The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  183 Amos’s wife, Catharine.

  184 Spanish: courtesy (Spanish is cortesia).

  185 Austrian-born translator Herberth Herlitschka (1893-1970) was the German-language translator of TNW’s early plays, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and all his subsequent novels except for Theophilus North, which was published after Herlitschka’s death. TNW shared his German-language royalties equally with Herlitschka, an unusually generous arrangement.

  186 TNW’s contract was with the German publisher Bermann-Fischer.

  187 The Hohenlohes were a German noble family.

  188 TNW’s story “The Warship” had appeared in the Yale Literary Magazines Centennial Number in February 1936.

  189 TNW wrote this letter on lined paper.

  190 Grant and Howard Hawks had contacted TNW about writing a film adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s satiric masterpiece. This project was never realized.

  191 American dramatist Avery Hopwood (1882-1928).

  192 The New Gulliver, a 1935 Russian animated film using the stop-motion technique, directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, in which puppets were used extensively.

  193 German journalist and editor Heinrich Walter, who had emigrated to the United States after World War II, had met TNW in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1948. At TNW’S invitation, Walter interviewed him thereafter in New Haven and subsequently submitted further questions to him by mail.

  194 This hotel in Rüschlikon is five miles from the center of Zurich.

  195 Brahms’s Neue Liebeslieder was composed in Rüschlikon in 1874. Swiss novelist and poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived in the nearby town of Kuchberg. His Balladen was published in 1867.

  196 The golden age of Spanish literature extended from the early sixteenth century to the late seventeenth.

  197 TNW is referring to The Alcestiad, or A Life in the Sun, as it was titled in its premiere production at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1955.

  Chapter 5

  1 A professor of Spanish at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, de Mayo met TNW in Aspen at the Goethe Bicentennial in July 1949. She arranged for him to give a lecture, “The Spanish Theatre of the Seventeenth Century,” at Vassar on January 12, 1950.

  2 The Netherlands (1948).

  3 The term grandes machines is usually used to refer to large French history paintings, although TNW uses the term in a more general context.

  4 Isabel Wilder had fallen in her home and suffered a concussion.

  5 TNW probably is referring to the seventeenth duke of Alba, Jacobo Stuart-Fitz-James y Falcó (1878-1953).

  6 Copland wrote TNW on March 23, asking him about doing the libretto for an opera version of Our Town, with the music to be composed by Copland. Copland had been asked to do so by Rudolf Bing of the Metropolitan Opera.

  7 Latin: against music.

  8 Valladolid, a city in central Spain, is famous for its Holy Week procesiónes, or processions.

  9 Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria.

  10 Olivier and Leigh were going to Hollywood, where Leigh was going to play Blanche DuBois in the 1951 film version of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947); Olivier was going to play George Hurstwood in Carrie (1952), a film version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900).

  11 Garson Kanin’s play The Live Wire, directed by Kanin and produced by Michael Todd, ran in New York in August and September 1950. Kanin’s play The Rat Race ran in New York from December 1949 to March 1950.

  12 Faraway Meadows was the Kanins’ country house in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

  13 Gordon was scheduled to appear in the pre—New York tryout of Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House at the Westport (Connecticut) Country Playhouse during the week of August 2321, 1950, but the engagement was canceled; she did appear at Westport during the week of September 11 in Garson Kanin’s adaptation of the French play The Amazing Adele, by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy. The two original movie scripts Gordon and Kanin sold to the movies may refer to The Marrying Kind and Pat and Mike, both of which were released in 195232.

  14 William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, starring Booth, ran in New York from February to July 1950.

  15 TNW did not adapt this 1934 play by Jean Cocteau.

  16 Eliot’s play ran in New York from January 1950 to January 1951.

  17 Latin: Either Christ or no one.

  18 Notley Abbey was the couple’s home in Buckinghamshire.

  19 TNW first met Stallman during the Depression when the latter was an able but poor undergraduate at the University of Chicago. TNW anonymously assisted him financially. Stallman got a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin and was, at this time, teaching at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He approached TNW to write him a letter of recommendation to the Guggenheim Foundation for a volume of Stephen Vincent Benét’s letters. This project was never realized.

