Part Two

BRIDGES: 1920-1929

WHEN THORNTON WILDER GRADUATED FROM YALE IN JUNE 1920, he was the only one of the five Wilder children who had never been to Europe. His youngest sisters, Isabel and Janet, lived in Italy and Switzerland with their mother from 1911 to 1913 while Thornton and his sister Charlotte were in school in China and then California. After her college graduation in 1919, Charlotte worked in a YWCA hostel in Milan, Italy. In June 1920, Thornton’s brother, Amos, who had served overseas during World War I, returned to Europe after receiving his Yale degree and began a fellowship at the University of Brussels. Thornton’s immediate future was decided when he was accepted as a paying visiting student and boarder in the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome for the term beginning in October 1920.

Worried about his second son’s employment after college, Wilder’s father encouraged him to enter the teaching profession as a prep school Latin instructor. The elder Wilder believed that his son’s enrollment in the School of Classical Studies would enhance his credentials on job applications. Despite the family’s limited resources, the foreign exchange rate was so favorable that nine hundred dollars—which the senior Wilder doled out in installments—fully covered his son’s year abroad. Before Wilder sailed for Italy on September 1, he completed six weeks of work in the last of five farm jobs he had held over the past seven summers.

Wilder arrived in Rome on October 14, 1920, and remained at the American Academy for seven months, taking graduate courses and participating in student social life. His social circle widened due to informal introductions to young American embassy personnel and more formal introductions from family and friends that provided him entrée to the large English and American community in Rome. He especially enjoyed his visits to the home of the Italian poet Adolfo de Bosis and his family, where on one occasion he met Ezra Pound. Wilder continued his writing, focusing on playwriting. He hoped to complete “Villa Rhabini,” a play with strong Jamesian overtones, and to read it to some of the literary ladies whose tea parties he frequented. He made short trips to other parts of Italy, such as his “Umbrian week” in Perugia and Assisi. After leaving the American Academy in Rome on May 18, 1921, he explored Florence and nearby Siena and stopped off in Milan to see his sister Charlotte.

From the time Wilder learned he was to go to Rome, he longed to spend time in Paris. He wanted to see a close friend who was studying music there, and to attend performances at the Vieux-Columbier, a theater established in 1913, whose founder, Jacques Copeau, employed novel stage techniques Wilder had read about and wished to experience firsthand. In early June, Wilder arrived in Paris, where he spent two and a half months. Although he had initially planned to stay there a shorter time, his father cabled him to say that the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey had offered Thornton a position as a French teacher. Once Wilder accepted the offer, he felt it necessary to study and immerse himself in French grammar and conversation.

While Wilder was in Paris, his mother and two youngest sisters sailed for Southampton, England. They spent time in London with Wilder’s maternal aunt, Charlotte Tappan Niven, and visited Amos, who had completed his fellowship year and was living and working at Toynbee Hall, the oldest settlement house in London. When Amos matriculated that fall at Mansfield College, Oxford, to study for a degree in theology, Mrs. Wilder and her daughters took up residence in that academic community. While the foursome settled down in Oxford, both Thornton and Charlotte left the Continent at the end of the summer. Charlotte gave up her job in Milan to work in Boston, and Thornton left Paris on August 31, 1921, on board the French liner Roussillon, to begin his teaching job at Lawrenceville, a private boarding school for boys. Their father had remained in New Haven, where he was now associate editor of the New Haven Journal-Courier. Once again, the Wilder family was separated by an ocean.

From September 1921 to June 1925, Wilder taught French and served as the assistant housemaster of Davis House, a dormitory at Lawrenceville. The school and the surrounding community provided a congenial place for Wilder to earn his living and continue his writing projects. He became especially close to Edwin Clyde Foresman, the housemaster at Davis, his wife, Grace, and their young daughter Emily, and to C. Leslie Glenn, a young math teacher who later became a distinguished Episcopal clergyman. Glenn remained a close friend for the rest of Wilder’s life. Nearby Princeton University had a wonderful library and kindred groups of musicians and literary figures. Lawrenceville was also only a short train ride from Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York City, where the off-duty schoolmaster could easily enjoy the current theatrical fare. As a result, during this time, Wilder broadened his ties to literary and dramatic circles in New York. These associations fostered his writing life, provided informal but professional criticism of his work, introduced him to Off-Broadway theatrical groups, and opened doors to residential programs for aspiring writers.

In the fall of 1925, Wilder, the successful teacher and housemaster, took a two-year leave of absence from Lawrenceville to enter the graduate program in French at Princeton University. The three siblings closest to him in age had either completed degrees or were about to enter graduate programs. Charlotte, who had received her M.A. in English from Radcliffe in June 1925, began teaching at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Amos returned from England in 1923 (as did Mrs. Wilder and her two youngest daughters) and completed his B.D. degree at the Yale nity School in 1924. After a year of tutoring and travel in the Middle East, Amos was ordained in 1925 and became the minister of the First Congregational Church in North Conway, New Hampshire. When Isabel returned from England in 1923, she worked for two years in New York before entering the three year certificate program at the Yale School of Drama. The youngest sister, Janet, now fifteen, attended high school and lived with her parents, who had moved from Mount Carmel, Connecticut, to Mansfield Street in New Haven. In the fall of 1925, the members of the Wilder family were not only all together on the same continent but living near one another in the Northeast.

Thornton Wilder’s commitment to graduate studies did not affect his determination to pursue a writing life, nor did it stifle the ideas, characters, and plots that filled his imagination. During July 1924, when he was awarded his first residency at the MacDowell Colony, an artist’s retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, he concentrated on a group of “Roman Portraits” he had begun in 1921, probably in Paris. He had worked on these pieces intermittently, but there was a new impetus to complete them. In March 1925, he had received welcome news from a Yale classmate who was working at a publishing house. He had requested a copy of Wilder’s manuscript months before and had shown it to the directors of his firm. Now they were interested in publishing it. Wilder expanded and revised the manuscript, and in November 1925, a month after he began his graduate studies, he signed a contract for his first novel. The Cabala was published in the United States by Albert & Charles Boni in April 1926 and in England by Longmans, Green in October of that year. Most reviews were positive and sales were strong, although not sufficient for Wilder to live by his pen alone.

After Wilder received his M.A. degree from Princeton in June 1926, he returned to the summer routine he had followed since his second year of teaching, dividing his vacation into two parts. He reserved one month to write and another to earn money tutoring at a boys’ camp. In July 1926, he was accepted for a second residency at MacDowell, where he began a new book. In August, he returned to Sunapee, the tutoring camp where he had been employed for the past two summers. From late September until the beginning of December, Wilder toured Europe as the paid companion of a boy he had tutored the previous spring. By December, he was in Paris, where he remained when his duties as companion had ended. There he met another young American author, Ernest Hemingway, whose second novel, The Sun Also Rises, had been published that year to excellent reviews, and whose writing Wilder admired.

Wilder enjoyed a banner year in 1926: In addition to the publication in April of his first book, on December 10, 1926, The Trumpet Shall Sound, a slightly revised version of a play that had won a Yale writing prize in 1920, was directed by Richard Boleslavsky at the Off-Broadway American Laboratory Theatre. Although it did not receive favorable reviews, the play remained in repertory for several months. Wilder was not overly concerned about its reception, because he was then deeply engaged in a new work, a novel set in Peru. He worked on it over the Christmas holidays, which he spent at a pension on the French Riviera with some Yale friends who were now studying at Oxford. There he met Glenway Wescott, another contemporary author he admired.

On January 31, 1927, Wilder sailed for New York on the Asconia. He rented rooms in New Haven, where, away from the hubbub of family life, he would have a quiet place to work on his second novel. Shortly thereafter, to supplement his small income, he accepted a six-week residential tutoring job in Briarcliff, New York, from February to early April, and also agreed that spring to translate a French novel for his English publisher. In July, at the urging of his father and the headmaster of Lawrenceville, he accepted the position of housemaster of his old dormitory, following the untimely death of Edwin Clyde Fores-man. Throughout this period, Wilder worked on his Peruvian novel. In July 1927, a year after he began it at the MacDowell Colony, Wilder delivered the final manuscript of The Bridge of San Luis Rey to his publisher. In August, he resumed his tutoring position at the camp in New Hampshire.

The academic year 1927-1928 at Lawrenceville began inauspiciously. The new housemaster, with his three-thousand-dollar-a-year salary, settled into his six-room quarters and prepared for the customary trials and tribulations that punctuated residential life at a boys’ school. The first trial, however, had nothing to do with his charges. A few weeks into the fall term, Wilder had a mild attack of appendicitis but was able to return to his duties. Another flare-up later in the fall required surgery and an absence from teaching.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey was published in the United States on November 3, 1927 (the English edition had appeared the previous month), to rave reviews and stunning sales on both sides of the Atlantic. By the time Wilder traveled to Miami, Florida, over the Christmas holidays to recuperate from his surgery, it had become clear that his second novel was already a huge success. The implications of this became apparent when he returned to Lawrenceville for the spring term: His dormitory home was deluged with telegrams and letters requesting interviews and speaking engagements, and packages of books to be signed were delivered daily. Most gratifying, perhaps, were invitations to meet notable authors whom Wilder, hitherto, had admired only from afar. In May, his novel won the Pulitzer Prize. Wilder had suddenly become an acclaimed author with a popular following and a great deal of money in his pocket.

In June 1928, Wilder resigned his position at Lawrenceville, but his association with the school was not entirely severed. At the beginning of July, he sailed for Europe with three Lawrenceville boys he had agreed to chaperone for a few weeks in England. After some travel, they joined Wilder’s mother and two younger sisters in a large house in Surrey he had rented for his family. Wilder stayed on in Europe for the rest of the year. During his recuperation in Miami the previous December he had made a new friend, someone just his age, and had planned a walking trip in the Alps with him for September. His companion was the book-loving heavyweight boxing champion of the world, Gene Tunney, an acclaimed athlete and international celebrity. Because Wilder’s recent success had turned him into a literary lion, it was not surprising that this seemingly disparate pair attracted widespread press attention, which continually interrupted their trip. The press surveillance ended only when the two men were able to slip down to Rome for Tunney’s private wedding.

With that furor behind him, Wilder retreated to the south of France, where he spent a month writing, exercising, and socializing before meeting his sister Isabel for a round of theatergoing, concerts, and visits to museums in Munich and Vienna. After spending Christmas with their aunt Charlotte in Switzerland, Wilder and Isabel returned home at the end of January 1929. No longer could he pursue his vocation as a writer in relative anonymity. From this point until the end of his life, forty-six years later, Thornton Wilder was to live the life of an internationally renowned and acclaimed literary figure. In this climate, the privacy and seclusion he needed to pursue his vocation became increasingly difficult to find.

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

Oct. 14 <1920>
Roma

Dear Family:

I have this minute arrived in Rome, and am waiting up in my room at half-past ten for some supper. The train was two-and-a-half hours late, and I know no more of Rome than can be gained on rainy evenings crossing the street that separates the station from the Hotel Continentale (the last room left for 22 lire). I had resolved not to write you until I had received your letters forwarded, but they failed day by day to come so I have hurried up to Rome to get them. French Lemon¹ may have decided not to forward to Cocumella on the Wagers’ casual advice, or they may be found at the Boston. Tomorrow will straighten out.

In the meantime (while my hunger resounds in my stomach like a great bell) I must tell you some of the news of the last week and a half in Sorrento. One day for instance when I had been walking enraptured for hours among the bronzes and marbles of the Museo Nazionale I returned at 3:30 to the Immaculata to take the Sorrento boat. I bought my ticket, went aboard; it was expected<inspected> by three guards. We started and I settled down to read my Paris Temps and Berliner Tageblatt.² I fell into conversation with an Italian sailor who had had a fruit store on upper Broadway. Suddenly I found I was on the wrong boat: I was bound for Procida and Ischia, and there was no return that night. Seaman Esposito embarrassedly offered to take me into his home at Procida but I laughed it off, saying that I would go on to the Ischia that had been good enough for Vittoria Collonna and Lamartine.³ Then I fell into conversation with a handsome middle-aged Anglo Italian who is employed between London and Rome in the wheat business. There are half a dozen exceedingly beautiful villas on Ischia because the bathing is so perfect for children, there being no cliffs as at Sorrento. This gentleman tried to be as helpful to me as possible, but with a touch of caution. I was hatless, in an eccentric-looking baggy grey-suit, and with a strange air of being at my ease that suggested arriére-pensée.⁴ We drove up towards his villa, whereupon he extricated himself, telling the coachman to carry me on to the Floridiana Hotel (“the best one” on the Island, but not very good.) In the glass of my Italian, darkly, I found the Floridiana closed for the season, and was waved on to the second best which was full. Then I was sent to the Albergo del’ belli guiardini<giardini> which turned out to be a rather ambitious kitchen-in-the-wall, peopled by several suspicious old women in black dresses who discussed things in whispers among themselves. I feared I was going to sleep in Vittoria Collonna’s castle, now a house of correction, but one of the women emerged and beckoned to me ungraciously to follow her. We passed to an outdoor court (the beautiful gardens perhaps of the title) and on the second story through four spacious dark funereal bedrooms, there being no hall, and no light, and no privacy. The last was offered to me, to my simulated delight, and I gazed at the great shapeless shabby bed where so soon (I foresaw) my throat would be cut. I wanted to keep my relations with my hosts as sweet as possible and so refrained from bargaining until the morning. I slept very well; I was awakened only once by a dog under my bed eating the Paris Temps, the Berliner Tageblatt having been used in a more humble and not inappropriate way elsewhere. The return boat for Naples left at six the next morning and I had told them to call me at five, so I lazily replied to a knocking in the dark. It seemed to me, as always on waking, that I was happily back at 72 Conn. or on Whitney Avenue.⁵ Soon the truth came to me that I was in a dubious situation on the island of Ischia. I threw some cold water at my face from a washstand in the corner, dressed and descended. There was a yellow streak in a dark sky visible above the narrow blanching street. By lamplight my padrona made me a cup of coffee and presented her conto.⁶ Twenty-two lire for that wretched room, a supper and a breakfast! It was too late to argue. I paid it and threw myself on circumstance. Except for my Express checks which were uncashable until late in the morning I had only three lire left, and the fare to Naples was five lire. I asked the woman if she’d give me two more, and I’d mail her five, but she concealed her obduracy under a flow of rapid Neapolitan dialetta.⁷ I left quickly without mancia⁸ and reaching the ticket-kiosk explained myself to the official. Suddenly it occurred to me that 3 lire would at least buy me a 3^rdClass passage, and so it did with a lire to spare. So at ten o’clock I reached Naples and going to beloved piazza dei Martiri cashed another Express at 25 lire to the dollar! Suddenly I passed an American soldier (as I thought) in the street. I ran back and spoke to him, inviting him to have an ice-cream with me. He turned out to be a Princeton boy of <an> imposing New York family who ran away from bank servitude to join the Near Eastern Relief. He was actually in the Wall Street Explosion.⁹ The J. P. Morgan skylight fell on him, and he’s got the scars! He came over and spent two days with me at the Cocumella, and we went to Pompeii and climbed Vesuvius together. (I keep going to the window. Outside in wonderful Rome, it is drizzling. Carriages and trams pass. Not far away the Pope and forty cardinals are sleeping, the coliseum and the forum are lying dampish, and silent and locked up but with one burning light at least, the Sistine chapel is glimmering, and somewhere further off, in the struggling starlight, your graves, John Keats and Percy Shelley, lie, succeeding to establish, if anyone can, that it is better to be in a moist hell with glory, than live in an elegant hotel with stupidity.) When we got quarter way up Vesuvius, at a hotel where are<our> horses were supposed to be waiting saddled for us, there were suddenly no horses. So we cut the price of our agents in half and agreed to walk. It’s a wicked mountain, half of every step you take is lost in the sliding blue-black dust, yet so steep that every step for two hours and a half is palpably lift. I suddenly got anxious about Charley White; he has been shut up in a bank for a year and a half and was unprepared for this. He insisted on going on, though he was on the verge of palpit<at>ions and heaves and blood-coughing the whole way. Yet Father and I had wisely let pass the call of the Near Eastern Relief because of my constitution: I who talked Italian all the way up with our guide, Nicola!

(Now it is morning and Stupidity is impatiently waiting for café-au-lait. A busy modern city with only a hint of romance is riding the tide under my window. In a few moments I am going to dash over to French-Lemons; then to the Londres-Cargill, an almost unheard of hotel with a room at about eight lire! Then this afternoon to the Academia.)

Love to you all. I’m dying to know about you.

Will write again tonight

Thornton

Looking in the cheval-glass I see a young man of about twenty-one who implicitly, or by his reason of his large shell glasses, presents an expectant eager face to the view. His shoes and clothes are in travelstate, but he is carefully shaved and brushed. On his pink cheeks and almost infantile mouth lies a young innocence that is not native to Italy and has to be imported in hollow ships, and about the eyes there is the same strong naivete, mercifully mitigated by a sort of frightened humor. He is very likely more intelligent than he looks, and less charming. Alone in Italy? To study archaeology! Why each single tooth in that engaging upper row is an appeal in the name of Froebel and in the name of Wordsworth to let childhood enjoy its rainbow skies and imagined gardens while it may.¹⁰ A delicious little breakfast has come, with a marmalade of orange and pineapple, and though I want you all here all the time, for this particular meal I choose Isabel.

TNW’s Yale graduation photograph, 1920.

TNW’s Yale graduation photograph, 1920. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

64. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

Am. Acad. At Rome
Dec. 4, 1920

Dear Papa:

I have received the remittance and acknowledge statim.¹¹ I was told it was coming the latter half of November and had planned things down to a science. Its delay by so much as a week (to say the least) compelled me to ask the Secretary here to forward one hundred and fifty lire, as you will see on the bill enclosed. I was also told that you were sending me eighty dollars, which on the day of your mailing would have been at l<e>ast Lire 2160 and more likely £2300. I presume of course that you got full exchange (otherwise you would have left the exchanging to me as the advantage lies here) and that your remittance was $55. about.

