The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  27 Worth played Queen Elizabeth I of England in the Italian film II Dominatore dei sette mari (1962), which was released the same year in the United States under the title Seven Seas to Calais.

  28 Lucius D. Clay, who was serving as the representative of President Kennedy to the citizens of West Berlin during the construction of the Berlin Wall.

  29 Dominican diplomat, polo player, race car driver, and international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa.

  30 Wescott’s Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism (1962) included a chapter titled “Talks with Thornton Wilder.”

  31 Smythe (1858-1944) was an English composer and suffragette.

  32 French composer, conductor, and teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), whose students included Louise Talma.

  33 By the end of May, TNW would settle in Douglas, Arizona, a small town on the Mexican border.

  34 TNW’s one-act play Someone from Assisi, with Lee Richardson as Father Francis, had opened in New York at the Circle in the Square on January 10, 1962.

  35 Reinhardt’s book, which concerns Homer and the Iliad, was published in 1961.

  36 Beulah Hagen, Wescott’s sister, was an assistant to Cass Canfield at Harper.

  37 Talma indicated in a footnote to this letter that if she had been rejected by the MacDowell Colony, TNW and Isabel would have offered her their house in Hamden.

  38 Leonard Bernstein.

  39 TNW was a guest at the White House dinner on May 11, 1962, honoring French author and critic André Malraux, who was France’s minister of cultural affairs at this time.

  40 Frances Scott (“Scottie”) Fitzgerald Lanahan, whom TNW had met in February 1928, when he spent the weekend at the Fitzgeralds’ house in Delaware (see letter number 107); she was six at the time of TNW’s visit.

  41 Robert Penn Warren and his wife, the writer Eleanor Clark.

  42 Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Avis Thayer Bohlen, the wife of Charles “Chip” Bohlen, the American ambassador to France at this time.

  43 French: (Friday, light). TNW is referring to the fact that since the dinner was held on a Friday, meat was not served.

  44 Violinist Isaac Stern, cellist Leonard Rose, pianist Eugene Istomin.

  45 Elza Heifetz Behrman, wife of playwright S. N. Behrman.

  46 Francis Biddle, a lawyer and former U.S. attorney general, and his wife, the poet Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle.

  47 TNW means Deo gratias (Latin: Thanks be to God).

  48 In a footnote appended to this letter, Talma explained that she mentioned to TNW that during certain “somewhat frivolous” parts of the fugue she was working on she was reminded of the night the two of them danced at Rumpelmeyer’s in Frankfurt.

  49 TNW’S aunt was visiting Isabel in Connecticut.

  50 American writer (1811-1859), whose only fictional works were a collection of short stories, Tales of the Puritans (1831), and a play, The Bride of Fort Edward (1839).

  51 French: overwhelming.

  52 French: solitary retreat.

  53 TNW’s aunt had moved from Winter Park, Florida, to a retirement home in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

  54 Willkie’s 1943 book, an entreaty for international peacekeeping after World War II.

  55 Sergeant was working on her autobiography, which she failed to complete before her death in January 1965.

  56 The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 2 vols. (1962).

  57 Talented English stage and film actress (1899-1923), who, at the time of her premature death, had already showed great promise.

  58 French: indecisiveness.

  59 TNW’s essay “Giordano Bruno’s Last Meal in Finnegans Wake” was published in the Spring 1963 issue of the Hudson Review.

  60 Peperharow is a small hamlet near Godalming, Surrey. Roland Le Grand was head of the Department of Modern Languages at the Charterhouse School, located in Godalming. A reprint of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson was published in 1961.

  61 French: exhausting.

  62 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), a novel by George Meredith.

  63 French: a contained despair, a disguised rage.

  64 Actor Renzo Ricci (1898-1978) was married to actress Eva Magni (1906-2005).

  65 Mabel Dodge Luhan died on August 13, 1962; Tony Luhan died in January 1963.

  66 French: thought.

  67 TNW’s nephew was in New York to study at Union Theological Seminary.

  68 TNW had rented an apartment in New York City from November 12, 1939, to March 12, 1940.

  69 TNW is referring to Charles H. A. Wager with regard to Oberlin; at Yale, he studied with Chauncey B. Tinker, George A. Baitsell, and Richard S. Lull.