  20 William Rose Benét, Stephen Vincent Benét’s brother and fellow poet.

  21 Secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation.

  22 Lowry was president of the College of Wooster (Ohio) at this time.

  23 French: You will forgive me; that’s your profession (TNW is playing on “Le bon Dieu me pardonnera: c’est son métier,” a quote attributed to Catherine the Great).

  24 German: Beautifully spoken, badly printed.

  25 TNW received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the College of Wooster in May 1950; the idea in the address he made on that occasion, “The American,” about the essential loneliness inherent in being an American, was one he expanded upon in his Norton Lectures at Harvard.

  26 TNW titled his Norton Lectures series “The American Characteristics of Classical American Literature” and delivered five of the required six before he became ill. He revised three of the lectures and they were published in The Atlantic Monthly as “Towards An American Language” (July 1952), “The American Loneliness” (August 1952), and “Emily Dickinson” (November 1952). All three were reprinted in TNW’s American Characteristics and Other Essays (1979).

  27 Besides being involved with his ongoing study of Lope de Vega and of Finnegans Wake, TNW was studying the music of the Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. The new comedy he was working on was probably “The Emporium” which remained unfinished at his death; incomplete holograph sketches, acts 1 and 2, and a story summary are in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

  28 Lowry had edited several books on Arnold, so it is difficult to determine for which one TNW was thanking him; but the second book he mentions is Lowry’s The Mind’s Adventure: Religion and Higher Education (1950).

  29 Alma was married to Mahler, Gropius, and finally to Werfel. She never married Kokoshka, although she had a three-year affair with him prior to her marriage to Gropius.

  30 TNW is referring to Egeria, the water nymph in Roman mythology, who was King Numa’s consort and provided him with advice. Her name became identified with any woman who was an adviser to or a supporter of a famous artist or political figure.

  31 At this time, William C. Craig was a professor of speech at the College of Wooster and Peyton was a professor of Spanish there.

  32 Yale English professor Chauncey B. Tinker was now seventy-five years old. He and Lowry had collaborated on The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (1940).

  33 This book may have been presented to TNW during his stay at the College of Wooster.

  34 After her serious mental breakdown in 1941, TNW’s sister Charlotte had not responded to treatments. In 1947, she had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy at the Neurological Institute of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Two and a half years later, she had appeared so much improved that, with financial assistance from TNW, she began to live independently in September 1950 in an apartment in Greenwich Village, her former neighborhood in New York City.

  35 Mira Rostova, Clift’s close friend and acting coach.

  36 Elizabeth Taylor had married Conrad “Nicky” Hilton
, Jr., heir to the Hilton hotel business, in 1950, but the marriage lasted only nine months.

  37 These, privately printed, were later published as Letters and Verses of Clara Boardman Peck (1951).

  38 Rose Jackson, Catherine Coffin, Helen McAfee, and the Withingtons were New Haven friends.

  39 Donald Gallup was curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature. Because of his friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, he was instrumental in obtaining their papers and artworks for Yale. Gabrielle was Toklas’s maid.

  40 Upon Dwight Dana’s death in 1951, Wright became TNW’s attorney.

  41 TNW and his brother, Amos, both received honorary degrees from Oberlin College in June 1952.

  42 In 1926, John D. Rockefeller had begun restoring the town of Williamsburg, Virginia, to preserve its eighteenth-century past.

  43 Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh played on alternate nights in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in New York from December 1951 to April 1952.

  44 The Joyce essay, “James Joyce, 1882-1941,” had originally appeared in the March 1941 issue of Poetry. It was reprinted as a chapbook by the Wells College Press in Aurora, New York, in 1944. It was later reprinted in American Characteristics and Other Essays (1979).

