The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder
Page 71
178 After serving for three months as an ambulance driver in the Argonne region, TNW’s brother began a seven-day leave on May 16, 1917, visiting London and England’s Lake District.
179 American editor, publisher, and writer Elbert Hubbard (1856—1915) was known as “Fra Albertus.” He is best known for founding the Roycroft Community in East Aurora, New York. Roycroft, established in 1895, was an important part of the American Arts and Crafts movement. Katherine Hubbard, born in 1895, was one of the children born to Hubbard and his first wife, Bertha.
180 Frost, who had been a professor of Greek at Oberlin College from 1876 to 1892, was now president of Berea College.
181 TNW may be referring to In Ole Virginia (1887), a book of short stories by Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922).
182 Etta Parsons Embree (1882-1962), the wife of a Berea trustee.
183 Sankey (1840-1908), a gospel singer and composer, was one of the compilers of and contributors to Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (1875). He composed the music for many hymns. Sankey was closely associated with fellow evangelist Dwight Moody, the founder of Mount Hermon School.
184 Had TNW not repeated his sophomore year when he transferred to Yale and had his brother returned earlier from Europe, the three eldest Wilder children might have graduated from college in 1919.
185 TNW’s contribution to the June 1917 issue of the Oberlin Literary Magazine was a short fictional fable, “The Marriage of Zabett,” which dealt with a young woman’s struggle to choose between marriage and the call of the church. Nina Trego’s poem was titled “Confession.”
186 It is unclear to which work TNW is referring here; no work matching this description appears to have survived.
187 Sinister Street (1913), a controversial novel by English author Compton MacKenzie.
188 TNW did repeat his sophomore year. Frederick Scheetz Jones was the dean at this time.
189 Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899-1977), whom TNW first met at Oberlin, eventually transferred to Yale, graduated with the class of 1921, attended Yale Law School, of which he became dean in 1927, and then went to the University of Chicago, where he served as president and then chancellor.
190 TNW is referring to Fioretti del Glorioso Poverello di Christo S. Francesco di Assisi, a collection of stories about the life and teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi.
191 TNW is probably referring to George Stransom in James’s story “The Altar of the Dead.” Stransom lights candles as a rite for his dead friends; he begins this ritual on his birthday. Bricharis and Samma may refer to pets belonging to the Wagers.
192 TNW’s brother was now an AFS ambulance driver in Macedonia.
193 George Durand Wilder, Jr. (1908—1984), Theodore Wilder’s younger brother.
194 Latin: he himself said it (meaning an unproven assertion).
195 When TNW arrived at Oberlin, he already knew both Theodore Wilder and his younger brother Durand from Chefoo. While at Oberlin, he became acquainted with their sisters, Margaret (1898-1987) and Ursula (1902-1997), as well as with their maternal grandmother (Mrs. Charles A. Stanley), their cousin Agnes, and their Aunt Mame, who kept house for them all.
196 Bushnell was a nineteenth-century Congregational minister, and Sill was a nineteenth-century poet.
197 TNW’s brother had enlisted in the U.S. Army in Paris in November 1917 and was assigned to field artillery in the Second Division.
198 The military training camp in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
199 Edwin DeWitt Hotchkiss (see letter number 28), who, in May 1918, entered the army.
200 Simonds (1896—1989) was a concert pianist and a Yale classmate and close friend of TNW; he taught at the Yale School of Music, where he also served as the dean.
201 With his father’s help, TNW got a thirty-five-dollar-a-month job as a clerk typist at the War Industries Board during the summer of 1918.
202 When he first went to Washington, TNW shared an apartment with Yale friends John F. Carter, Jr., and Stephen Vincent Benét. Benét, who was in Washington as a clerk in the State Department and was a class ahead of TNW at Yale, was already recognized as a major literary talent. He served on the Yale Literary Review’s editorial board and published three volumes of poetry while still an undergraduate.
