The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 45
x
You have a choice: to take the risk of photographing the exact text, trusting that the visual excitement of great-and-small men will hold up to the end.
Or: taking constant liberties: having Gulliver really intervene in a war between the people of Lilliput and Blefusco; having Gulliver really have an absurd but touching tendresse (and farewell) with the Queen of Brobdingnag,—things like that.
I suggest that you attempt the latter.
x
Your deference over the phone to my being occupied and having no time, etc, embarrassed me. Wherever I am, I am always a lazy loafer, a very intermittent worker.
If you and Mr. Hawks would wish in addition to seeing this increasingly famous valley and also talk over this very exciting project, I should certainly be delighted. On the afternoons of the 27th and 28th the Budapest String Quartet is giving two concerts (the 28th is both the birthday of Goethe and of Mrs Walter Paepcke). If that sounds too much like a distraction, any other day would be all right up to my departure for the East on September 3.
Sincerely yours,
Thornton Wilder.
Hotel Jerome Annex, Room 321
228. TO HEINRICH WALTER.193 ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Private
Oct 28 1949
Dear Dr. Walter:
Unfortunately the request you convey comes at a time when I cannot do anything about it. I must absorb myself completely in the completion of this work.
You may wish, however, to recast some of the following items into a sort of interview:
a large portion of Our Town was written at the Hotel Belvoir<,> Ruschlikon.194 It was a stimulation to know that in immediately adjacent houses Brahms was reported to have written the Liebeswaltzer and Conrad F Meyer the Balladen.195
For several months I walked into the city every evening and walked back to my hotel—in addition to long walks in the surrounding country. Often in the City I attended the performances at the Stadttheater and the other theatres for drama and opera.
The absence of representative scenery has never been felt by me to be an innovation, but a “restoration” of dramatic conditions as established in Elizabethen England and the Siglo de oro of Spain.196
The aim of the last act is not to present a statement about the life after death but merely a point of view of how life should appear to us while we are alive,—the “after death” situation is only a metaphor and is borrowed from the picture given in Dante’s Purgatorio “Our Town” is an attempt to present our daily life against the perspective of vast stretches of time; “The Skin of our Teeth” is similarly civilization as viewed against vast stretches of time; the play I am working on now is, perhaps, the subjective life of the individual so viewed.197
Like all my plays, “Our Town” is filled with borrowings from Our Masters. Emily’s farewell to the world is from Achilles’ praise of the things he had valued in life: his “fresh raiment” becomes “new-ironed dresses”; his wine—naturally—becomes coffee.
As I was writing this your second letter arrived.
I think it surprising that “Welt am Sonntag” cut the first paragraph which must have explained to the readers that the interview took place at the Goethe Feier in Colorado.
Yes you may certainly borrow from Mr. Jungk and I’m sorry that I cannot now send a more extended “interview”.
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
Part Five
HONORS: 1950-1960
DURING THE 1950s, THORNTON WILDER WAS ENGAGED IN intermittent travels, writing projects, and civic events, which often included receiving honors from governments, universities, and professional societies. After a three-month trip to Europe in the spring of 1950, which included Lope de Vega research in Spain, Wilder flew back to the United States in May to participate in a college production of Our Town, give an address, and receive an honorary degree. He took the position of Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard for the academic year 1950-1951. The terms of this prestigious appointment required that he live on campus, give six public lectures, which would then be published by Harvard University Press, and generally make himself available to the Harvard community. Wilder made himself so available that in March 1951, he collapsed from exhaustion and a sacroiliac condition and spent a month in the hospital. He gave five of the six Norton Lectures and stayed in Cambridge after his appointment ended to prepare them for publication, a task that proved to be extremely difficult. In an effort to make progress on the essays, he changed his location, spending two months in France, then three months back in the United States, where he traveled from Pennsylvania to Florida.
