The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 53
Well, I’ll never mail this letter if I don’t stop at the bottom of this page. I send you the enclosed Christmas present well before Christmas, so you can be thinking over what you want. ¶ This minute Aunt Isabel tells me you’ll be away for ages—so I must send this to Cambridge. I wish I’d got it off earlier.
Love
Uncle Thornt.
Not reread: punctuate and re-spell to taste
273. TO JANET AND WINTHROP DAKIN. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Yale
Friday
Dear Janet Dear Toby
Selah!
Lobet den Hern!167
First, I want to say that again I had a lovely day at your house on Thanksgiving and then another following.
There were only two flies in the ointment:
One: that I there discovered how completely I had lost whatever little practice I had had with the piano; and
Two: that there were no new drawings of Toby<’s> on the wall, and that he is in danger of losing whatever considerable practice he had.168
It’s too late for me to regain mine, but it’s not too late for him to recover and to advance. He must have a very real aptitude for one of the first he did—the shoe—is still one of his best, and is a very good drawing indeed.
I have been in Newport most of two days and have scarcely said a word, except indispensible greetings to the staff etc. and going without speaking is—like going with
Now I have something to ask Janet.
Frankfurt am Main has asked me to write a play to open their new theatre in September 1963.
I can’t do it, of course, unless I get a good IDEA.
And maybe I could write a play, good or bad, and they might not like it.
So many things may rise to prevent it. But.
I have an idea or two ideas that might set me planning and plotting. One is how down through families and cultures and centuries the destructive elements in one generation can produce good elements in the next; and how the good elements in one generation could produce bad effects in the next—a sort of birds’ eye view of a hundred years; the audience recognizing the strands of certain qualities from parents to children, saint to rogue; hero to fop; rascal to patriot, and so on. With the general tenor that something more than moral judgment is at work—that what struggles to be free (in criminal or in hero) is what is ultimately valuable for society.169
And the other: that it takes many hundreds years of this mixed-mixed-social-anti-social living to produce a community helpful to the individual.
And for that I’d like to meditate
Will you be thinking that over?
I don’t want it now—I won’t want it until well after Christmas. And even then it need only be six lines (of the length of the lines I’m writing now) like: grasses to low bushes (1000 years); low bushes to willows; willows to soft oaks (300 years) soft oaks to hard oaks (500 years). Something like that.
Again lots of love to BOTH
TO BONNIE and JINGLE
and to BRAVA and GREY-Y170
Thy
Thornts
274. TO LAURENCE OLIVIER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) British Library
(Newport, R.I.
Dec 10 <1960>… returning home today.)
Dear Larry:
Rê: Far From the Madding Crowd.171
Had never read it. A thousand thanks for calling my attention to it. Read the first two thirds of it in a whirl of admiration. Delight in the chorus of yokels; the sureness of Hardy’s hand which comes from his observation of nature and of farming.
Above all his power to make us believe that the characters are really in love—that makes most novelists seem immature.
But it has two big weaknesses:
It runs down badly in the third part. Very few of those novelists escaped that resort to crowded Victorian melodrama, wild coincidences taking place under thunderstorms, etc. Hardy made it worse by claiming to identify these goings-on with a philosophical and even theological meaning. He pulls the artificial strings of his puppet-show and then declares that God is a sardonic showman piling up tragic and ironic catastrophes upon poor human beings.
Hardy even says so in Far From the Madding Crowd: near the end of Chapter LIII: “Even then Boldwood did not recognize that the impersonator of HEAVEN’S PERSISTENT IRONY towards him…….” That’s the views that makes Jude the Obscure and The Dynasts nearly unreadable and which almost ruins The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Bound up with this, because it increases so in the third part is the behavior of Bathsheba.
As Alec Woollcott once said of Eleanora von Mendelssohn: “There comes a time when you can no longer do anything for a girl who persists in making every mistake.” And Bathsheba sure does plunge from one blunder to another.
xx
But.
Just the same.
It’s a stunning novel.
Any dramatization of a novel that succeeds amazes me. My friend Paul Osborne has done half a dozen of them. I should be so distressed by what one would have to omit that I’d lose confidence in saving what one could save.
But I wish you every success, if you do go to work with it.
xx xx
I saw the Kanins in Boston. They’re working at an awful pitch of tension, shaping and reshaping that vast project.172 I believe it will be a success, but at what a cost. I get downright mad at the extent to which it has removed Ruth and Gar from all other interests, from all other exersize of their gifts, from their friends…… It’s as though they had gone to Tierro del Fuego for eight months and aged themselves in building an attractive gazebo there.
xx xx
On the 16th I start driving South. Gas stations, roadside restaurants, villages, motels. Shenandoah Valley. The Mississippi. I’m going to spend Christmas in New Orleans. I only know about 3 people there and I’m not going to call them up until after the holidays.
People say: “But won’t you be lonely, Mr. Wilder?”
And I say: “I HOPE SO!”