203 A typescript of the unfinished comedy “Vecy-Segal” is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. A fragment, “Sea Chanty: ‘Vecy-Segal,’ Scene IV” was published in S
204 William Rose Benét, Stephen Vincent Benét’s older brother, was a leading American poet and anthologist.
205 Hearts of the World (1918), a silent film directed by D. W Griffith.
206 The career of American film actress Marsh (1895-1968) spanned fifty years.
207 Latin: critical vantage point.
208 The volume TNW submitted probably contained some of the five short plays he had published in the Oberlin Literary Magazine in 1915 and 1916 and the six playlets he had published in the Yale Literary Magazine in 1917 and 1918.
209 Producer, director, theater owner, and writer Arthur Hopkins (1878—1950) produced A Very Good Young Man, by Martin Brown, in Washington in August. In the spring of 1919 and then again in September 1919-February 1920, he produced The Jest, starring John Barrymore. Although Nazimova appeared in three Ibsen plays produced by Hopkins, she did not appear in a production by him of Ibsen’s The Master Builder.
210 L’Aiglon (1900), a play by dramatist and poet Edmond Rostand about the tragic life of Napoleon’s son.
211 Symphony on a French Mountain Air (1886), by French composer Vincent D’Indy (1851-1931).
212 TNW’s review of A Very Good Young Man appeared in the Boston Transcript on August 17, 1918.
213 TNW submitted the play “The Breaking of Exile” to Hopkins, but it was never produced; a copy survives as a holograph and undated incomplete typescript and undated typescript carbon manuscript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The note from Hopkins’s secretary has not survived.
214 TNW is referring to the small flags (a blue star in the center of a red-bordered white rectangle) that families during World War I hung in their windows. Each star represented a son serving in the military.
215 Grand Manan Island at the mouth of the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada.
216 On September 14, 1918, TNW was inducted as an office orderly into the army’s First Coast Artillery Corps stationed at Fort Adams, Newport, Rhode Island. He was discharged as a corporal on December 31, 1918, and returned to Yale.
Chapter 2
1 French, Lemon & Co. was a place where foreigners picked up their mail.
2 Daily newspapers.
3 Italian poet Vittoria Colonna (1492—1547) lived on the island of Ischia for many years. French poet Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine (1790—1869) visited Ischia and wrote a poem by that name.
4 French: ulterior motive.
5 72 Conn. was TNW’s room in Connecticut Hall at Yale; Whitney Avenue was the road that ran past the Wilder family home in Mount Carmel, approximately eight miles from the Yale campus.
6 Italian: bill.
7 Italian: dialect.
8 Italian: a tip.
9 On September 16, 1920, an explosion rocked the heart of New York’s Financial District, killing over thirty people; those responsible for the bombing were never apprehended.
10 German educator Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel (1782-1852) was the founder of the kindergarten system.
11 Latin: immediately.
12 Henry R. Luce, later the founder of Time, Fortune, and Life magazines, was TNW’s classmate at both Chefoo and Yale; William Dwight Whitney was TNW’s classmate at Yale. Luce and Whitney were Rhodes scholars at this time.
13 Probably TNW’s wordplay for the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
14 TNW no doubt meant the Whore of Babylon, a derogatory term for the Roman Catholic Church.
15 The Blakes were aunt Charlotte Tappan Niven’s closest friends; he w
as an Anglican priest.
16 TNW is referring to King Lear’s daughter, who is disinherited by her father because of her refusal to flatter and fawn over him but who eventually proves to be the only daughter who truly cares about him.
17 TNW’s father was a nationally known orator and often spoke at private schools and before such groups as the National Municipal League.
18 Hero of Thackeray’s The History of Pendennis, who has a sheltered and spoiled childhood.
19 Adolfo de Bosis was an Italian poet and translator. His son Lauro de Bosis (1901—1931) translated TNW’s 1927 novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, into Italian. Lauro de Bosis was one of the two people to whom TNW dedicated his 1948 novel, The Ides of March.
