The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  Bill Schuman140 has also written me a friendly letter. I’ve told him that I’ve written you. Would you kindly let him see these paragraphs?

  And all best wishes to the work you are doing.

  Sincerely yours

  Thornton Wilder

  P.S. And Morton Gottlieb141 who, I think, didn’t get the point when I tried to explain it earlier.

  TNW.

  309. TO CASS CANFIELD. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel / Colombia Excelsior / 16126 - Genova Italia) Yale

  Friday March 1. 1968

  Dear Cass:

  Isabel’s phone call yesterday at dawn and her cable received this morning leave me in some doubt as to whether (“addressed to your home before Saturday noon”) you wish a mere statement of my acceptance of the prize or an extended portion of a 500-word speech of acceptance. I have sent you the cable of acceptance and I now send you a few notes to add to a short acknowledgement of my gratification—to be delivered, I believe, on March 5.142

  Isabel said that you already had some fragments of a letter that I wrote you which you intended to draw upon.

  x

  Here are some additional jottings which you may or may not wish to incorporate.

  x

  The principal idea that is expressed in the novel (and in its title) has been present in Western thought for some time—that Man is not a final and arrested creation, but is evolving toward higher mental and spiritual faculties. The latest and boldest affirmation of this idea is to be found in the work of Père Teilhard de Chardin—to whom I am much indebted.

  x

  It has given me pleasure to be both commended and reproved for writing an “old-fashioned novel.” There is the convention of the omniscient narrator, reading his character’s thoughts and overhearing their most intimate conversations. I have been more reprehended than commended for introducing many short reflections or even “essays” into the story. That is old fashioned also, stemming from Henry Fielding. I did this even in my plays: there are little disquisitions on love and death and money in “Our Town” and “The Matchmaker.” I seem to be becoming worse with the years: the works of very young writers and very old writers tend to abound in these moralizing digressions.

  It has somewhat surprised me that few readers have found enjoyment—or even noticed—the allusions, “symbols,” musical thems that are a part of the structural organization. These cross-references are not there to tease or puzzle; they are not far-fetched or over-subtle. It is hoped that they reward and furnish both amusement and insight in a second reading of the book. It is a device particularly resorted to by writers in their later decades.

  x

  So, Cass—if there’s anything here that can save you time and trouble—use it—or just throw it away.

  x

  Again my thanks to the committee… deep appreciation, etc. …

  The hermit of Arizona will be home soon—but even more hermitlike than before.

  A world of regard to you, dear Cass—and to Beulah who may have to decypher these words

  Ever

  Thornton

  310. TO TIMOTHY FINDLEY.143 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) National Archives of Canada

  April 20 1968

  Dear Timothy:

  Many congratulations. Thanks for your letter with the good news. Yes, indeed, Viking is very fine publishing house.144

  I’m glad you’re turning to write for the stage. I’m sure you’re endowed for it as well as experienced in it. Beware, however, of regarding yourself theatrically. You and your sense of guilt about Dr. King’s assassination! In a very general sense everyone is daily responsible for some measure of injustice and ill will in the world—but you taking that crime on your shoulders—it’s like putting on a penitent’s garb in amateur theatricals and admiring oneself as a “Great Sinner.” You rightly describe yourself as seeking “quiet”—well, don’t endanger your own quiet by introducing imagined troubles like that.

  For this play:

  Select your subject carefully. One very real and close to you—not autobiographically but inwardly. Take long walks—view it from all sides—test its strength—its suitability for the stage. Then start blocking out the main crises or stresses. I suggest (though all writers are different) that you don’t begin at the beginning but at some scene within the play that has already begun to “express itself in dialogue.” Don’t hurry. Don’t do too much a day. In my experience I’ve found that when I do a faithful unforced job of writing every day that the material for the next day’s writing moves into shape while I’m sleeping. Never hesitate to throw away a whole week’s good hard-won writing, if a better idea presents itself.

  All cordial best wishes to you

  your old friend

  “T. N.”

  311. TO CATHERINE COFFIN. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Yale

  April 22, <1968> some say

  Dear Catherine:

  This is one of the most heart-felt thank-you letters I ever wrote. I’m thanking you for pure intention. What could be more courtly?

  Like some great lady of the Renaissance—a Borgia, a Medici, pupils of il grande Macchiavelli you extracted from me that I already owned the magistral recording by Fischer-Diskau of Der Lied von der Erde.

  A gift, an intention, à la hauteur145 of yourself and—I hope—of me.

  So:

  I thank you with the weight and expansiveness of my 72nd year.

  x

  Now I have a confession to make to you. When we saw you Thursday night I was all steamed up to tell you about my newly-acquired interest and concern about Professor Herbert Marcuse. It may be that you know more about him than I do. Besides, Thursday night I hadn’t my ideas fully organized and I was afraid that I’d make a foolish exposition of them.