In May 1952, Wilder received the Gold Medal for Fiction from his peers in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the same time, writing projects new and old invited his attention: a possible screenplay set in Chicago for Italian director Vittorio de Sica, the rewriting of some plays he had put aside earlier, and the completion of the Norton Lectures for Harvard University Press. He revised three of the lectures at this time and they were published in The Atlantic Monthly in July, August, and November 1952. The film did not materialize and his playwriting projects were temporarily put aside.
The State Department asked Wilder to represent the United States as head of the American delegation to an arts conference sponsored by UNESCO, which would be held in Venice in September 1952. He was assigned to write the general report of the conference, and as soon as he completed this, Ruth Gordon asked him to revise The Merchant of Yonkers for her. Wilder spent the next eight months in Europe, where he worked on the play, as well as socialized with friends and pursued Lope de Vega research. When he returned home in May 1953, he had completed most of the revisions and a scholarly article on de Vega. The article was published in August 1953, just as he was putting the finishing touches on the script for Gordon at the MacDowell Colony. The revised play was titled The Matchmaker.
During the fall of 1953, Wilder was in Newport, Rhode Island, one of his favorite writing hideaways, trying to complete a third act for “The Emporium.” Although he had begun the play in 1948 and worked on it over the years, a final version continued to elude him. He drove south for the winter and turned northward again with the coming of spring, his car filled with his journals, notes for the rest of the Norton Lectures, his Finnegans Wake material, his manuscripts, including the still-unfinished “Emporium,” and the usual quantities of mail to be answered. He spent the spring and early summer of 1954 in various locations on the East Coast, then sailed to England in mid-July to attend rehearsals of The Matchmaker, which was to have its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival in August. The production received wonderful notices, and after touring England in October, it opened in London in November, to rave reviews.
After the Edinburgh success, Wilder left for the Continent in early September 1954 for a round of lectures in Germany and socializing in Paris. By mid-October, he was settled in Aix-en-Provence, ready for solitude and work. Following some Christmas travel to Switzerland, he returned to Aix and resumed writing. During this time in Aix, he took short breaks in Italy and Spain, then returned to the United States in April 1955. While in Aix, Wilder had worked on The Alcestiad, a play he had begun in the late 1930s and then turned to again in 1942, when he was stationed at Hamilton Field. Although it had been no more than half finished when he resumed work on it in 1954, his writing had advanced far enough by mid-January 1955 that he’d entered into negotiations to have it performed at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1955. The festival managers believed that Wilder’s title might be off-putting for their audience, so The Alcestiad was retitled A Life in the Sun. Wilder continued to work on the play throughout the spring, and in mid-July 1955, he sailed to England for another round of rehearsals and another Edinburgh Festival opening in August. This time, however, his play was not well received.
Wilder spent the early fall of 1955 on the Continent, enjoying the company of his friends. In mid-october, he
returned to the United States for rehearsals and out-of-town tryouts of The Matchmaker, which was scheduled to open in New York on December 5. He went back to Europe before that opening because he had arranged to meet with Louise Talma, a composer whose music he admired and with whom he planned to collaborate on an opera. They had first encountered each other at the MacDowell Colony in 1953, and throughout 1954 both of them had searched for a libretto idea. Wilder suggested they consider The Alcestiad, and when Talma agreed, they began work. For Wilder, this meant the attractive idea of immersion in a new writing form. He remained in Europe, traveled, began work on the libretto, and met once more with Talma before returning to the United States, arriving on February 29, 1956.