  70 Erwin R. Goodenough was professor of the history of religion at Yale University; TNW may be referring to Eliot’s 1932 essay “Modern Education and the Classics.”

  71 Wright’s third wife.

  72 TNW is referring here to Hello, Dolly!, the musical based on The Matchmaker. It opened the following year, directed by Gower Champion and starring Carol Channing.

  73 Albee’s play ran in New York from October 1962 to May 1964.

  74 French: the little humdrum routine.

  75 English actress Estelle Winwood was Bankhead’s best friend from the 1920s until Bankhead’s death; they frequently costarred on the stage. Here Today is a 1932 play by George Oppenheimer.

  76 Judith Anderson, one of whose most famous performances was as the heroine in American poet Robinson Jeffers’s 1947 adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, which Jeffers wrote for her.

  77 The Juilliard School was going to produce the Hindemith opera of TNW’s The Long Christmas Dinner in March 1963.

  78 From “The Garden,” by Andrew Marvell.

  79 Although Kilty’s adaptation of TNW’s 1948 novel was somewhat successful in Berlin in 1962, it failed in London in 1963.

  80 Mozart’s Quartet in C Major, which apparently was one of the recordings Coffin had sent TNW.

  81 Catherine Coffin’s children, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., of New Haven, Edmund Coffin of Long Island, and Margot Coffin Lindsay of Massachusetts.

  82 TNW’S sister, as his representative, had attended the Juilliard School opera production of The Long Christmas Dinner and reported her disappointment in the opening-night performance. She said the orchestra was too loud, the tenor could not be heard in the sextet, and there was a general nonprofessional air to the whole production. She found the second night better, however.

  83 The opera version of The Alcestiad had had its world premiere in Frankfurt on March 1, 1962.

  84 Arizona Democrat Isabella Greenway served in the House of Representatives from 1933 to 1937. She also built the Arizona Inn, a well-known hotel in Tucson.

  85 A fashionable address in New Haven, noted for its large and beautiful old houses.

  86 The Eighth Day (1967).

  87 Mrs. Ana “Tia” Bates was the American proprietor of Quinta Bates in Araquipa, Peru, an inn that became famous throughout South America and attracted famous visitors from all over the world. TNW had visited there during his South American trip for the State Department in 1941.

  88 Claire Dux Swift was married to Charles H. Swift, of the Chicago meatpacking family. TNW knew the couple from his days at the University of Chicago in the 1930s.

  89 Alice B. Toklas died on March 7, 1967, three weeks before The Eighth Day was published.

  90 Lee Strasberg, the artistic director of the Actors Studio, had expressed interest in producing The Alcestiad.

  91 Cheryl Crawford, who had cofounded the Group Theatre with Strasberg and Harold Clurman in 1931, also cofounded the Actors Studio in 1947.

  92 Sam and Elza Behrman.

  93 May was Freedman’s wife, and Bobbie was his son. Sam cannot be identified.

  94 French: How elegant! How beautiful.

  95 French: life on the edge.

  96 French: Let’s get on with it, then.

  97 The line is spoken by Lady Bracknell in act 1. The correct quot
ation is “Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

  98 Shakespearean scholar Hotson’s Mr. WH (1964) identified the individual to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed as William Hatcliffe.

  99 Laurence Olivier was one of the founders of the National Theatre Company, which was established in 1963.

  100 Elective affinities was the 1854 translation of Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Stendhal’s Oeuvres Intimes, edited by Henri Martineau, was issued by the French publisher Gallimard in 1955.

  101 O’Hara received the Award of Merit Medal for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (not the Academy’s Gold Medal) on May 20, 1964.

  102 Canadian-born American poet (1905-1978).

  103 English translator Constance Garnett (1861-1946), whose translation of War and Peace was first published in 1900 and was, for many years, the only English version of Tolstoy’s novel.