  45 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952).

  46 Benjamin Constant’s novel Cécile was probably finished in 1811, but it was not published until 1951; Constant’s best-known work was his novel Adolphe (1816).

  47 TNW had met American journalist and biographer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (1881-1965) in the late 1920s.

  48 Italian: softness (TNW is referring to Mann’s Death in Venice [1912]).

  49 Guthrie was not involved in the production of The Merchant of Yonkers that opened at London’s Embassy Theatre on December 27, 1951, but he did direct the revised version of the play, The Matchmaker, which opened in Edinburgh on August 23, 1954, and in London on November 4, 1954.

  50 TNW is referring to Sergeant’s book Willa Cather: A Memoir, which she had worked on at the MacDowell Colony. It was published in 1953.

  51 French: completely devoted.

  52 Amos Wilder’s poem “Autumn Fires” was later published in his poetry collection Grace Confounding (1972). It was the custom of Amos and his family to send one of his poems as a Christmas greeting, but on this occasion they sent the poem at Thanksgiving because they were in Frankfurt for the year, where Amos was at the University of Frankfurt-am-Main as an exchange professor. The two children were at boarding schools—Catharine (“Dixie”) at the coed International School in Geneva, Switzerland, and Tappan (“Tappy”) at the all-male Ecole des Roches in Cléres, France.

  53 French: hard-heartedness.

  54 Higginson met TNW in Tucson, Arizona, in 1938, when she was nine or ten. TNW had a letter of introduction from a mutual friend to Higginson’s recently widowed mother, who had taken her three young children from Boston, Massachusetts, to spend several months in a dryer, milder climate.

  55 American dramatist Bates (1884-1977) met TNW at the MacDowell Colony in 1924, where she was known for being able to transcribe Edwin Arlington Robinson’s minuscule handwriting into readable manuscript form.

  56 Bates was a close friend of American poet and critic Winfield Townley Scott (1910-1968), whose essay “ Our Town and the Golden Veil” appeared in the Winter 1953 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

  57 TNW’s talk at the Amos Fortune Forum in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, was titled “Modern Literature and the Inner Life.”

  58 French: My beautiful and good one.

  59 Latin: and so forth. Higginson lived on Ware Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and invited TNW to tea or drinks. He suggested she invite some friends as well, which she did, and there was a group of about ten people.

  60 After having graduated from Radcliffe College, Higginson wanted to be a writer and go to Paris.

  61 Mansfield’s journals and letters were edited after her death by her husband, John Middleton Murry: The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927) and The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (2 vols., 1929).

  62 Cobb’s Mill Inn is on the Saugatuck River in Weston, Connecticut.

  63 Their youngest sister and her husband lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.

  64 TNW’s father had lobbied his Yale classmate Frederick Scheetz Jones, dean of Yale, to get TNW admitted there in September 1917.

  65 TNW’s concern about his sister’s eating habits stemmed from Charlotte’s bout with a hemor-rhaging gastric ulcer, brought on by irregular eating and a general disregard for her health and physical surroundings. That illness resulted in a six-month hospitalization in 1952 in a halfway house at the institution in Amityville, Long Island, New York, where she had lived from January 1945 until September 1950, when she had begun to live independently. She returned to her Greenwich Village apartment after her convalescence and after assuring her doctors and her siblings that she could take care of herself. But she was unable to do so; the ulcers recurred and she required an operation that involved removing most of her stomach. On July 18, 1953, she was readmitted to the house in Amityville and her apartment was vacated. She spent the remainder of her life in institutional settings.

  66 A summer inn in Brooklin, Maine, approximately six miles from TNW’S brother’s family home.

  67 TNW’s nephew was racing a Brutal Beast class sailboat in Blue Hill, Maine.

  68 “(Sept. 10, 1953 from McDowell Colony)” supplied here in another hand, probably that of TNW’s brother.