20 Shelley’s epic poem Epipsychidion was dedicated to Emilia Viviani. Richard Garnett was an editor of Shelley’s poetry.
21 Pantagruel is the principal character in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel.
22 TNW is referring to “Villa Rhabini,” which survives in holograph and in a typescript carbon in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
23 The Telegram was the only English-language evening newspaper in Paris. TNW submitted several articles on the theater to them, but none were published.
24 Mrs. Kendall and Polly Comstock were New Haven acquaintances; William Douglas was a friend of TNW’s from Yale who published poetry in the Yale Literary Magazine..
25 Rosemary Carr.
26 Barney (1892-1952), Yale class of 1916, was a poet and photographer.
27 A residence hall at Yale, also known as West Divinity Hall, it was torn down in 1931 to make way for Calhoun College.
28 Located on the edge of the Yale campus, it was a private club that contained rooms for boarders.
29 Tennis trophies TNW’s brother won in amateur tournaments.
30 French: month
31 During this period, Isabel Wilder was writing one-act plays, two of which TNW copyrighted for her in 1922; apparently, she saw in a magazine an advertisement for a course in writing for the movies, which interested her.
32 TNW’s aunt was probably in Paris in connection with her work for the YWCA.
33 Charlotte Wilder had moved to Boston, where she worked as a companion/secretary to a family, then as a governess, and then as a proofreader at The Atlantic Monthly.
34 During the summer of 1922, in a rented room at the YMCA in Newport, Rhode Island, TNW, stimulated by his reading of French authors Proust and Morand, continued writing what later evolved into The Cabala.
35 The short sections appeared in the September 1922 issue of The Double Dealer, a little magazine that in that same year published early work by William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
36 The Dial did not publish any of TNW’s fictional memoir.
37 Augusta Homer Saint-Gaudens was the widow of the noted American sculptor; their son, Homer Saint-Gaudens, was an author, art critic, and museum director. At one time, he worked as a stage director for American actress Maude Adams.
38 Gilbert McCoy Troxell (1893-1967), a friend of TNW’s while they were both Yale undergraduates, was at the time working at the Yale library, where he later became the curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature. They remained good friends until Troxell’s death.
39 Novel (1861) by George Meredith.
40 Cornelius Vanderbilt began his career by ferrying passengers from Staten Island to Manhattan.
41 Belasco (1853-1931), American director, dramatist, and manager.
42 Wilmarth Sheldon “Lefty” Lewis (1895—1979) was TNW’s schoolmate at both Thacher and Yale; his 1922 novel was Tutors’ Lane.
43 French: You tell me what you think!
44 Latin: sweet glory.
45 This playlet was published in the January—February 1923 issue of the little magazine S
46 Charlotte was a junior editor of The Youth’s Companion.
47 Like Tinker and Phelps, John M. Berdan was also a celebrated member of the Department of English at Yale.
48 The article was published as “The Shelley Centenary—A Notable Exhibition of Shelleyana at the Brick Row Book Shop” in the October 13, 1922, issue of the Yale Alumni Weekly.
49 TNW is probably referring to “And the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead.”
50 TNW had recommended this play to his father during its 1917 New York run (see letter number 52).
51 TNW’s review of English dramatist, poet, and novelist Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer ran on the front page of the student newspaper The Lawrence on February 8, 1923.
52 Momauguin was a beach community and resort in East Haven, on Long Island Sound; TNW’s family probably spent some of the summer there.
53 Italian: dear.
54 Charlotte Wilder’s brief essay “Hail and Farewell,” an impressionistic piece about places visited and remembered, appeared in the January 1923 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
55 Fitch was professor of the history of religion at Amherst College and author of Preaching and Paganism (1920).
56 At this time, Young was the chief drama critic of The New Republic and an associate editor of Theatre Arts Magazine. TNW met him on shipboard when returning from Europe in August 1921.
57 Daughter of Mather A. Abbott, headmaster of Lawrenceville.
58 Saint-Simon’s Memoirs offers a vivid account of life in the court of Louis XIV
59 Siegfried et le Limousin (1922), a novel by French dramatist and novelist Jean Giraudoux (1882-1944), which the author later adapted into a play, Siegfried (1928).
