BECAUSE OF THE LITERARY SUCCESS AND FINANCIAL REWARDS of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder’s way of life had changed radically by the time he returned from Europe in mid-January 1929. He had resigned his job at Lawrenceville, and that decision freed him to relinquish the delicate balance he had maintained between his teaching and writing routines. Now he had to establish a new regimen.
Before he had left for Europe in the midst of his growing renown, he had signed a multiyear contract with the Lee Keedick Agency, a nationally known speakers’ bureau, contracting for what turned out to be 144 lectures over several years’ time. In mid-February 1929, he began his first series of lectures, traveling throughout the Midwest until May. On his return, he entered another writing residency at the MacDowell Colony, where he remained through June. While there, he began The Woman of Andros, a new novel and the third of the four books he had contracted to do for Albert & Charles Boni. Much of the rest of Wilder’s summer was filled with social engagements and lectures, but he did manage to spend two weeks at his old tutoring camp on Lake Sunapee.
In September 1929, Wilder was off to Europe again, this time with his mother. They visited Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Munich, Paris, London, and Oxford, and returned to the United States in November. Wilder finished his new novel in October, and The Woman of Andros was published by Boni at the end of February 1930. In 1928, after the success of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder had acceded to his father’s recommendation that he retain a local New Haven attorney, J. Dwight Dana, to represent him in his business affairs. Dana’s representation gave Wilder control over the format and presentation of his new novel, a control he had not had previously.
The Woman of Andros was one of the top ten best-selling novels of 1930, although it was not the phenomenon that The Bridge of San Luis Rey had been. Reviewers admired his style and craftsmanship, but several of them had reservations about the relevance of this novel set in pagan times on an obscure Greek island because it was so removed from the practical experiences beginning to affect his reading public. The specter of Black Tuesday, the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, already haunted the American public, including the audience for literary novels.
Wilder’s royalty income of approximately forty thousand dollars was not an insignificant sum in 1930. It was, however, an income subject to wide vacillations, a circumstance that had to be taken into account, because he had become the sole support of his parents and two younger sisters. His other siblings were self-supporting, with Amos teaching at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and Charlotte at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and later at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Wilder had invested a portion of his royalties from The Bridge of San Luis Rey in land in Hamden, Connecticut, just outside New Haven, and in 1929 he built a house there for his family. In the late spring of 1930, after he returned from a two-month lecture tour, Wilder, his parents, and his younger sisters moved into their newly built home, a residence referred to by the family as “The House The Bridge Built.” The financial resources for running this household had to come from Wilder’s earnings, because his father could no longer contribute to his family’s economic needs; after several mild strokes, he was gently but firmly asked to retire from the associate editorship at the Journal-Courier in 1929. Wilder’s sister Isabel, who remained at home, had begun to assist him with his voluminous mail, particularly when he was off lecturing or traveling abroad. His youngest sister, Janet, was a student at Mount Holyoke College, her tuition paid by Wilder.
Robert M. Hutchins, Wilder’s friend from Oberlin and Yale, became president of the University of Chicago in 1929 and invited Wilder to teach there for two quarters a year, at a salary of four thousand dollars. Because he enjoyed teaching but also because he wanted the extra income, he agreed to begin his first quarter in April 1930. He taught a course in advanced English composition to a small class of students selected by him, as well as a larger lecture course on classic literature in translation. After classes ended in June, Wilder spent a month at the MacDowell Colony, working on six one-act plays. In September, he returned briefly to work in his new study in Hamden before going back to Chicago to teach in the fall quarter.
By 1931, Wilder seemed to have established a schedule that was flexible enough to accommodate his lecturing and teaching obligations without compromising his ability to travel and write. He began the year with a speaking tour that lasted through February, embarked for Europe in late March, returned in July, spent August and September socializing and writing, and then returned to Chicago in October to teach until the end of December.
The six one-act plays Wilder had completed at MacDowell were published in November 1931 by Yale University Press and Coward-McCann as The Long Christmas Dinner and Other Plays in One Act. The Boni firm was interested only in his novels, and Coward-McCann had published Wilder’s first volume of his short plays, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and Other Plays, in 1928. It had sold well, coming, as it did, on the heels of the successful The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Two of the new plays in the 1931 volume, The Long Christmas Dinner and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, had premieres at the Yale University Theater and the University of Chicago Dramatic Association in late November and early December 1931, respectively. Both of these, as well as another one-act in the collection, Pullman Car Hiawatha, anticipated ideas and stage techniques that would blossom in Wilder’s full-length dramas at the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s.
In 1932, Wilder began the year teaching at the University of Chicago instead of lecturing on the road, and later in the spring he tried his hand at translating and adapting two plays. At the behest of Broadway producer Gilbert Miller, Wilder translated from the German and adapted Hungarian Otto Indig’s The Bride of Torozko. But when the production opened, Wilder’s translation was not used; the production closed quickly. The second was a translation from the French of André Obey’s Le Viol de Lucrèce for Katharine Cornell, a leading actress of the day The play, now entitled Lucrèce, received a lukewarm reception in New York when it premiered in December 1932, and it closed shortly thereafter.