  104 Classic Japanese work believed to have been written by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu (978-1014), which is considered to be the world’s first novel. TNW was reading the translation (1960) by English sinologist Arthur Waley.

  105 Pierre Bezukhov and Konstantin Levin, principal male characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, respectively

  106 Spanish: dear niece.

  107 Spanish: the language of kings. TNW’S niece was going to take a course in Spanish at Harvard Summer School in order to meet further requirements for teaching credentials.

  108 A comedy (1635) by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

  109 TNW’s niece was teaching French at Wellesley Junior High School in Wellesley Massachusetts.

  110 Archibald Hobson, the son of TNW’s first cousin Wilder Hobson; Archie’s mother was Verna Harrison Hobson.

  111 TNW had had a cancerous growth removed from his cheek.

  112 French: to repair the years’ irreparable damage (from act 2, scene 5, of Jean Racine’s Athalie [1691]).

  113 The teacher and companion of Dionysus, the god of wine.

  114 Spanish: (on first line) With much love, my child; (on second line) Your uncle.

  115 TNW is quoting from Sartre’s 1944 play.

  116 Wertheimer was a bookbinder.

  117 TNW is referring to the musical Chu-Chem, which Crawford was coproducing at the time. The play concerns Jews who migrated to China in the tenth century

  118 The two plays and the novel TNW mentions also deal with Jewish characters.

  119 Günter Grass’s Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising) opened in West Berlin in January 1966. The character of the Boss in this play represents Bertolt Brecht.

  120 Lukács (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic.

  121 Volume 1 of Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, edited by Dan H. Laurence, was published in 1965.

  122 Charlotte Payne-Townshend Shaw was an active member of the Fabian Society and a patron of the London School of Economics.

  123 In 1888, English social reformer and Theosophist Annie Besant was one of the organizers of a strike of women workers against the Bryant and May match factory in London’s East End. The Match Girls, a 1966 English musical, tells the story of that strike.

  124 Ruth Norman was Crawford’s companion.

  125 Princeton University English professor Lawrance Thompson.

  126 The Eighth Day, which had been published on March 29, 1967.

  127 The Foresmans’ daughter, Emily, had been married to John K. Tibby, Jr., who worked at Time-Life. See letter number 305, which mentions the divorce. The couple, who had three children, later remarried each other.

  128 Henry R. Luce had died in February 1967.

  129 Briton Hadden, TNW’S and Luce’s classmate at Yale and one of the most admired men in their class, cofounded Time magazine with Luce in 1923. They served in alternate years as the company’s president until Hadden’s untimely death in 1929.

  130 The line, which reads, “O ciel, que de vertus vous me faites haïr,” is from La Mort de Pompée (1644) by Pierre Corneille, not his less-famous brother.

  131 American novelist and dramatist (1927-1993) Herlihy was the author of the novels All Fall Down (1960) and Midnight Cowboy (1965), both of which were adapted into films, and the play Blue Denim (1958), which was also made into a film.

  132 Among the stars of the 1962 film of All Fall Down were Eva Marie Saint, Angela Lansbury, Warren Beatty, Karl Malden, and Brandon de Wilde.

  133 Herlihy was born in Detroit.

  134 James T. Farrell (1904-1979) was best-known for his three books about Studs Lonigan, a native, like Farrell, of Chicago.

  135 TNW is referring to locations and a character in All Fall Down.

  136 Herlihy wrote several plays prior to and after Blue Denim.

  137 At this time, Chapin was in charge of programs at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which includes the Vivian Beaumont Theater. He had expressed an interest in producing Our Town there.

  138 TNW is referring to Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play.

  139 American stage director Ball (1931-1991) had founded the American Conservatory Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1965, then moved it to San Francisco in 1967.

