44. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Men’s Building Oberlin O
Jan 11 <19>17

Dear Isabel,

I hear that you are becoming reconciled to N.H.H.S.¹⁵⁴ and see that your letters are improving. There is a very nice man here who taught in a summer-camp where some boys from your school were staying. He said that some were all right, but that there were others he couldn’t say much for. So look sharp, petite, and carry your own books. The girl who insists on carrying her own books will surprise the boys who like a girl to be surprising. You avoid too that akward moment when he piles them back into your arms. Even if he is nice about it.

There is a greater difference between High School and Grammar School than between High School and College. You would enjoy being in one of these girls’ Dormitories like Dascomb, but you would hate some of the rules such as all Freshman girls must be in their rooms by 7:30.

So Mother is going to New York. So father casually noted tho why the lady or yourself did not mention the Why and When I cannot imagine. Whenever any of the family want to go to New York and there are any slight chances of their going to the theatre I want them to ask my advice. I know altogether too much about what is going on at the New York Theatres as it is, but since I have the knowledge I want to put it to some use if I can and prevent such awful mistakes as Amos going to see “Hush” when there were such stunning thing<s> as “Pierrot the Prodigal” and “The Yellow Jacket” in town. Tell Mother to go to either “A Kiss for Cinderella” or “Shirley Kaye” with Elsie Ferguson or Nazimona <appeared in the left margin> or Getting Married of Shaw and to send the Bill to me; and I’ll abstain from shoestrings and clean linen in order to pay it.¹⁵⁵ Tell her too that she must for this send me an exact account of the whole performance. But if she goes to “Turn to the Right” or “Cheating Cheaters” or “Nothing But the Truth” let her never see a footlight again.¹⁵⁶

And you, Isabel, might even ask my advice about the movies because for Wilders to spend a dime and be disappointed is a crime, when there is a censor of censors born right in the family

Lovingly,
Thornton.

45. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp Yale

Feb. 14—<19>17
Men’s Bldg. Oberlin.

Dear Papa,

I want to go away to Italy but not to relieve suffering—tho’ while I am there by all means let me do it.

—not to see pictures and Classical landscapes

—not to get away from the uninspired complacency of Oberlin.

Let me go to have some time to myself. Not just a day, or a weekend, or a week—but half a year.

There always seems to be a thot waiting for me to find it out, just around the corner of my mind.

And I know that when I have dropped the net I both hold and am held by, that I can dig out a most lovely play or story. Everything I have done so far has had to be turned out during other things. Let me have liesure to examine the thing fully, (as I had in part during the “Tragedy” in my one week! at Monhegan) and I will give you something which <will> not only cheer you by it’s achievement but not vex you by its imperfections.

Barrie brings forth a major work every three years! A student could not hammer at a thing for three years; he is too feverish about getting his thing before his teachers, father’s or judge’s eye. He lets it go by unbrushed. He’d rather receive acknowledgement for its promise that <than> lurk without appreciation in the hope of finally submitting an unquestionable achievement.

A person like me has got to keep writing things or it irks us to pain; when we think we have written a good thing we feel as tho’ it had justified our existance and we don’t know what “plain people” satisfy that self-demand with.

Make a business arrangement with me. Give me three or four months on Monhegan, or a year alone somewhere, and I will give you something final and convincing.

And yet I do not need your faith in me. I know by what Catholics call their “vocation” that I can now, with time, “trespass among superlatives.” This elation and confidence follows the completion of “The Little Turtle a play in five scenes”¹⁵⁷ brooded upon for years, but written in a month of chemistry lessons; imperfect and skimpy to the point of tears; but authentic in parts and in birds-eye view as an axe

T.N.W. Letter to follow.

46. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 5 pp. Yale

Men’s Bldg.
March 14 <1917>

Dear Mother,

I can write you a letter (now that the appraising eyes are in Chicago),¹⁵⁸ as full of everyday small-talk as ordinary common speech is.

Besides you are home alone and the empty mail-box has a hol-lower ring.

I have at last read “Ghosts.” This does not mean that your influence over me has at last totally dissapeared. It only means that I imagine you as giving me your consent, since our Classics in Translation class is about to read Oedipus Rex. Oedipus makes Oswald sweet and sane in comparison! Besides I’m reading “Evelyn Innes”¹⁵⁹ and after that there is no pathology. I confess to being a little disgusted with “Evelyn,” but I must go on. George Moore and I are twin-knit. We are what—before they found a better term—were called Affinities by the Movie-makers.

George Moore spends half of his time—the better half—dropping aphorisms, reflections and phrases; and they so suit me that I cannot miss any one in the most obscure of his books. Besides his tone! his mood!

When I told Granville Barker that our mutual friend Rudolph <Rudolf> Kommer (of Monhegan) was collaborating with George Moore on a play, Mr. Barker smiled wryly—“I’m about the only person he hasn’t collaborated with,” he said. And the quaint impudent personality of George M. was reflected in his eyes and smile.

You remember that the only other author who has engrossed me this way is Barrie. And always will. But the side issue with George Moore, his interest in the forms and spirit of the Catholic Church and his Cadence—his great contribution to the English sentence borrowed by him from the Anglo-irish, intrigue me as greatly as do the stage-direction of the Scotsman.

You will be appalled to hear that I am preparing two of the “Affairs of Anatol”¹⁶⁰ for local benefit performance. Fear not, I will brush away the highest flashes of sophistication and no one need ever know more than that a charming man happened for a quarter-of-an-hour to share the umbrella of Mrs. Gabrielle Somebody on Christmas in Vienna. There they stood, witty and whimsically tender, and then she goes off saying that she might have been happy with him and sending her greetings to her sucessor. The things would seem ridiculously inconsequential and rubbishy if we did not have four sensitive actors who could at least approach the wit and irony of the perfect things.