While Wilder was working on these adaptations and translations at MacDowell in June 1932, he also began serious work on his new novel, Heaven’s My Destination, his first to be set in contemporary America. He hoped to finish it by April 1933, but it was not completed until the end of September 1934. Wilder’s royalty income had dropped precipitously, from over $40,000 in 1930 to $13,300 in 1931, $9,200 in 1932, and $6,700 in 1933; as a consequence, he spent a good part of 1933 earning money to support his family. He was on the road giving lectures in January, February, and part of March. On April 1, he began teaching his spring-quarter classes at Chicago, and he stayed on through the summer term, earning four thousand dollars. After a short visit home in Hamden, Wilder departed by train for Los Angeles at the end of October, then sailed for Hawaii, where he was engaged to lecture at the university in Honolulu for two and a half weeks. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he lectured at UCLA for five days; made a short rest stop to visit with his friend Mabel Dodge Luhan at her ranch in Taos, New Mexico, in early December; gave more lectures in Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago on his way east; and arrived home in Hamden just before Christmas.
During the Depression, Hollywood was the one place where writers could earn large salaries. In Los Angeles during the fall of 1933, Wilder, who was genuinely interested in filmmaking as an art form, became acquainted with people in the movie industry. He spent approximately two weeks in Hollywood in March 1934, working on a screen treatment for a projected film about Joan of Arc. After Wilder taught in the spring at Chicago, he was invited back to Hollywood to work for Sam Goldwyn and RKO. When he returned to Chicago to teach for the fall quarter, he spent two weeks writing a film treatment for William Randolph Hearst’s production company. For approximately ten weeks of film work, Wilder earned $11,500, twice his teaching salary and five times more than he had earned lecturing.
On his way home from Hollywood before the fall 1934 teaching quarter at the University of Chicago, Wilder again stopped at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ranch in Taos and finished Heaven’s My Destination. The novel was published in England by Longmans, Green on December 3, 1934, and in the United States on January 2, 1935, by his new publisher Harper & Brothers, which bought the book from Boni and would henceforth be Wilder’s American publisher. This fourth novel was successful and restored Wilder’s bank account, earning approximately $27,000 during 1934-1935.
While he was teaching at the University of Chicago for the 1934-1935 academic year, Wilder met Gertrude Stein on November 25, 1934, when she spoke on campus. When Stein returned to Chicago for two weeks in March, Wilder lent her his apartment. Despite their difference in age (she was sixty-one and he thirty-seven at this time) and public renown (she was something of a literary curiosity, while he had been in the literary limelight for six years), they developed a friendship that became very important to both of them.
When Wilder finished his classes that spring, he spent some time in the Midwest, fulfilling speaking engagements, then returned east for much of May and June, visiting friends and joining family celebrations. That May, his sister Janet received an M.A. degree from Mount Holyoke, and in June, his brother married Catharine Kerlin, Thornton serving as best man. Shortly thereafter, he sailed for Europe for his first visit to the Continent in three years. He visited Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in France, went to Salzburg for the music festival (in the company of the political and literary hostess Sibyl Colefax, whom he had met in London in 1928 and who became a lifelong friend), walked in the Dolomites, and then spent time in Vienna, Innsbruck, and Paris. He returned to Connecticut for a somber family Thanksgiving: During October, Wilder’s father had suffered a series of strokes, which left him paralyzed on one side; his condition worsened when he was hospitalized and operated on for an intestinal blockage. In spite of a grim prognosis, however, Amos Parker Wilder recovered enough to be tended to at home by family and nursing help.
In 1936, Wilder’s grueling schedule of lecturing on both the East Coast and the West during the first three months of the year and teaching the spring and summer quarters at Chicago was interrupted by his father’s death on July 2, 1936. He returned to teach after his father’s funeral and concluded his classes. After six years of teaching, he resigned his position. He spent the summer of 1936 at home, and in early October, he left for new territory, sailing to the West Indies and stopping at several islands, where he searched for comfortable writing locales. Although he did not find an ideal place, he finished a writing project he had promised to do for Gertrude Stein—an introduction to her book The Geographical History of America or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind, which was published in 1936. He had performed a similar service for her in March 1935, for Narration, a book of four lectures she had delivered at the University of Chicago.
The lecture commitments Wilder had made in 1929 were the only contractual obligations left that competed with his freedom to roam and write at will. He was free of that obligation by the end of March 1937, after spending the first three months of the year on the speaking circuit. During April and May, with the aid primarily of German translations, he wrote a new stage version of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for a close friend, the actress Ruth Gordon. In June, after a five-year absence, he returned to the MacDowell Colony to concentrate on a new play, Our Town. During the summer, after serving as the first American delegate to the annual gathering in Paris of the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, an enterprise that was part of the League of Nations, calling on Gertrude Stein, and attending the Salzburg Festival, Wilder completed most of his new play in a hotel in a small town near Zurich, Switzerland. He returned to New York in December for rehearsals of both A Doll’s House and Our Town; the latter was to be directed by Jed Harris.
Wilder’s adaptation of A Doll’s House opened in New York on December 27, 1937. It was a great success and had a long run, closing in May 1938. When Our Town opened on February 4, 1938, and was similarly received, Wilder achieved the rare distinction of having two hits on Broadway simultaneously. In the spring of 1938, Our Town won Wilder his second Pulitzer Prize, this time in drama. At the end of March, Wilder left for Tucson, Arizona, to complete another play, a farce called The Merchant of Yonkers. It was to be directed by the Austrian theater director Max Reinhardt, whose career Wilder had followed for many years. Rehearsals began in November, and on December 28, 1938, The Merchant of Yonkers opened in New York. Wilder’s Broadway winning streak came to an end when the production received lukewarm reviews and then closed on January 28, 1939, after just thirty-nine performances. Despite this temporary setback, he now not only was internationally recognized as a novelist but, with Our Town, had established himself as an innovative major talent in the literary area that had dazzled and attracted him since childhood, the theater.