  My hotel in Genoa was on the same street as the main building of the University. Constant protest agitation. I passed it the day that the students sat—hundreds strong—in the mighty portals and on the vast staircases to prevent the Rector and his council from entering his office. I assume they were at the “back doors,<”> too.) Among their banners and placards were

  MARX MAO MARCUSE

  and so the names were linked in Rome and Berlin. And Prof Marcuse was calmly giving Socratic interviews to pilgrims from all over the world in his office as Professor at the University of California in San Diego.

  The first wide-spread revolt that has not been able to engage the cooperation or even sympathy of the laboring classes and the proletariat. He explains that.

  In all ages a ruling hierarchy has exploited the slaves, the enfief-fés<?>.146 the industrial worker… and revolts have been about economic justice—ie money.

  But now Capitalism has reached a new type of reducing men to servitude. The Technological Establishment makes sheep of men by making them “one-dimentional men”: by publicity means it tells them what they want and gives them what they have been taught to want. The industrial workers and the bourgeosie like their new condition. They’re seduced. N.B. Marcuse is a Marxian but believes that Kremlin-Communism is doing exactly what Capitalism is.

  The press (hence the students’ hatred in Germany of the magazine-lord Springer147) feed them irrelevant pap; the universities form technological robots and irrelevant “culture”; the governments “absorb” and trim the claws of socialist parties—

  All is soothing de-individualizing—

  Marcuse showed the young what to revolt against; and how to go about it—

  Massive resistance—with or without violence.

  What he proposes (now their aim) is a dictatorship (yes) of the intellectuals who see through the technological strategy: a dictatorship which once having produced the New Man will be superceded, will disappear into thin air.

  So utopian dream fantasies—again.

  In the meantime we
have this really “massive resistance” against the technological stupifying of man.

  Love—every day of the year

  Thorntie

  312. TO WILLIAM A. SWANBERG.148 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Columbia

  July 25. 1968

  Dear Mr. Swanberg:

  Please forgive this delay of my reply to your letter of July 10. I have recently returned from the hospital after a serious operation.149 I shall be out of circulation for some time.

  Yes, I knew Harry Luce over many years. He was, for the most part, a shy and guarded man. I think it was the fact of our long association that made him particularly so with me. After college days I saw him seldom—always in large groups—once when he came to speak at the University of Chicago;—at the reunions of the Class of ‘20—I dined with the Luces twice in the Waldorf Towers. About 10 years ago Harry invited me to a meeting at the Chinese Instute (if I remember the name of the institute correctly) to honor the recently dead Dr. Hu Shih.150 He gave me no intimation that I was to be called on to speak. I went to this meeting in New York merely to express my regard for Harry. (I have never been sympathetic to the non-recognition of the People’s Republic of China.) To my surprise I discovered that I had been assigned the rôle of concluding speaker on the program. I heard Harry introduce me as an old friend of Dr. Huh Shih. I spoke—to the best of my knowledge—of Dr. Huh Shih’s work as a scholar and reformer of the Chinese language. I did not tell the audience (nor Harry until the close of the meeting) that I had never met Dr. Huh Shih.

  I liked and admired much in Harry. I believe (with Charles Lamb) that “one should keep one’s friendships in repair”; but that takes two.

  I shall be here a number of weeks under house arrest. If you wish to mail me the photo from the China Inland Boys’ School I shall endeavor to identify Harry; but I am still too tired to receive any callers except relatives and old friends.

  All best wishes toward your task.

  Sincerely yours

  Thornton Wilder

  313. TO E. MARTIN BROWNE.151 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Harvard

  July 30 1968

  Dear Friends:

  Absolutely delighted. Couldn’t be in better hands.

  Oh, how I hope it finds friends among you all.

  There’s usually an air of suppressed excitement about rehearsals—because its a large cast with so many “distinct” parts in it; and because the actor begins to feel an additional responsibility on him because there is no scenery.

  If I’m not mistaken Martin—the kindest of men—will discover that he has to be as “mean” and tyrannical as a lion-tamer or as a Toscanini. Actors—by selection and training—are highly suggestible; they will try to impose the mood (not the content) of the last act on the first two. They will “grave-yard” the whole play. (Oh, the productions I’ve seen; this applies to The Long Christmas Dinner, too.) For two acts nobody has the faintest notion that they will die or even that time is passing (except the Stage Manager and he only indicates that he is aware of it by an increasing dryness of tone); and even in the third act the mood is not elegiac: it mounts to a praise of life that is not impassioned regret but insight—and affirmative insight. The poignance is not on the stage but in the hearts of the onlookers.

  I love those moments when the actors are real loud—milkman with his horse; Emily and her school friends. We found that the biggest laughs in the play (and legitimate laughs) are when George decends to breakfast.

  “Four more hours to live”—noise, real loud, of cutting his throat.

  Breakfast with Mr. Webb. Long embarrassed pauses and glances while stirring their coffee, then MR WEBB—real loud!—“Well, George, how are you?” George almost loses his mouthful.

  God grant you can find an actress who can say Emily’s farewell to the world not as “wild regret” but as love and discovery.

  [Did you recognize that that speech is stolen from the Odyssey—Achilles in the underworld remembers “sleeping<?> and wine and fresh raiment”!!]