Wilder also began a new drama project in May 1956, a series of “Four Minute Plays for Four Persons.” Soon they exceeded his imposed limitations and he began to envision them on an arena stage. Between social engagements and travel, he continued to work on these plays, as well as on the Alcestiad libretto. He spent some time at home, but he was also on the move, looking for places to work. For the next year, he traveled around the East Coast, went to the Southwest, and then on to Mexico. In April 1957, a few days before his sixtieth birthday, he and his sister Isabel sailed for Europe. They visited friends in Paris, traveled to Brussels to see The Matchmaker performed in French, and went to Switzerland and then to Bonn, where Wilder was given a signal honor for intellectual achievement: He was inducted into the Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste. After this, he returned to Switzerland for rehearsals of the German-language production of The Alcestiad in Zurich. It was well received, foreshadowing the play’s popularity on the German and Austrian stages. Wilder returned to the United States in July 1957 to spend the summer in New England, having completed a one-act satyr play to accompany The Alcestiad; titled The Drunken Sisters, it was published in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1957.
Acceding to another request by the State Department, Wilder flew to Germany in September 1957 to participate in the dedication of the new Congress Hall in West Berlin. Two of the new one-act plays he had written in 1956, as well as a play he had written much earlier, were among the seven plays presented by American dramatists on that occasion. Wilder performed in two of his plays and was master of ceremonies for the entire program. After the festival, he visited Bad Homburg before going on to Frankfurt in October to receive the German booksellers’ Peace Prize, the first American to be so honored, and to give his address, “Culture in a Democracy,” in German to an audience of two thousand people. That same fall, he received an honorary degree from Frankfurt’s Goethe University and was awarded Austria’s Medal of Honor for Science and Fine Arts.
After he returned to the United States in December 1957, Wilder spent most of his time at home in Hamden. Then in February 1958, he journeyed to Washington, where he received a medal from the government of Peru. Soon thereafter, he resumed his peripatetic writing life. This time, he drove to California to confer for a week with Louise Talma. He drove around Southern California before heading home to Deepwood Drive in a leisurely fashion. During this period, he continued to work on his one-act plays for an arena stage, which he now conceived of as part of a series based on the seven deadly sins.
When Wilder returned home in June 1958, he embarked upon what had by now become a summer routine, driving around New England, where he visited friends or enjoyed quiet times alone. once autumn set in, he packed up his manuscripts and notebooks and sailed for Europe, where he spent the winter and early spring of 1959 in several favorite locales in Austria, Switzerland, and Italy, places that suited both his desire for company and his need for solitude in order to work. At the end of March 1959, he returned to Hamden and attended to his mail and business matters before setting off yet again. This time, he drove to hideaways in Saratoga Springs and Newport. Between May and October 1959, Wilder devoted himself to a number of projects: He agreed to have his one-acts produced in the arena-style Circle in the Square Theatre in New York once they were completed; cleared his latest libretto draft with Louise Talma; performed in a summer theater as the Stage Manager in Our Town (his last appearance as an actor); and helped with an adaptation of The Ides of March for the stage. He also resolved to abstain from his time-consuming Lope de Vega and Finnegans Wake studies.
In the fall of 1959, Wilder sailed for Europe. He traveled in Germany and Switzerland, spent a couple of weeks in Paris, and then visited Italy. After leaving Italy at Christmastime, he took a long sea voyage, finding, as always, that a shipboard routine was beneficial for writing. He was back in Hamden by the end of March 1960 and remained at home much of that spring. In the summer and fall of 1960, his writing materials at hand, he roamed around New England, then drove south for the winter. He put aside some projects dating from the beginning of the decade, such as “The Emporium” and the overdue Norton Lectures; others he continued working on, such as the libretto for The Alcestiad opera and the unfinished one-act series concerning the seven deadly sins. There were new projects, as well. He agreed to write another libretto, an adaptation of his one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner, for use as a short opera by composer Paul Hindemith. He also began a new series of one-act plays based on the seven ages of man, one of which—Childhood—was published in The Atlantic Monthly in November 1960.
Wilder ushered out the year 1960 in New Orleans. More than ever before, as he reached his mid-sixties, he was feeling that the demands of his public life were impinging on and interfering with his writing, and he yearned to find a way to escape these obligations for a sustained period of time.