If this means that your method of conducting my arrangement has changed it deserved explanation before it was put in practice. I gratefully accept anything, but like to know the worst. If I am to <be> paid with you getting the benefit of the exchange, I shan’t be able to go with the Classical School for three weeks to Pompeii; I shan’t be able even to buy the pocket microscope we must have for the numismatics study in the course on Roman Private Life. I shan’t be able to go to the Opera, which definitely narrows my visit to Europe as being purely Classical Study.

Out of the 1500 I have already paid:

The bill for November	Lire 709.45
10 Italian lessons	70.00
A pair of gloves	45.00

I’ve immediately stopped Italian lessons.

Is the idea for me to stay in Italy as long as I can for $900, or is it to stay for one year under as pinched conditions as possible? We parted on the first agreement.

On a generous amount of money I could make quite a little agitation on this Roman scene that recognizes extraordinary eccentric sharp young men, as it did when Emperors adopted them! Enclose yesterday’s cards received.

On a discreet amount I could still do the name Wilder modest credit and gain entrance to regions incomputably valuable to a younger writer who misses nothing, as far as observation goes.

On an adequate student allowance I can walk about and see things and meet rather complacent Americans at the hotels, and do a little work without worries, and with an extraordinary amount of pleasure.

At present, as a shabby repressed soul, I can breathe and go into museums (not too often) and get a great deal of pleasure in a denied, envious sort of way with all my capabilities still in the cocoon.

love
Thornton

<appeared perpendicularly in left margin>

On my margin I couldn’t b<u>y any Xmas presents on time. Photos later,—

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

Porta San Pancrazio
Roma Italia
Dec 13, 1920

Dear Amos:

I’m so ashamed at not writing before, especially in view of your closely-written and -observed letters, that I don’t know what to say. I have certainly be<en> idler than you, too, full though my days have been with sightseeing and lectures. I think I must unconsciously have postponed writing you from pique at your intimation that I was probably on the point of borrowing money from you, a terror which Charlotte also experiences, and gratuitously reminds me from time to time that she hasn’t enough to live on herself. Hug your avarice as closely as you please; it never occurred to me to borrow from either of you! Though, since both of you got the idea simultaneously I suppose penury and dependance are as conspicuous as two red flags in my temperament, or else father, whose idée fixe about borrowing is perfectly Freudian, has been warning you about what he calls the Leech of Rome. I have every intention of being parasitic all my life, but always on those who can easily afford so expensive an encumbrance and who take a special delight in subsidizing those talents to which I make so modest a claim. I have at last found in Italy a mecca for just such patrons, and am myself presenting myself as a sort of objet-d’art of a most singular and quaint charm, rentable for teas, dinner-parties and dances; will read MSS plays to adoring ladies; will sit in their palaces and talk to them about their own uniqueness; will — and so on, in a catalogue that you blue-nosed Flemings can only envy and disapprove of.

A vacation from dalliance comes to me with the visit of Harry Luce and Bill Whitney over Xmas.¹² I have just trod the via dolorosa of Roman pensions (unprecedentedly overcrowded) and finally found them a room-and-pension for 25 lire a day—less than a dollar in present exchange: Within stones-throw of the house where Keats died (little as that will mean to them!) and the College of the Propeganda of the Faith¹³ (little distinguished in your mind, you Calvin, from the Inquisition and other practices of the Whore of Rome,¹⁴ about which you have only the vaguest and most superstitious of ideas). This last thought of mine is so important that I am going to drag it out of brackets and continue it, by belaboring you for your ignorance and prejudice before the most beautiful religious system that ever eased the heart of man; centering about a liturgy built like Thebes, by poets, four-square, on the desert of man’s need. You and I will never be Roman Catholics, but I tell you now, you will never be saved until you lower your impious superiority toward this magnificent and eternal institution, and humbly sit down to learn from her the secret by which she held great men, a thing the modern church cannot do; and a church without its contemporary great men is merely pathetic.

¶ Charlotte is spending Xmas with the Blakes¹⁵ in Florence, I hear, then coming on to me. I receive this indirectly. ¶ Don’t acquire a barbarous lowland accent to your French. ¶ I’ll try and pick you up something for Xmas, though I must borrow to buy it. ¶ Tell me any intimate dope you may get from America on our parents; Mother’s letters are delightful quiet dining-room table affairs, and Father’s are trenchant homiletic. It’s foolish to expect other people to write as revelatory letters as I do, but I wish that they’d at least intimate the alternations of climate in their minds and hearts. ¶ I’m not at all sympathetic with your shockedness over fellow-students conduct: you haven’t learned Morals, you’ve learned the Code of Morals. Politeness and Celibacy are a matter of indifference to God. Go deeper. If possible, sin yourself and discover the innocence of it.

love
Thornton

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

Accademia Americana
Porta San Pancrazio, Roma
Feb 1, 1921

Dear Papa:

I have been shamefacedly conscious all these last few weeks that you were just about to receive, or had received, an ugly-toned letter from me. I would give the world to recall it, especially now that your beautiful grave reply has come. Now I am conscious that you are receiving two more “financial” letters, not bad-spirited I hope, but violent and despairing. You see the date on my letter and will be glad to hear that I have payed my January bill with a little help from a discreet unexpected source, and can now live weeks and weeks without raising my voice. The whole original trouble lay in the fact that I did not realize my monthly Academy bill was £500 (now £600) and that my original Express checks gave out soon after I arrived in Rome and could no longer eke out the transoceanic remittances. I think I have now learnt how not to spend lire; and am out of the danger of ever exhibiting myself in such a disgusting uncontrolled state as you’ve had to look at lately.

Just the same I’d like to go away from this crowd about Easter time. My two courses in Epigraphy and Roman Private Life will be finished by then, and I think the new one, Numismatics. They are full Post-Graduate School courses, and although I have groped, and scrambled and lagged behind the PhD fellow-students I think I can get the professors to sign a little document to the effect that I passed the courses. Teas and dinners increase, and I hope it can be said I have improved those opportunities too, but I would be glad to leave that. There is only one friend I shall greatly miss. The dim churches, the pines, the yellow sunlight you will see in my eyes for years—it doesn’t matter when I leave them. I should like to leave for a week or two in Florence and the hill towns about the middle of April—then up to Paris until sailing home in late June,—either by the Fabre Line again from Marseilles or if I can find one cheaper from northern France.

In imagination I hear you quite clearly wondering reproachfully why Thornton—in the middle of great natural beauties, amid masterpieces, with a great deal of free time, well-housed and fed, among friends—shouldn’t at least be docile and simply grateful. My only answer is that the very complexity of things flays one’s peace of mind to the point of torment. You are haunted by the great vistas of learning to which you are unequal; continuous gazing at masterpieces leaves you torn by ineffectual conflicting aspirations; the social pleasures and cheap successes bring (against this antique and Rennaisance background) more immediate revulsions and satiety. A snowy walk in Mt. Carmel, Mother’s sewing and you with your pipe hold for me now all I hold of order and peace. Your queer “aesthetic” over-cerebral son may yet turn out to be your most fundamental New Englander and most appreciative of the sentiment of group; when Amos and Charlotte have set up independent self-centred institutions, I shall turn out to be a sort of male Cordelia!¹⁶

Your enclosures give me the keenest pleasure. I miss only one sort; the “Alumni” and newspaper reports of your recent speeches. I am very pleased and proud of all these menu-cards and the letters that come in to you. I can’t have too many of these, and am jealous of every one you sort out into Amos’ or Charlotte’s mail: if I can’t claim a great part of the inheritance of your patience and sublime endurance (virtues you have consigned to my light-haired fellows) I can at least rush forward and stake out reflections of your animation and vitality and (hear, ye Heavens!) your eloquence.¹⁷ You will always turn to find my eyes bright with delight and admiration at your wit and charm, even if I am occasionally (Oh, for the last time!) thoughtless of your sacrifices. And I can already see Amos and I, whiteheaded at the age of eighty, disputing amicably as to which of us knew you best, Amos who could not take his eyes off of your labors, so beautifully and quietly sustained, or I who was always after cajoling you into those moods of quickness and inspiration that you were allowing to grow less frequent. Either aspect alone could make the reputation of a great father, but with both we have a right to feel a little bewildered and hide ourselves from the responsibility of standing up to so much privilege and love. Here I am, a sort of Arthur Pendennis,¹⁸ breaking down in front of you, and wishing old words unsaid and old silences forgotten, and remembering you so intensely as you were when you came to Litchfield, or to Mt. Hermon, or to the Duttons’. I hope this letter will get to you at about your birthday and if you sit down on that day to think us all over, I hope it may lift from my record some of the discredit left there by my last three letters.

Much love
Thornton

67. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Accad. Americana
Roma: Aprile 13 1921

Dear Mother:

I have just sent off letters to Father and Amos, and feel so virtuous that I must write you two<too>. I left you after my last, hung up in suspense over my luncheon at the De Bosis.¹⁹ It fell out almost as I anticipated, only twice as delightful. The reddish-yellow villa, hung with flowering wistaria at the end of a long avenue of trees; choked garden plots with various statues of Ezekiel glimpsed through foliage; the rooms of the house furnished in rather ugly Victorian manner—all modern Italian taste in music and art being deplorable, perhaps because they are so discriminating in literature. Some guests, a young Englishman named James; a Miss Steinman; the young Marchese di Viti whose sisters I had met, a beautifully bred discreet medical student. Signor de Bosis himself has a sort of abstracted gently humorous air, silent, that sits agreeably upon one who having so many over-intelligent children doesn’t have to descend into the arena of conversation very often, and then only to kill. These days—perhaps I told you—he is revising his verse translation of Shelley’s The Cenci for immediate performance by Italy’s foremost company now in Rome. He is one of the best Italian poets (conservative) and as such made an address in the Protestant Cemetary on the anniversary of Keats’ death last month. [Upstairs he showed me his recent discovery of the meaning of the first two lines of the Epipsychidion, and if you turn to the lines you will be glad two <to> find that the Emilia Viviani’s sister spirit is not (as she herself thought and Ed. Garnett) Mary Wollstoncraft, but Shelley who puns here on his name Percy—in Italian “lost”—as Signor De B. found in a few casual lines where Shelley began translating his poem into Italian.]²⁰ At table things went merrily in and out of both languages. Lauro—my friend—and the Arabic-Arimaic sister I admire, so began throwing at each other in latin and from memory the ridiculous list of beautiful books which Rabelais says Pantagruel found at the library of Saint-Victor.²¹

April 14 1921

I went with some of them last night to the last Symphony Concert conducted by Arthur Nikisch; the program was “popularissimmo” Beethoven’s Egmont and 5^th; Lohengrin and Tristan and Tannhauser Overtures and the Liebstod, but I have never heard such conducting in my life. ¶ Signór de Bosis has sent me a book of his verses inscribed. ¶ I have found an Italian playwright whose plays I adore, the Sicilian Luigi Pirandello. Philosophical farces, actually,—strange contorted domestic situations illustrating some metaphysical proposition, with one eccentric raissoneur in the cast to point out the strangely suggestive implications of the action. The very titles evoke an idea of his method: “Se Non Cosí” “Cosí è (se vi pare)” “Il Piacere dell’ Onestà” “Ma non è una cosa seria.”

¶ One of our boys here is developing such serious hallucinations that he may have to be treated for madness. He is insanely in love with a lady more clever than considerate, and altho’ she is away fancies her arrival momently, prepares imaginary teas under the delusion that she is arriving, rushes out as each streetcar climbs the hill. He fancies also that she is just around the corner but refuses to come in, that she stands evening-long under the arc light opposite gazing at his window, or prowling about the iron fence of the Villino Bellacci. By an impossible chain of logic he fancies me in league with her, dictating letters for her to have mailed from Siena (where she is in fact) while she obscurely fixes her gaze upon him in Rome. I no longer try to reason with him; (as Freud will tell you) the idee fixe is only agravated by contradiction. The woman is a pure adventuress,—like the woman in my play strangely enough, a Bohemian countess.²² ¶ I had myself a strange little sentimental experience that made concrete the warnings that Continental women however impersonal, comradely and full of good sense they seem, cannot understand friendship that is without romantic concommittants, cannot, cannot. Queer!

love Thornton

68. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

American Express Co. 11 Rue Scribe Paris
June 27, 1920<1921> Sunday

Dear Papa:

A letter came from Mother dated June 1, Mt. Carmel, giving me directions to write her at the boat’s landing Southampton. But it only reached me on the 16^th and I could never meet her then, so I await further addresses. People about here are full of the delays and losses of mail in the American Express Co; I hope I am missing no one’s letters altogether.

Well, I have begun conducting a column in the Telegram called The Boulevards and the Latin Quarter. It takes no time to do it and I am already following up openings that lead to jobs to combine with it. But there is so much “call Thursday, if you can. Mr. Y will be here,” calling over and over. If I get enough of these, I hope you will approve of my staying until Xmas. I am making as little inroad as possible into the money that is understood to be my passage money. I have still over 1500 francs there, and if the readers and advisers of the new Telegram write in that the chatty theatrical column is an ornament I shall be taken on regularly and perhaps given more—interviewing and so on. In the meantime I am provided with addresses of American movie people who want someone to write cinema “titles” etc.²³

Don’t worry or think about me. I wear clean linen, brush my teeth, “hear Mass” and drink much certified water. Without sticking to Americans I meet many people you would like to feel near me in ambiguous Paris—Mrs. Sergeant Kendall, for instance. Polly Comstock (of Trumbull St.) asked me to lunch at her pension the other day, and there was a Mr. Winslow of Madison who remember<s> me as a baby. I couldn’t tell him that Mr. Cushing and himself were the two people always held up as object-lessons to avoid. Bill Douglas is here, too.²⁴ Steve Benét returned to America, but will be back in October. I have met his fiancée here, a journalist on the Tribune.²⁵ She has made him give up drinking so, or almost. Mrs. Wells is here, though I haven’t seen her yet. It seems quite true that Danford Barney²⁶ is incredibly mean and brutal to his wife. I ran into Frank Brownell of Thacher and his mother the other day; and a young Mr. and Mrs. Holcomb York of New Haven. I don’t know what’s become of Amos and Charlotte since last I wrote you. Charlotte hasn’t even acknowledged the receipt of the twenty-eight dollars which vexes me: I have all the receipts however.

I buy little penny paper copies of the great French classics and read indefatigably, but I am increasingly at a loss how to find opportunities to speak French at <a> stretch. I go often to the clubrooms of the American University Union and there are some notices hung up there of students wishing to exchange hours with an American but inquiry at the desk reveals that the notices are months old and the requests long filled. This is something to worry about for me—since you must—and also about the difficulty of keeping one’s stomach working regularly. And the distastefulness of having to go to public baths for one’s shower; a vulgar practice that I resent, universal and respectable though they are over here. I am often homesick for America or Italy. The Frenchmen are not so immediately “sympathetic” as the Italians, and I am eager for letters from you and mother. I should like to know if the Mt Carmel house is given up, and if you are left to the depressing emptiness of Taylor Hall.²⁷ I hope you have made a homely room in the Graduate Club,²⁸ with your photographs, Thoreau, and the neckties (from which Amos and I long since rifled the best) about you—I remember against the wall, too, long envelopes bursting with matter that I have always supposed to be your notes on the years in China. They will be in your new room. A cup or two of Amos’s.²⁹ You may feel quite free to smoke, too, for even if it’s example should penetrate to me, it would do little harm for I don’t finish a cigarette a week. An arrangement so that you can read in bed, read Walpole and Burke and Mrs. Montague and Swift—all the inexhaustible standards that wait for me someday when I have lost both legs in a streetcar accident, and need stout trenchant reading. Copies of The Literary Digest and other sources to transmute into public reflection.

You see I wish you happy. When you have counted your troubles with a certain Puritan satisfaction in the reflection that the Inexplicable Disposer of Things has thought you worthy of trials beyond the endurance or even sympathy of most men—leave me out. Consider me as some other man’s son, strange and remote, loving you at that distance prodigiously and unaccountably.

Thornton

69. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

269 Rue St. Jacques. <Paris>
Thurs. <August 1921>

Dear Mother:

I’m so amazed I don’t know what to do! All the millions of French books I’ve read this last year haven’t helped me the slightest in speaking or in grammar? However I am bold to bluff. I rushed right out to take a lesson every day with a certain lady who has been taking my fellow-pensionairres; she will supplement my forced marches through grammars at home.

I shall come over and see you very soon but not until the day before my mois³⁰ is up here—money must be saved at every corner, and although its worth a hundred dollars that I should see you again before going back, it is hardly worth ten that I should see you seven days instead of six. So I shall probably come over—following your directions—the night of the 26^th of August. More later.

Let Isabel be very cautious about her movie course. The magazines are flooded with inducements to take courses. Let us talk over.³¹

I shall try and see Aunt Charlotte tomorrow morning, although I have heard no word of her.³²

I have not cashed the money yet but am sure it will go through as quietly as the other did. ¶ A letter from father Aug. 1. in which from what he says he seems not to have received my cable YES nor my S.O.S!

Lawrenceville you know is the smart prep. school for Princeton and entertains only big husky team material. Oh, how well dressed I must be! I’d better grow a moustache for maturity.

Well, well, I’m as excited as a decapitated goose. Will see you soon. I might perhaps get a later sailing but I’d rather not and I dont think Father’d mind, since my stay has been a month prolonged as it is.

None of you say how you like London. It has finally broken into Rain here and the whole world seems better. You must polish up your French and find a neighbor or two, a French maid perhaps who will sit on the area steps with me gently exchanging subjunctives.

Isn’t it perfectly mad of Father; but it’ll be awfully good for me in the long run.

Love to the whole caboodle.

Thorny—soon

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

Oct. 3 1921
Lawrenceville

Dear Father:

I didn’t realize until I got your letter, on returning from Trenton that the suit and the other obligations were to be separate. I didn’t send you enough, of course. So I am enclosing the first of my checks. Will send on more whenever you say.

I hope they can cash this for you without delay; otherwise let me know by card and I will send you the same thing by postal money-order.

