The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder

  184 Bagnold lived in Rottingdean, near Brighton, Sussex.

  185 TNW was completing his novel Theophilus North (1973) at this time.

  186 In May and June 1946, Laurence Olivier performed in New York with the OldVic Company in the plays mentioned above. From December 1951 to April 1952, Olivier and Leigh appeared in repertory in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra but not in The School for Scandal.

  187 Alicia is André Previn’s daughter by his first wife. Tina may refer either to Farrow’s sister Tisa or to Frank Sinatra’s daughter Christina “Tina,” who was Farrow’s former stepdaughter.

  188 French: Where is my head?

  189 Farrow had been appearing as Irina in Chekhov’s play at London’s Greenwich Theatre.

  190 Farrow starred as Daisy Buchanan in the 1974 film The Great Gatsby.

  191 American actor and director F. J. O’Neil, whom TNW met in 1950—1951 at Harvard University while O’Neil was an undergraduate there and TNW was giving the Norton Lectures.

  192 The Players Club, on Gramercy Park in New York City.

  193 In 1962, TNW had chosen Brandt & Brandt as the agency that would represent his nondramatic works. Carol Brandt’s husband was Edmund “Pavvy” Pavenstedt.

  194 The musical A Little Night Music ran in New York from February 1973 to August 1974.

  195 Glenn was a graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey; TNW first met him when they both taught at Lawrenceville.

  196 TNW is undoubtedly referring to Richard Goldstone, who, despite TNW’s requests that he not do so, continued to approach TNW’s friends, collecting personal materials for his unauthorized critical biography.

  197 Glenn had conveyed to TNW an invitation to speak at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

  198 Glenn’s second wife.

  199 American artist Peggy Anderson and her husband, Roy, a musician, became friends with TNW during one of his stays in Newport, Rhode Island.

  200 Theophilus North was published in October 1973.

  201 TNW may have first met Helen and Jacob Bleibtreu during the summer of 1942, when he was stationed in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to receive military intelligence training.

  202 A chapter in Theophilus North titled “Rip” features a character named Nicholas Vanwinkle (“Rip”) and his wife.

  203 Kahn had directed an evening of three of TNW’s one-act plays—The Long Christmas Dinner, Queens of France, and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden—at the Off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in 1966. At the time this letter was written, Kahn was artistic director of the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. Kahn had contacted TNW about mounting a production of The Skin of Our Teeth, but the play was never staged at Stratford.

  204 American film animator Bute’s live-action film Passages from Finnegans Wake, which she directed and cowrote, appeared in 1965. Her film of The Skin of Our Teeth was never completed.

  205 Actress Carole Shelley made her New York stage debut as Gwendolyn Pigeon in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple (1965).

  206 Hayes played Mrs. Antrobus in the 1955 revival of The Skin of Our Teeth.

  207 TNW’s niece was at her family’s summer house in Blue Hill, Maine, recuperating from an operation.

  208 Cato Street premiered at the YoungVic Theatre in November 1971.

  209 A friend of TNW’s niece.

  210 French: Always your old uncle who loves you so much.

  211 American scholar Glasheen (1920–1993) was an authority on Joyce and Finnegans Wake. She compiled three censuses of Finnegans Wake (1956, 1963, 1977). She and TNW corresponded about Finnegans Wake from 1950 until his death; their correspondence has been published in A Tour of the Darkling Plain, edited by Edward M. Burns and Joshua A. Gaylord (2001).

  212 Glasheen sent TNW a copy of her essay “Calypso,” which was published in James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays, edited by Clive Hart and David Hayman (1977).

  213 French: in his skin.

  214 Empson’s “The Theme of Ulysses.”

  215 Mrs. McCormick, who lived in Zurich, was one of Joyce’s benefactors.

  216 Joyce’s wife.

  217 Mary Haight and her husband, Gordon, an English professor at Yale, were New Haven friends of the Wilder family.

  218 In 1964, Bernstein and Jerome Robbins had worked with Betty Comden and Adolph Green for six months on a musical version of The Skin of Our Teeth, but the project was abandoned because of artistic differences.

  219 TNW is referring to “Grossmächtige Prinzessin,” an aria addressed to Ariadne in Richard Strauss’s opera Ariadne auf Naxos.

  220 Brunauer, a professor of English at Clarkson College of Technology in Potsdam, New York, was studying TNW’s work and had published an essay, “Creative Faith in Wilder’s The Eighth Day,” in the Autumn 1972 issue of the academic journal Renascence.

  221 In September 1975, TNW had undergone surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston for prostate cancer.

  222 American educator Helen Hosmer was the director of the Crane School of Music in Potsdam, New York, from 1930 until 1966.

  223 German: “The Bridge Is Love” (the last words of TNW’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey). Alma Mahler Werfel’s memoir, And the Bridge Is Love: Memories of a Lifetime, was published in the United States in 1958.

  224 In the November 9, 1975, issue of the New York Times Book Review, Cowley reviewed Richard Goldstone’s Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait (1975), harshly criticizing Goldstone and praising TNW. In the December 21, 1975, issue of the Book Review, after TNW’s death, there appeared an exchange of letters between Goldstone and Cowley. In these letters, which were even harsher than Cowley’s review, Goldstone responded to the review and Cowley described Goldstone’s book as “intrusive, condescending, shallow, [and] badly written” and called TNW “the most neglected author of a brilliant generation.”

  225 American journalist and author William G. Rogers met Stein when he was a young soldier in World War I, and she continued to refer to him as “the Kiddie” thereafter.

  226 TNW is probably referring to the French agent for his book.

  227 German: Best wishes to dear Pavvy and his lovely wife.

  228 Roland was in Bhutan on one of the UNESCO assignments he accepted as an expert in secondary education.

  229 Ray’s film set in Darjeeling is Kanchenjungha (1962); the 1973 Ray film TNW is referring to is Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder).

  230 Amos Tappan and Robin Wilder’s daughter, Jenney Gibbs Wilder, was born on June 7, 1973. TNW died on December 7, four days after writing this letter.