I got into a little difficulty yesterday. I take a nice interest in two High school boys who are literarily inclined and yesterday one of them came to me and asked me whether I could go up to Cleveland to see Leo Dietrichstein¹⁶¹ or not. I said that I had better not; I had been up so often (four times) and I always felt as tho’ I were taking the clothes off my family’s back…etc. Oh, he said, he would provide the tickets. I had never heard of such a thing. I laughed and said that if we went at all we had better be democratic with it. I walked down the hall with my arm around his shoulder, and pleasantly repeated the democracy of it. When I spoke to Mr. Carr he said it was perfectly proper and accepted for one boy to go as the guest of another, and that I’d probably hurt Baird’s feelings. Mr. Wager said of course it was perfectly natural and that I should have thanked him and gone. “But” I said ruefully “I never heard of it before.” “Oh” said Mr. Wager disappearing behind a door, “There are lots of things you’ve never heard of.”

So I’m in a fix.

And mind you, lady, I lay it at your door. You with your money-obsession brought us up to feel continually self-conscious about the transfer of coin … you have made us desperately afraid of putting ourselves under obligations to anyone …. we seem no longer able to tell when a person is trying to be kind to us … we suspect them of endeavoring to put us at a disadvantage.

And the moral is: Never think about the dirty shining pieces. Fret not yourselves with bills and loans

Etc. Etc.

Love
Thornton.

47. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

The Square Tower
The First Day of Spring
The Third Year of the War.
<March 21(?), 1917>

Dear Papa,

and I am tired again tonight. A long day, full of a hundred distressing interruptions: today I have wished to contemplate peace and religious repose, as the sun with constancy contemplates the tender earth.

Two dull classes: Miss Fitch on Evidences of Gnosticism in the Letters to Collossae; Harold King on Wages.

An organ lesson wherein I play my first hymn “Holy Holy Holy” and am introduced to rules governing the repitition of notes.

I write some rhymed jokes for the College annual.

I go to Laboratory and fail to get results from some dismal experiments with Antimony and Bismuth. But the errant gases from sixty students’ experiments pass through my dried and coated lungs.

Then to rehearsal of the French Play. I remember myself as merry there, but there was no reason for it that I remember, so we must have been fools together.

Through all of this I was waiting for the dark. When people are tired in the day the thought of dusk is present in the back of their mind, not only because it brings sleep, but because it hides one face in the shadow. A tired person is a wounded person, and his eyes are his wounds;—to them night brings a balsam.

Tonight I had to deliver bills for the College annual—to the Assistant Business Managership of which my class in compliment elected me. So I took a long, wandering walk, as I went dropping envelopes onto the mail-tables of the boarding-houses. I have enjoyed the walk. In the streets is the smell of leaves burning, whence I know not. It is one of the things Rupert Brooke mentioned as loving:

“These I have loved:

White plates and cup, clean-gleaming

….. Wet roofs<,> beneath the lamplight; the strong crust

Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;

Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood.<…>”¹⁶²

And as I went along I thought of your beautiful letter to me, as good as any letter I ever received. I do not think it a less spirit in me to say that perhaps I liked it partly because you spoke well of my letters, in turn. There are two insidious ghosts in our family and this exorcised one of them away; we in our way are not abundantly generous to one another—think us all over in turn—we are a grudging family. And now let me take another shoo at the other ghost—the fear of poverty, abject.

But we all seven of us are so splendid individually (we are more like a case of blue weapons than a flower-bed) that it would be presumptious to as<k> for a sweetest<sweeter?> ensemble. If we were a sober, New England, around-the-lamp, co-praying family I insist, we should be less. Amos would be more docile; I less modern, Charlotte less promising, Isabel less vivid, Janet more sophisticated, Mother less concentrated<.> You more demand-ative. We should be cut into pieces.

Love Thornton.

48. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

Men’s Bldg
April 10—<19>17

Dear Family—

We begin drilling tomorrow.¹⁶³ All the honorary trustees of the College have been using their influence to try and secure us an Army officer for instruction, but they cannot obtain one, so we begin under some Seminary men who took four years of such training in the U. of Missouri. We are to combine Theory and Practice in three hours a week, and add to it extra marches and field-excursions. We have begun study in the little Government handbook. Only four boys in the whole College have enlisted, (one my friend Hankinson for the Navy)—and Those Who Know advise us to begin this work. Those who enlist now will be put in Concentration camps with the hoi poloi, whereas College boys, (with this advance we will make by June) will be recommended for non-commissioned officerships. It doesn’t seem to me to much matter whether one learns with their hoi-poloi now—I suspect its a survival of Eligance. ¶ This is to say that I have to buy a pair of shoes tomorrow. Trust me! I buy nothing without counting a hundred.

This drilling does not mean that I have committed myself to enlistment. I have committed myself to something severe in the physical way—I should smile. It seems to me now that I must go. Putting aside that odd insistant self-ridicule that I am not meant for this: not made of remotely heroic grain, a mere wisp whom the first shock will shrivle to a cinder; putting aside to<o> the feeling of responsibility and bewildered solicitation for my Little Gift; putting aside, as I can most of the time, the feeling that the issues for an American are not great enough to risk everything for. The only way I see going is for what it can do to me in sudden maturing, completing; and what it can do to put greatness into my Little Gift. From such sights and sounds; and from the conviction that I am suffering for great ends I will come or live long enough—deo certe volente¹⁶⁴—to leave a great little thing somewhere. Other<s> fight for their country or for their sheer love of great action, but the artist is the great egoist, and counts the world well lost for one created perfect thing

Love-in-a-hurry-   Thornton

49. TO ELIZABETH LEWIS NIVEN. ALS 4 pp. Yale

The Men’s Building,
Oberlin, Ohio
April 29, 1917.

Dear Grandmother,

This month—stirring, exciting month, tho’ it is!—shall not go by without my thanking you warmly for your remembrance. At this time when we young men are being commissioned to represent the whole country, we begin individually to feel the joy in relatives and family, the solid background to our perplexities. So now in addition to my personal love for you, you may feel my veneration for you as my Tradition.