The MacDowell Colony
Peterborough New Hampshire
July 24 1929
Dear Lady Colefax:
If this is a long letter in small writing and crowded with matter, will I be forgiven for my frailty and broken promises? The time I thought I was writing you a letter and telegraphed the news was on my lecture tour. And lecturers ought to be forgiven the delusions that visit them in the nineteenth story of some strange hotel. The moment I sat down to write the bespoken letter, Heaven only knows what Reception Committee called up on the ’phone, or what reporter, or what new cousin, or what former pupil. Similarly any cables you receive from me next January and February must be regarded as fantasies and wish-fulfilment idyls. So great is the dislocation caused by a Lecture Tour that it is not until July that Friendship, Admiration, Gratitude and Obligation begin to collect themselves in the wreckage of my faculties.
This is the place for such a revival. The music of Edward MacDowell is not wearing well, but this Colony that his widow has built up in his name is a sufficient memorial. Edwin Arlington Robinson, our best poet, has been here about fifteen summers; Elinor Wylie wrote a great deal of her work here; Porgy and Death Comes for the Arch-Bishop and The Bridge of S.L.R. and Scarlet Sister Mary and Tristram were, all or partly, written here. 1 At nine each Colonist drifts off to a studio, a little house quarter of a mile from most of the other studios, set in deep pine woods, with views of hills and mountains, and doesn’t see another human being until five o’clock. His lunch is brought by a cart and left on his doorstep without knocking. Naturally all that solitude is too austere a draught for me: I go walking or I play Patience or I go to the village to buy fountain-pen-ink. But finally one is caught by the contagion of concentration; a little routine is set up, and finally even I, the reluctant author, write a few pages daily.
It’s still the Woman of Andros, my hetaira who is developing into a sort of Dr. Johnson. 2 Her sayings and parables and her custom of adopting human strays is weighing down the book. But die she must, and with unhellenic overtones, an anima naturaliter christiana. 3 I love to think that Terence’s play on which, ever so inexcusably, I base the nouvelle was a favorite with Fénélon 4 and John Henry Newman. I’d love to introduce a strophe in salutation of those three lions with honey in their mouths. (As to Terence I don’t know, but Strachey was a fool when he compared Newman to a dove and my Fenelon I take from the gallery of Saint-Simon, the true book for the shipwrecked, a sufficient compensation, Heavens, for a lost leg.)
The last bit of writing I finished was a preface for Sir Philip’s book in its American edition.5 I did my best with a subject matter I know nothing about; I tried a wandering personal essay; it may be stupid and childish. I hope not. Now that my “strength” is returning I hope to write him in a few days, a long overdue answer. If you see him, tell him that my silences are not the meter of my regard and that (you may guess from all this latinity what author I have been reading) my instability is passing, has passed.
There is a very fine novel by Ernest Hemingway (of “Fiesta”) now running serially in Scribner’s Magazine.6 It caused the magazine to be barred in Boston and I hear that 1500 indignant subscribers cancelled their subscriptions, but it is very fine work. ¶ Have you met Alfred Lunt and Lynne<Lynn> Fontanne and aren’t they lovely? Give them my great love. ¶ Here’s a very confidential secret. In the blessed engagement of Jean Forbes-Robertson and Jim Hamilton magna pars fui.7 Jim and I once talked almost all night at the Savoy—I was packing to leave on a boat train and my back hurt too. But about 6 weeks ago I got a cable that read: Took your advice it worked congratulate us. Ach, doctor, heal thyself. ¶ I’m sailing somewhere in the first wks of Sept. I should love to go to England but I don’t dare—I must also write on a play-notion that in the right hands could be lovely.8 All I know is that probably I must see what the State Theatres and the Kammerspiele of Munich have been doing; and see my dear old Swiss lady that runs a 6-room pension at Juan-les-Pins. If you are here-or-there on the Continent I should love to cross your path for some meals and long walks and a merciless examination of life and letters in Our Times. ¶ I feel so ashamed at having failed you in a thing that I eagerly looked forward to. That is: seeing your son in New York. I live in New Haven and the few times I went to NY. were so involved in business and educational matters that I never found the spacious evening that the meeting required and promised. Is it still possible? Will it be possible the last wks of August and the first of Sept? ¶ I am to be a “special lecturer” in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago during the Spring Term. Yes, Iliad and The Birds and Dante and Don Quixote and everything. And I can’t even spell. ¶ I no longer admire Brahms. ¶ The Alfred Lunts already own a drawing by Augustu<s> John: if they want another tell them that Rosa Lewis in one of her apartments at the Cavendish has that wonderful head of Euphemia Lamb9 (you promised one day to tell me all about Euphemia Lamb) and everything in the Cavendish is for sale except rest and privacy.
So: forgive me, believe me and recognize one still ever
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
<appeared perpendicularly in the left margin at the bottom of the last page>
As from: 75 Mansfield St., New Haven Conn.
Oct 15 1929
Dear Norm:
Forgive my haste and everything.
It seems to me that my books are about: what is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose to it.
In other words: when a human being is made to bear more than <a> human being can bear—what then?
The Cabala was about these “extremities.” Ones “nervous breakdowns.”
The Bridge asked the question whether the intuition that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living.
The Woman of Andros asks whether Paganism had any solution for the hopeful enquiring sufferer and—by anticipation—whether the handful of maxims about how to live that entered the world with the message of Christ were sufficient to guide one through the maze of experience.
The Trumpet Shall Sound was given Dec. 1926 or 1927 at the American Laboratory Theatre in NY. About 35 performances in repertorie. Apart from the Lit never published<.> Now withheld for purposes of rewriting the close.
Yes a minor lit. editor.