  69 The Gotham Book Mart in New York City, a popular gathering place for writers.

  70 Daughter of William Sergeant Kendall, dean of the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1922.

  71 Catharine Dix Wilder entered Dana Hall School, an all-girls boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in September 1953.

  72 TNW met Albee at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1953, when Albee was there to visit his partner, American composer William Flanagan (1923-1969), who had a fellowship there. When Albee showed him the poems he’d been writing, TNW reportedly advised him to try writing plays. As a result, Albee began writing a verse play, “The Making of a Saint,” and wrote TNW asking if he would look at it and enclosing a poem he had written.

  73 American poet Marcia Nardi (1901-1990) most likely had met TNW in the summer of 1953 at the MacDowell Colony.

  74 A poem by Nardi that she sent to TNW; it was published in the October 1964 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

  75 Read (1893-1968) was an English poet and literary and art critic.

  76 American dramatist Michaela O’Harra (1911-2007) founded New Dramatists in 1949 as a monthly craft seminar for young playwrights. She apparently asked TNW for suggestions to be given to fledgling playwrights and she then printed his reply in the bulletin or newsletter that New Dramatists sent to its members. TNW’s original letter has not been located; this appears to be a secretarial transcription.

  77 Among the students George Pierce Baker taught in his ‘47 Workshop at Harvard University between 1905 and 1924 were Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Wolfe. After moving to Yale University in 1925, he taught American dramatist Paul Osborn (1901-1988).

  78 Henrik Ibsen served as a stage manager with the National Stage in Bergen, Norway, before beginning his career as a dramatist.

  79 Anglin, Adams, and Matthison were among the most popular stage performers of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

  80 Shaw’s earliest plays were produced by Harley Granville-Barker at London’s Court Theatre, which was managed by J. E. Vedrenne. English actress Ellen Terry, English actor-manager Sir George Alexander, and American actor Arnold Daly all appeared in plays by Shaw.

  81 Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real had opened on Broadway. Its run at the National Theatre from March to May 1953, a total of sixty performances, was a significant failure.

  82 MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Huntington Hartford Foundation’s colony in Pacific Pa
lisades, California, afforded artists short-term residences.

  83 French: Very good and very dear ones.

  84 After ten weeks on the road, The Matchmaker opened at London’s Haymarket Theatre on November 4, 1954.

  85 French: gaming rooms.

  86 Nardi’s Poems was published in 1956 by Alan Swallow, which was based in Denver, Colorado.

  87 French: a great lover.

  88 Actress Irene Worth played Alcestis in the world premiere of TNW’s The Alcestiad (retitled A Life in the Sun), which opened at the Edinburgh Festival on August 22, 1955, directed by Tyrone “Tony” Guthrie.

  89 In mid-January, the Seine rose to flood level, necessitating removal of artworks on the ground floor of the Louvre and causing the evacuation of thousands in the suburbs of Paris.

  90 French: Isn’t God French?

  91 Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, whose company, H. M. Tennant, coproduced A Life in the Sun with the Edinburgh Festival Society.

  92 Sir Ian Bruce Hope Hunter was the artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival.

  93 The quotation is from act 2, when Jack indicates that his brother Ernest had “expressed a desire to be buried in Paris” and Chausuble observes, “I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.”

  94 Irene was the Greek goddess of peace and the name derives from the Greek word.

  95 Wright had wired money to TNW

  96 TNW’s “Notes on The Alcestiad” was published in the program for the Edinburgh Festival production; it was reprinted in volume 2 of The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder (1998).

  97 Alan Schneider (1917-1984), who, while teaching at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., had directed a production of TNW’S The Skin of Our Teeth in 1952. In 1955, he directed a major revival of the play, starring Helen Hayes as Mrs. Antrobus, George Abbott as Mr. Antrobus, and Mary Martin as Sabina. The production, produced by Robert Whitehead (1916-2002), ran in New York for twenty-two performances in August and September 1955 before going to Paris as part of the American National Theatre and Academy’s Salute to France program.