(N.B. I shall have a corner table every noon at Galatoire’s.173)
x
Confidential: Paul Hindemith has made a chamber-opera of my old one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner. It’s a jewel. It’s a treasure. Vienna wants to put it on in its June Festival. Especially if Paul and I run up another one to fill out the bill.174 I hope to do that in New Orleans, though I’m a slow worker. The Maestro can fill his sheets of music paper as fast as the hand can travel.
x
Please give my affectionate admiration to the radiant, strong, sincere, gifted, beautiful young lady I met in the elevator.175
your old
Thornts
P.S. That was a mighty silly conversation we had with Mr. M. in your dressing room about doctorates.176 But you were unkind to forget yours from Tufts! And I lied because I now remember that I have not ten but nine, and my best three (Harvard, Yale, and Frankfurt am Main) dont equal your best. My brother’s got one that beats us all: The University of Basel on its 600th anniversary.177
TNW
275. TO LOUISE TALMA. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 17, Connecticut) Yale
Dec. 31. 1960
7:30 p.m. waiting to go to a reveillon party
I can’t drag myself to reread this—punctuate to taste
Dear Louise:
Well, the holidays are almost over.
&n
bsp; Here, they won’t be over until Tuesday the 3rd (Monday is another holiday—banks closed and all—because of the Sugar Bowl Game; this year the Rice (Texas) Owls are playing the U. of Mississippi Rebels (sic), and I can tell you the passions run high. Since Friday night the racket in these hotel corridors until late at night. …<)>
x
New Orleans has a great deal of charm but along with the charm you’re constantly aware of that fact that for decades the South got no real education. Some fellows went to Princeton; some got as far as Harvard (“The Sound and the Fury”—do you remember the closing words? “I don’t hate the South; I don’t hate it!”)178 I was going to save for you a manifesto in this morning’s paper by a group bent on keeping the public school system undefiled. Well, the syntax and the coherent thinking of its ringing paragraphs threw an odd lite on the education they were so impassioned about.
Anyway, it’s all very interesting. This is the third large community of French-outside France that I’ve seen a good deal of: the Québecois; the Colons of Algeria; and these Créoles. These are easily the most engaging. Besides they’re the only group that brought their refinement in cuisine with them.
x
So I promised to write something about the Emily Dickinson volumes.179
Before I forwarded them, I cheated: I read them myself. And somewhere in volume II I remembered that you said you like to read volumes that I had marked. (I always mark up a volume—often making an additional index of my own.) So I began. And then I noticed that I was underlining to correlate certain things between the lines that I can only call the gossip aspect. And I became ashamed of myself and stopped. Leyda (I gave him some letters of introduction when first he went to Amherst, many years ago—having much admired the similar “log” he did on Melville) has done a very curious job as editor. Apart from a few circumspect remarks in the introduction he hasn’t said boo! I suppose that’s because he promised all those people who ransacked their attics and also because he must efface himself before the Big ED works being given out of the Houghton Library by Johnson180 (without which his volumes would have been impossible.) But what he does is leave us this semé181 of items; we can weigh, speculate, and probe if we wish.
I profoundly admire her poetry. But as with Joyce I feel no admiration for her character. I don’t believe in all that fulsome language of endearment. I detest the constant seeing her loved ones snatched away, gone to Heaven, especially the newborn babies whom she consigns to the ground at once. There is a terribiltà182 all over the place, muffled, muted. And I wish Leyda had shared with us all that additional matter he must know. What an awful place Amherst was! All that religiosity, and how atrociously they treated their “ministers.” It’s all a putrescent protestantism. What a woman, Sue!183 All the hatreds in those two houses. Leyda should have told us (since there is so much about them) that Austin loathed his father yet when his father died, he dyed his hair red to resemble him. The father was a tormented s.o.b. but one evening he had the church bells rung to call the town’s attention to a particularly fine sunset.
And out of that the poems came!
x
I thank you, dear Louise, and shall thank you daily while I live for those two volumes that will be arriving for my Christmas.184
Love
Thornt
Jan 2. 1961
Going to the “symphony” tomorrow night. Arrau is playing the Schumann and a Chopin.
Word has come that I’ve got to go to the Skin of Our Teeth European tour company—try out in Palm Beach… So I’ll leave here about next Satdy.
Part six
JOURNEYS: 1961-1975
AS 1961 BEGAN, THORNTON WILDER VOWED TO WORK ONLY on novels and plays; he stopped writing essays and introductions, and he discontinued giving lectures and speeches. He had several current writing projects in his portfolio as he drove north after spending February 1961 in Florida. The libretto for The Alcestiad opera was completed, and the libretto for the Hindemith opera of The Long Christmas Dinner was almost finished and would be ready in time for its December 26 premiere in Mannheim, Germany. Wilder was also at work on the two series of one-act plays, “The Seven Deadly Sins” and “The Seven Ages of Man,” for the arena stage at New York’s Circle in the Square Theatre, and these manuscript materials were packed in his luggage when he left in March for a two-month trip to Italy, Switzerland, and Germany.