229. TO MARGARITA DE MAYO.1 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Vassar
Midnight and a half
Jan 12-13. 1940? <1950>
Dear Margarita:
I strongly suspect
I strongly suspect
I strongly suspect
that the enclosed envelope contains an honorarium
I’ve long made a rule
I’ve long made a rule
I’ve long made a rule
never to accept an honorarium from any educational institution.
I’m very well fed
I’m very well housed
I’m very well clothed (only I don’t take care of my clothes)
by the Entertainment business and movies and readers.
So I delight
So I love
So I rejoice
to give my services when I can to young people in schools and colleges.
And never have I been happier doing it than under your charming and gracious auspices
Your friend
Thornton
230. TO AVA BODLEY, LADY ANDERSON. ALS 4 pp. Rice
American Express Co.
11 rue Scribe
March 19 1950
Dear Lady Anderson:
My last hour in London I stopped by the Authors Club in Whitehall Court (for once it had not been able to lodge me; long booked-up, they said, by visitors to the Ideal Homes Exhibition) and there found your kind messages. I’m sorry I had not received earlier the change of hour for Thursday’s lunch,—every moment being so delightful.
Mr. Sitwell presented me with a copy of his book on the Netherlands2 which I promptly read—at Dover—with continuous pleasure and a mounting desire to go right back to Holland. Mr. Sitwell is a determined individualist; we must take him on his terms. He resolutely refuses to discuss the Big Things in order to call our attention to overlooked beauties and half-hidden oddities. He says that there is nothing new to be said about the grandes machines3 —the great churches and canvases; but it is precisely from such richly-furnished minds as his that we could obtain fresh lights on the great masterpieces. Wouldn’t it be fun to get him in a corner some day and make him talk about “The Night Watch” or the “View of Delft”?
I leave Friday for the few weeks in Spain—long walks, musing, and work. I am so conscious of having been “bad”—of neglect
ing work in order to pursue a variety of interests—and of having been impeded by my sister’s illness,4 that I have determined to make this really a solitary Trappist work-siege. Hence my feeling that I must deny myself the splendor and violence of Holy Week at Seville. The moment has come when I must make and not receive. Hence, too, my confused and absurd remarks at lunch—which certainly laid me open to the charge of fatuity—about being annoyed by reporters. The happiest occasions in my life were those days when as dreamy student-vagabond—boundlessly un-noticed—I visited foreign countries: to recover that is all my aim.
If I finish my play this spring, then I can give my summer—or part of it—to work on Lope de Vega in the archives of Spain, and then I may ask you for the introduction to the Duke of Alba.5
The reason why I have been able to make so great an advance in Lope studies is that I selected a limited moment in his career. other Lopistas treat of his entire life and work—the most immense output in all literary history; they can do no more than scratch that vast surface. I fixed first on 1599-1600, and began making explorations in depth, widening gradually. Under this microscopic treatment passages and documents began to reveal more and more material; and now I know my way about his life and works from 1590-1606. (The poet did not die until 1635, writing voluminously the whole time).
We know that Lope withdrew from the service of the Duke of Alba during the early months of 1595; but scholars have been in much doubt as to when he entered it. We have a play dated in Lope’s autograph Carlos El Perseguido November 2 1590. Only a microscopic Lopista would notice that in it a wicked duquesa is the daughter of a duque Albano. Throughout the next ten years Lope was to use the name Albano with deference and even affection, because of the syllables Alba that it contains—including writing plays, poems, and a novel referring to the marriage and sentimental history of the Duke who had been sent “into Coventry” by Philip II for shifting from one bride to another on the eve of his wedding. Hence Lope was not yet secretary by the end of 1590. Soon after Lope had a daughter whom he christened Antonia probably after the Duke Don Antonio. In May 1593 the Duke’s brother Don Diego de Toledo was killed by a bull in a fiesta. Lope wrote a most beautiful threnody for the occasion, but in the comedias I have found two allusions to this death which have never been remarked before—in modern times—and which help me to date the plays.