What is being planned for me? I do not know. Perhaps in two or three weeks the machinery of conscription will be set in order and I will be tested and examined. It is likely that they will not consider my eyesight good enough to “fix” a spiked helmet at twenty yards. But if I am passed I think by that time I will be reconciled to the soldier’s life. In my funny, sensitive way of being distressed and despairing over my life and my fitness, I am always at odds with life; I am a personality perculiarly isolated. And to me in my dark (and true) mood the simplification of a soldier’s life—the reducing of the jangling wires to an orderly routine—offers sweet compensations. But let no one mistake my acquiesence with the positive fire of patriotism.

Perhaps Father will soon put me on a farm. Seventy boys have left College already (with credit for College work given them) to “serve the agricultural need of their country and their countries’ allies.” Another thirty has enlisted in the Mosquito Fleet, a subdivision of the U.S.N.¹⁶⁵ Gradually the Male Student Body is breaking up—or rather petering out. A dozen boys leave every day. I had better try a farm until the Govnt ferrets me out.

In reality I am not as upset and excited over all this as I should be. I suppose I am built along the lines of The Artistic Temperament (Oh, perilous sea!) and for such the stress and tossings of wars, domestic and national, can be shut out as secondary to the process you so charmingly referred to as “my catching of wild ducks.” To slay or be slain in battle will always be of less consequence than the turning of an expressive phrase; and one story achieved is more satisfying than the taking of a strong city.

So I go doggedly about my peculiar life, at variance with other peoples ideas as to how I should live and yet not conforming to my own—but thankful and grateful for tokens and kind wishes from you

Your loving grandson
Thornton.

50. TO RUTH KELLER. ALS 3 pp. Private

Mens Building Oberlin,
May—about the 8^th or 9^th <1917>

Dear Ruth,

I can’t understand your card. It sounds snappish. As though perhaps you were doubting my sincerity in wishing you back to see me. “Ah, Seraphina, you do me wrong.”

I suppose you want a frank statement of what you (so distressingly) call the-person-who-would-not-demand-too-much-attention who succeeded you, I will furnish it. Miss Nina Trego¹⁶⁶ and I—(I began the sentence wrong.)

I am often found plaguing and worrying the life out of Miss Nina Trego. Our conversations consist of that same sharp commentary on passing events that I enjoyed so with you; and our friendship takes place on the same high, independent, Platonic plane. But I am often reminded by contrast that compared to you she is merely clever and sharp-tongued; whereas you were more human, and something of a philosopher too.

Now, Ruth, treat me straight. Perhaps soon you will write me a letter offering me up to my country, closing characteristically enough—for I first came to know you thru Latin poetry.

“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”¹⁶⁷ I irresistably think of you on Sunday morning, but no other Senior girl ever dares to take walks with me then. You and I were unique in a delightful way—we were like characters of a mock-heroic novel, touched with fantasy. I will besides always remember the tea-room in connection with you

Nina Trego.

Nina Trego. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

TNW at Oberlin.

TNW at Oberlin. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Afftly
Thornton.

51. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<Oberlin, Ohio>
May 10 <1917>

Dear Papa—

This receiving of two letters a day is very brightening and encouraging. It gives me the thrilling impression that you are doing nothing all day but stoke the furnace of my interests. But there are two kinds of coal that are impractical as fuel:

I could never take the Yale entrance exams in the subjects I have covered in the last three years. Tutors and thumbscrews could not effect. You and I have a tacit agreement, a common law, that I am not in College to learn any subject per se except English and Languages; that Chemistry, Economics, Civics, Botany have been only the pegs on which to hang the COATS of spiritual qualities: Persistance, fidelity etc. The pegs have lost all individuality—they are cold steel to me.

If I must be examined in the virtues—let my literary work be scanned.

Imagine giving me an examination in Botany or even special textbooks in German. Assiduous study avails nothing then or now.

I do not want to go to Yale. My aims in life lie clearer before me everyday; they reach me every day as the complaints of the Engineer float up to the Captains deck from the hidden energies.

One is that there is no conviction stronger in me that<than> when I sit under Prof. Wager “it is good for me to be there.” I might say of him what he says in his only revealed poem—from Atlantic Monthly—“the thought that runs along thy brain is mine.” The situation (paradoxical enough) is simplified by the fact that he is not particularly fond of me. He likes the great, boyish, naive, accepting boys, and I am odd, over-learned, distressed and adrift, but ruddered by my own conceit. So I remain no less fond of him than ever but with a subdued deference that is not satisfying, but is best for what I really want. I have been attending two of his classes regularly now; one just finishing Cardinal Newman,¹⁶⁸ and now the other on Dante. When I consider what I know of Phelps and Tinker, Copeland and Baker¹⁶⁹ I admit they may be brilliant and literary but they have not got that spiritual almost ascetic magnetism of Mr. Wager. His great background of St. Francis Literature and the Newman, Erasmus and St. Augustine periods are always making themself felt. If you can find me another mystic for my Gameliel¹⁷⁰ I will come but better I live in an ordinary routine College and Mr. Wager than in a World-famous University without him. Albeit if you hear well of some Catholic college I will discuss that seriously. I think that after all I am an acutely religious temperament and that beside it nothing else matters.

I have reconciled myself to staying here and going to Berea.¹⁷¹ If my age is drafted I shall acclaim its compensations since nihil humanum me alienum puto—¹⁷²

Love Thorny.

52. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

<Oberlin, Ohio>
May 15 <1917> Wednesday

Dear Papa,

I have received the beautiful the supreme letter, and the check for twenty. You have referred to me as noisily expressing my love to you; it is what I have so often intended to do and never felt that it was reaching you with sufficient intensity; there is that ignoble restraint that civilization and middle youth brings that ties me tongue before it has spoken the heart’s pourings. If I loved you less I could find it in my conscience to express it more showily; but you must gather my depth from the short declarations and stray hints that I leave lying about. If you are soon in New York you will see the case put on the Empire Theatre stage in a one-act by my Sir James Barrie.¹⁷³ A boy before leaving for the trenches comes in his khakis to say goodbye to his father. They have been tongue-tied all their lives but in this last moment they arrive at a new understanding. It is a wonderful, touching, dialogue, and an example of the greater Barrie; the same performance contains another little warplay even greater, of a wonderful pathos and tenderness, but not concerned with the subject of this paragraph.

You ask me where I got a quotation in my letter, and quote: “until he reached a place of considerable comfort.” I do not remember seeking aid elsewhere, in that letter, altho I remember dimly taking down from the shelf for a previous letter. If not too much trouble please copy out the passage in full and send back. Be gorry perhaps I said something and unconscious too. Please be frank and send it me. The only context I imagine it in is where Dr. Donne began to recieve livings and deaneries, like plums falling into his lap.¹⁷⁴

I try to assure that since I saw myself in one illumined and flaring hour as a soldier, I have taken pains to read the most elevated literature. The sermons of Newman, three dialogues of Plato, “Macbeth<,>” St. Augustine (unsuccesful). Ike Marvel¹⁷⁵ long ago proved too mellow and unarroused for me; there is no mood more distasteful to me than the regrets and pipe-dreams of a reminiscent bachelor. Perhaps when I am older. At present I am ordering a golden trumpet from the forge, built on designs of those in the lower circles of Paradise; not shrill however but persuasive of those sempiternal lawns and the pulsating radiance that bathes them. ie legands of the saints in bliss shall be my theme, and the manner in which they gloriously won that desired rest.

Thornton

53. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Men’s Bldg—
Oberlin, O.
May 26—<19>17

<appeared perpendicularly above salutation>

I drilled for 2 hours this afternoon. Corporal again. Send me a photo of you in kahki. Some very nice Oberlin boys coming out to you. I am associate Editor of Hi-O-Hi; want to resign.¹⁷⁶ Monday night I appear in Dramatic Assoc. play. The Poet in Lord Dunsany’s one act The Lost Silk Hat.¹⁷⁷ Chem class visited grand Lorain steel plant yesterday. Am I going to get thru Chemistry? Lots of love

T.

Dear Amos,

I got your beautiful letter ten minutes ago and hurry to go over it with you.

All the fever about my going into the army has passed—there were moments perhaps hours when it seemed to me the perfect thing for me to do—but with the news that the Registration age is from 21-30, the fever has passed with the necessity. For the present Fathers plans carry. For seven weeks beginning about June 7 I go to work on <a> farm at Berea College, Ky, among the Mountain Whites. It will be hard but I face it this year with a new motive, and with some anxiety about Father. Our domestic life approaches the piteous. But I would not allow blame to be thrown on Mother—her undemonstrative temperament wreaks greater havoc than she knows; but what eats at the happiness of them both is their preoccupation with money and economy. They admire the generous mind that refuses to harbor prying obsessions, but about their own souls stalk wolves and lynxes! Neither of them will age prematurely for all their cares, but when they do it will be unwillingly—no acquiescence.

Oh, to be with you in the Lake country, or to have you with me on Monhegan.¹⁷⁸ But most I would like to have you here now—tho, more to myself than your return to Oberlin would really allow—among the little waves of this cove. Perhaps it is with the thought I may not come back next year that I look upon Oberlin now as a forest of paths I have not ventured: the friendships I have omitted to seek out, the experiences I have failed to fling myself into, the habits I have avoided forming. Noble boys like John Allen, the runner Fall, Farquhar, men like Prof. C. B. Martin and Ian Hannah.

Will I find a compensating variety at Harvard or Yale for these few unworked mines?

Your religious self-examination I cannot duplicate. I am a less conscientious nature and do not examine my faith. I fling myself upon my knees as though at a divine compulsion, mostly when I am happy, tho also in extremis. I am happiest in loving and being loved by human people and next to that in writing words and being commended for them, and next to that in mysteries of the spirit, into which I penetrate I believe more every year, until perhaps God will be my whole life. I suppose that everyone feels that his nature cries out hourly for it knows not what, but I like to believe that mine raises an exceeding great voice because I am a twin, and because by his death an outlet for my affection was closed. It is not affection alone but energy and in it I live and because of it I believe I seem to see life as more vivid, electric and marvelous than others so placidly do. I am continually surprised at people’s lukewarmness; I am perpetually enthusiastic over some composition or book, some person or some friend.

I thank you for the photos. I thank you for your assurance of “backing me up” in my ideas on fighting; the issue may yet rise to face me. It will never confront you, will it, who have your duty marked? In war one says that the lives of young men are on the knees of God and that only such bullets as he permits ever strike the human heart. [Alas, those times when one thinks one is on the verge of a new thought and then sees that it <is> nothing but an old platitude!]

I am glad you received my letter, and more glad to receive yours—always in love

Your loving brother
Thornton.

54. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Men’s Bldg Oberlin O
June 3—<19>17

Dear Family,

This is my last Sunday in Oberlin, perhaps for a long time? A mixture of leaves overburdened with sunlight and of blue, benignantly threatening clouds. As I leave Oberlin I do not find myself regretting my commissions so much as my ommissions. I hear father telling me that I should groan for the evasions I have learnt, the sidestepping of duties through which others have had to plow, but I don’t—I justify them completely to myself. But I regret intensely acquaintanceships I have not made, and friendships I have not improved. There are three names that seem to call me back to Oberlin as much as imagined openings beckon me elsewhere. The brown study, Prof Martin darkened but not embittered, whose wife is my Tante. We not only have much in common—which is not necessary anyway—but we appeal imaginatively to one-another, for I have been told <a> remark he has let drop about me. And he likes nothing better than to read aloud with some one which is dearer to me than solitude itself. Then there is Farquhar, the great runner, a kind of gaunt intense boy, all silence and awareness. Then there is Katharine Hubbard, Fra Elbertus’¹⁷⁹ daughter, by an early alliance, an excellent performer on the piano and a wonderfully vivid girl, and pretty as a mermaid and as fresh and strange. I know all three of these a little, but I have neither laid siege to their confidence as I have with so many—for in friendships it seems I have always to take the initiative, seldom being myself pursued—. On the other hand I have known intimately Mr. Wager, Walter Smith and Nina Trego and last year Harold Spore, Theordore Wilder and Ruth Kellar.