After his return from Europe, Wilder worked on several of the plays at New England summer retreats and continued this writing throughout the fall. There were to be fourteen one-acts in all, but only three were ready to be staged. His “Plays for Bleecker Street,” so called because the Circle in the Square was on Bleecker Street, opened on January 11, 1962. Someone from Assisi was from the “Sin” series and Infancy and Childhood were from the “Ages” series. Wilder kept working on both series, and, as was his habit, he did not attend the premiere. Instead, he was in Atlantic City, helping Jerome Kilty, a young actor/playwright friend, adapt Wilder’s 1948 novel, The Ides of March, into a play. Shortly thereafter, Thornton and Isabel left for Frankfurt, Germany, for the rehearsals and premiere of The Alcestiad opera, which was scheduled to open on March 2, 1962. “An Evening with Thornton Wilder” was held in Washington, D.C., in April. At this event, Wilder read from his work in front of an audience that included President Kennedy’s cabinet and invited guests. Less than a month later, he drove to Arizona to become a self-styled “hermit in the desert,” planning to live anonymously and write for two years. He set off in his car on May 9, 1962, and arrived in Douglas, Arizona, on May 26.
Wilder stayed in Douglas, with occasional visits to Tucson, for a year and a half. While he was working on the one-act plays around Christmastime in 1962, he decided to change course. He began a new novel, which he would work on during his entire stay in Douglas. Since he was unsure at the outset whether this project would continue to flourish, he did not mention it to his sister Isabel until March 1963. He intended to be in Arizona for two years, and he planned to leave only for a brief trip, scheduled for September 1963, when he was to receive the Medal of Freedom from President Kennedy in Washington. The ceremony was postponed twice, once because of the death of the president’s newborn son in August 1963 and then because of the president’s assassination. A new date for the ceremony was set, and Wilder left Douglas in late November in order to reach Washington for the presentation of the award by President Lyndon Johnson on December 6.
Having decided not to return to Arizona, Wilder traveled to Hamden and then went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend his brother’s retirement dinner at the Harvard Divinity School and spend the Christmas holidays with his family before setting off in early January 1964 for a four-month stay in Europe. That month, after he had left for Europe, a musical based on his play The Matchmaker opened in New York; the great success of Hello, Dolly! gave the Wilder finances a tremendous boost. His goal during his time abroad was to complete his novel, but he began to realize in April that it would be significantly longer than his previous ones. In May 1964, he booked passage on an Italian ship traveling from Genoa to Curaçao, a three-week voyage that would allow him to continue writing in comfort and without interruption.
He remained in Curaçao for a week before flying to Florida, where his concentration was hampered by the necessity of driving himself around and visiting his aunt Charlotte Niven, who was now living in St. Petersburg. When he reached Hamden at the end of June, Wilder had a routine eye examination and a cancerous mole was discovered near his left eye. He subsequently underwent surgery to have the tumor removed, then spent most of July undergoing radiation treatments. By August, he was pronounced fit enough to resume his travels around New England. By mid-September, he was off to Quebec, and by December, he was able to make the long car journey to Florida.
In January 1965, Wilder was ready to return to Europe to continue work on his ever-expanding novel. Reversing the route he had taken from Europe the
previous spring, he flew from Florida to Curaçao and embarked on a leisurely three-week Atlantic crossing, this time to the French Riviera. He spent six weeks writing in Europe, then embarked on another three-week ocean voyage, returning to Curaçao. He was back in Florida by mid-April. May 4, 1965, was the only inflexible date on his calendar that year. That was the day Wilder was due at the White House to receive the first Medal for Literature award from the National Book Committee, which was presented to him by Lady Bird Johnson. After that, he was off to New York to see, for the first and only time, the long-running Hello, Dolly! and, as promised, pose for publicity photos for the show. Early June found him in New Haven to attend his forty-fifth Yale reunion; he remained in Connecticut for most of the summer, working on his novel, and then spent several weeks in August with Isabel on Martha’s Vineyard. With the manuscript of his unfinished novel in tow, Wilder sailed for Europe with Isabel in October. They stayed three months; in early February 1966, Wilder embarked on his now-preferred leisurely ocean voyage from Genoa to Curaçao, then flew to Florida, where he spent three months writing.
upon his return from Florida, he spent a short time at home in Hamden, then set off to writing retreats in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Quebec. He spent August 1965 in solitude at New Haven’s Hotel Taft before joining his sister on Martha’s Vineyard for September. When Wilder traveled, he could set the parameters of his writing and social life. This solved the difficulty of declining invitations and offending friends and family. As a solitary vagabond, he could also make the abrupt changes of locale that sometimes helped to stimulate his thought processes when he felt stymied in the midst of his work. Wilder had been working on his novel full-time since January 1963, and now it was almost completed. At the end of October, he returned to Europe, visiting Paris and Munich. Then on November 26, 1966, in Innsbruck, Austria, he signed off on the proofs of the new novel, The Eighth Day. He spent Christmas in Switzerland, traveled in Italy, then sailed back home and arrived in Hamden a few days before the March 29, 1967, publication of the novel, three weeks short of his seventieth birthday.