The work goes on by strange ups-and-downs. The heart of the matter is that no amount of good intentions or mental coercion can really bring my interests into our table conversation, our discussions of verbs, of athletics. I am still in Europe. I especially cannot forget Italy. The boys see instinctively that I am not the collegiate live-wire.

But then again—especially mornings before I am tired by the awful excitement of dragging a class through the iron teeth of an assignment—I seem to be irresponsible and “good fellow” and we exchange the expected breakfast remarks with all the spontaneity in the world. There are a number of boys in the house for whom Mr. Wilder is quite an adequate Assistant House Master. I get on well with Mr. Foresman too, but I suspect he regrets not have<having> the vigorous snorter assigned to him.

There are times of great pleasure in the class-room when I know I’m not merely adequate, but really good. It only took me a day to reach perfect composure; I usually stroll about if a class is reciting well directing olympianally now from the side now from the back. With my older class—we are reading a French classic—quite unconsciously I get drawn into some exposition of idea or technical expression—and I suddenly think that that art of holding twenty intelligences in hushed attention is going to justify my coming down here in the capacity of unprepared teacher and unsuitable companion

—afftly
Thorny

Davis House, Lawrenceville School.

Davis House, Lawrenceville School. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.     151

71. TO CHARLES H. A. WAGER. ALS 1 p. Oberlin

<Lawrenceville>
Nov. 4 1921

Dear Dr. Wager:

Four evenings a week I sit up in my study from seven until ten while my thirty-two boys do their preparation for the morrow. They begin to drop in, a difficult phrase in Caesar, a little Trig, “Please, sir, what does mendacity mean?” some French, a little chat, “would you like some fudge my sister made, sir?” Every now and then there is a sound of scuffling on one of the three floors. I rise, and descend the stairs with majestic and perfectly audible advance, dispensing awe and order like fragrance. Finally fifteen minutes freedom before lights-out; sudden activity, four Victrolas play, rushings to the bathroom, four-part harmony. Then the last bell and I lower the lights. An expensive benevolent peace invests us; my heavy reconnoitring footsteps flower into symbolic significance as I lock the backdoors and try the windows. Follows about ten minutes of furtive whisperings from bed to bed, and they fall off to sleep—most of them having sustained the incessant impacts of football practice throughout three hours of the afternoon. People said to me Never teach school, You will be so unhappy, It will deaden you. But what happy surprises you find here; how delightful the relations of the teacher and an interested class; casual encounters with retiring boys on the campus, and at lights-out the strange big protective feeling, locking the doors against dark principalities and powers and thrones, and the great lamp-eyed whales that walk ashore in New Jersey—

Thornton

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

Davis House
March 4 <19>’22
night

Dear Father:

I wish I wrote you often. My natural inertia is now fortified by my professional lack of quiet time, and I write even less often than before. ¶ It is agreed that I am to stay on here another year. I had no way of knowing whether I “suited” or not,—at times it seemed to me that the Headmaster loathed me, my housemaster longed for a change of assistant, and the boys on the point of petitioning my removal. But these must have been phantoms of an (at times) overworked nervous system, for the day, March 1, when you must announce your decision about next year, and when—so says the contract—the H’dmaster must announce his objection to you, if such there be, has gone by. Mr. Foresman was amazed when I told him that I had expected to be called into the Foundation House, told that I was an entertaining guest but that they required a more athletic type. He told me that I was considered a pearl of great price, that he for the first time felt secure about the house when he was absent, and that if the vote of the boys counted for anything I had reason to feel signally pleased. There is a considerable amount of double-reading in all this that mitigates its flattery, but on the whole I feel like one who has come out of a perplexed bad dream into a more confident waking.

My little English Club is coming along in the most delightful manner. The boys read very earnest bad original poems to oneanother. We take, eight of us, walks through the bare tree trunks of a hesitant Spring; its really too easy for me—imaginative boys from homes and schools that never fed an imagination—my flattest remarks on books or style or even people are manna to them. I’d like to give you all their innocent names if I thought they would evoke for you as they do for me, the awkwardness and charm and rush of their opening minds. ¶ We have almost found, you and I, that, with food and shelter, I can be happy almost anywhere. If the Amherst offer comes after all, and now I can no longer accept it, without doubt it indicates a scene where I might too have been happy; but not happier than my second year promises to be. Now I have learned some of the principles of teaching, now that I have mastered all but the obstinate core of the problem of classroom discipl<in>e (the core—those one or two fundamentally bad boys who are bored and restless and vindictive anywhere except in a pond of mud); and that I have made many friends and got over my worried distressed eager-to-please attitude,—I look forward to reaping a harvest after my real labors of this year.

Will you send an occasional letter of mine to Oxford. I write to the mad air-fed ladies every now and then myself. To you I can write hurriedly, between bells, but to them I compose like an artificer, and the result <is> I write them with despicable infrequency. Keep urging the wild witch Charlotte to tell me how it goes.³³ ¶ If I save hard, am I justified in looking forward to months on it at Monhegan this summer?

love from
Thornton

73. TO THE EDITORS OF THE DIAL. TLS 1 p. Yale

Box 282, Newport, R.I.
August 3, 1922

The Editors of The Dial

152 West 13th Street New York City.

Dear Sirs:—

I am submitting under separate cover the MSS of a series of imaginary memoirs of a year spent in Rome, entitiled The Trasteverine. These give the appearance of being faithful portraits of living persons, but the work is a purely fanciful effort in the manner of Marcel Proust, or at times, of Paul Morand.³⁴

Attached hereto find return postage.

Very truly yours,
Thornton N. Wilder

74. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. TLS 2 pp. Yale

Box 282, Newport, R.I.
August 22, 1922

Dear Mom:

I have told the family where I tutor that I must go away Friday; so now I give a lesson every day and am a solid fellow. In the afternoons I take the ferry to Jamestown, walk out to a remote point of land, so far from the World (that father cannot get over his fear I am in town to cultivate!) that I need only wear the trunk of my bathing-suit. Here I read and read, exposing myself to the ultra-violet rays of the sun that give me a thorough sunburn. Every now and then I plunge in and swim a big arc, then come back to read some more. The other day as I was just about to enter the ferry on my return a boy came running out of breath to shake hands; a Laurentian whom I didn’t remember from Adam, but an auspicious beginning of the new year.

There is a new, very radical magazine, called the Double Dealer, published in New Orleans, that has accepted two “Sentences” of mine, drawn from the Roman memoirs. I’ve never even seen a copy of the paper; but will forward all to you when it comes out.³⁵ “The Dial” a very high class, though ultramodern, review is flirting with the publication of the whole Memoir. I only sent them the first book, ten or twelve thousand words. They write back that it is hard to estimate a fragment, that some pages are interesting, and those that aren’t may be so because of their relation to the unfinished whole. They enco<u> rage me to send them the rest. Well, I can hardly send them books seven and eight when I have not begun Book Two. And I am unwilling to kill myself with the composition of an interminable Book Two without still greater assurance of their using it.³⁶

You remember that I told you how when I met Mrs Augustus St Gaudens in Rome? She confided to me that her son, Homer, the stage designer, was engaged in dramatizing General Ople and Lady Camper, a long short story of George Meredith, for Maude Adams, their very good friend.³⁷ I suddenly became curious to see it and send<sent> to Trixie Troxell,³⁸ my friend in the Yale Library, to send it to me. It is quite amusing, but utterly unsuited to stage arrangement; and the idea of Maude Adams as the sophisticated dictatorial Lady Camper is the crowning absurdity. Since then I am mulling a play about the riotous character of the Countess of Saldar in Evan Harrington.³⁹ I tell you all these tentatives because it may set you reading the old books to distract your mind, and because even as unfinished impulses they might interest you.

The fleet has been in the harbor and the community is after giving them a block dance. A stretch of well-paved Washington Square, as wide as the Yale campus and twice as long was roped off and sprinkled with corn meal. The moon was shamed by strings of colored electric bulbs and by batteries of searchlights with petticoats of amber gelatine in front of them. Up until eight oclock a twenty-foot hem of craning citizens was held back by the police, while in the center of the naked acre on a few precarious chairs sat the patronesses, Mrs Admiral Sims, the mayoress, and some ladies from the Summer Colony whose closest connexion with the navy resided in the fact that they were great-grand-daughters-in-law of Cornelys van der Bildt,⁴⁰ the ferry-boy of Staten Island and pseudo-commodore. The grand march was so long that it reminded me of the armies of David Belasco⁴¹ where, as soon as a soldier passes out of sight of the audience, he rushes around behind the scenes and re-enters on the other sight<side> as some one else; it was headed by a great deal of gold braid and brought up by a million gobs and their girls. There were two alternating bands composed of musicians off all the cruisers and very good they were too. I went and stood near them to subject my deliciously suffering spine to the rages and hurricane of the great brasses; just as in Rome (when the lira was at twenty-eight) I would get a seat for Verdi’s Otello fairly on the percussion, so that during the Taking of the Oath at the end of the Second Act my nervous system might happily be reduced to rags. Someday I shall take a camp stool and sit inside the bass drum during a performance of Elektra.

You will have a great headache from seeing all these misprints. I will close by saying that I shall not be able to see Charlotte after all; she is gone on a few vacation trips until the thirtieth. I take the night boat for New York Friday night and will be with Father Monday morning to help him on the Journal Courier for two weeks while he goes to Maine. I don’t know what he thinks I can do, but I am willing to try. Love to you all, named Wilder and to Aunt Charlotte. I am eager to hear anything you can snatch time to say.

love
Thornt

75. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Davis House Lawrenceville NJ.
Sept 19 1922

Dear Mother:

I must write you something at this psychological moment. This is the first night that the boys are back in the house. Mr Foresman is away at committee meeting and I have just turned out the last lights. A most well-omened silence wraps the house. Thirty-three heads have fallen back on their pillows as though they had been chopped off. The excitement of arriving and shaking several hundred hands has fatigued them, just as football practice and Latin will next week. There are a dozen new boys in the house and of course we are all looking each other over furtively. There are almost a dozen new masters in the School, too, all young but three. They come from all sorts of backgrounds and are much shyer than even the new boys. Mr. and Mrs. Foresman, with whom I live are looking well; he is a little stout man, an old football celebrity, with blunt ideas and a jovial reticent manner; she is much superior intellectually, a Cornell graduate, but domesticating rapidly—her not inconsiderable good-looks gradually approaching the benignant maternal. Her French and Latin are in astonishingly good repair, and we play piano four-hands after a fashion. The baby Emily, age three, is a squirming little girl with a piquant French face. Contrasting though we are, Mr. Foresman and I get on finely. I often think that the reason I have got on in the House so well, is because his personal affection for me is always forseeing and averting things that might embarrass me. The result is that I am being extremely well paid for being happy. In return fortunately I am able tacitly to help him; today, for example: Mr. Foresman has a horror of meeting the fathers and mothers and making conversation. Consequently in the face of express orders from Foundation House to stay at home, he drives off to Trenton, and leaves to me to a dozen fascinating encounters with mamas depositing their sons in our spiritual Pawn-shop^* Human nature is often as simplified as the comic supplements represent it: I have had exactly twelve proud, deprecating, anxious accounts of some priceless sons. The same apology for their inability to study, the same confidence that the fundamental gray-matter is all right, the same anxiety about blankets.

I have written now into profoundest night. The last mattress has creaked, the last slipper flopped back from the bathroom, the last yawn-blurred words between room-mates, exchanged.

lots of love
Thornt.

Dear Mom:—

I forget whether I sent you a copy of The Plain<Double> Dealer, so if I send you another put it down to utter indifference to the honor of print, rather than to pride. I shall send you Lefty’s novel⁴² too, when I can get into Trenton. You should see my room. I got an introduction to a department store and started shopping on account. Two deep blue rep curtains as a portere between my study and my bedroom (there was a dusty red thing there last year) two deep blue strip rugs crossed the empty bit of floor by my desk, a really beautiful blue, without design except for two inches of still darker blue around the edge; and white curtains for both windows. Vous m’en direz des nouvelles!⁴³ I just controlled myself from buying one big deep blue rug a foot thick, that would pervade the room and (being a little too big) would turn up to climb the walls for about an inch all around, like the toe of a Turkish slipper. I have a big rectangle of blue cloth that says YALE on it, but it seems to have been lost over the Summer; it was to be, of course, the keystone of the decorative plan!

I am to teach 24 hours this year, if there is still pressure on me to take an hour of Bible. Naturally with such a load I don’t have to take any Study hour supervision in the Big Study (that I am very glad to be out of). I have no 1^st Formers to teach, though I was supposed to have shown some aptitude for the wrigglers last year: instead I teach a 2^nd 3^rd 4^th and 5^th—these last two mature ones are, of course, my dulce decus.⁴⁴

I am fashioning a new 3-minute playlet, very strange called And The Sea shall give up its Dead.⁴⁵ which I shall send you, if it comes to anything.

Excuse now if your grown-up and busy son rushes away to help boys arrange their schedules to direct tramping negroes on the stairs as to the destination of trunks, and to brush the teeth of his thirty three stoopids. Love to Isabel, who may find an outlet for herself and a chance of helping Charlotte enormously on that page of the Youth’s Companion.⁴⁶ I’ve just about broken my neck looking around for something else odd to send Janet, but I swear there’s no originality in our shops. To Amos a salute, as we may be on the brink of new wars, wars in Palestine too for a generation that can see no irony. love

Thornts

76. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

Davis House, Lawrenceville, N.J.
Oct 9, 1922

My Dear Mrs. Wilder,

Your son has asked me to write to you in his stead for two reasons. The first is that he is so ashamed of not having written you for so long that he has no idea of how he should begin. The second is that since you have never received a letter from Lawrenceville written by anyone except himself, you might enjoy someone else’s view of the life there. I am not only in his house, but in two of his classes and can give you some idea of how he appears to us.

If you are going to excuse his silence, it will be a shear act of grace. It is only fair however to tell you the few arguments he might put forward. He teaches twenty-four hours; most of the masters have between eighteen and twenty-three. The correction of papers for so many is enormous, to say nothing of the tiredness that follows it at night. Besides just as he was about to write you last week something urgent arose. One night while we were at supper I was bidden to answer the telephone. It was for him—a long distance call from New Haven. When I told him they were waiting for him, he changed colour, dropped his spoon into the soup, and ran. It turned out to be Mr. De Lacy of the Brick Row Book Shop. Mr. Hackett had been struck by an editorial in the Journal-Courier during the Summer on the Shelley Century, and had called up your husband, thinking he had written it. Dr. Wilder redirected him to your son. They wanted a longer article in the same vein, to be printed in the Yale Alumni Weekly as an introduction to the collection of Shelleyana they were offering for sale shortly. The collection was to include a locket containing some of the poet’s ashes, set in fourteen aquamarines and listed at three hundred and fifty dollars, a beautiful portrait of Mary Wallstonecraft Shelley, for the first time drawn out from the obscurity of a private collection, and many first editions. The Book Shop assumed that the article would be a labor of love, but would instruct its treasurer to mail him ten dollars. This was Thursday night and the material must be in New Haven Monday. The school pressure was hard enough without this, but he undertook it. He has intimated that if the article is printed in the Weekly and meets the favor of such Tinkers, Phelps, Berdans,⁴⁷ as have hitherto watched him but doubted his adequacy to conventional tasks, like that, it might lead to offers of college teaching. Again, it is probably a delicate sounder from the Book Shop that has now three branches and is looking for cultivated young men to station at their outposts. At present he feels disinclined to join either connexion, but he would like to have them offered to him. The finished essay was amusing, although it had serious weaknesses of structure. To me it has a tremendous air of learning, though Mr. Wilder says that is merely the result of a hasty pillage of some source books that can be found in any good library. It is not unlikely however that the article will not suit the requirements of the Book Shop; it does not go into ecstacies over the brooch filled with ashes, and a repulsive portrait of Shelley (companion piece to that of his wife) is given a cold notice. Everybody knows that the Brick Row Shop has grown more and more bloodlessly financial, and the economic interpretation of your son’s piece is temperate; he refused to boot-lick. However, it is at least suave; they may have to use it for lack at that eleventh hour of other material. If it goes in, he is almost certain of its attracting notice. In parts it is green, but in others it is trenchant and witty with his characteristic precision of words tempered of late by his much French reading.⁴⁸

We get on very well with him in the house. He almost never interferes with us, and we do not play dirty tricks on him like they do in other Houses. He doesn’t come out and watch our football much, but perhaps if he were the kind that did he wouldn’t be able so well to help us in Latin etcetera. In class he talks so fast and jumps on you so sudden for recitations that often you don’t know a thing. Please write him for his own good to speak slowlier, as it would be for his own good. Of course this year he is an old master now, and has the hang of keeping a classroom down and never has to give marks, any more, or even fire us out of the room, like new masters do. He must have learnt summers somewhere. Can you explain why he hasn’t any pictures of girls in his room, nor even of you, everybody has pictures of women in their room, can you explain this? Why did you give him a name like Thornton for, didn’t you know it would be a thing we would hold against him, you might have made it Theodore through<though> even Theodore is bad, and Bill or Fred is best. Don’t think I’m crabbing, because after all he’s all right for the present and you don’t expect a master to be everything. He says he has some sisters, are they good-looking, or are they like him, and nothing can be done about it. Thanking you for your patients, I am

faithfully yours
George Sawyer Naylor.

77. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

Davis House Lawrenceville N.J.
Feb 10 1923

Dear Mama:

Your wandering boy tonight is very contrite. If Father however forwarded to you my playlet, as I bade him, let me count that as a letter, and the case is a little less damaging.⁴⁹ My letter before that described to you my Xmas vacation. Since then I have lain very low in Lawrenceville, teaching without respite. Last Tuesday however a fellow-Master, Mr. Rich, two faculty ladies and I acted Barrie’s The New Word⁵⁰ before the Woman’s Club. This choice one-act play was in the volume Isabel sent me a year ago with the inscription “bought in a shop in Tottenham Court Road.” We are to repeat our performance Thursday night in front of the boys, our most exacting public. I am including a review I wrote of our student Dramatic Club’s latest effort.⁵¹ So much for “events.”