No,—single,—no wife nor chillun.
The W. of A. (out late next Spring perhaps) is based on the action recounted that took place before the curtain rises on the first act of Terence’s play.
Again forgive brevity etc
Ever yours
Thornt.
The Biltmore
<Los Angeles>
January 2nd, 1930
Dear Mom:
Sunlight, honey. Just terrible. Poinsettias and palms, everywhere. They haven’t had any rain since July except a drop and a half in September. It’s getting serious and everybody says they have a cough from the dust, but the dust isn’t so bad as that and the sun is worth it. One day I went out to the beach at Santa Monica and just baked.
This city is getting near to two million people and has got to be seen to be believed. It’s very American, only more so. I thought I had seen the limit of this kind of thing in Miami, but I spoke to<o> soon.
The first night I was here I went to see La Argentina dance.11 Charlie Chaplin was in the front row, the present-day poverello;12 and right behind me was Steve Benét and a young couple I knew in Juanles-Pins. Argentina was wonderful, Oh!
I’ve been typing all afternoon and am wore out, so I can’t think connectedly. The script will be done by tomorrow noon and sent to Isa by air mail and let’s hope the English copy will reach Longman by the fifteenth.13
Mr. Keedick’s Western agent is taking me to dinner at the Ambassador tomorrow night. He’s a nice sort of Frank-Walls called Ainslie MacDougall. Apparently there are no new dates for me yet, so I can just lie on beaches and later sit in the Greek Theatre. At one of these lectures, he says, they are expecting two thousand people; count that off your abacus, yes, at a dollar and a half an admission. He says that last year at Toronto I pleased a number of people by my lecture and a number of others (on the committee) by making them four hundred dollars clear.
After this: No thousand, no speechy.
Never, mind, honig, next year I don’t lecture nor teach nor travel. I just sit up on Dewberry Road,14 or whatever it’s called, and write play after play for Edith Evans.15
Just read a novel you’d better read if you want to know how terrible it is to run a boardinghouse in a small southern town. The novel is called Look Homward Angel16 and is full of prose poetry and bursts of tears and every now and then it’s even more sordid than the book about Andros.
It’s true that this town is full of fungus religions and fungus medicine. Every apartment house window on the ground floor has a little card in the corner saying: “Mrs. Whoosiz: spiritual healing and advice.” or “Naturotherapy Institute.” There’s a lot of Bible reading done in public by strollers with moving lips, or all a-dream on park benches; and you know I always felt that Bible reading in public or in the home was one of the less significant wrestlings with the angel.
Got Isabel’s first batch of forwarded mail; and answered everything that had to be answered at once, at once.
I’ve lost my appetite for some reason. I walk twelve miles a day. My teeth are perfect; my appendix is out. Yet I don’t approach any plate with a ghost of interest. (Well, there’s a symphony tonight with Horowitz, that’s something.) I guess I’m just homesick as usual. Or else I’m alone all the time, or else with some people that leave my pulse unhurried. Anyway I miss you-all a lot.
Aunt Grace17 roasted an enormous bird and we had a nice four hours or more. I forgot to say a word about their Xmas present to me, and as I hadn’t made any to them, they must have thought my conduct very strange. However am thanking them in a letter and trusting the rest of the oddity to kindly bewilderment.
I wish I had come Santa Fé. I looked out of the windows all day, especially all night and at dawn from my Lower, and liked it, but the Santa Fé would have repaid such gazing even more. And the fellow travellers were sad. Beside we all draw dividends from Santa Fé.18
There’s no Ray or Pauline Hanna19 in the telephone book.
There’s going to be a very small crowd at the Pasadena lecture because there happens to be two big rival social events at the same moment. Ishkabibble.
I don’t see how I can get to know Charlie Chaplin, though I was so confident I could do it before. He looked awfully nice the other night; his hair is all gray, or rather white, at the edge of his ears.
Well, sufficient to the day is the Lawrence thereof.20
(A telegram was just brought me to the door and I tore it open and it was a New Year’s greeting signed Contessa and then I saw it was addressed to a James Wilder. Yeah?)
Well, I love you more than Tunkantell. Mrs Johnson (Bill Hinckle’s mother) sends you her best, and many pretty thanks. Tell Papa that Southern California is thataway; I still think that Florida, except for the dearth of concerts and lectures, is a better place to live.
love and pinings,
Thornt.
As from: 75 Mansfield St.
New Haven, Conn
Jan. 20, 1930
Dear Mr. Shaw:
Your letter gave me great pleasure.21 I too live so much in the great books and great music I admire that it becomes a sort of mortification to talk about my own books to people whom I value. The dejections of writing drive me to various Second Strings. I wildly sign contracts to teach or to go on lecture-tours (as now), and all to escape the self-assignments of my literary hope. At present I am cursed with the wish to write a beautiful play for Edith Evans and her wonderful voice—before she is too old or too discouraged.
If I talk for a moment about your comments on my work, it is not that I am trying to justify my shortcomings. The inadequacies of one’s book are the inadequacies of one’s self and they have no surprises and no palliation from me. But I do not recognize the attitudes of mind you describe: the choosing of an easier subject in order to attain ease; and the determination, as though it were a matter of choice, to be in a given book, experimental or not experimental in language. I am too timid, without and within, ever to cast myself into the tradition of the stormy self-revealing books; all I can do is to mutter over and over to myself as I work: Mozartian form: Mozartian form.
But what book is it you refer to as your last in which you deliberately limited your intention? A paper I bought today says you have prepared a translation of Homer22 which is wonderful news. I imagine the introduction you might do for it (though I have no doubt you refused to)—a long profound debate on the differences between living such actions and singing them. You are one of the few persons in the history of the world who has stood with a foot in each kingdom—Sophocles fought, and Dante a little.
