinitely treasurable people always with us. I never foresee their not being there. It may be that this makes my losses twice as cutting, but I think it has one consolation: while they were alive I had them really as a possession, I didn’t feel them as temporary. My Gertrude is always there, as she was there before I knew her, which is to say: always here.

  My poignant self-reproach at not having written her is acute. It doesn’t help that I remember that she taught me how all those audience-activities—“articles”, letter-writing, and conversation itself are impure at the source,—but oh! that I had at least sent her signs and signals of my ever-deeper love and endebtedness.

  At the time of her death, so soon after my mother’s, I was booked up with engagements acting in my plays in the summer theatres. I was unable in that stupifying work to write an adequate, a half-adequate article for one of the weekly reviews,—revolted though I was at the incomprehension of their papers about her. Again, this unmarked sense of time came into play—that someday when I had realized fully her loss and had penetrated still further into the greatness of her achievement I should write what I remembered and what I had come to grasp.

  During the War I was not exposed to any particular danger or even tension; I have no right, compared to my friends in combat, to claim any long slow and difficult readjustment; but nevertheless that’s what I’ve been undergoing. I seem only now to be emerging from a long torpor and misanthropy and paralysis of the will. My outward health soon recovered—the disabilities that prevented my fulfilling the appointment to the Embassy in Paris—but the psychological effects have dragged on for a long time.146

  I do not know whether this silence and “absence” led Gertrude to believe that the literary executorship of her work would better be transferred to another person.147 If she felt so, I would very well understand it. If, however, she wished me to assume it I am as eager as ever and I hope as efficient. I mention it because I have interested the editors of the Yale University Press in a possible publication of Four in America which seems to me one of her most significant as well as her most charming works. It is the one I dreamed of publishing myself “the next time I made some money.” My money-making capabilities have slowed down, along with the rest of me, and if this turns out to be a real offer of publication I think it should be accepted. In whose hands would you like to place the negotiations?148

  I have not said anything, dearest Alice, about the loneliness you must be feeling. All I can say is: WASN’T IT WONDERFUL TO HAVE KNOWN AND LOVED HER? What glory! What fun! What goodness! What loveableness!

  Everything one can say falls short of it. Someday before long I shall try to put all that down in words as carefully chosen as I can choose them—in the meantime she grows in my mind and heart and realization. Her greatness in the larger world has scarcely begun yet; long after you and I are dead she will be becoming clearer and clearer as the great thinker and the great soul of our time.

  With much love, dear Alice,

  much love

  Thornton

  216. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) NYU

  January 7.

  <19>47

  Monday

  Dear Sibyl:

  That’s the chief thing I have to say so I write that big.149

  So, dear, I put this Fall into living in Deepwood Drive, and refocusing the ménage after it’s loss. We coped with the community; we went to people’s houses and we had people in. All this became positively mountainous over the holidays, what with eggnogs and everybody’s relatives visiting from out of town. Such greetings over cocktails; such “now we have to hurry on to the Tuttles or the Donaldson’s, or the. ….”.

  So that’s done. The house is repainted. Isabel is installed in a great wheel of social give-and-take that will occupy her for years. During my absence a friend of long standing is coming to live in the house.

  My sense that any particular value of heart or head is transmitted in “conversation” has never been very strong. It was much sapped during the War. So I went through all this with mounting fretfulness. I even developed a technique of coping with it. Dreading the conversations of others. … on politics or literature or on our neighbors. …. I resolutely set about talking myself on what interested me. During those obligatory two hours after rising from table at a dinner party or even in the meleé of a cocktail party, I too often threw my partenaires150 into consternation by insisting on telling them about Lope de Vega, Freud’s theory of the physiological basis for avarice, Kierkegaard and the “leap”. This practice cannot be acquitted of egotism; but it was not at least complacent egotism, for I did not enjoy it. It was a modus vivendi.

  At last I can go. On the 15th of January I start driving to Mexico. And oh the exhalation of Relief and the joys of holding my tongue.

  The work on the novel stumbled. But just last week I rolled up my sleeves to do a page or two to keep it in hand, and it came fine. [A sample from the Notebooks that Cornelius Nepos kept for potential biographies he might write some day. He had had Cicero to dinner and lured him into talking about Caesar. Cicero’s fear, envy, and incomprehension comes out as wit. Very funny. This book ought to have every color, and I knew that it had developed without much being funny—now it’s got some very funny places and will have more, juxtaposed with much that is painful and much that is, I hope, beautiful.]

  So, dear, I shall miss Henry Uxbridge151 and John Gielgud. In the light of Lady Anderson152 all your recommendees are so joyfully rewarding that I regret this much. But I shall be at San Miguel or at Manzaniko.

  Look at this wildly self-centered letter. Well, I am spiritually ill from lack of solitude. I shall return healed and a Franciscan brother of the human community. Now that the Dioscuri (Larry and Vivien,—I like to think of happy married couples as twins) are resting I shall venture to write them a letter. Yours are of such fascination and vitality that we forget that you are surmounting pain

  You will hear from me oftener when finally I am not in the situation of a bear frustrated of his hibern
ation.

  Lots of love

  Thornton

  217. TO JUNE AND LEONARD TROLLEY.153 ALS 2 pp. Yale

  As from: 50 Deepwood Drive. Hamden 14. Connecticut

  New Orleans, La. Feb. 23. 1947

  Dear June; dear Leonard:

  I throw myself on your forgiveness. I had a sheltered life during the War and have no right to talk of post-war maladjustment, but that uprooting in my middle age did have bad after effects on me. One of them was a relapse into melancholia, lethargy and unsociableness. The death of my mother and the consequent necessity of settling in New Haven (i.e. Hamden) all Fall in order to rebuild the home for my sister after it had lost its center, all added to this. What I needed was to work, and in order to work, solitude, so soon after the New Year I left home and came down here. Tomorrow I take a tramp ship to Yucatán, and that will be sufficiently “cut off” and solitary. So I ask your forgiveness; and plunge at once into answering your questions.

  a. Common Sense says that you shouldn’t cross the water now,—and yet. …… On the one hand, you know our Actors Equity rule that a non-American citizen engaged for a role here must wait six months at the termination of that role before assuming another. [Occasional exceptions are made when a manager goes before Equity’s council and asserts that such-an-such a non-American actor is the only one he can find to fill a given part.] Moreover, jobs are hard to find. Your theatre structures were reduced by bombing; our by the fact that movies buy up the houses and convert them into cinema halls. There’s an awful dearth of theatres and plays wander around the provinces waiting to enter New York when a theatre tenancy is vacated.