Isabel’s letters from Paris to yourself, to Father, and to me—I receive them all ultimately, are absorbing reading. My stomach faints with emotion at the very address: 269 Rue St. Jacques. I expect I shall have saved enough for a trip by this Summer, but I am afraid to use it. Any sums I may be able to put by (and even such will be less than a thousand) will be too valuable as a resource for us Wilders and I do not want to touch it until the year following. No doubt you are astounded to notice this touch of avarice; but believe me, I am a very naughty boy and the reverse of avaricious. I am just about agreed to join one of two Summer Camps that are angling for me—to do a little French tutoring, spend the days in a bathing-suit under breezes smelling of the pines, with almost no fixed or disciplinary duties. There will be a considerable interim at the beginning and end of the Summer, and generous leaves of absence during it, so if you are back here I shall <be> transported with joy and at your side. Father says the Adams are urging you to take their house for the Summer months, and in combination with the reduced fare to Mamauguin⁵² it seems a good start. Turn it over for yourself however, carina⁵³; I’m behint you.

Great long stretches of my Roman Memoirs are now done, and I’ve a good mind to group together the Society sections and try and send them out into the world first, under the title: Elizabeth Grier and her Circle. To many readers they will seem (this show of the low-life and ecclesiastical material with which in the ultimate version they are relieved) too gossipy and feminine. Many passages however are of a valuable mordant satire, and others drenched with restrained pity; I am not ashamed of it. You would be a great help, but I cannot send my forlorn unique text across the ocean.

Charlotte’s essay in the Atlantic⁵⁴ has made a pretty stir in Lawrenceville. She has been sending me some sonnets of her writing that will make you hold your breath. If she keeps on right she may discover herself as something of a very high order that will scatter our magazine poetesses, as a hawk does the hens. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. What is the secret, madam, of having astonishing children? thousands of pretty, intelligent mothers growing old among their dull prosperous and un-appreciative sons and daughters ask you that question. Their life threatens to be a decrescendo; have you any advice as to how young mothers can guarantie themselves a crescendo?

Albert Parker Fitch⁵⁵ of Amherst spoke at our School service today admirably. I met him here last year and twice this year; Stark Young⁵⁶ had told him about me too,—we had fine talks. He spent the Summer at Fiesole in perfect quiet at a nuns’ nursing home. I have a letter from Gwynne Abbott⁵⁷ full of how charming you and Isabel are. She has gone on to Merano in the Tyrol.

Anybody care to know what I’ve been reading. I’m now in the XIII’^th tome of Saint-Simon,⁵⁸ more adoring than ever. This influence, believe me, arrived most à propos—henceforward whenever I am endangered of falling into silken felicities and jewelled or flute-like cadences I have only to remember this memoirist whose three greatest virtues are energy and energy and energy. I have just read also “Siegfried et le limousin”⁵⁹ by Giraudoux which I like for the rather weak reason that it is interested in the same things that interest me. The second instalment of your Xmas present has come and I have just derived a vast amount of pleasure from Doormats and Outcast. Who is Janet that you mention in your letters? some Y.W. worker doubtless; you say she enjoyed The Mollusc—send me a photograph.⁶⁰ I can’t abide women who aren’t pretty; must I advance money for milk baths and electric exhilirators to make her more presentable? Is she by any chance interested in horses? When my book’s published, and I’m very rich, I’m going to live in the Connecticut hills and own a large stable of horses that can tell time and play bridge etc. I shall need a capable women <woman>, sympathetic (and pretty) to put over them. If you know anybody who might suit, have her write me at once and enclose a photograph. You can see how my ink is turning quite red with eagerness, and quite illegible with fear that such a valuable woman can’t be found.

—Quite a time has gone by since I began this letter and I want to add that my Eliz. Grier and her Circle is almost finished—watch and pray

love from a drying aging schoolmaster
Thornton

78. TO EDITH J. R. ISAACS. AL (Draft)⁶¹ 3 pp. Yale

<Lawrenceville, New jersey>
May 3 1923

Dear Mrs. Isaacs:

Please take your time over the four acts I sent you.⁶² When reckoning comes do not spare me: I learn meekly. Besides they are from a closed chapter; after them came Dada.

Last night I shook hands with Max Reinhardt.

In the summer of Sixteen I spent a week on the lonely island of Monhegan, off the coast of Maine. In the colony of surf-painters and solitaries, human sea-gulls, that such an island would attract I frequented a group of Germans that gathered every evening in the draughty pine-board studio of I no longer know what musician, There was Herr Doktor Kuhnemann, University of Breslau, author of a standard life of Schiller; a Fraülein Schmidt or Müller, head of the German department at Bryn Mawr or Smith (one could verify these in an hour); and a Viennese dramatic critic named Rudolph<Rudolf> Kommer, who answered with unfailing good humor and wit my thousands of questions. Even while I was on the island I heard that the group was suspected of espionage, but, after I left, my Aunt says they were convicted of midnight signalling to a submarine base nearby, and interned. All these years go by and I see in the Sunday Times of two weeks ago that the article therein on Reinhardt is by Rudolph<Rudolf> Kommer now travelling with him as interpreter and agent. Just after I had made my plans to go to The Cherry Orchard in Philadelphia last night I saw, again in The Times, that Reinhardt was running down from New York to see the same performance. Sure enough, at the close of the first act, there he was in a stage box (with a gloriously beautiful actress setting off her face with the waftings of a huge feather fan in Paris green), and there behind him sat Rudolph<Rudolf> Kommer. They did not leave the box until the next intermission, when I pushed down the alley. Kommer was very cordial; declared that he had been wondering how he could find me, etc. He introduced me to Reinhardt, with a rapid, “nur als knabe er kannte mehr vom deutschen Literatur als die meisten Deutschen.”⁶³ You know that the producer is astonishingly young and homely, but with bright eyes, and with a pretty, deferential manner. After a few polite changes, he said in good English that he was with a lady and must go; and went.

Kommer then said that it was all settled that he would return for production in the Fall; that he would begin with a big pantomime spectacle (though he is no longer fond of them); and that he ultimately hoped to do Strindberg’s The Dream Play and Shakespeare. He is excited about America, stunned and bewitched by the Ziegfeld Follies, and by the negro entertainers (he mentioned The Plantations). Kommer said that they had been to many plays and that Reinhardt was always pointing out actors in roles of fourth and fifth importance who were full of possibilities; he added that some of the actors for his Fall season were selected already.

Perhaps you have met them yourself these days and know a great deal more than this.

In the afternoon I saw Henry Miller, Blanche Bates, Laura Hope Crews and Ruth Chatterton in The Changelings a jumbled comedy by a New Haven friend, Lee Wilson Dodd; a quilt of contrasted intentions—ten minutes of drama about misguided ladies stealing to bachelors’ apartments; sudden rush for chairs and a poor Shavian badinage about morality; Blanche Bates suddenly turns farcical and does Hermione⁶⁴ (just before the curtain she will return to her Noble Mother tune); stretches of preachment about pretty wives who shirk light-housekeeping and on studious young husbands who do not admit their wives into their enthusiasms and Ph.D. theses. Oh, how bad it was; even Laura Hope Crews was bad. And in the intermission Blanche Bates made a speech about how they all loved Henry Miller, how they knew they were out of the beaten track of the theatre, but that they were glad and proud to be with him, who had always led out in the direction of the Best Things in the Theatre …….. and Stanislawsky⁶⁵ and Reinhardt both in town!

I should love to write you for seven days and nights, but I shall see you soon—unless you leave for Europe before the third week of June. You will have a glorious trip, but you will not regret too much arriving back in New York for the finest season in our history.

Give my very best to your husband and children. I hope I can see you when I come up from graduation, but I shall not force you to choose between me and Italy.

Affectionately,

P.S. I forgot to say that Kommer mentioned by name Bel-Geddes⁶⁶ as one of the younger artists Reinhardt hoped to work with.

79. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale

Davis House,
June 5 1923

Dear Mother;

Just a page to supplement the letters Father and Uncle Thornton wrote you about Grandmother’s last days.⁶⁷ Father asked me if I could come up Sunday. I arrived at about two and turning into 44^th St. from Broadway came upon Father leaning against the area-railings. He had waited in and around the hotel for three days, it seems, and was to be relieved that night when Uncle Thornton arrived on the midnight from St. Louis. He took me right up to Grandmother’s room, nodding to the various people in the lobby all of whom were very concerned. She had been moved into a larger and lighter room, with a big bed and was attended by a homely middle-aged nurse whom Father claimed to find “superior,” but who gained my confidence only by her stolidness. Father leaned down to Grandmother’s ear and said that ‘little Thornton from New Jersey had come up to see her’. She opened her eyes wide and I am sure she recognized me, for she framed with her lips the elongated O, and uttered the tremulous cooing noise with which she always greeted me when I knocked at her door for a visit. Father continued to repeat that it was grandson and not son Thornton, whereupon she broke into a musical but incoherent flow of words in which I read a reproach at his presuming her capable of such a mistake. Her words in themselves were clear and even beautiful; the difficulty lay not in speaking but in thinking. When after a few moments we made a motion to go, it distressed her, for she raised her hand and wrinkled her forehead in a characteristic expression of humorous reproach; so we sat down, until from fatigue or content she had closed her eyes and forgotten us. Somehow the interview was anything but painful; it seemed to breathe Grandmother at her best, sweetness and a touch of humor. Father has probably told you the many beautiful and characteristic incidents of the days he watched by her.

After that Father and I walked for a few hours in Central Park, and I left for School. I went up again for the Service on Thursday. There seemed to be quite a number of people in the Bible Study room behind the Church Auditorium (she and I had once sat there waiting for Church to begin). Father led me up to sit beside Charlotte; it had never occurred to me that she would be there and dressed in complete black. Dr. Kelman,⁶⁸ whom Grandmother admired so and had taken me to hear during my Christmas vacation, the great Dr. Kelman, opened with a wonderful prayer; it wasn’t just good, for it was perfect. Then the Dobbs Ferry minister who conducted with him read some lines of your father’s that Grandmother had once found for him. Then just the six of us drove out to the cemetery, to the knoll amid countless columns marked Lewis and Nitchie.

I shall miss her a lot, especially when I am in New York and suddenly realize that we cannot take up again our modest little lunches and expeditions (she so fearful lest I be ruined with the price of street fares) and our little accumulation of jokes and comments we had in common. To you who only received news of it by the cruelty of cablegrams it will seem more tragic than it has been for us who saw an end as gently disposed as is possible among us.

Lots of love
Thornton

80. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Sagawatha Lodge⁶⁹
Lakeside, Litchfield Co. Conn.
July 2. 1923

Dear Mother:

I suppose I’ve made a mistake in coming here; it’s not terrible, but its hard in the queer duties laid on you and in the monotony. The whole problem of these camps is to keep the urchins amused on five acres for fourteen hours a day: nothing more difficult. They are pursued by boredom and fretfulness and homesickness. They practically desert their own baseball-games in the middle of an inning; no game (however passionately and stridently acclaimed at first) can hold them long; they adore singing, but their minds wander after twelve minutes of it; only story-telling can enthrall them long, and I hold that monopoly here, sitting on a piano-stool and narrating with my wiry hands and the changing horrors of my face. Two months of this and I see where I’ll get thinner yet.

Passing through New Haven I picked up two second hand books, two by Couperus. Where was it that you and I used to read Small Souls and Dr. Adriaan? One of these Old People and Things that Pass promises—one of his complicated semi-aristocratic families of the Hague with at least five generations gradually revealing their not quite plausible secrets. The other The Inevitable I got because it was about foreigners in Rome, and its one of the poorest stories I ever read; I cant say a thing for it. Besides it has an erotic notion to proclaim that is untrue and revolting. It is surprising that there is not a single brilliant portrait among all the minor characters—one can hardly believe it’s Couperus.⁷⁰ I have also just finished another amorous novel about modern Rome, Robert Hichens’ The Fruitful Vine.⁷¹ written with tremendous superficial cleverness (under that Paul Bourget-Edith Wharton bedazzlement in the presence of hotels and coronets)⁷² but the love-love itterations are silly; nothing convinces; the humblest page of Dostoevsky would burn it up in a trice; I wonder why I read them. “Il y a trois choses” said La Bruyère “òu la mediocrité est insupportable: la musique, la poesie et…..” I forget his third, but propose le roman.⁷³

TNW at Sagawatha Lodge, July 1923.

TNW at Sagawatha Lodge, July 1923. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Guess whom I at last met in New Haven? Sherman D. Thacher. I never pass through without calling on the Whitney sisters and this time (as one of their million cousins) he was staying with them. I had a long talk with him. He had the idea that I hated his school, and he was even a little ready to apologize for its inflexibility in regard to me & I hurried to reply that the school had been perfectly right and that (especially with my sharpened professional eye) I looked back upon it with increasing admiration and affection. While we were talking Pres. Hadley⁷⁴ came in with some books “for Marian”⁷⁵ (Father hints they were almost a match and what a match it would have been); he recognized me and said he was sorry not to have seen me the week before (when he was giving us our Commencement address at Lawrenceville), and left us gobbling adorably in the throes of fifty adieux. In parting S*D* said distinctly that he hoped someday I could give him a year in the Ojai. You can’t estimate all that’s implied there—though he hardly meant it and I wouldn’t considerate it—the very fact that he could commit himself so far must mean that I’ve thrown off and fought off and outgrown so much. He used to despise me and shudder at the very sound of my high voice.

Tuesday.

Endless games of Flags, Authors, Birds, Flinch, Jack Straw, Dominoes, Checkers, Parchesi. Teaching stupid boys the simplest rules. Soothing the contempt bright boys feel for duller competitors. Moving Olympianly amid the shrill whirlpools of running games. Rebuking little Turks with a passionless firmness that must have come instinctively to “an experienced worker with boys.” Sleeping in a log cabin with six youngsters and hearing their perpetual nagging of one another: “You dumbell”. “It’d take a ton of dynamite to get through your head, you nut.” “Aw, his head’s ivory.” “You come from a hick-Town, you hayseed—Hemstead is only a hick-town<.>” “It is not.” “It is. Only one train goes to Hemstead everyday and that’s a day late.” “Gee, if I had a face like you got, I’d try an’ get smallpox.” In swimming three times a day, warmish water, like swimming in tea; supporting boys’ stomachs while they try their first strokes; taking out wide-eyed ten year-olds in canoes, in rowboats, drifting through lily-pads with the mysterious noise of stems and leaves brushing against the bottom of the canoe. You tell them its drowned men’s fingers. They laugh and hold their breath.—Getting ready beds for Inspection; perfect neat corners. Shoes all in a row. Our little cabin Kwasind has twice won the prize. Everybody’s thoughts are on prizes, medals, banners, honorable mentions.—Good food at table prepared by a cook who used to be at Lawrenceville, Winters, and now is at Miss Masters’. Endless announcements between courses—the self-importance of adults giving orders to ten-year-olds. “I don’t want to see any boy without a sweater at meal times …. keep away from the Office unless you have special business…” Nobody impressed.

Thank you for The Adelphi; full of good things—poor hysterical D. H. Lawrence, soupy one minute and fine the next.⁷⁶ Did Isabel ever get the Molnàr plays⁷⁷—I gave the money to a Philadelphian bookseller who hadn’t them in stock, but promised to forward them in a week—was he honest?—A nice note from Lola Fisher.⁷⁸ If I were away from this Camp I could write her a perfect a little play.—Added some handsome brocades lengths to my Roman memoirs, vital, rich, crowded. Conscious of that inexhaustible invention that is so lacking these days where they can give you a thousand details without giving you a thousand lights; my portraits rise from my own pages to surprise me, solid, three-dimensional, speaking. All of them a little eccentric and all frustrated, wretched, but forceful, combative.

Lots of love, more soon
Thornt.

81. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Davis
Mon. night
Oct 29, 1923

Dear dear

But don’t I know just what you mean!

One has a low opinion of one’s family and yet one is angry at oneself for appearing at a disadvantage before them at some public function.

Of course in the end you passed through the Williams’ dinner like a charm, but I know what you felt.

Its the malady of the Wilders; each is better when the others aren’t around. Father is ponderous when Amos and I are near; but I enter houses that he has just left and I hear wonders of his wit and nonsense. Hasn’t Charlotte insisted a hundred times, almost with tears, that when we are not around she is Madame Recamier? I have even a suspicion that Isabel is more buoyant at those parties where there is no chance of meeting my depreciating eye over the shoulders of the dancers.

When you go out with me you may be as talkative or silent as you choose—you may stare at the carpet, or trip over the rug—it is too late to erase from my mind the conviction that you have the purest natural and cultivated talent for living that I have ever seen. Your technique ranges from diplomatic dinners to village book clubs; do not suppose that a Mrs. Williams cannot sense the presence of a lady and feel troubled. (The malice of her tea-table has become a scandal in New Haven; I heard indignation against her from all sides. Besides she hasn’t the remotest idea that she should reach out to an unassimilated guest, or respect a newcomer’s ignorance of her circle, and so on. However I do not need to expose her to make your gift the brighter; you are what you are.)

I read and read the endless tide of Madame de Sévigné’s letters, and enjoy more and more the happy resemblance of your natures. If I could only give you a Les Rochers⁷⁹ where you could retire for a few months every year, with a Breton climate, a son to read to you, your walks in the allées.—some books fallen on the gravel-path, as you sit thinking in the sunshine of Madison and Berkeley days. Don’t be worried that you cannot fling Isabel into Hillhouse Avenue⁸⁰ by the sheer impetus of your welcome there; let you take your deserved rest. Presently you will encounter by nature some congenial friends—more delightful even than Mrs. Day and the old corps de venues.⁸¹ Do not even read; compose your mind with an occasional unostentatious concert. You have something to talk with that hundreds of restless women have not,—the excellence of your own mind, with its monologue of temperate wise humorous comment. Only think of the poverty of their thoughts!—They have read nothing; they have been nowhere; they have not been favored by God with the slightest innate distinction to turn these things to mental magic if they had them.