How many times, after making a new acquaintance I have said: now I know all that are in this village, between whom and myself an acquaintance would prove valuable. And before evening new personalities suddenly strike me as necessary to my human education and I go out to find.

All this curiosity has taught me a hundred tricks of getting to know people, of fastening on them, accidental-like, and of making them say things illuminative of themselves. I have developed a kind of conversation method of insisting on saying sudden significant things in order to bring others to contributing sudden significant things, and becoming restless unless the conversation darkens with revelation. It is like drama, in which the dialogue must for always be throwing light before or behind and at the same time be searching itself.

This is not to give the idea that what I want is earnestness and starting tears; anything will do for me—the atmosphere of the other person’s homelife, his interest in electricity, her opinion of X,—no I can’t explain what I want but I recognize it when it comes and quiet myself like a child at a fairy story. Enclosed find picture of Nina. I received suitcase. Leave for Berea next Friday morning

Thornton

55. TO WILLIAM GOODELL FROST.¹⁸⁰ ALS 1 p. Berea

Men’s Building, Oberlin, O.
June 10, 1917.

Rev. Wm. Goodell Frost

Berea College, Ky.

Dear Dr. Frost,

My father writes that he has arranged for me to work at Berea College during the summer. I am looking forward to the experience and have been much interested in the catalog. I hope that my comparative lack of experience will give the minimum of trouble.

Unless I hear that it is inconvenient to you I intend to arrive at Berea on Friday afternoon, June 15. Thanking you for the opportunity your kindness has extended, I remain

Sincerely yours,
Thornton N. Wilder

56. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

c/o Berea College Berea Ky.
July 1 1917

Dear Papa,

Thank you for the ten dollars. Five of it are gone for tuition. I hoped less but one can’t be surprised at that for seven weeks @ 2 ½ hours a day. The teacher is really very good and walks around under the name of Livengood. Then one and eighteen cents when<went> to pay for two little textbooks of business letters etc. I will probably not want more for a great while now that I’ve bought me a straw brimmy hat and have raked out some more old trousers.

I was sick for four days, but except for one of them went on with my work. They had put us into the room next to the washroom and we found that the hot pipes went the whole length of one wall and acted in the nature of steam heat day and night. The room was hot just as an oven is hot. I carried the thing to Mr. Trosper, our dormitory monitor, who promised to see about it, but he kept delaying. He’s one of these persons who believe that the most forgivable excuse in the world is to say “Now frankly I tell you: it clean went out of my mind.” I kept pegging at him and extracting nothing but hearty promises; and all the times my headaches and perspiration baths continued. At last I jumped to the official beyond him one step and now we have a new room, cool as a cellar.

The custom with farmers around here is to work until eleven and then lay off until two-thirty, but we poor drudges leave the farmhouse after twelve and are back and started before one. The heat in the fields is often intense and I am almost broken up by it, until the later clouds sail before the sun.

The stupidity and primitiveness of my roommate drives me to tears of vexation. He brought here no change of clothes for himself, and he so wide-eyed envies me everything I have that I have been driven to lend him some pieces of my delicate finery that will be hard to ask back from him. He never saw light union suit underwear before and gasps at the price of it. He is as vain in the suit I lent him as a girl with a feather. He takes a bath just so the boys can see the slim whiteness of it as he comes and goes in the hall.

Thanks for the Ole Virginia days.¹⁸¹ I will get to them soon. I am now on Froude’s Life and Letters of Erasmus, that Mr. Wager brought to my attention.

I have given some of my new and lighter MSS to Mrs. Embree¹⁸² to read for fun. What can she find to keep her aware in Berea. You will be interested in the Pres. Frostiana I have collected. As one remarked in Berea: Its the first time I was ever in a real Oligarchy.

I’m learning more Ira Sankey Hymns than I ever learnt even in Mount Hermon.¹⁸³ The Mountain Peop<l>e are a vague element and I don’t know whether I have laid hold of it or not. There is certainly nothing of Lincoln around here. Perhaps they are all asleep with hook-worm—Like my roommate. Explanations are so easy

Lots of love
Thornton

57. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Mt. Carmel <Connecticut>
Sept. 7 <1917>

Dear Amos

The hateful red-tape of entering College is being unwound around here in order to transfer me to Yale. All the rattling skeletons of the past are being un-graved ie the application blank is being filled out by Thacher, B.H.S. and Oberlin. I have lost all interest in entering Yale or any other College, but Father prophesies that the war will end before next September—which isn’t committing himself very much—and then says that all three of us will be seniors at the same time.¹⁸⁴ I don’t want to go to College any more and I don’t need it. It has come to the place where it positively harms me. And a lot of Papa’s money that hes grown to be almost tearful about, is spent in just keeping me mediocrely respectable and all the fidgety apparatus that goes up to make “Mr. Wilder’s son—a junior at Yale.” I could take half of this gentlemanly money into my own victorious developement if he only let me take a year in strenuous quill-driving about Washington Square, talking til fifty o’clock in the morning with the young blood of American literature, instead of the corrected and sandpapered etc etc from the prep. schools. But you must have heard invective like this before. With me its à propos because I have an offer from the Cincinnati Little Theatre to join their Repertory Company. Its just that practical experience I need to almost finish me off as dramatist, but the familie won’t hear of it.