It will be a long while before I arrive in England, but I hope to attempt what you have proposed, that I see whether it would be possible for you to leave the camp for a few hours. In the meantime know the pride I feel that you have written to me and my great admiration for the pages of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom & for yourself.
Sincerely yours,
Thornton Wilder
¶ From the window here I can see, though seventy miles away, the sudden barrier of the Canadian Rockies. The area of the greater peaks is fifty times the area of the Alps.
¶ Five days ago it was 40 degrees below zero in Calgary.
¶ Lecturing is an ignoble profession but it has these compensations.
Atlanta Georgia
Feb 20 1930
Dear Lady Colefax:
This letter pretends to be written you from Calgary. I have always hoped to write from some remote and colorful place that you have never visited. I did sit down to write you there (the thermometer fallen to thirty-five degrees below zero; and, seventy miles away, the frieze of the Canadian Rockies rising in a sudden barrier on the horizon), but the telephone kept ringing, the local lecture committee swept through the room and letters had to be postponed. It is always possible that you too have been to Calgary, have had lunch at the Ranchmen’s Club and met the tremendous Mrs Winter.
I am still trying to make amends for teasing you about penman-ships. The chief sacrifice I can make just now to solicit your forgiveness, the olive branch that costs most to pluck, is to write a letter myself—you remember how I disclaimed any possibility of correspondence while ‘on tour’. Well, I am very much on tour, with ten close-packed engagements just ahead of me. So please begin to forgive me.
It is no news to you that America is stirring in its sleep. The other night, Monday, Hugh Walpole and I were announced to debate on whether Fiction or Non-fiction throws more light on experience. It was at Washington, D.C. and four thousand people attended. It looked like a football game. It was not a very good debate, Heaven knows, and you with your resources would have found your mind wandering to other things under the flood of truisms but the four thousand scarcely coughed—catarrhal February, too—while our humble little abstract ideas advanced and retreated in a very sedate combat. In all we furnish four great cities with that debate! I hope you are smiling more in amusement than scorn.
March tenth brings my trip to a close. It began January 6 at San Diego, California, and has covered a great deal of country. I begin to think I know why I am doing it. It is partly of course to assemble money to pay for the new house and its Steinway; partly to buy the thirty-five volumes of Saint-Simon in the edition grands écrivains de France. All that is true but only vaguely felt by me. I know now that the tours are Preparation. I don’t know quite what they prepare for: I prepare and Circumstance fulfills. Sometimes I think I would like to be a College President: collect moneys and buildings and hospitals from millionaires, and once a week breath urgency into fatigued, limited and mostly jealous-hearted professors; and once a week (very successfully) excite my assembled students, wide-eyed, bewildered and so easily-excited students.
Another minute I think I want to be the head of a New York Burgtheater.23—bewitch money out of millionaires and build a repertory with Edith Evans, Haidée Wright,24 Walter Huston and so on.
Do you like that?
At all events, I am burning out a host of awkward adolescent fears and maladjustments. I am actually serener. And the more people I meet the more I like people. I know America down to every absurd Keep Smiling Club, every gas station, every hot-dog stand.
April first I start teaching for two and a half months at the University of Chicago. Ten to twelve thousand students under President Hutchins, age 30 and an old friend of mine. “Tradition and Innovation—Aeschylus to Cervantes.” 40 lectures (including Dante) with the students writing a 6-minute paper every morning to prove that they read the long assignment for homework. It’s absurd, but its very American and is exactly what I want.
Do be patient with me and find a minute to comment on all this turmoil.
Ever sincerely
Thornton
50 Deepwood Drive, “The House The Bridge Built.”
50 Deepwood Drive, “The House The Bridge Built.” Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
<P.M. September 3, 1931>
Dear Sharlie:
I hear you are delighted about Yaddo, that you did a lot of fine work, and that you are looking very handsome.25
I hope from time <to time> you will come to Deepwood Drive, not only to cheer Mama, but to take advantage of the friendships you have arouséd in Mrs Canby,26 Helen McAfee et alii et alliae (those should be in the Ablative.)
If your New York life becomes expensive, do not hesitate to call on me. Do not crowd your soul by living on sandwiches and sausages
Amos has finished his thesis, and is far cheerfuller. Isabell has made much progress in her novel and is cheerfuller.27 Mama is beginning to be aware of a home-economic-security and is cheerfuller. I am full of new wonderful thoughts and am cheerfuller, so your new well being should sustain ours—less wilder nail-biting, fears, and scruples and distrusts.
Ever thine
Thornton
Enclosed a small birthday present.
<Chicago>
Monday morning
<October 1931>
Dear Mom:
Forgive my being so long in telling you all about it.
I arrived none too early. I filled in the time with all kinds of things and assembled a lot more notes on the Iliad. Then on Tues and Wed I had to sit in the Gym which for those two days is turned into a Registration Hall. Representatives of each department and teachers with special classes sit under large placards bearings their names and the students approach them as though they were choosing dishes at a cafetaria. Its a great bazar of education: it is very interesting and very funny. All kinds of applicants came for my advanced comp.—some had been out in business for years; one had taught it at Mt. Holyoke; a man had been selling General Motors appliances at Kobe: a woman who had left a husband at Grand Rapids to work three months with me on her deathless novel and who submitted as earnest of her genius an essay called Motherhood: A Vocation for Women. Well, you know me. Instead of saying with firmness that they are unsuitable I got all tangled up telling them they were too good for the course, that all they needed was to follow their own lights etc. Some cried; some argued; some phoned and returned and hung about and pleaded. But at last I picked a good eighteen. One negro who writes violent prose poems about Industry and the spilled blood of his people.