Get ready to come down here, for interruptions arise until it seems that it will be impossible for me to see you for a long while unless you accept my invitation to come. But more soon from Him who Laughs at your Fears

Thorn.

82. TO MATHER A. ABBOTT. ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed Lawrenceville School / Lawrenceville, N.J.) Lawrenceville

Jan 26 1925

Dear Doctor:

I have been hunting for an opportunity to tell you that I am planning to go to the Princeton Graduate School next year and roll up a magister artium.⁸² If all goes well my hope is to come around about this time next year and ask if I can be useful to you Fall after next. My father is especially insistant on the degree and has at last persuaded me to try for one. And I am glad I shall be still your neighbor,

Sincerely,
Thornton Wilder

83. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Lawrenceville School / Lawrenceville, N.J.) Yale

Feb 4 1925

Dear Da:

I was intending to write as soon as the Princeton Graduate College had announced to me that my application was accepted. It will be here any day; in the meantime know that my bridges are burned at Lawrenceville. Now that the four years are drawing to a close I can feel regret at missing the class-room routine (and at not having done it better), but I can see more clearly the vulgarity, the superficiality of the present régime—above all the devestating lack of sympathy for boys (one side of which is exactly too great a sympathy for their complaints and requests and their wheedling). Nor can tongue tell the childishness of the chief: his cruel generalizations on absent masters (all the worse because he does not believe them himself and will instantly change his tone if the subject is suddenly cast in a more favorable light); his hard turning away of masters of twenty years service by a letter as late as May; his gorging on flattery; and so on. I will be right sorry to leave Mr. and Mrs. Foresman. He must have had a sinking of the heart when three and a half years ago he saw a slight and anxious (and ill-dressed) stranger coming up the path with an enormous suitcase, and personifying all that boys find most ridiculous. Oh là-lá, I’ve gone through the machine. Enclosed find insurance remittance. I shall enquire among my fellow veterans about my bonus. I am getting awfully alive to money. My article⁸³ is all proof-read and now all I have to do is to wait for the cheque that will reimburse me for all the expenditure of the holidays.

¶ I now do my running out-of-doors on a new board track, my bare knees among the snowdrifts. ¶ It’s all settled that I get 300 bucks for tutoring at a camp on Lake Sunapee, Middle New Hampshire. ¶ When we were small in Berkeley you used on Sabbath to force us to read a book which now I dip into voluntarily (I won’t pretend that I am dematerialising utterly): Law’s A Serious Call.⁸⁴ It’s pretty good but God had better hurry and raise up a new devotional literature for an age of Bessemer⁸⁵ and Radiotelegraphy—the impress of machines is more than skin-deep. My generation can no longer exclaim in the purple light of an eclipse that the heavens declare the glory of God; eclipses aren’t at all strange; we have found that space is finite and we have chased the unknowable down into the kernals of an atom. If that explodes tomorrow I shall have nothing to pin my faith to except the music of Schubert, the prose style of George Santayana and the disinterested affection of two people in New Haven—(and even one of them is the most grudging Isaac sighed over Jacob.) ¶ Give my love to the other, whom it will not embarrass; tell her she’s mostly right about Jennifer Lorn⁸⁶ but must trust in its successor. Be good and send me more clippings.

thine
Thornt—

84. TO ROSEMARY AMES.⁸⁷ ALS 4 pp. Yale

96 Bishop St. New Haven Conn
July 4 1925

Dear Rosemary Ames:

If any of your friends would frown on our clandestine correspondence per se, how much more would they frown on it if they knew what I have to tell you. Remembering that you are the only living girl who never shocked Dr. Abbott I’m almost afraid to answer one of your questions. But.

People aren’t far from the truth in assuming that the ladies of the stage are of entirely different stuff from our mothers and sisters and aunts. But the change in the actress has not come about from the kind of people she has had to associate with. If I believe what my sisters tell me a lady is not free from persecution in any walk of life?

The actress pays no formal calls; she is too busy to receive any; if she kept up social relations with her mother’s friends she must suffer their curious and fascinated gaze; as a freak would. If she becomes famous she becomes loneliest of all, for then even her closest friends (I know Maude Adams’ best friend⁸⁸) must handle her with a certain insincerity. In other words she lives a life in which the What-Will-People-think becomes unimportant.

Worst of all the excitement and fatigue of acting (especially of good acting) make her hungry for praise and lively suppers. One can’t go soberly to bed at eleven after a superb climax; one is so self-dazzled that one’s best friends seem dull: one wants new bright admirers. Last of all, the actress feels herself becoming something more than a lady: an artist. The old things are no longer important and a new set of needs comes in sight.

I think there’s only one school better than the Theatre Guild’s and that is Boleslawsky’s Laboratory Theatre⁸⁹; but he long since picked his class and has been working with them for two years. I almost joined it. I have attached a clipping to show what good people you can learn from and what a close connection the Guild School has with the real stage. I distrust the Sargent School⁹⁰ and the Academy because they turn out good slick competent Broadway actors, not actors that work from within from a long painstaking experimented technique

Through<Throw> even the ghost of discretion to the winds and ask me everything you like. Pls let me know what happens next. All best wishes in your war with the Familly. Grim persistance is better than dramatic flare-ups. Promise them you’ll live at one of those Y.W.C.A clubs. And so on.

Most sincerely—
Thornton Wilder

85. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

c/o Roger Coleman, Esq
Newbury. Lake Sunapee
New Hampshire
<Summer 1925>

Dear Mother

I had a postcard all written to you when your full crowded letter came to which only a piker could return such a jot.

To make a long letter out of jots let me begin by saying that although Part three of The Caballa is refractory (I don’t <know> what the matter is for I see the whole thing quite clearly: Mlle d’Homodarme’s veneration for the Cardinal gradually turning into hatred until in full Caballa dinner she fires an ineffectual revolver at him) altho that refuses to be begun, I suddenly finished the Second Act of Geraldine de Gray⁹¹ the other day, the obstinate, the insoluble Second Act. It finished with unexpected simplicity and I begin to see the mists rising from the Third.

Let me describe some diversions of wistful bachelors. We have been three times to dance at the Grauliden; the manager is only too glad to have us and introduces us at once to various damsels all forlorn. Meet Miss Corday, who en plein fox trot announces that she is a Beautician. Young though she is (some twenty-three) she has her own shop in New York, her own manicurist; the business pays well, she saves a good purse to squander on three weeks at a smart hotel, playing the lady, and looking for rich widowers. She had also been an exhibition diver at Long Branch, and a Five-mile International Swimmer. I know lots more about her ….. Meet Miss Henry, pretty, rouged, and thirty-eight, who is an illustrator, yes, she illustrates medical journals and can be found sketching in the operating room of Johns Hopkins any time these winters. She saves a good purse to squander on three weeks at a smart hotel, playing the lady, and ….. Meet Miss Pursley. She looks exactly like Katharine Cornell. Black evening gowns; enormous earpendants in seed-pearls. She is a designer for Lord and Taylor, or rather a disposer of fabrics and apportioner of materials among the different shops making clothes for that firm. She hopes next year to go to Paris and study with Paul Poiret. I spent the evening asking every partner whether they could present me to her and at last I found a Galeoto:⁹² I still half believe it was Katharine Cornell on vacation.

The scene shifts to a dinner party at Mrs. Wertheimers. Left to right Mrs. Wertheimer,⁹³ a proud sad Jewess with literary yearnings, thirty-five on her own confession; Mr Dresser, headmaster of Wood-mere, a preparatory school for Jewish boys on Long Island; Mrs. Rosenthal, a vivacious young matron who would be an actress if her husband allowed her; Roger Coleman, Yale football, very tall and a little noisy with highballs; Mrs. Dresser, very sweet middle-age, a little shocked; Mrs. Giers, già Giersburger, comic falsetto manner, very funny, more stage yearnings, warm (nay, moist) sympathies; Mr. Taylor, fellowmaster; Mrs. Coleman, the prettiest woman in the world, the very face that magazine covers fall short of fixing, but with a difficult carping disposition; then me. Though it is little more than a camp and there is a shortage of table silver the food is wonderful. After dinner, movies, for the hostess owns her own motionpicture camera, charades, horseplay, scotch. Where you ask are Mr. Wertheimer, Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Giers. Down in the law offices of N.Y., madam, far from the merry wives of Blodgett⁹⁴ who hold their parties in the middle of the week so that the broken glass can be swept up before the Friday night invasion of husbands.

But you don’t like my letter. Try this.

I canoed over to church this morning, St. James of Birkhaven, a fine sermon, and Dean Wilbur Cross⁹⁵ passing the plate. I told him I was coming to see him soon, tho’ how I shall explain my residence next year I cannot see.

Or this:

Dear Ellie Jones Campbell⁹⁶ and consort called on me and took me home to dinner. Good chops and things, a slightly confused rolly-poly husband, a nice house with canoes and motorboat. The Doctor inspires confidence, a research chemist with a taste for the Church Fathers. We swam and then they brought me home late across the black lake weaving in and out among the coloured signal lights, and buoys and poles.

Today I went with Mrs. Coleman (to whom in the absence of the husband I am playing a little perilously, the cavalière servante⁹⁷) to a benefit bridge party and tea dance given at one of the great estates about the lake. Miles of cars parked en queue; a sprawling shingled house with fern gardens snapped from Town and Country; hundreds of people bowing, staring; a picture raffled; Turkish girl selling cigarettes; crowded dance floor; the hostess very condescending to the vulgar strangers who were peering at her rooms. Great satisfaction of dancing with Mrs. Coleman. The prettiest lady on the floor, being stared at, being pointed at—“there, the one in blue! She’s coming now!”

I’m reading The Golden Bough, the one volume edition abridged from twelve. Tons of folklore, witch doctors, how to make it rain, May day myths, Spring ceremonies, resurrection legends ….. the evidence accumulating like a great Juggernaut trying to flatten out any particular importance that might be reserved for Christian doctrine. But the theoretical interludes are a little pompous and repetitive and there remains a chance that the notions I learned at your knee may survive.

Give my love to the whole house. I think its splendid of you to have gone to Storrs and to New York. I feel as though I’d see you very soon. Love to Father and tell him I take great pleasure in all his enclosures. Your adoring son. Thornton.

86. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed Graduate College / Princeton University) Yale

Oct 2 1925

Dear Amos

You must not let the deliberations of these committees worry you. I’m now sure that you’re not meant to be a preacher at all; I’ve been rereading your poems. Now I think that some passages in them are so fine that writing more should be your only business. I was just stupid never to see before that such passages as the “Muse on this epitaph….” And the “life’s sufficient lures” ought to cut you off from being a clergyman.⁹⁸ The clergyman will kill the poet. It’s the passages in which you talk least about “He” and “Himself” that are best.

You must not allow yourself to believe that the verdicts of vestrymen have anything to do with your qualities; your pretensions are far above anything they can estimate. Father either. At heart Father is about sixty times more worldly than you or I. He is devoured by the College President Complex. There are times when I feel his perpetual and repetitive monologue is trying to swamp my personality, and I get an awful rage. He has wonderful and beautiful qualities, but he has one monstrous sin. Mother, Charlotte, you and I (and lately Isabel) have lived in a kind of torment trying to shake off his octupus-personality.

Don’t you hesitate to suddenly turn down all the committees. Tell him you are not looking for a job. Settle down for at least six months in Mansfield Street.⁹⁹ Perhaps more. Perhaps forever. You have justification enough in your lines. I will defend you; Charlotte and Mother will.

Come down here for a week-end if you like. I have an extra cot in our study all ready for you.

Anyway don’t you be afraid of anything on earth. You have the goods. I was a fool not to have been so sure of it before.

love
Thornt.

87. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Private

Grad College Princeton N.J.
April 25 1926

Dear Amy:

Your remembering a birthday by more than a letter gave me that same Wilder mortification that Mother always experiences when one so much as pays her carfare for her. But I thank you very much and will try to do something with it that will allude to your good wishes.

You were very restrained in your glancing at the misprints and at the graver limitations of my book. Most of the misp- are not my fault. The final proofs were perfect, I feel sure. But at that stage the firm suddenly decided that the book was too short and began expanding it by all the devices known to the trade. In the respacing of lines therefore many must have been broken and crazily repatched by the typesetter: But a few of the errors remain my maxima culpa!—

heure de champagne

exampla gratia

The chronological tangles at the close of Book II and the middle of V. The misprint that lacerates me most is p. 196 the conversion of France!!¹⁰⁰

Almost no one likes the last book. I should have “prepared” it more consistantly thru the earlier. Well—all in all, I have learned lots of lessons—to be scrupulously attentive; to be more flowing; to extract all the possible resonance from repetition and echo etc. etc.

No big reviews in yet. Bonis not seriously advertising until some blurbs begin. The thought visits me every now and then that Bonis may give it a brief and decent interrment. They are very rich and keep their eyes mostly on their enormous successes. Even a thousand copies is chicken feed for them. Apparently both Princeton and New Haven villages are having a moment’s tea-table excitement over it. After all I earn my living elsewhere and have elsewhere my real pleasures. Many delightful & reassuring letters have come. (they were as specifically phrased or as full of helpful aperçus as yours). You are right about IHS.¹⁰¹ I am too young and too undedicated a person to achieve a restrained Grand Style (which I pretend after)—notes of burlesque, smartalecisms and purple-rhetoric creep in and are only discovered when it is too late. Let me promise you tho that tons of bunk were deported in the successive readings of the proof. Hope for the best.

The acct of your circle and your routine sounds beautiful to me. Do be awfully wise about your health. I do my long run or my fierce handball every day and what began as an act of will has become a pleasure & a necessity. I hope you’ll get married soon. As for your poems please be patient and self sufficient; in these matters early or late isn’t so important<;> excuse me saying that I waited six years beyond the time when the Gossip Fair assigned me a debut, and even now the real pleasure is in the insight of the few who could have read the stuff in MS anyway.

I wish you could have come in here for a weekend or so. I am almost an ardent son of old Nassau. Next year I will probably be tutoring a boy in Rochester. This Summer a month in Peterboro,¹⁰² I hope<,> and some time by Mother<?>. Perhaps here in this very building—living cheap, proximity of a great library, terrible weather but on a slight hill.

Don’t hesitate to write me your troubles, if I can act for you. Hope you have few. See you in Summer somehow, I hope. Thanks for the memento and comments.

Affectionately
Thornton

88. TO CHARLES H. A. WAGER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Graduate College / Princeton University) Yale

May 25 1926

Dear Dr. Wager,

If I deserved to be happy no letter could have made me happier than yours. But every time I am commended by persons I greatly value a real shame goes through me. I become aware of all the negligences and greennesses that I let by. I shall try again and keep in mind such readers as yourself. Try and remember that I kept adding bits to the book during all those years at Lawrenceville, but always with the sinking feeling that nowhere a publisher or friend would read it.

What emotion went through you as you discovered your influence turning up on every page? It is fairly speckled with your favorite quotations, and it is always aspiring after effects that you taught me to admire in others. How many hours I sat under your rostrum, burning with awe and emotion, while you unfolded the masterpieces. Dear Dr. Wager, like Alix¹⁰³ you have “a form of genius that is seldom praised to its face” but which it is so satisfying to praise. I am an old-fashioned believer and when I assert that I believe that lives are planned out for us I am always thinking of the fact that my father, by the most unexplainable accident, sent his two sons to Oberlin where the younger could get the nourishment without which he would have remained a bright blundering trivial hysteric.

The book has been doing well; a second printing is ready (with all the twenty-eight errata corrected) and I hope to go in the Fall to the hills around Salzburg to write some plays.

Give my love to Mrs. Wager. I hope Italy does you both all the good in the world. Always remember me as your devoted and affectionate

Thornton

89. TO AMY WERTHEIMER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

June 21 1926
Princeton Grad College
until Thursday
Then 75 Mansfield
St. N.H. until July 1.

Dear Amy:

I must say I like your letters more and more, even though you don’t like my new reason for liking them: their serenity. Now I walk into the Commons Room, read them by the window overlooking a vast perspective of lawn and woodland; I smile here and there; your likeness floats up from the pages; I am reminded that I have a good friend and that in my queer unsound and almost secret life I have a sturdy last resource against the occasional conviction that “I don’t belong”, that there’s no room for me.

Wilder family at Mansfield Street. Left to right: Amos N., Isabel, Janet, TNW, Amos P.

Wilder family at Mansfield Street. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

That is one of the things then that should be making me very happy This very minute Andy is in taking one of his College Boards and my tutoring is practically over; the first flurry over the book is at an end, but I continue to get letters assuring me that friends and strangers are surprised and pleased by it; I am to be in Peterborough all July and am alive with wonderful little touches for the Peruvian novel.¹⁰⁴ But I’m not very happy, and that’s all there is to be said. Perhaps it’s because through distraction and laziness I haven’t written a word for so long, i.e. denied my raison d’être.—however I mustn’t try and shadow you with my depressions. I shall be all right when I’m home; there is one place in the world I am really at peace and that is on the little cot up in the hall in Mansfield Street, with my Father and Mother and Isabel tiptoeing about their affairs.