I am sending you the last copy of your class Oberlin Magazine, with myself representing you.—(with a study in abnormal psychology more suitable to a Pathology museum than a sweet college magazine.) Note the poem by Nina, Trego.¹⁸⁵ I send you also a playlet illustrating the history of religion—(oh no! nothing’s too pretentious for me!) in which the whole idea is in the title and the last lines. This playet illustrates the Roman Catholic tendency in me that pains dear Papa so, and Mama too, who has become so full of Theology and metaphysics that I’m afraid of her. Charlotte is typeing some others that illustrate better my dramatic method. This one is only a baby oratorio.¹⁸⁶

In these war days and with you so intimately engaged, we are ashamed to mention that we went to such-and-such-a movie, or spent a fortnite at such-and-such a seaside place. I wonder how you picture America in wartime anyway?

There are a good many khaki men on the street cars; all the women knit all the time; flags droop to the right and left; everything costs more; and all the nicest young men are wearing silver on their shoulders.

Butstill loungers smoke on the corners, still young men play tennis on the University courts; and Yale boys with their hair scrupulously parted in the middle drive up in huge cars to the street corner and ride off with wonderful girls in astonishing clothes. And still the Waterbury street car is overcrowded between 2 and 4 P.M.

lovingly for your 22^nd Birthday
Thornton aged 20 6/12

58. TO CHARLES H. A. WAGER. ALS 4 pp. Smith

414 Berkeley Hall
New Haven
Sept. 25 <1917>

Dear Mr. Wager,

This is my first night in my room. I have just come back from seeing Sara<h> Bernhardt. The white stones I lay upon important days are my envelopes to you.

Just before I moved here I read the first part of Sinister Street.¹⁸⁷ It is a wonderful picture of the amenities and atmosphere of Oxford life—(The second part is of course an entirely different matter as The British Censorship said.) And it is with that illustration that I cannot help hunting for resemblances. College does not open until day after tomorrow, but already the boys are coming in. Quite a number of windows are brightly alight in the walls that overhang Berkeley Oval.

I am happy and expectant, but my family is troubled. The entrance-board has sat upon my application and decided that I am a Sophomore. But Dean Jones is a classmate of father’s and promises a successful subterfuge.¹⁸⁸

I saw Bernhardt in the Fourth Act of “Merchant of Venice” and the Last of “Camille.” In the former she had that nervous technical proficiency of Mrs. Fiske. That flecking of a point with the hand and the turn of the shoulder; and she smiled and laughed far too much. But Camille was very wonderful. What a great tragic face she has to begin with. And the voice.

I am awaiting minute by minute by<my> roommate that the Authorities will assign to me. Bob Hutchins wrote a splendid letter from the Oberlin Ambulance Unit, regretting that he couldn’t be with me.¹⁸⁹

Did I tell you that my Mother and I were reading the Fioretti¹⁹⁰ that you gave me, all summer. And that at our Cape Cod hotel I sat next to the Colgate Geology Professor who spoke very highly of you & wanted to be remembered? (I forget his name; what the ladies called “the nicest man!”<)>

Like Henry James’ hero we burn our candles Thursday for your Bricharis birthday altho the office really fell on Aug. 22—lagging not far behind Samma in our protestations.¹⁹¹

Excuse this ink and paper. Amos writes that he is near Jimmy Todd in Saloniki.¹⁹²

I am learning shorthand and typing at a Business College from 9-1:00 every day so that when my hour strikes I may be as useful as the 7^th clerk of a sub-quarter master.

Afftly
Thornton

59. TO THEODORE WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Box 414 Yale Station, N. Haven
Feb. <19>’18

Dear Ted,

I received your humorous letter and the trunk, and all’s well. I was a ninny to leave such a tiresome job to anyone else anyway and I hope you will forgive me for inconveniencing you. ¶ The social notes at the end of your letter were intense reading: I was absorbed in finding out that Theodore Wilder will resume sharing an elegant apartment with Mr. Durand Wilder,¹⁹³ the idol of the Freshman class, during the Spring. Agnes’ engagement came to me as a greater shock than my gentlemanly reserve can express: but it was a model of womanly delicacy and fine feeling that she did not send me the embittering news herself. I never could quite make out whether I was on the point of being engaged to Agnes or Nina Trego. An alliance with the former would have been exhilirating, and the quarrels would have been fine, vigorous and as tonic as <a> sneeze. With Nina life would be close-centred, nervous, with only oases of serenity and the quarrels would have been silent, repressed, dark and intense. In considering a possible wife—this is a real ipse dixit,¹⁹⁴ Ted—choose her in the light of her quarrels. Ascertain her style in argument, her method in animosity. ¶ But I hear you laughing at me.

You didn’t tell me enough about your Grandmother, Aunt and Sister. These deficiencies are not to be excused. If I stepped (without knocking) into the good old house on N. Professor St (imagine me as returning from my solitary four-mile walk!) would I find everything very much as it used to <be>? Grandmother at her desk? Agnes the sudden-smiling busy at the telephone, endlessly farewelling? You and Durand on the point of leaving on the other’s wheel?—(there is only one wheel but it always seemed to belong to the one who wasn’t using it, and had to be petitioned for.) And our much enduring Aunt Mame sewing upstairs in the frontroom or in the kitchen, finishing some fragrant bread and generous of it? Or have I imagined it wrong, and does Margaret, instead of holding her head upstairs over her Algebra, now usurp Agnes’ place at the telephone chair?¹⁹⁵ Keep me in touch with these alterations; they are of more moment to me than the hopping crowns of the Balkans.