  140 Composer William Schuman (1910-1992) was president of Lincoln Center at this time.

  141 Producer Morton Gottlieb (1921-) was involved with many plays at Lincoln Center.

  142 TNW was awarded the National Book Award in Fiction for The Eighth Day, but he did not attend the ceremony.

  143 TNW met Canadian novelist, dramatist, and actor Timothy Findley (1930-2002) in 1954, when the latter played Rudolph in the Edinburgh Festival production of The Matchmaker. Through TNW Findley also met Ruth Gordon, who, with TNW encouraged Findley to consider a career as a writer. Findley enjoyed great success, eventually publishing eleven novels, three collections of short stories, six plays, and three books of memoirs.

  144 Findley’s second novel, The Butterfly Plague, was published in 1969 by Viking.

  145 French: at the height.

  146 TNW probably meant en fieffé, French, describing those who wandered and had no home.

  147 German journalist and publisher Axel Springer (1912-1985), whose German tabloid Bild was attacked for its conservative viewpoint.

  148 American biographer Swanberg (1907-1992) was researching his biography of Henry R. Luce at this time (Luce and His Empire [1972]).

  149 TNW had a hernia operation on July 2.

  150 Chinese diplomat and scholar (1891-1962).

  151 English stage director and producer Browne (1900-1980) was putting on a production of Our Town at this time.

  152 Actress Henzie Raeburn (1896-1973), Browne’s wife.

  153 Our Town (1938).

  154 Goldstone’s 1960 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University was titled “The Pariah in Modern American and British Literature: An Illustration of a Method for Teachers of Literature.”

  155 The phrase “the yellow lakes” occurs in the first sentence of TNW’s short story “The Marriage of Zabett,” which appeared in the June 1917 issue of the Oberlin Literary Magazine. TNW’s play “The Trumpet Shall Sound” was published in the October 1919, November 1919, December 1919, and January 1920 issues of the Yale Literary Magazine, and was produced in a slightly revised version in 1926 by the American Laboratory Theatre.

  156 From < >chapter 6, “The Portrait of Thornton Wilder,” of Stein’s The Geographical History of America (1936).

  157 TNW’s niece was planning a vacation trip to Mexico.

  158 Viva Mexico! A Traveller’s Account of Life in Mexico, by American writer Charles Macomb Flandreau, was first published in 1908.

  159 Latin: the working man.

  160 TNW is referring to Farrow’s role in the 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby.

  161 Farrow did not marry André Previn until October 1970.

  162 Farrow and Previn’s twins, Matthew and Sascha, were born twenty-fou
r days later.

  163 TNW means the Spanish idiom dar a luz.

  164 Worth had played Miss Alice when Albee’s play premiered in New York in 1964.

  165 TNW is probably referring to one of the semiautobiographical sketches he was writing during this period.

  166 The bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth.

  167 Tennessee Williams.

  168 Farrow was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award as Best Actress for her role in John and Mary (1969); she did not win.

  169 TNW’s nephew married Robin Gibbs on June 15, 1968; their first child, Amos Todd Wilder, was born on April 22, 1970.

  170 TNW met heavyweight boxing champion Tunney in Florida in December 1927 and spent time hiking with him in Europe in the summer of 1928, an excursion covered extensively by the press. This is a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original has not been located.

  171 Polly Lauder Tunney, Gene Tunney’s wife.

  172 The quotation is from act 3, scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, in corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies”

  173 Polly Tunney’s goddaughter.

  174 TNW’S godson was working on a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

  175 English novelist and dramatist (1889-1981).

  176 English word for a porkpie hat, derived from the Yorkshire term for pie made with pork.

  177 TNW is referring to the heroine of Arthur Wing Pinero’s play The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893).

  178 Italian actor, dramatist, screenwriter, and poet (1900-1984).

  179 Italian librettist and poet Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838), who wrote the librettos for The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and CosÎ fan tutte, is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, New York.

  180 Gordon played Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker for ten weeks on the road, then for eight months in London, and then in New York from December 1955 to February 1957.

  181 Minnie Maddern Fiske.

  182 Bagnold’s first play was Lottie Dundass (1941). The production in Santa Barbara starred Geraldine Fitzgerald.

  183 TNW is referring to the last stanza of Goethe’s “Phänomen” (1814), written when the poet was in his mid-sixties. However, TNW has misspelled certain words and misquoted the final line.