  N.B. It was GBS who said “Every child born into the world… etc”

  I’ll be interested to know if an English audience finds Emily’s self-satisfactions (about being “wonderful” in her class studies) unappealing.

  NB One Mrs Webb in ten is able to remain apparently unresponsive to Emily’s appeal to her in Act III

  I love dear Henzie152 as Mrs Soames—real loud, her voice cutting across the wedding—the village gossip, etc. Fun.

  I’ll send a cable

  lots of love to you both

  Thorny—

  P.S. Had an operation July 2—hernia—am still under house-arrest—progressing fine—Isabel taking wonderful care of me. She sends her love, too.

  TNW.

  314. TO RICHARD GOLDSTONE. ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) NYU

  Nov. 19, 1968

  Dear Richard:

  This is going to be an unpleasing letter for you to read So sit down and reach for a cigarette.

  x

  I’ve been telling you for years that I’m not the kind of author that you understand—that you should treat. I’m not tearful, I’m not self-pitying, I don’t view myself tragically, I don’t spend any time complaining or even looking backward. I’m energetic, full of projects for the future, engrossed in other people’s writing (Lope de Vega, Joyce), engrossed in what happens about me.

  x

  In July a week after my operation you wrote me a letter that contained some phrases that were so absurd, so obtuse, so lacrimose wrong-headed that I burst out laughing and then got mad. Damn it, you wrote:

  “and each year I understand you better. I understand that your life has been difficult, filled with profound disappointments, with strivings and struggles, that the rewards have not been many.”

  Where the hell do you get that?

  You get that out of your own damp self-dramatizing nature.

  God damn it, I’ve lived a long life with very little ill health or pain [in the same letter you talk of the “great pain and discomfort. … all the agony” of my operation. Go fly a kite—it was amazingly free of discomfort; it was bracing; I wouldn’t have missed it… you derive some dreary relish in draping other people with fake misery]. Struggles? Disappointments? Just out of college I got a good job at Lawrenceville and enjoyed it. I made a resounding success with my second book. The years at Chicago were among the happiest in my life. I got a Pulitzer Prize with my first play.153 What friendships—Bob Hutchins, Sibyl Colefax (400 letters) Gertrude Stein, Ruth Gordon (hundreds of joyous letters, right up to this week).

  What’s the matter with you?

  x

  Of course my work is foreign to you.

  You can’t see or feel the play of irony.

  You have no faculty for digesting serious matters when treated with that wide range that humor confers.

  For you the woeful is “mature”—you chose the Pariah as a thesis-subject154—the solemn-humorless alone is “grand.”

  Go pick on Dreiser or Faulkner. Leave me alone. Write about Arthur Miller.

  x

  Also you’ve never understood—though I’ve warned you—that I am not interested in my past work. I refused to cooperate with those authors who put out books about it—poor Isabel had to bear the burden.

  I can’t help feeling that you so far misunderstand me that you think I’m flattered when you run up palliatory extenuating phrases about The Trumpet Shall Sound or The Marriage of Zabett (I can’t remember a word of it—not even “the yellow lakes”).155 I suspect that every self-respecting author loathes hearing his juvenilia mentioned. stop it.

  x

  In Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of me she says:

  “He has no fears.

  At most he has no tears.

  For them most likely he is made of them.”156

  “For them” means for a large p
art of the reading public—and for you—The Bridge of San Luis Rey and Our Town are tender, tear-drenched, and consoling. But they aren’t, they’re hard and even grimly challenging, for “he has no fears.” Stop wringing your hands over me and find your own congenial subject.

  x

  I’m leaving a copy of your letter of July 10th and this letter with my literary executor

  x

  I’m sorry I’ve had to write this letter, but at 71-plus I must speak to you with absolute firmness (you have a way of not grasping what I’ve said a number of times) and I must clear my decks.

  Sincerely yours

  Thornton

  315. TO CATHARINE DIX WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden, Connecticut 06517) Yale

  Nov 19. 1968

  Dear Dixie:

  Loved your letter.

  Rê Mexico.157

  I never got much relish out of Mexico City. Maybe the altitude leaves you with a faint malaise (don’t move fast, or touch alcohol the first 24 hours.) Mostly because the young ambitious republic tried to build its capital in imitation of Paris of the Exposition style.

  But the Mexico of the villages and smaller towns is a warm glowing mysterious proud and gracious thing—largely derived from the survival of Indian blood in the people (they are descendants of great civilizations, too.) The Spanish civilization was a great one, but its descendants in the new world exhibit too much and in adulterated form the old world characteristics—vanity, pompousness, insecure and easily injured pride, obstinacy, “closed minds.”

  Try to see something of the villages, especially on their market days. Note the eyes of Indians—obsidian black, but so watchful (not primarily distrustfully, but humanly) and so quick to catch a courteous or friendly overture. You have a tendency to be “little princess” shy and stand-offish—oh, don’t be so with the Mexicans or you’ll come to hate Mexico—catch the eye of every waiter and waitress, of every sales-girl, and watch the result; abound in muchas gracias and buenos dias, buenos tardes.