Now let me talk about a thousand stray things so that you can see that I’m at least alive enough to be interested. ¶ Been reading Spengler’s Decline of the West with the greatest enthusiasm. I’m told a lot of it is wrong, I know that a lot of it is beyond my reach, but at least it’s absorbed me beyond the call of dinner bells and movie-going. ¶ Boni’s made me the following proposition: if I would turn back to them my royalties on the not-yet-sold first five thousand copies, twelve hundred and fifty dollars, they would add to it from their coffers the same amount, the whole sum to be used to plaster the country with adv’ts, to try and ram it down the public<’s> neck as one of the six best sellers of the Spring and perhaps recoup all that was invested. I replied no, thank you. In the first place I must eat. In the second, it would be absurd to make a little goldfish go through the antics of a whale. They’re loony, and every now and then a little ….. a little … As they get much more than I per copy, shouldn’t they have offered to contribute more than 50% of the advertising drive?—anyway, don’t mention this bit of publishing gossip to a soul. ¶ You notice I’m writing this to you on a Monday—that’s because Sunday is getting to be a little farcical—the telephones rings for dinners and teas. Now I’ve moved into another entry and phonecalls can’t reach me at all, and that’s how blasé I am. So I telepathed you for half-a-day’s delay on this letter and you made a moue and accorded me it. ¶ There’s no denying that music is the first of all the arts, that literature even cannot hold a candle to it. Well, did I tell you about my Thursday nights at Prof. Menzies (pendants to my Sunday nights at Mrs. Franz’s)? about our long sessions for two pianos eight-hands, hours with the Brandenberg concerti and the Brahms symphonies? with me being inept and requiring the other three proficients to go back to six bars before M, and to be reminded of the changes of key-signature.¹⁰⁵ There are two maiden-ladies from the Princeton Conservatory of Music, super-sight-readers taking the passage work with a great rattle of bracelets & heaving of shoulders and, Mrs. Menzies of Edinburgh, a still pretty young woman with an accurate if a little pedestrian accomplishment. The Cabala lies guiltily on the center table and the author is humored along when he falls out of time and key; others hurry to take the blame and declare stoutly that the<y> skipped three bars etc. ¶ This little M. A. has been drinking a little too much lately having fallen into a crowd after his own heart—tough-guys, chemists and physicists and other non-introspectives. Their major ordeals are just over and they are all for stealing the distilled alcohols reserved for experimental work in the biological laboratories and infusing it with whole groves of lemons and shaking violently at the level of the shoulders. Then I am almost happy, accepted as a mere fella among fellas, closing one eye and pronouncing upon the recipe of the concoction, strolling about Nassau Street and taking great pride in “not showing it.” I long to be ordinary as Elinor Wylie longs to be respectable. ¶ You mention a review in the Post that says my book is too clever.¹⁰⁶ That makes the 3rd unfavorable review; they delight me most; but what Post is it—I have a review from a New York Evening Post Book Review Section (Stuart Sherman’s) but there is no problem as to who it’s by for it is signed (I haven’t the handsome leather scrapbook by me now) and moreover I hear that (I remember now her name is Eva Goldbeck) she is Lina Abarbanell’s daughter.¹⁰⁷ The line she takes is that she “has heard” that it is a roman à clef and that her pleasure is practically spoiled because she does not know enough about Roman big-leef (as they call it) to identify my victims. If you have a different review from that, do copy out the two most significant sentences. Don’t copy out the retelling of the plot or the opening salutations. ¶ The thought suddenly struck me last night that I owed Jean¹⁰⁸ a letter. I am mortified at having been so long. I will send that therefore during the week. ¶ I am finishing this up in the Octagonal Room of the University Library. Through the windows float the sounds of heavy green trees brushed by a breeze, the sound (I insist) of sunlight on ivy and that of applause for the class day exercises are being held before a vast crowd a stone’s throw away. This may be my last letter to you from Princeton (I am still thinking of coming back here to work in August) and I should close with a majestic summary of what the whole chapter has meant, but you have known all the agitations and all the satisfactions and its not impossible that in the back of your mind lies a better evaluation of my year here than will ever lie in the back of mine. So, Madam, you draw the conclusions and add the column, mentioning always that changes of place and the completion of time-units have no power to alter my admiration for yourself.

So
Thornton.

90. TO LEWIS S. BAER.¹⁰⁹ ALS 4 pp. Morgan

The Lake Sunapee Summer School
Blodgett’s Landing, N.H.
Aug 7 1926

Dear Lewie or Louie:

(Anyone who commits a shy message to a postal-card, as I did, deserves to be misunderstood.)

First, I haven’t submitted my plays to any publisher, except you.¹¹⁰

My thought was that they were so frail that even if you did bring them out during the next two years, it would probably be bad for my “booksellers” and even perhaps for most of “my readers.”

And yet I should love to get these little things out somewhere, quietly and even unprofitably.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey grows lengthier (in design) and can hardly be finished before Spring. Though it might be serializing from Jan. (The nice note in The Century encourages me to hope for them:¹¹¹ they like costume pieces: Messer Marco Polo and The Venetian Glass Nephew¹¹² (later Doran))

My thought then was that if they appeared for a few years in some obscure publisher’s lists (if they would even take them) just enough to make presents for a few special friends and to give me the feeling that those Juvenilia were once <and> for all “off my chest”—it would be nice. Then they could revert to you in say, 8 years and go through the ’Boom (if you chose) then.

However, as I say, its not anything I’m very het up about and if you think best, we’ll say no more about it. Anyway you are my one and only House, of course & I tried to get Robinson for you—we even had a long confab, of which I shall someday tell you the details, but he’s for MacMillan to his death.¹¹³

Ever Thine
Thornton

<appeared perpendicularly in the left margin of the first page>

Next Day: Gee I’d love to send you some hunks of The Bridge of San Luis Rey—but I haven’t any copies and I couldn’t be sure you’d be able to “foresee” all the treatment a first draft can rec’ve later.

91. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. APCS 1 p. Yale

<Aix-les-Bains, France>
<P.M. October 22, 1926>

What the h— am I doing at Aix-les-bains, sleeping in royal chamber for ninety cents a night. Well, we’re going from Paris to Rome (French Lemons Co. Piazza di Spagna) by relays, so as to avoid the 3,360 francs for the Rome Express. Tomorrow night we sleep in Genoa, and then in Rome.¹¹⁴ Things are much brighter & cheerier than when I wrote you-alls last. ¶ Tell Isabel that stopping in at Shakespeare & Co, Miss Beach introduced me to Ernest Hemingway (one of the two other good novelists of my generation, the 3^rd being Glenway Wistcott<Wescott>) and we had a grand long talk. Brentano’s can’t keep enough C-l-as in Paris, but I got one for Ernest at Gaglia’s on the Rue de Rivoli. Mama, the franc is 3 cents today and prices not yet proportional. More tomorrow—love

Thornt.

92. TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel Bayerischer Hof / München) JFK

9^th November 1926¹¹⁵

Dear Ernest:

This crazy journey is drawing to a close and I may show up in Paris one of these days and drag you out to help me find a room. I still think it would be best for me to go South and keep in the sunlight; but I need to hear a lot of good talk and be near some big libraries. This Munich is pretty wonderful; I keep imagining myself here. The theatres and the music put any other country in a green shade (quotation ended.)

Crazy journey is right. Andy hates all Europe. If he could he’d like to park all day in his hotel rooming (reading the Paris Herald and smoking Chesterfields) and never put foot in Paris, or Rome or Naples or Florence. He’s not even got ordinary vitality for he hates to walk more than two block<s> and yet among those dozens <of> prep. schools that he honored for a couple of weeks each he was discovered by the examiners to be the strongest boy in school, etc. He doesn’t even learn the names of the towns we’re in and Naples and Florence remain for him as: <“>what was that city we were in last?” He’s quite taken with Germany because there are so many trick devices in street management and elevator service, and because he has heard their airplane routes are in such a good state. Even his interest in mechanics though is not a saving grace. Its only the passing observation that a boy often would give. The terrible epitaph for Andy is this: He’s not even interested in the things he’s interested in.

So you can imagine sitting through long blank meals with him. Naturally he thinks I’m as much of a mess as I think he is. But I know that any other kind of tutor would have been as poor a companion. Even if he had had a snappy nightclub collegiate tutor, he would have been left at home more and more, for Andy looks irresistably like a lonesome but conceited little boy when he’s on a party. His whisky goes straight to his egotism and he will boast for three hours on end of what he regards as his achievements in polo, heavy drinking, cards and love. An ordinary common-sense tutor would have given him up because of his curious dependence, his inability to say where, what, why, how. He can complain afterwards, but he can never propose before.

However you see I can almost work myself up into a pathological state over my companion. Most <of> the time I can be found enjoying myself immensely in the cities. I’m a hound for museums and I don’t care who knows it. Where the Baedekers are thickest, there am I in the midst of them. There aint no ruin that escapes me. So between the aesthetic excitements of the Sistine roof and the exasperations of the pie-face back at the hotel I get worked up into a curious state that may not be so bad for me after all. I get crazy to write. And ideas, and anecdotes and developements in my next book keep hitting me at all hours, even though I have only time to put them into a notebook. And notions for plays!—which reminds that I’ve been writing to Richard Boleslavsky back at the Laboratory Theatre and, Ernest, you must begin to think of a play for him. His group can’t do the bold usual good Broadway play, but they can do quiet genre studies, and realistic character comedy, as no one in New York can. Besides they have repertory and though they only pay 10% of gate receipts (a very tiny theatre) they at least don’t run the play until the audiences thin out and then cast it aside for ten years, they keep it alive in a shifting program for a long time. They’re now considering a very poor Jim Tully-Robert Graves play about tramp life, that you could beat with one finger.¹¹⁶

I’m awfully eager to read The Sun Also. I shall have by the time you see me. Don’t be harsh to me about mine: I’m rapidly deculturing. Be patient with me and there’ll be less fooling with inessentials etc. Give my best to Miss Beach.

Ever
Thornton Wilder

93. TO ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 6 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel Édouard VII / 39 Avenue de L’Opéra / Paris) Yale

November 28 1926
Sunday

Dear girls:

Andy sails Wednesday and the farce is over.

Three more nights in this vulgar hotel (one hundred francs a night. ‘magine! I protested all I could. But as he remarks so often: It’s his money; and it’s less than the Plaza!)

Then I’m either going over to live with Ernest Hemingway or else going to the pension de la Schola Cantorum for a month, or going straight South.

I’d love to go into the studio with Ernest, but there are no meals with it. He eats around with the enormous and flamboyant Rotonde crowd. And his wife is about to divorce him and his new wife is about to arrive from America, so I think I’d better not try. But he’s wonderful. Its the first time I’ve met someone of my own generation whom I respected as an artist. Neither Steve nor Edna Millay inspired one tenth the confidence that he does, as a writer.

The pension Schola costs 800 francs a month for everything and I’ll have Wednesday morning (I’ll explain why I’m putting it Wedn. morning.) about 3,500 francs. You love money matters so I’ll explain all. I have still one hundred dollars of mine. And (this will give you the staggers) I have still one hundred dollars of my expense account. Nine hundred dollars seems a horrible amount to have spent from Sept 25 to December 1, but even that was kept down with great adroitness. Andy must easily have spent two thousand, not counting a lot of tailoring in London and gifts everywhere. When Wednesday morning I pay my bill for this week’s hotel (that will be 7 nights: 700 francs, a couple of breakfasts and baths and mineral waters & tips = 1000) I will have 1500 francs expense money left.

As Doug.¹¹⁷ said that of course he would pay me the value of a return ticket, instead of returning the Expense Money left over after the hotel is paid, I shall keep it and tell him to deduct it from the Return Ship money.

The exchange today was 27 fr. to a dollar which brings my capital up still further: even 4,400 francs.

If that’s all true I really should go right South, but these telegrams and anxious letters make me think I ought to stay for a while.

But I love your letters!! I just have a glorious time collecting them at Morgan Harjes¹¹⁸ and strolling off to a cafe and reading them 12 times. Between you and me I don’t like Paris. I never did. If I had somewhere to go in America I’d come straight home, but I don’t want New York and I couldn’t park on you adorable people in New Haven and that’s that.

The important thing is that The Bridge is getting along fast and is just filling up with beautiful passages that take your breath away. The whole last week Andy has been sleeping all day and prowling around all night with his brother in dress-suits. (Brother Chick, not Douglas who couldn’t come after all.) and I’ve stayed up in the old room and worked. I’m awful lonesome. I know a good many people in town, but none (except Ernest) that I really want to park around with. I go and sit and have good long talks with Sylvia Beach when I’m extra blue. Jack Kirkpatrick of Lawrenceville and Princeton I see everynow and then; and a certain Atkinson a phd grind at the Biblioteque nationale, and some girls; but for the most part, I write: all morning, take a late lunch somewhere (a dollar in American money, but dazzling to the French) drift forlornly into churches or louvres or buy a Berlin paper and read it through. (Oh, how I love Berlin compared to this dump.)

Andy and I are at last on pretty strained terms, but I have nothing to reproach myself with and don’t think twice about it.

I feel awfully remote from the news about The Trumpet, though of course its exciting. I was horrified at a telegram from Boly saying that Dabney was going to read the Lord’s prayer. I sent back one of the frankest telegrams ever committed to the wires: Please no prayer<.> I think he’ll find he’s made a mistake in telescoping the 3 & 4^th acts, but I don’t care. Its all sort of remote to me. If its well-done or ill done, or successful or unsuccessful, it’s all one to me: its there on paper and someday when I’m older I’ll revise it and get the ideas sound. It’s scenario is too pretentious. If Dante had gone into the theatre he couldn’t have carved himself a more ambitious subject. On the eve of performance I shall telegraph the company my thanks and go to bed.¹¹⁹

The English weeklies I see havent shown the C-b-la on the Longman’s lists yet; but I haven’t seen any for quite a while. Aunt Charlotte’s keeping an eye out for me.¹²⁰

Are you all well? Isabel’s a saint for doing all these chores for me in addition to all her work. Your all saints, and like all saints—far away. Now I’m all in a stew about how to get some little Xmas trifles over to you. Andy’s being sunk on me is pretty nice because it leaves me so much free time, but it prevents my asking him to carry home some items in his trunk. Mrs. Hemingway (she’s a brick and we all secretly hope he’ll go back to her: there’s the most beautiful little 3-year old baby you’ve ever seen:¹²¹ Ernest is just a Middle Western kid whose genius and health and good looks and success have gone to his head a little and I think the new wife is a mess) well, Mrs. Hemingway says that your bundles arrived<arrive> in U.S. torn to ribbons and your friends are made to pay fantastic duties. However I’ll get Sylvia Beach’s advice and Rosemary Carr Benét’s advice and a couple of others.

Every now and then I go to a concert. Tell Bruce¹²² when you see him that I went to a concert at the Schola and it was terrible. And every concert I’ve been to in Paris is terrible. Everywhere they try and make charm take the place of rehearsals, and I don’t get their charm.

The only thing that could take away the curse from Paris for me would be to live in it with my dear Mama.

Otherwise the only nice things about Paris are:

Morgan Harjes on mail days

The silly little franc and its troubles.

Ernest Hemingway.

Russians and their restaurants with Borsch.

The tombs of Racine and Pascal. St. Etienne du Mont¹²³

The El Grecos in the louvre

The memories of the XVII and XVIII centuries (first decade), especially Mme de Sevigné’s salon.

Memories of Stendhal

Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier.¹²⁴

I really can’t think of a tenth

love in dejection
Thornton

<appeared perpendicularly in the left margin of the first page>

PS. If I stay a month in Paris I shall rent a typewriter and do the glowing Bridge myself. Otherwise very soon I shall get hold of a good person going to America and entrust the two unique cahiers to him or her to give to Bonis and Bonis or Mrs. Wertheimer can have them typed. P.S. I haven’t mentioned Father in this letter. Give him my love. And he’s to read all letters if he wants to, though most of them are just trivial gabble like this one.

94. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Closerie des Lilas¹²⁵
Blds Montparnasse et de l’ observatoire.
To be found there every morning from 9:30 to 10:30.
<P.M.? December 9, 1926>

Dear Mom:

If I wrote you every day for hours I wouldn’t get out of my system all the things I want to tell you. That means that we ought to <be> meeting daily. When last I wrote you that seemed imminent. Since then a little flurry of things have happened and I have decided to try and stay over here until my March allowance comes and then go home on that from Italy. The events that have made me change my mind are: one, just when I thought I was frozen over and the Bridge would never be finished, for lack of notions, suddenly I went to a performance of the Ninth Symphony (one thousandth as good as the Berlin one, but good enough) and was all broke up. I came home and wrote the pages you will someday know as the death of Manuel; and the next morning I wrote Doña Maria’s visit to Cluxambuqua and I’ve been writing evenly ever since. Then came event no. two—letters from England. First Richard Blaker,¹²⁶ the novelist, whom I have never met but who writes me often invited me to his home from<for> Xmas. Roy Bower, vice-consul at Southhampton, through whom I knew him, has just passed through Paris and told me a lot about him. For instance he is married to his uncle’s wife, a bond not permitted in the prayerbook but offering no difficulties to commonsense. They had to travel about the world hunting for a country that would absolve them of their sin and presently both Holland and the U.S. Roy says they are both perfectly delightful. Well, I was on the point of spending Xmas with Dick and his aunt, or rather with Mayme and her nephew, when another letter came from Coleman Walker (football star, U. of V. and ex. Lawrenceville master, and Rhodes scholar) announcing that since I was on the Riviera I should at once engage him a room near me, for he was going to spend Xmas with me, willy-nilly, and right thereafter a whole horde of Oxonians would descend on us. Thirdly, I began to know the motley crowd in my house, the Polish pianists whose money doesn’t come and another Polish pianist who is rich and famous and charming and trying to hide from the Princesse de Polignac, and other menaces. There’s suddenly developed in our dreadful pension a thickness of local color that would stagger Balzac. The successful pianist is taking me to a tough dance tomorrow; and Sunday I am to go to a farewell party among the impecunious Russian composers and painters. And a French law student urges me to come and try the company of his cafe circle.

Ernest Hemingway remains the hot sketch of all time. He bursts with self confidence and a sort of little-boy impudence. The other day Mrs. Vanderbilt (she who is going through procedures to get her divorce that make my Mrs. Roy episode sound tame) asked him to dinner and he accepted addressing her in his note as Mrs. Vanderbuilt, “just to keep her in her place.”¹²⁷ He’s now at work on a play about Mussolini. Ernest claims to have dabbled in secret service and plots, and to have access to highly secret dossiers. He swears that of the attempts against Mussolini’s life all except that of the mad Irish woman, were intentionally planted by Mussolini to create a martyr-legend. This last shot was not fired by the boy who was stamped to death by the crowd, but by someone else who escaped as planned.¹²⁸ The little boy was a sturdy Fascist Junior and made the mistake of turning to run when the shot was fired. You can judge by that how full of astonishments Ernest’s conversation is.