There are no changes in my life to report, except that now I reside in the oldest dormitory in Yale, the celebrated Connecticut Hall, once roomed in by Nathan Hale, Horace Bushnell and Edward Rowland Sill.¹⁹⁶ The floors tip like the ocean through a porthole, and the ceilings sink to meet them, but Yale traditions and Yale history leaks from every crack and wormhole. It is the best we can come to in America that bears the flavour of old Oxford and Cambridge. I am still taking eighteen heavy hours, Business College three hours a week. I am still “writing” much, both for the waste-basket and for posterity which is only a temporary postponement of the waste-basket. I received a fine letter from Harold Spore, a charming one from Marian Tyler that I intend to answer momently—and Oh Ted! a wonderful one from Mr. Wager. A marvel, boy.

Amos is in the artillery,¹⁹⁷ I suppose you know. Bergström, Oberlin ex ’19 is here in the Yale R.O.T.C. Tell me what news you can of the Oberlin bunch at Allentown.¹⁹⁸ Will they move to France en masse? ¶ Tell me if Hotchy¹⁹⁹ is in town; if he is remember me warmly to him and tell him to send me his address. I owe a letter to Mr. Jeliffe that I am ashamed to have delayed so long to answer. Remember me affectionately again to your whole household, with great wishes for yourself

Thornton

60. TO BRUCE T. SIMONDS.²⁰⁰ TLS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed: War Industries Board / Washington)²⁰¹ Yale

July 19, 1918

Dear Bruce, my bonny,

From now on address me: c/o Chevy Chase School, Washington, D.C. where all your letters will find me happy, tired and temporarily excited. I have moved from the gloomier (that’s my little joke!) atmosphere of the Perpetual Carousal, finding that four boys in a small apartment whether it belonged to a literary Marquise or not, was both warm and excitable, especially when the noise is created by that perpetual competition in cleverness which constitutes the relation of Steve and John.²⁰² My home is now almost three quarters of an hours ride away from Washington and them. It is in a fashionable old-colonial-fronted Girls’ School which for the summer is turned into a suburban mens’ club. There are lawns and verandahs and great halls, and although I arrive there every evening at about seven very wan and staggering a little I am usually able to pick up a little spirit before I go to bed. In other words I have written two whole new scenes into Vecy,²⁰³ and the two that I like the best in the whole play. But here in this whole town I have no one to whom I would care to read them, except WilliamRose Benet,²⁰⁴ whom I have got to know very well, and he me. I havent read them to him yet, but he is coming out to hear them some near Sunday afternoon under the wide elms of the Chevy Chase Tearooms. And dear Brucekins, you cant imagine how starved I am for music. To a large extent it was my hungar for music that took me to see Hearts of the World²⁰⁵ three times, for there was a large orchestra that played from time to time the more conspicuous of the melodies (though which of his melodies are there that are not conspicuous?). After a while even the commoner tunes in it had a strong appeal for me and I induce a grand melancholy in myself at any time just by singing over a few, and remembering the great marvelous face of Lillian Gish who has succeeded in my opinion to Mae Marsh²⁰⁶ as the greatest screen actress. I realize however that that is an argument in which you have not yet achieved a full locus critici.²⁰⁷ One of the greatest omissions of my faltering life lies there: I did not introduce Bruce to the celuloid.

Drop me now and then a card of some cool shore you come to on your trip, for the weather here shows signs of breaking its matronly temperateness and becoming in Falstaff’s figure, characteristically misquoted be<by> me, “a wench in flame colored taffeta.” I wish it would occur to you to give a red cross trip to open the hearts of the arrogant worldly stiffnecked art-supercilious Washingtonians. There is scarcely none of the lovable middle-class in this city Bruce dear, just a lot of marble-faced limousiners and a lot of wretched women clerks living on a farthing a day, forty thousand of them, desperately driven.

I told you I guess that I sent my ten playlets to the yale press but except for a cordial note from mrs day (i am too tired to strike the capitals—) saying that the press was forwarding THEM to her—(i am never to<o> tired to capitalize that kind of thing.)²⁰⁸

My mother and three sisters are all up at Mount Holyoke together where Charlotee is doing War Farm Work. Arthur Hopkins will be in Washington the last week in august putting on a play. Shall I try to make an appointment to read to him do you suppose, or just send it in to his bored readers? Did you know that he had secured the new great matured John Barrymore as his star for the coming season and was to produce him in a series of plays, and was going to do the same with Alla Nazimova, probably putting on the greatest play since Hamlet, namely the Master Builder?²⁰⁹ I weep at these beautiful things. I want to write a play for J.B. about a young Lord Sands a fated gifted tragic boy of the Yellow Ninties period, with a highly colored background of Whistler, not Wilde, a little Beardesly, Dowson etc. A boy that took a rococo period too seriously and died like L’aiglon.²¹⁰

As you love me, do not laugh at my silly plans.

Conceit and ambition are the first luxurious of a tired frustrated man.

I long to hear you and Arthur doing the D’Indy Symphony²¹¹—I cannot even remember that great rhthmic figure; I cant even remember the Motto.

Wouldn’t it be beautiful if my little book were published—eventually why not now? as they say of razors.

Forgive me if I stop now. I am leaving this hot <office?> for my nightly vacation in my place of carpets and shrubs.—and great dignitary officers, very kindly and a little communicative.

love
admiration
curiosity
everything else good
Thornton

<handwritten> My best to Caroline

61. TO AMOS P. WILDER. TLS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed War Industries Board / Washington) Yale

August 14, 1918

Dear Pops,

Dings are going shplendidly. I took my Advisory Board Exam. and probably passed it. But this is not certain. However I think so. So I went today to the office of the Coast Artillery and put in my application for an induction into that service. IT ONLY TAKES MEN WHO ARE IN GENERAL MILITARY SERVICE OF THE DRAFT (and of course general enlistments.) and Men who have had at least one year of College. So that if they find out from my Branford office—the only people who are allowed to tell me the result of last night’s exam—that I am fit for general milit. service they will immediately call me to go to Fort Adams on Narragansett bay, Long Island or somewhere near Connecticut. But if the Branford board says “limited service” they will refuse to have anything to do with me and I will be left where I am. So you see either alternative is desirable; and the grand Mt. Carmel send-off with hot coffee and hymns is off the horizon. Besides this process does not introduce the ambiguities and uncertainties resting on the disposition of further medical exams, whose inter-se disagreements and conflicts has until now been my trouble. They take you as you come from the draft board and ask no questions.