Classes met Thursday morning and I loved it. I was as nervous as though it were my first time. “Your assignment for tomorrow….” I began in a loud voice.
Then Thursday a<t> noon a telegram came from Stanton Kennedy of Omaha (and Yale Law Sch.—I suppose you remember him)—“If I arrive Friday morning with manuscript will you receive me?” He arrived all right with his novel Proust-cum-Joyce. I’d read a few chapters while he mooned about by the lake. He was terribly nervous. ALL depends on the novel. Unless it is the greatest novel since War and Peace he will have to go into his uncle’s law office or his father’s construction work. He was somehow both nervous and lumpish, parasitic lumpish. And besides he was defeatest sneering fatigued. It comforted <him> to tell how awful Omaha’s social life and its pretences to culture are. It comforted him to see in Chicago or in my beloved University little things that bespoke America’s stupidities. It also comforted him to save money and to accept too many meals from me. Enfin—as Mme de Sévigné said—-j’ai vu qu’il me préparait les délices d’un adieu.28 So he went off Sunday afternoon with a letter to Cass Canfield.
So I stole off to Prof Rafe Lillie29 and played Four Hands and began to convalesce. When I got home at six I was told that the Pres. wished to speak to me on the phone. So I went to a little tray-on-your- knees supper, just the three of us upstairs, and I told them about Jed and Ruth30 and Isabel; and about Reinhardt and Du Schöne Helena31 and he forgot his troubles and I forgot mine. And then I read them The Happy Journey and they were deeply moved32 —And it was one of the nicest evenings we had ever had together. And no harm was done when I left them at nine because we were all dead tired.
The lake is more beautiful than you can imagine and the frieze of skyscrapers is as fine as ever. The Midway at my door is a perfect green lawn. My rooms are still pretty bare, though they have given me two rugs for the sitting room, two leather chairs etc. Do I dare ask you to send me the map of Scotland Lady Astor gave me—in the shelves at my right as I sit at the desk in my study. There is a big roll for mailing with it. I think. I could frame it and it wld solve the problem of the space over my fireplace mantel. Next time you are in N.Y. you must see The House of Connolly33 and tell me about it.
Give my regards to Helen, to Phyllis, to Dr. Williams and to the Fultons. I haven’t see<n> Percival Bailey yet but will today. 34
Love to all
Thornton
<Chicago>
Feb 2 1932
Dear Mom, dear Isabel, dear Pop, dear Astrid,=35
Tomorrow morning at eight I give my annual rendition of Ugolino in the Tower.36 Yes, that class now meets at eight. My alarm clock goes off at 6:30. When the doors open for breakfast at 7:00 there I am waiting with such impatience that I fall forward on my face like an eavesdropper. At ten o clock I give my other class the works with a psychoanalytical interpretation of La Rochefoucauld. Usually after two lectures I’m so tired, I go down town just to be away from people. I lunch in railway stations or somewhere, then gradually seep back to the Campus about 3:00 and begin to go into training for the two lectures on the morrow. I don’t “go out” during the middle of the week; but when Friday comes around I get gay and “go out” in a big way. But all the time I’m worried about next week’s lectures. I worry in my sleep and wake up wondering if I have enough notes to pull me through these eternal fifty-minutes. It’s extra hard this term because both my classes are “preparation” engagements for me. Previously the ten o’clock class was Advanced Comp. and did not require anything but talent of me; now it requires diligence. Toward the middle of Feb begins a series I am giving in our “downtown college”, that is 5 lectures on Tuesday evenings at the Art Institute (Chicago’s Metropolitan Museum) on Sophocles for English Readers. It is billboarded all over town, and all the North Shore ermine dames are preparing to go, so there’s some more lectures. SO you see I’m longing for March 19th. Am I!! And I think I’m taking a year’s leave from the University. I haven’t told Bob yet.
Bob was thirty-three the other day. Maude’s birthday is Thursday. Little dinners in the bosom of the family. The family consists of June Preston and me. Franja37 finally had her tonsils out, but has had a long dragging temperature: so Franja simply lives in the children’s hospital of our Clinics. Its just next door and so very convenient. She’s not really ill; Franja likes it: it’s merely more convenient so. The Doctor says she ought to be in another climate, but Maude won’t leave Bob so what can you do about it but leave the baby in the hospital where the climate is practically Bermudan.
Cornelia Otis Skinner is performing for two weeks in town. I met her “out”; we talked of Helen Andrews etc; I dread going to see her show; her phlegm bores me.38 And speaking of monologuists I sent a cable to Ruth Draper and received a friendly cable in reply.
The wife of the Governor of Wisconsin writes to ask me when I am coming up to stay with them. She says she is polishing up Ole Bull’s bed39 for me. I shall go up in two weeks I think for a Sunday night. Moral: home town boy makes good.
Girls, please do me a favor. See, if on my desk you can find my two volumes, Everyman’s Library, of Don Quixote with my marginal jottings. Perhaps you can only find Volume One. If its there please send it to me with kisses.
Tomorrow, dearies, you are going to see Charles Laughton as Detective Poirot. Perhaps this very evening Isabel was to rehearsal for hours.40 He’s a fine actor and a delightful person. Has Mama got to know him. His accent alone will be enough to slay her and then comes his charm. Hoop-wow-zowie. I bet you he’s wonderful in that part; I saw ten photographs of his facial expressions in it.