I haven’t the slightest idea whether the play has been produced yet or not. Isabel said about the 5^th. I tried to read it the other night but I couldn’t ‘see’ it, it was unreadable. But if I knew when the performance was I c’ld send a telegram of good wishes to the Lab. Perhaps there will be letters from somebody tonight.¹²⁹ Mail arrives here at 8:30 AM and PM and at those times I am like a lion at feeding hour. The more I think about all you treasure the more I pine to come home perhaps I shall go to Nice for Xmas with Coleman then hop a boat back after that.

Tonight I’m taking the almost-ex Mrs. Hemingway to a concert. She is a nice brave little soul, looks very like Mae Marsh and therefore a little like Mrs. Lincoln and no one knows how she feels about Ernest’s cut-ups. I think she has ceased to be particularly in love with Ernest, but dreads being alone and divorced and back in America. Fortunately she has the most beautiful little boy in the world and all the royalties of The Sun also rises. ¶ I have sent Amos a book; now I must find Charlotte something. Mansfield St. must be content with the Century. Oh, honey, I forget to tell you that I filed an application for the Guggenheim—only I was as usual a little too high hat. I asked for residence in Munich & Salzburg (though I meant Vienna) in order to learn the theatre from the inside out etc through friends on Reinhardt’s staff—(Rudolf Kommer). They want you to claim a definite piece of work even if you are one of the “Creative” fellowships (Steve pretended something in Old French History) and they must learn better. I’ll probably not get it, so don’t worry.¹³⁰ Do you realize that the Bridge is going to be a riot. Every twenty pages there’s a tremendous emotional situation and between times it’s as lyrical and beautifully written as……. …….. It will help you build the most adorable little Engl. house and put a maid in it too. And then I’ll never travel to Europe again but will sit reading aloud to you while you punch rugs. Sweetest lady in the world, au revoir

Thornt.

95. TO WILLIAM I. NICHOLS.¹³¹ ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Alpha Delta Phi Club / 136 West 44th Street / New York) LofC

Feb 4 1927

Dear Bill:

Excuse me for not having sent a letter for you the minute I got off the boat (Tuesday noon.) The nearest I came to it was this idiocy which I enclose and which was put through by the determination of the young lady. I like her only pretty well; and the last-day of the trip I surprised her in a not-very-nice action. However she’s not so bad, and if it turns out that you liked her especially well, I can be brought around to a kind of acquiescence.

The trip was very long and pretty rough. The ship’s company was below the average except for two astonishing friends I made—two beautiful examples of a high-class Hungarian and a high-class Swede. I projected a letter to you in which I would paint their full-length portraits a la Cabala, but I see now that they would take up four closely written pages and wld be out of proportion with the things I want to say to you.

The impetus you gave me to whip myself into publicity survived the voyage. I have paid amiable calls right and left. I wrote a letter to Eva Le Gallienne asking for an appointment. I called on Aswell,¹³² whom I like very much (though fancy your trying to give me the impression that he was a sort of Nichols!) and who assured me that serial opportunities must be sought six months ahead of the first instalment. Bonis were full of deferense and good news. The C^xb^xla continues to sell with quiet obstinacy. The review in Punch had just reached them and so on.¹³³ Then I went to see a performance of my play. There are lots of beautiful things in the production and the great technical virtuosity of Boleslavsky discovers lots of good things but there are some pretty distressing moments. The last ten minutes aren’t mine at all—they are sentimental and preachy beyond words. I am permitted, nay begged, to rewrite all the last part and it will go into rehearsal at once. I don’t like the play. It’s remote from me. If I came upon it as the work of someone else I doubt whether I would see a grain of talent in it. But the actors love it, are fairly revérent about it, especially the heavenly sweet face that plays Flora. She’s an emotional little angel, doesn’t know her lines yet even. I gave her a copy of The C^xb^xla, inscribed with all my admiration and gratitude “as a Valentine” and she cried and cried.¹³⁴ I took Ray Bridgman¹³⁵ out to dinner last night, and he haranged me for four hours about the stars, and the fourth dimension, and idealism and universalism. It’s quite true: he almost lives in a trance;—his extraordinary mad eyes do not see any human being. I think there are no brains there: just yearning and escape from life. He is as thin as a pole, thin arms and hands, and a desolate face that won’t give in. I think he regards himself as having been trapped into marriage (by nature) and all he wants for the rest of his life is to take an endlessly long walk about Staten Island reciting Adonaïs to himself.

I saw a splendid rich meaty performance of The Brothers Karama-zoff and another of Tchekov’s The Three Sisters.¹³⁶ There are dozens of glorious new skyscrapers. The faces on Fifth Avenue this morning—eleven o’clock and sharp wintry sunshine—were 3 times as interesting as any European parade outside Germany.

Your letter doesn’t say anything about your rooming problem and I assume that you have had to resign yourself to staying where you are. I keep thinking about crossing the ocean again just to see you. Nothing has given me so much quiet pleasure as being liked by you. Life is short, and has so little congeniality at best that I keep wanting to throw everything else aside and rejoice in the share that has been given me. I have been feared for my sharp tongue; I have been admired with a sort of distaste; only lately have I simplified out enough to be worthy of being liked (by men that is.) I don’t dare say that my silly egotism is entirely buried yet, but it is with you.

Hurry on, hurry over, Letter. I was shy of writing you at once for fear I would give the impression of presenting you with mail (so unready am I to believe that I am welcome). I do not like the thought that a whole month will have elapsed before you will have heard from me again.

When various sides of me come forward that you do not like—the introspective side, perhaps, as on the bottom of the previous page; or the sentimento-demonstrative side (I have not known you very long after all and cannot be sure what strains make you impatient); or the I-did-this-and-that side, as on page 2—when such things come up, be patient and realize that after a long ill-adjusted awkward age I am only just beginning to be simple. Perhaps that remark makes you mad with the others.

I am going down to New Haven in a few minutes, to live for two months in great retirement. I shall finish The Bridge in 3 weeks. I shall be very thoughtful to my good father and mother, a sort of unexpected autumnal comfort. I shall write you often. And I shall prepare myself for writing (ten years from now) such beautiful books that all kinds of things will be forgiven me.

Letter-writing bridges next to nothing. Goodbye my dear Bill. Is my affection some help to you when you are depressed and restless?

Ever
Thornt.

96. TO WILLIAM I. NICHOLS. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Alpha Delta Phi Club / 136 West 44th Street / New York) LofC

Feb. 16 1927

Dear Bill:

Here I am in New York again for 2 days prowling around after Advertisement. <appeared in left margin underneath the drawing of W.I.N.> I hate to resign myself to the fact that certain of the fine arts are closed to me. A tiger can’t change his spots, and I’ve found out that I’m not much good at exploitation but I’m doing my best. For instance, there are signs that the University of Michigan and the University of Southern California want to put on my play¹³⁷ At first glance that doesn’t seem much. But if you can get to be a Little-theatre-author you can make thousands. The Middle West and West are lousy with little theatres; they copy one another’s shows and they pay about twenty-five dollars a performance. So I’m trying to get the theatrical publisher French to bring it out (first wringing the permission from Bonis). Between I and you the play is almost no good, but that has Nothing to do with the Case.

The Lab. theatre has struck a great financial and prestige success with Clemence Dane’s Granite.¹³⁸ Crowded houses. This brings refreshed audiences to all the alternating plays in the repertory, too, so even mine is getting new life.

New Haven is fun. A whole crowd in the Elizabethan Club bought a row for Abie’s Irish Rose last night and I was in before I knew it.¹³⁹ We all put on wigs and dress suits with ambassadorial ribbons and medals and beards and some dreadful gin. We put our make-ups in our pocket long enough to get by the doorman, but the police put us out in the middle of the second act. You can imagine the P-rade of fourteen flagrant Jews and Irishmen filing drunkenly out during that solemn oratorio. And again you can imagine how I enjoyed it—being mistaken for a young man, or even for a lighthearted one.

I’ve been reading Spengler and Keyserling, and Santayana’s Character and Opinion in the United States—the devil’s own intelligence playing around the Puritans and other institutions. And the meanest deliberate effort to puncture William James and Royce,¹⁴⁰ and a long look at HARVARD and all American education. All sorts of beautiful things wilt at the breath of that damned Spaniard.

It seems more and more likely that I’m going off to New Mexico in the middle of March to concentrate. Get letters to Mrs Mabel Dodge and her primitivo-sumptuous colony at Taos,¹⁴¹ and take long walks, look at color, listen to Brahms and concentrate.

Later.

Bonis are thrilled with the first instalment of The Bridge. Friday I’ll give them the Twin-Brothers passage and if that doesn’t knock them cold, I’ll be.

Just got a letter from Jerry Hart’s Marjorie, inviting me to the Chateau des Enfants.¹⁴² Also a letter from Jerry two days ago. Also a letter from Coleman saying that he had had a long walk with you. To all these people I write better letters than to you because I don’t know them as well. All I say is: Be patient, be patient with me, Benny.

There’s a big hot article in the February American Mercury by a returned Rhodes scholar.¹⁴³ I’ll send it to you as soon as I get back to New Haven. ¶ Ernest Hemingway writes from the Austrian mountains that at 2 bucks a day he’s warm and well-fed and hard at work. Also that ski-ing is a sensation like something between tearing silk and ……………………..Fill in the blanks from what you have heard of Ernest. ¶ I had tea with Muriel McCormick day before yesterday, the daughter of Harold and step of Ganna.¹⁴⁴ She was on her way to Palm Beach and suggested that it was an ideal place for a young author to do his best work. Remind me to tell you someday all the drama behind that there tea. I’ve been butting into turgid complicated lives all this year—never again shall I dismiss a play as “mere melodrama.” Books are timid. God, how good for me to be always tangential to someone else’s whirlwind. Even though every now & then they suck you in for twenty minutes.

Ever
Thornt.

97. TO CHARLOTTE E. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

75 Mansfield
New Haven
May 2, 1927¹⁴⁵

Dearest and sweetest of Charlottes:

I forgot when you were here to thank you for this elegant stationery and to be very meek about the overtone of reproach involved. So an hour after putting you on the train I shall write you a letter though sheer astonishment may endanger your health. Many thanks; naturally I had that minute of terror with which any Wilder views any other Wilder buying anything. But if you always buy to such advantage, buy on and tell me when it’s all gone.

Did you see the two sailors playing checkers on the train in the seat in front of yours and how they gasped for envy when I kissed you so loudly. Always kiss on trains; it gives the whole car something to meditate upon for the rest of the ride. A kiss in a railway station always reminds people that for all its appearance Life among the Anglo-Saxons is more than mere Amiability.

Try more and more to carry about with you a little secret deposit of contempt. Do not fill your late twenties and early thirties with the flutter of little friendships however comforting. Read, read the classics and the great critics on the classics. My motto is Prepare for the forties and fifties. Your friends are mostly gentle and sweet. They do not require enough of you. They lean on you (I’m sure) but after this Wheaton interval you will find, and I shall bring you, friends of a bigger mold. Not bigger by brains (at l<e>ast not Economics brains, or Social Message brains).

Be awfully wise about your health. Cut your classes in cold-blood and tear up exams if you are indisposed. Don’t give a goddam for the Sour Spinsters. No pastry. No whipped cream. You are very good looking and you do nothing about it. That is criminal. Set aside money for cold creams, massages and nice things for your hair. Good looks are a tremendous blessing and every now and then you insult yours. Be a vain woman; use your glasses sparingly; stand well and walk without constraint. In your new evening dress you put yourself at an advantage that thousands of women cry all night after in vain. Good looks and good clothes are courage. Don’t you think you’d better take up tennis—will you let me give you a raquet? have you one? don’t be reticent about gifts with me, idiot.

love
Thornt.

98. TO EDWARD WEEKS.¹⁴⁶ TL (Copy) Yale

75 Mansfield St.
New Haven, Conn.
June 3, 1927

Dear Mr. Weeks:

I am sending you under separate covers two very untidy portions of The Bridge of San Luis Rey Of course I should be prouder than I say if the Atlantic could use some of it. As you see there are two separate novelettes there, but the process in surgery would be beyond me. When I was in London Mr. Squire¹⁴⁷ wanted to run the chapter on the Marquesa de Montemayor (a treatment of the life of Mme de Sévigné) but at that time I didn’t see how the piece could be extracted from its “theological” frame. If you saw possibilities in the story of the twin brothers; then to retain some of the poignancy I think the portrait of Madre María del Pilar whould<should?> be somehow lifted from the preceding chapter and inserted at the beginning.

The whole book will be very short (you have two thirds of it there; the Uncle Pio section excerpted would be a little strong for the Atlantic) and I should be dazzled at your liking the whole. But Boni’s and Longmans, Green want to bring it out simultaneously (there is a copyright law about that) in the early fall, and I suppose your tables of contents are pretty well packed for many months to come. I don’t mean it to look pretentious when I ask you to let me have the script back as soon as possible …. I haven’t quite finished Parts Four and Five and am all flustered.

Whether you feel it suitable for your magazine or not, please write me an editorial-advice letter; I am eager for suggestion and if you found certain parts too sentimental or too didactic or others too summary etc., I should be very indebted to you for saying so. I am not haughty about alterations in matters of “taste” either!

I hear that you are doing Ernest Hemingway’s Five Thousand Grand.¹⁴⁸ That’s fine.

Well, whether anything comes of my ambitions for the Bridge and yourselves, thanks very much for writing to me, and excuse all this careless typewriting.

Very sincerely yours,
Thornton Wilder

99. TO C. LESLIE GLENN.¹⁴⁹ ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed The Elizabethan Club / of Yale University) Yale

Wed June 14 1927

Dear Les:

There is a piece of news here that I scarcely dare to tell you. Dr. Abbott has been after me to come back and teach at Laurenceville and today I telegraphed him that I would. That’s an awful come-down after the pretentious outlines I laid down for myself in front of you. It was partly the result of my rereading The Bridge. The Bridge is far better than the other, but it is so sad, not to say: harrowing, that I doubt whether it finds as many readers as the other. There is a faint chance that its very earnestness may strike right into the need of a large number, in which case I might spend the Fall taking long walks in the Austrian uplands. But with a dear vague impractical family group like mine I don’t dare stake on the margin of risk. If something happened to Father ….. etc. Besides I love the Laurenceville atmosphere, my “running”, the proximity of the Princeton library and the flights to New York and New Haven, and I shall ask for a very moderate wage in return for a modified teaching schedule. If you are very disappointed in me, just remember that it is for one year. In one more year I should be able to find a real niche somewhere.

We took our sick man from the hospital to the Pennsylvania station Monday. He still has no idea that he is as ill as he is. The doctors keep up the most amazing hopeful soft-soap as a matter of policy. He will not live through the Summer. I go down Friday for a week and a half.¹⁵⁰

Someone told me by accident the other day that the Worcester Art Museum contain<s> three El Greco’s. El Greco is a religious painter compared to whom Raphael was merely the inventor of the Christmas card. He is the perfect illustration of some of Rudolph Otto’s finest pages.¹⁵¹ Steal an hour away from Martha and invite Mary for a trip thither.¹⁵² You will probably see pictures that look as though they were seen through the elongating mirror of an amusement park and painted in a bilious green. If you can accustom your eye to it you will be catching one of the most extraordinary transcripts of the numinous in all art. (I shouldn’t have said that about “stealing an hour from Martha”; you are never with one to the prejudice of the other.)

C. Leslie Glenn.

C. Leslie Glenn. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

¶ The more I think about the girl at Smith and your way of thinking about her and her way of thinking about you, the more I think she is the real best find. ¶ Now that you see that I can write a sober simple letter will you do me the favor of tearing up the other two or three? The only part that you are to retain in them (mentally) is the notion that I was greatly helped by my stay and have gone about some amateurish attempts at trying it on other people. An awful hope is stirring in me. Perhaps ….. well, it’s too soon to tell. ¶. The proofs for the first 3 parts of The Bridge came this morning. I’m going to have Boni send you some duplicates and you tear them up when you have shuffled them. ¶. Isabel sails for England Friday just in time to avert a nervous breakdown. I threw a little party for my women downtown tonight. You wouldn’t have known they had a care in the world. The wonderful resiliency of the human spirit when it is fed by affection from no matter where. ¶. Every now and then I would love to think of you at Worcester one more year, partly because I don’t like to think of you climbing in and out of trains and meeting every day new faces and partly because the good people at Worcester are so fond of you and will probably have to discover in your place a ‘busy’ young curate, or an effortful one, or a smug one or something. ¶. My little millionaire tutoree Gibbs Sherrill is about to spend his second summer with Dr. Grenfell, and sends me from Groton a composition he wrote about the great doctor.¹⁵³ I wrote to Gibbs about the ministry and so on (he would not be so bad in Worcester ten years from now); he writes back with a tentative wonder and wants to know who, how and why you are! ¶ I enclose one of the English reviews of my book. If I were a bigger person I probably would not send it, but now that I am retreating, “declining” to an assistant-mastership again, in a last faint spurt of pride I want to show that I have a little corroboration for the claims I made for myself. My weaknesses are no secret to you and I suppose you can oversmile this as you have the others. ¶ The English language (as I’m always saying) does not comfortably permit of the expression of great regard between gentlemen; but let me indulge in a paroxysm of understatement and announce that I am pretty attached to you, pretty attached, as it were.

ever
Thornton

100. TO GRACE CHRISTY FORESMAN.¹⁵⁴ ALS 6 pp. Yale

75 Mansfield Street
New Haven
July 25 1927

Dear Mrs. Foresman:

As you may be in Pittsburgh I am sending this letter to Lawrenceville and hoping that it will not take too long in getting to you.