60 Doormats, Outcast, and The Mollusc were plays by Hubert Henry Davies; all three were published in vol. 2 of The Plays of Hubert Henry Davies (1921), which may be the Christmas present to which TNW refers.
61 Between May 1, 1923, and December 31, 1923, TNW hand-copied many of the letters he sent into a “Letter Book.” This unsigned transcription is from that copy; the original letter has not been located.
62 TNW sent his play “The Trumpet Shall Sound” to Edith Isaacs, the editor of Theatre Arts Magazine. The play had been published in four successive issues of the Yale Literary Magazine (October, November, December 1919; January 1920) and won Yale’s Bradford Brinton Award. While Isaacs did not accept the play for publication, she was instrumental in arranging its first production in 1926 (for which TNW made some revisions to his text).
63 German: even as a boy he knew more of German literature than most Germans.
64 Presumably, TNW is referring to the tragic Queen Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
65 Russian director and actor Konstantin Stanislavski (1865-1938), cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre.
66 Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958), American industrial and theatrical designer who pioneered the use of lenses in stage lighting. In 1957, TNW collaborated with Bel Geddes on the script for a film about the American experience, “The Melting Pot.” Bel Geddes’s death ended the venture, though TNW copyrighted the script, which survives as an undated holograph manuscript and as an undated corrected typescript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
67 Elizabeth Lewis Niven died in early June 1923.
68 John Kelman, the minister of New York’s Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church.
69 TNW spent part of the summer working at this summer camp for boys.
70 Dutch novelist Louis Marie Anne Couperus (1863-1923).
71 English novelist Hichens (1864-1950).
72 French novelist and critic Bourget (1852-1935).
73 TNW misquotes French writer Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696). The actual quote is from Les Caractères (1688): “Il y a de certaines choses dont la médiocrité est insupportable: la poésie, la musique, la peinture, le discours public.” (“There are certain things where mediocrity is insupportable: poetry, music, painting, and public discourse”) Le roman is French for the “novel.”
74 Arthur Twining Hadley was president of Yale University from 1899 to 1921.
76 Lawrence’s “Trees and Babies and Papas and Mamas” appeared in the June 1923 issue of the English magazine The Adelphi.
77 Ferenc Molnár (1878-1952).
78 American actress whose Broadway career extended from 1913 to 1924.
79 Château des Rochers, Madame de Sévigné’s country home near Vitré, Brittany.
80 A fashionable and prestigious address in New Haven.
81 French: local group.
82 Latin: master of arts.
83 At the invitation of Edith Isaacs, TNW wrote a review of sixteen new Broadway plays; tided “The Turn of the Year,” it appeared in the March 1924 issue of Theatre Arts Magazine.
84 A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), by English spiritual writer and mystic William Law (1686-1761).
85 English engineer and inventor Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898).
86 First novel (1923) by American novelist and poet Elinor Wylie (1885—1928), wife of William Rose Benét.
87 Ames (1906-1988), whom TNW met at Lawrenceville, probably in the fall of 1924, when she was a guest of the headmaster, became a stage and film actress.
88 TNW probably meant Homer Saint-Gaudens (see letter number 74).
89 Richard Boleslavsky (1889-1937), Russian-trained actor and director, began his career as an actor with the Moscow Art Theatre before coming to the United States and founding the American Laboratory Theatre, with Russian actress Maria Ouspenskaya in 1923.
90 Franklin H. Sargent was an acting coach at New York’s Madison Square Theatre in the late nineteenth century.
91 “Geraldine de Gray” was apparently never completed; incomplete holograph and typescript versions survive in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
92 TNW is referring to Spanish dramatist José Echegray’s best-known work, his play El Gran Galeoto (1881).
93 Amy Wertheimer (1890-1971) became a binder of rare books for the University of Connecticut; she remained TNW’s friend and correspondent to the end of her life.
94 TNW’s phrase “the merry wives of Blodgett” refers to Blodgett’s Landing, one of the eleven original steamboat landings on Lake Sunapee, and the site of the summer camp.