First thing we are sent to train until September—near the end of Sept.—when the bonny promising ones of us are selected by our own application to go into a training camp, the graduation of which, a one or two-month’s course—confers a Second Lieutendantcy on us. Then we go to France and deal with the very heaviest artillery, the Big Berthas etc. If this goes through as indicated and there are no hitches any where—the snow this winter should fall on me in France, and that before Xmas. This no doubt sounds incredible to you, but remember that it is only men with at least one year of College that are called, or others who pass bravely an exam in Plane Trignometry and Logarithms, both of which I had Freshman year in Oberlin, and can polish up.

To make this letter really impressive I should stop here, but I am going on.

I sent the enclosed too hastily written critique of a play to the Boston Evening Transcript which keeps a whole page open to Drama three or four times a week, after a scholarly analytical type. The reason this copy is so dirty is because it is the carbon copy and the erasures on the original turn up as smudges on the copy.²¹²

I wrote the producer Arthur Hopkins who is in town with this play, saying that I had a play of the China Coast and the effect of the war on the social and political exiles there, that might be of interest for the use of John Barrymore, and since he, Mr H. was in town perhaps he might have liesure to read it or have it read to him. I finished up saying that if I did not hear from him I would infer that he prefered the manuscript to be handed in to his New York office in the usual manner. But I did hear from his secretary in a very nice note saying that Mr.—but I will enclose the note.²¹³

I am being drawn into a Bohemian crowd here. The ladies dye textiles and write, the men serve in the Fuel or Food administration or the War Industries Board by day and write by night. And they meet at a tea-tavern called THE SILVER SEA-HORSE which you must confess is a happy stroke. They put on plays from time to time, want me to appear in a Chinese pantomime and insist that I hand in some of my playlets immediately to the play-reading committee. So you see the low company to which I must relapse if I am not called to Fort Adams in two weeks.

All possible luck, my dear family, to <t>he Maine trip. I am half mad to be going on with you. This hot weather makes every primitive pore of your body sing for the sea of one’s origin, which, by felicity, will be always near me, in the Coast Artillery.

How soon can we tell Amos that little brother is in the Artillery—the unskilled emergency-rush section of it, to be sure? Tell little lady mother to keep her shears poised in air and her needle threaded for the sewing of the star.²¹⁴ One knows not the day or the hour, except that it will come within a week and a half. It was something artful of me to avoid the terrible drilling camp-days during the worst days of heat. When I played at Camp Meigs they said that that afternoon about twenty soldiers had fainted during afternoon drill. Perhaps I would have fainted during morning drill.

Give my love to every sloping wave, especially to the long low urgent ones that come in towards evening with a sense of distress, as though the whole long-sighing night tide were pressing even then upon them. Of<If> it <is> Gran manan²¹⁵ you are going to, give your afternoons and mornings to the search for porpoises under the sky-line for the child-races felt that busy rolling of school<s> of them in the distance was a religious thing, noting with simple quickness of the primitive mind that of all the animals of the world, these seem most to be moving in an inspired trance, with their heads always under the water and the solitary, self-sufficient, world-alone air. But do not interrupt them, for wh<e>ther it be minnows they are pondering over, or whether it be The Divine Nature, it is best that we respect the folk-lore of the ruminative south sea-Islanders.

Can you realize that Washington can see me perhaps no more in two or three weeks? We never know our fate; we never know our fate.

Lots of love
Thornton

TNW as a corporal in the army’s First Coast Artillery Corps, 1918.

TNW as a corporal in the army’s First Coast Artillery Corps, 1918. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

62. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 3 pp. Yale

<Fort Adams, Rhode Island>²¹⁶
<November—December 1918>

Dear Papa,

I have been so busy transferring fatheads preparatory to their discharge, and writing letters to your old friends, that I’ven’t been able to drop a stitch home.

I have received and written two letters to Mrs. Weed, who is now an old fast friend of mine. And I have just mailed my regrets to Mr Chapman. These letters have been simple, my dear parent, but under their simplicity the very virtuosity of letter-writing. The gem-like salutations and valedictions will very likely die of faint admiration. In both cases the body of the letter contained a fanciful picture of the officials in Washington issuing the Bulla forbidding any personnel Officer or clerk, in any post, Camp, fort or Headquarters to be given any 24-hour pass, furlough or discharge until further notice. Then followed “to slow music” a depressing of we clerks after the last man has been discharged, “limp, overworked, disillusioned soldiers, dragging ourselves under the snows of February, joylessly home.”

I have spoken to the Adj. about Yale’s Jan. 30 opening. He says no force as yet known can break through Mimeo 91, quoted above. The Gov. of R.I.<,> Beekman, sent a special telegram for the discharge of one of my fellow-workers, and was disregarded. However I think we may be out by New Year anyway. The Coast Defenses are supposed to be on a Peace Basis by next Sunday. This is laughably impossible. The slow sleepy Officers downstairs were suddenly shaken last Sunday by an irate phone-call from the Department Hdqrs. in Boston: “The U.S.A. has discharged 200,000 men: why have you not done your share?”

We’ve been working like mad ever since. The red-tape and forms of the Government must be seen to be believed. Seventeen separate little paper forms for each discharge, where three years ago, there were only four operations. Now you have a little poster to account for the disposition of your very shoe strings.

The spectacle of the great heavy-moving opaque gov’t guarding itself against remote and inconsiderable frauds in its divine stupidity is so depressing that it affects one physically. The lucid, deft, swift French mind would make a wonderful facile channel of the process, and a million men would be discharged with <a> bow and a smile

love
Thornton