You may have suspected that even during the last weeks of Clyde’s life Dr. Abbott had offered me the Davis House for the following year. I turned it down without even hesitating, partly because the very idea of taking his place (especially if he were still alive in retirement) seemed unfriendly, partly because the responsibilities and the details were distasteful to me and would even find me plain incompetent. But I did tell the Doctor for a while that I was really tempted by the idea of going in again as Assistant, if he could find a congenial Head. He was very pleased because he was eager to retain a continuity in the Davis Line and thought that a certain middle-aged master now in the Lower School, I forget his name, would do. But the next time I went back even that much house routine seemed to be not what I was looking for and so I declared for Mrs. Brearly’s.¹⁵⁵

But less than a week ago he telegraphed to me offering the House again. The message had to be forwarded to me in the North through my father’s hands who begged me not to refuse, adding that it would do a great deal to ease some of the problems in the family also. So I accepted.

Oh, I shall be so bad when it comes to all those details of demotion and credits and signing the boy’s allowance checks and a hundred and one other things. But at least I can hope to aim toward the simple wonderful thing that Clyde maintained. I should love to think that you wish me well and that you still feel that you are an active Davis House “master” and a part of us.

If I knew when you were going to be in Lawrenceville I should come down and see you there and talk over with you buying the furnishings or some of them, or whatever suited you. I don’t even know whether the School supplies some of the Housemaster’s furnishings or not. Anyway do be sure that all the plans are yours. Yours to live there as long as you like, and I hope, to return often.

I am still at work on the last pages of The Bridge and trying to weave into it all the thoughts and the meanings of our last few months. I think of Clyde so often and now it seems to me that he knew, after all. I wish I had many months yet to assimilate it so that in the book it would come out beautifully and persuasively; but I must close it up soon and drop literature for a whole year.

Give my love to your Mother and keep me fresh in Emily’s mind.¹⁵⁶ I wish she and I could steal away to another Secret meal. Perhaps you will be in the East soon and I shall see you again before long. I wish I could be useful to you in finding you something “to do”. But for a while I hope, you are resting, best of all in Our House, by your garden.

Affectionately ever
Thornton

101. TO LEWIS S. BAER. ALS 3 pp. Berg

75 Mansfield St.
New Haven Conn.
July 25 1927

Dear Louie:

If your firm were in serious difficulties at the edge of bancruptcy I should be patient, but I cannot believe it is.¹⁵⁷

I have always been very grateful and loyal to you for having discovered me. This loyalty is a very real thing to me and I should never dream of leaving your Firm merely for bigger Terms elsewhere, though I have had them. But my loyalty is being thrown away, if you cannot be normally considerate of me these early difficult years. You have not yet caught up to the January statement; you promised me some of the Spring royalties; and surely some of the Advance on a book of which four-fifths is set up. In a few weeks the translation of Paulina 1880 will be ready which I am willing to sell en bloc for three hundred dollars down, but which will certainly be too expensive for your Firm.¹⁵⁸ I shall stay with Bonis’, not only <for> the three stipulated books, but for a whole shelf-ful, if Bonis’ shows some interest in me above and beyond the mere literary machine.

My new job at Lawrenceville requires my furnishing a house and sends me on a number of trips this Summer, so please send me my five-hundred, Louie, and let us keep the association cordial.

Ever
Thornton

102. TO ISABEL WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale

Blodgetts Landing
Aug. 22 1927

Dearest Isabel:

Look what befell me. I was on the way from a weekend at Cape Cod with the T-s to a week with Les Glenn at Champlain with perhaps a Sunday night supper at Mrs MacDowells.¹⁵⁹ Then I was going back to New Haven to finish Paulina and to sit with Mama. But I decided to stop in here a day or two and say howdy to my old camp. Presto, they wanted me to stay and teach. You know how I love an Even Tenour. So here I stay set. They offered me wages, but my pupils are so few that I allowed that board and lodge was enough. (Now I have a new pupil to tutor after hours and that’s money.) The usual crazy thing has happened: I love it. I take twelve mile walks almost every day; I swim over a mile; I’m brown-black and roaring with health. And two of the nicest boys on the lot are to be among my 33 at the Davis House next year.

Of course Amy Wertheimer is in the vicinity. I only show up once a week. She’s resigned and wistful. She always has house guests so that there isn’t much occasion etc.¹⁶⁰

The Bridge was finished etc. Longman writes about a nice format. Boni is revolted that it isn’t long enough to keep up the fraud of a 2.50 book. He wants six to eight illustrations, and the Canadian and Esquimaux rights. I begin to see a lit. agent to keep Bonis quiet.

I’ve bought over all the Foresmans’ furniture for five hundred bucks. There will be much additional outlay for linen. So I guess I’m a weighty schoolmaster for some years. With anyone else it would be wrecking one’s talent for money and all that slop: but for very special reasons I think it is a subtly remarkable solution for me. I don’t write in leisure. I don’t write from any aspect of my life that daily life can exhibit. I am Dr Jeykel and Mr. Hyde. And the more ordinary and uneventful Mr. Hyde’s life is, the better Dr. Jeykll pursues alchemical research.

The rumour reaches me that Dr. Abbott has grown so impatient with certain of the big housemasters’ wives that he has decided to keep certain of the big houses as Bachelor Establishments. Men’s Clubs; Camps, almost. He is wrong. Davis makes the third of these. But you and Mama can come and stay as long as you choose to the delight of the proprietor and of the boys, I wot.

Well, how are you? Do you love London? and Oxford? Are you tranquillizing out? Ach, honey, I should have joined you over there. I could have perfectly well. Boni just slipped me five hundred dollars on the Bridge.

How about the sentimental ghosts of New College (was it New?). All that assimilated long ago? I am going to write herr. Childers, I’ve decided, and ask him to come to Davis. He’s the kind that haunts New York pretty often, pullman or no pullman. Next week I’m going down to Peterborough where Rosemary Ames is star pupil at the Mariarden Theatre Camp. Such letters—quite turn my head—also from Gwynne Williams. Eco¹⁶¹ writes frequently elaborate introspective fantasias. I trot humbly along behind. I’d rather put my head in a lyon’s mouth than spend a weekend at Chappaqua. But, God, what brains. She’s getting raises and rolling up influence: if only she doesn’t get fired on a touch of temper.

Our adorable mother misses you girls no end. They had some mean hot days, but on the whole the Summer has been very cool and the farmers crops are a month late and lack flavor (dope acquired from Doug Townson, the canner).

What shall I write next, by slow stages at the Davis? Plays, I suppose. Another letter from Charles Wagner wanting to see some and all that. But I have no burning ideas.

Go to St. Mary’s, for me.

Reread the first part of Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.

Take a scoot over to Cambridge and write a charming little essay for The Literary Review.

I hope your homeward trip is better than your outward, and that there are some nice gents.

Lots of love and ever thine
Thornton

I own a paino and a victrola. And a handsome dining room table and six chairs and a big sideboard. Wouldn’t it freeze y’?

103. TO CHAUNCEY B. TINKER. ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Yale

Dec 6 1927

Dear Mr. Tinker:

You may imagine how exciting your letter was for me and how happy and fit-for-nothing it left me the rest of the day.¹⁶² It has decided me to fix on you as the judge in a new problem I have: more and more people are muttering to me that I must leave the little chicken-feed duties of the housemaster and teacher and go to Bermuda, for example, and write books as a cow gives milk. I do not know how to answer them, but I do feel (though with intervals of misgiving) that this life is valuable to me and, I dare presume, my very pleasure in my routine can make me useful to others. Anyway no one, except you and I, seems to believe any longer in the dignity of teaching. (Though to us even ‘dignity’ is an understatement.) Ach, you should see the Davis House and all the sincerity and contentment and application that keeps coming out of 32 potential roughnecks and Red Indians.

Well, you must think over this for me, though I don’t know when I can pin you down for it, for, Xmas I am going South. I’m not all well of Dr. Verdi’s adroit appendectomy and am finding some minor Florida beach to lie on for a few weeks.¹⁶³ But that will only make a short postponement for New Haven rather than New York is still my week-end privilege.

As for your questions, oh, isn’t there a lot of New England in me; all that ignoble passion to be didactic that I have to fight with. All that bewilderment as to where Moral Attitude begins and where it shades off into mere Puritan Bossiness. My father is still pure Maine-1880 and I carry all that load of notions to examine and discard or assimilate.

No, I have never been to Peru. Why I chose to graft my thoughts about Luke 1¾ upon a delightful one-act play by Mérimée, Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement, I do not know. The Marquesa is my beloved Mme de Sévigné in a distorting mirror. The bridge is invented, the name borrowed from one of Junipero Serra’s missions in California.

It is right and fitting that you cried for a page of mine. How many a time I have cried with love or awe or pity while you talked of the Doctor, or Cowper, or Goldsmith.

Between the lines then you will find here all my thanks and joy at your letter

Ever
Thornton

104. TO F. SCOTT FITZGERALD. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Princeton

Jan 12 1928¹⁶⁴

Dear Scott Fitzgerald:

I have been an admirer, not to say a student, of The Great Gatsby too long not to have got a great kick out of your letter.¹⁶⁵ It gives me the grounds to hope that we may sometime have some long talks on what writing’s all about. As you see I am a provincial schoolmaster and have always worked alone. And yet nothing interests me more than thinking of our generation as a league and as a protest to the whole cardboard generation that precedes us from Wharton through Cabell and Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. I know Ernest Hemingway. Glen-way Westcott, I think, is coming down here for a few days soon. I’d like to think that you’d be around Princeton before long and ready for some long talks. I like teaching a lot and shall probably remain here for ages; a daily routine is necessary to me: I have no writing habits, am terribly lazy and write seldom. I’d be awfully proud if you arrived in my guestroom some time.

I spent last Xmas with a pack of Rhodes scholars (I’m not one) at Juan-les-Pins. The dentist-doctor-ex-sailor-adventurer on the plage told me you were working on a novel based upon a pathological situation seen in the hotel crowd.¹⁶⁶ You’d do it wonderfully and to hell with Scribners. The new firm of Coward-McCann would do their share wonderfully well. I’m sending you my Second.

We’re looking for some more tremendous pages from you. Thanks a lot for writing me

Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder

Later: God, I write a bad letter. I hoped this was going to carry more conviction. Fill in with the energy I’d have had if I hadn’t just taught four classes in French. T.W.

105. TO CASS CANFIELD.¹⁶⁷ TL (Copy)¹⁶⁸ 1 p. Yale

COPY THORNTON WILDER
DAVIS HOUSE
LAWRENCEVILLE, NEW JERSEY.

Jan. 16, 1928¹⁶⁹

Dear Mr. Canfield:

I wish to commit myself to the house of Harpers by putting on paper the following conditions:

That if the House of Harpers will consent to subsidize me to the extent of five thousand a year for three years beginning June 1929 (even though it covers some of the time when I must be completing the two remaining books that I am required to give to Albert and Charles Boni) I shall agree to consider all further books thereafter as belonging to the House of Harpers.

This shall except the book of short plays published by Coward-McCann;¹⁷⁰ and the money to be reimbursed if the time is consumed in writing plays or material of a specially limited type of interest.

The fifteen thousand dollars shall be considered as applying against the royalties of at least two novels of 50,000 words or more.

In the event that this guarantee arrangement is not necessary to me, I shall be willing to enter into a contract along the ordinary lines on terms satisfactory to both of us.¹⁷¹

Sincerely yours,
(Signed) THORNTON WILDER.

106. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Yale

<February 23, 1928>¹⁷²

Dearest of mamas:

I’m the worst of goofs. I write sixteen letters every two days but I never write the important ones! I haven’t answered E A Robinson yet, nor Robert Longman¹⁷³ nor sent Amos the book I promised him. Instead I write the queerest little letters. Well: here are the items for today:

You and I and Isabel and Janet or everybody are taking a house near London (Oxford or the Thames-side) all Summer. And we, all or some or more, are staying there until March. Then I am coming back to lecture for two months under Lee Keedick (the best: Margot Asquith and G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole).¹⁷⁴ You stay on if you like.

2. I am sailing on the Adriatic July 7 with 3 boys¹⁷⁵ vaguely under my care. Their mamas would not let them have the Summer abroad without me being there. They are going to golf in Scotland and spend a week in Dea<u>ville with a friend, and are going to return to America as early as Aug. 20. (for college boards)

3. You are going over to England quite early in the Spring, probably alone to prepare the way. Find a house with a garden, please. Like Duff House in London; or somewhere very nice near it. And a big house.¹⁷⁶

4. The book is going to go well above 100,000. Friday I was in NY. and the Bonis (who by the way have forgiven me) mentioned that on that day alone I had earned over 600 dollars (5,000 copies by telegraphic order). <appeared perpendicularly in left margin> Just got $6000 from Boni. More monthly.

5. You are to get the rental of a real house, big

6. So be a honey: think this over and come to a decision soon.

7. I don’t dare come home Easter. Three days in N.Y? or New Orleans: or Charleston; or Atlantic City. I’m tired, and good cause too. ¶ I am forwarding Father’s accident, left behinds when I can find paper and cord.¹⁷⁷ ¶ love to all.

love
Thornton

107. TO F. SCOTT AND ZELDA FITZGERALD. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Princeton

<early March 1928>

Dear Scott, Dear, Zelda, dear Scott, Dear Zelda,

Why should I tear up three letters in an attempt at writing you. One was a long and over-literary catalogue of the things I enjoyed at your house,¹⁷⁸ with delighted characterizations of all the guests and of yourselves (hurry, come and get it; it’s in my wastepaper basket here, Davis House), and one was a letter to little Scotty, the new planet. All I can say is that I filled my eyes with more than they can digest for a long while, and my affections with more than they can ever consent to lose. For instance I met the beautiful and wonderful Zelda and feel as though I’d been no-end awkward and inadequate beside her. Anyway I know that she understands that in my fashion I was happy and excitingly interested in everything. And now I’m more than ever eager to live near you someday on some European beach with long lazy days for talking and just mooning about. Since I got back the routine has been more complicated than usual, but I have been collecting a little bundle of things to say to you, which I shall not take the trouble to link together or even to interspace. ¶ If you are staying long at Ellerslie you should get a piano for Scotty. She’s alive with some gift or other and that may be the one. Besides I can come down and give her piano-talks. (I went into Trenton on the streetcar yesterday with a little girl 8 yrs old and she wasn’t anywhere near Scotty, and yet Barbara Baker’s no slouch for brightness.) ¶ You, Scott, seemed to have the impression that I was restless under Miss Murphey,¹⁷⁹ under “the banyan-tree of her tragedienne’s voice.” No, I was delighted; we discovered the same enthusiasms in French memoir literature and I could have got on as happily as that for years<?>. ¶ I started my phonograph agency searching for copies of the Rosenkavalier and Pavilion d’Armide waltzes for Zelda, so please don’t get them in the meantime. They’d make a deaconess’s<?> eyes droop, if you get what<?> I mean. ¶ Rex Lardner was here to lunch nailing an option on the serializ. of my next for Hearst-Cosmop.¹⁸⁰ He says he knew you at Great Neck. I told him the opening of Scott’s next was stunning. I hope that’s all right, isn’t it? ¶ Next Sunday night (we are allowed a half-hour’s reading-recreation after House Prayers then) I am reading the boys: Rags and the Prince of Wales.¹⁸¹ Is it all right with you. Seven-twenty, Eastern Standard Time. ¶ Can you-alls ever come up here? Can’t I ever be hospitable to anybody? ¶ The ballet teacher at the American Laboratory Theatre 222 East 64^th St. is Mme Irantzoff-Anderson and La Sylphe is retained for corrective gymnastics and something else; something new in sylphs.¹⁸² (10:15 p.m. Just turned off the house-lights. 3^rd Floor kinda restless. Organized rough-house brewing? Heaven help us thru the Winter Term. Spring Term is Housemaster’s paradise.)

ever thine
Thornt.

108. TO JOHN A. TOWNLEY.¹⁸³ ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) Lawrenceville

March 6 1928¹⁸⁴

Dear John:

The book is not supposed to solve. A vague comfort is supposed to hover above the unanswered questions, but it is not a theorem with its Q.E.D. The book is supposed to be as puzzling and distressing as the news that five of your friends died in an automobile accident. I dare not claim that all sudden deaths are, in the last counting, triumphant. As you say, a little over half the situations seem to prove something and the rest escape, or even contradict. Chekhov said: <“>The business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly.” I claim that human affection contains a strange unanalizable consolation and that is all. People who are full of faith claim that the book is a vindication of their optimism; disillusioned people claim that it is a barely concealed “anatomy of despair.” I am nearer the second group than the first; though some days I discover myself shouting confidentally in the first group. Where will I be thirty years from now?—with Hardy or Cardinal Newman?

Thank you for your fine thoughtful letter. I am carrying your messages to Mrs. Abbott. May we see you before June?

A letter like yours does me lots of good. If you were here I would outline my Next¹⁸⁵ to you.

Ever
Thornton W.

109. TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY. ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed Thornton Wilder / Davis House / Lawrenceville, New Jersey) JFK

June 20 1928¹⁸⁶

Dear Ernest:

Wonderful to hear from you.

Talk about you all the time. I had <a> weekend with Scott and Zelda this Spring. Scott read the opening chapter of his new book to us, perfectly fine. Your ghost crosses the stage everynow and then, but so it does in all of our books willy-nilly, mostly willy. You haven’t published anything, big or little, for ages. All agog about a novel plus a play.

I <am> writing from bed, laid up with four-day-grippe. Nothing compared to your pretentious ills—anthrax and fmger-in-the-eye. Sailing for 2 months in Eng. (Adriatic July 7); then walking tour with Gene Tunney (vide press passim).¹⁸⁷ As fine a person as you’d want to meet; not much humour, but I’ve always had a taste for the doggedly earnest ones. Then another tutoring job from Oct 20^th on with Xmas in Egypt, then some readings & lectures in America (March and April.). Hawaii to write two plays. But I dread and lose my enthusiasm before all this leisure. I need routines.

You see I haven’t much to say, but I’m strong for you and wish we could sit down to some long talks. Honest. I’m more flexible than I was. And you modified me lots. If I can do any errands for you note the Ship’s Date.

Ever thine
Thornt

TNW and Gene Tunney hiking at the Mer de Glace in the French Alps, October 1928.

TNW and Gene Tunney hiking at the Mer de Glace in the French Alps, October 1928. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.