Its now 11:30 and I must get to bed out of respect for my alarm clock. Isabel: Write the German agent that I would sell him The Woman of Andros cheaply enough, but only on condition that it is:
for Elizabeth Bergner41
for German speech alone
She is coming to America soon I hear to play for English-speaking audiences and films. If she wanted to use it in English it would require a different contract and with an American film company.
See you all before long.
Love me hard
Thorny.
April 8 1932
Dear Miss Cornell:
I should be proud to translate Le Viol.42 It is an eloquent play in itself and the freedom with which it overrides the conventions of the stage should make it very fruitful and additionally important. It is full of little difficulties of literary tact and I hope to come and see you during your Chicago engagement, about May first, to ask your help on some of those passages.
The University of Chicago allows me to teach two Quarters a year and then absent myself two Quarters. My vacation has just begun. I am sorry I cannot be there during the whole engagement in order to see The Barretts43 many times, but I shall be able to make up some of my loss.
I hope you are well and the continued performance of so exacting a part is not too trying.
Very sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
P.S. My agent is Mr. Harold Freedman of Brandt and Brandt. I have asked him to make a reasonable arrangement with Mr. Goodyear.44
T.N.W.
Nov 2 1932
Dear Lady Colefax:
Many thanks for the encouragement to go and see Francis Lederer.45 I shall try to call on him at the end of this week. German theatrical records are my hobby and I know a great deal about him.
Rehearsals for “Lucrece” begin very soon. Being only a translator I feel very remote from it. My heart-beat hasn’t registered the slightest acceleration except at the moment that I realized that success would mean one hundred and eighty dollars a week. I’m so seldom mercenary—and never as regards my own works—that I cite that curious experience to you in order that you may see how indifferent I am. I am a great admirer of Kath. Cornell, the woman, and happy that this will bring us often together, but I distrust some of the casting and the commission for some music from Deems Taylor. I have never met Robert Edmond Jones.46 People say we look alike, talk alike and think alike; which bores me in advance.
I translated a piece for Gilbert Miller—Die Braut u. Torozko by Otto Indig from the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna. Not literature, but a delightful play. I hear Mr. Miller is disappointed that I did not alter it more. So I must sit down and alter it.47
The middle point has arrived of my year’s absence from the University of Chicago. In the six months I have done the two translations and a third of a novel. The novel is very funny and very heartrending—a picaresque novel about a young travelling salesman in textbooks, very “fundamentalist” pious, pure and his adventures among the shabby shady hotels, gas-stations and hot dog stands of Eastern Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma etc. His education, or developement from a Dakota “Bible-belt” mind to a modern grossstadt48 tolerance in three years; i.e. the very journey the American mind has made in fifty years. I don’t know what to call it, but I am thinking of this:
Heaven’s my Destination
by
xxx
George Mercer Brush is my name, America’s my nation;
Ludington’s my dwelling-place.
And Heaven’s my destination.
(Doggerel verses which children in the Middle West used to inscribe in the fly-leaves of their schoolbooks.)
The book has given me a great deal of pleasure. If it turns out that I am not a humorist and that the whole project was a lapse of judgment I shall not greatly care.
Lately I have been going up to New York a little and seeing people. My best friends there (Chicago holds my real ones) are Jed Harris and Ruth Gordon. Lately Edward Sheldon.49 I have a sort of urchin’s hero-worship (urchin-watching brilliant lion-tamer in spangles) for Norman Bel-Geddes. I like Marc Connolly,50 but as it were a little helplessly: he has so little cultural or emotional fond, for all his gifts.
Had lunch last Sunday with Ruth Draper and we talked of Lauro.51 Tears and everything. She confesses that she invites and cherishes grief; has been so shaken that she has no new monologues and so must tour new territory—South Africa.
Alex. Woollcott is a real pleasure too. The gaiety of good digestion combined with a curiosity about crime and flambuoyant personality whether it be Mary Baker Eddy or the Empress Carlotta.
Myself have dwindled to the least fashionable of authors. Few book reviews come out without a passing disparagement of my work. But I don’t mind. I have a rather low opinion of my books myself, but am fairly conceited about the next ones.
I want to thank you very much for calling my attention to Charles Du Bos.52 I derived a great deal from the Journal and the Byron. Less from the Gide. If you should see him, reproach him for being so slow about the Nietzsche et la symphonie héröique de la pensée à contre-courant. This used to be announced among the works à paraitre53 and has now disappeared from the promises. To my dismay; for I need it. Nietzsche has been my great discovery of this last year, my meat and drink. Nietzsche does not trouble my faith, for I see already enough what Egon Friedell54 meant in calling him “the last great believer in Europe;” but I need a great believer’s help in isolating the essential from the accidental Nietzsche. So do what you can to provoke such a book—tortured footnotes and all.
I haven’t liked anything F L Lucas has done since the manual on Tragedy. Not the poems. And the papers in Life and Letters don’t stand long enough on one spot to be helpful. There was a grievous lapse of taste in his paper on France.55
Phillip Sassoon and I have fallen away. He came to Chicago and I got him a lecture at the University. He must have thought his audience was imbecile. There was a great deal of manner and charm and no substance. And when last in London he introduced me for one disastrous evening to his clique—a dinner at a Mrs Fitzgeralds, where were Cole Porter and Lady Cunard and others; and such unsavory double-entendres were flying about—my naive remarks were twisted before my face to the merriment of all. Finally they were ashamed of themselves and went to the other extreme and were very sweet and gentle to me in words of one syllable as though I were a peau-rouge56 at an orgy at Sceaux.
At present my day-dream enthusiams are
| Reinhardt’s plans | The poetry of Mörike57 | Nietzsche |
| Croce on 17th & 18thCentury Naples58 | The plays of Nestroy and Raimund59 | Walter Winchell |
| The music of Bruckner | The Barthian mov’mt60 | The new pieces of the Compagnie des Quinze61 |
It’s a little late for me to apologize for not having written you for so long; and to tell how much I enjoyed your letter written from the villa in the Goldoni-Casanova country62 I still hope that I may be near you in some continental town where we can have long walks and talks. You too are among my day dream enthusiasms: most people live haphazard, but you have been able to apply the same sense of form and style to your life that artists apply to the most secret and dedicated work of their midnight vigils: you apply direction and continuity and preparation and immediately effaced labor; and now look at your rewards: learning and great connaisseurship and friendships and immense usefulness.
Most sincerely yours
Thornton
The Faculty Exchange
University of Chicago
June 18 1933
<appeared in a circle above and next to the salutation>
Dear Ruth: Aleck arrived after this was written. He tells me you are back in this country. Wish that you were here or would at least pass through here en route to Calif. Weather to Aleck’s intense surprise is temperate and even cool. ¶ Mary Pickford wants me to write a play with her! ¶ Saturday Aleck, Kit, Gert and I are going to Genesee to sleep on army cots.63 Ever Thornton
A few weeks ago—one night—I telephoned to a whole series of addresses in New York trying to speak to you. I upset the Barbizon and the Barbizon-Plaza and the office downtown and finally all I could reach was your Banker’s Address.
I hope the difficulty meant that you had slipped quietly abroad and that this will find you in some delightful French or Swiss hotel,—and with a contract for some big part lying in the desk drawer. <appeared in the left margin next to preceding paragraph> Excuse formalism; not yet warmed up. T.W.
There’s nothing to tell about me. I became very discouraged about my university connection 2 week<s> ago. I decided to tell Bob H that I couldn’t come back for my two quarters next year after all. I teach worse and worse, instead of better. I talk awful rubbish. My days are dissipated amid so many types of activity that I cease to be anybody. Nothing I do has been sufficiently prepared. I go through life postponing thinking.
However I have been able to make some changes in the details of my life—place of residence, meals, hours etc and shall try again next year April to September. [I need the money for the running of Deep-wood Drive. I get $4,000 for a half-year, which is pretty good, considering that I can live here pretty cheaply myself. To be sure, if I settled down to write consistently I could make a good deal more than that, but I hate to feel any necessity-money aspect to my writing.] <appeared in left margin opposite bracketed passage> Confidential.
Kit is in town; two weeks run has been extended to four. Friday night she let me escort her to a big flashy party for George Gershwin that the Byfield’s gave in the cottage on top of the Sherman. The papers will have the announcement of her plans next Monday. November to April first repertory tour of all the one night stands of the middle west—Candida, Barrett’s, Romeo. Opens with Romeo in Buffalo. Imagine. Then New York City in April. Guthrie rehearses Sept. in New York. Owen Davis’s Jezebel, probably with Bankhead.64
Last Sunday afternoon Mrs Barnes65 and I drove up to see Alfred and Lynn. Gardening and painting their house. They were lovely and cordial.
Alex is coming this week to see the Fair.66 I am putting him up at our Quad Club Wed Thurs and Friday nights; then he goes to Genesee Depot. All this New York air suddenly blows through my academic round.
The Fair is not serious; but its fun. Artistically its one big lapse of taste, but on such a big scale that it becomes somehow important. I love it; I trudge all over those bright awkward acres, staring at my fellow-citizens. I see the back side of it: the immense personnel a little frantically earning a living, because scores of my students are selling hotdogs and pushing jin-rickshas and holding Information booths.
Janet graduated Phi B K and magna cum laude. The only Wilder to make the big grades. Amos got an honorary degree. Isabel has a lecture contract with Lee Keedick.67 Ma has been through a long protracted alarming cold (fatigue—monotony) but is better. Father is vague and may become a trained-nurse problem.
I go to fulfil the engagement at the University of Hawaii in the middle of November, so be sure and let me have your father’s address.68 All September I shall be in New Haven resuming work on Heaven’s my Destination and I hope slipping in to New York to see Jed rehearsing. Katherine Hepburn passed thru town the other day and talked to Mrs Barnes enthusiastically about Jed and The Lake. Jed’s happiness is one of the ingrediants of my happiness, and every hint of these plans gives me a good warming afternoon’s meditation. It seems to me that The Green Bay Tree will come wonderfully out of his hands.69
I shall be here through August. If there are any errands I can do for you in this country, please let me. Give all my best to Jed and if the mood should strike him some midnight to write me a letter I should be knocked over with joy. Give my regards also (French or English) to notre ami.70
And as for yourself a ton of admiration and deep regard.
Ever
Thornton
The University
Aug 7 1933
Dear Ned:
In asking to be forgiven for so long a silence, I can simply hurl myself on two things: your magnimminity and THIS LONG LETTER which is at once a request to be reinstated in your good books, and a mark of the joy that does lie in writing letters to you once one can get started.
Now I’m started. The joy has begun; and I make so bold as to feel the first steps of my forgiveness.
Yes, the Summer Quarter goes on and on. The students are now on an average of fifteen years older than my usual pupils. These Summer students take notes furiously; one ventures a harmless sally and a hundred pairs of owl’s eyes gaze, surprised and troubled, then bend over their notes and put it down.
That’s the Eight O’Clock Class (The Inferno and the Don Quixote); in the Composition Class (ten o’clock) they are no less earnest, only very timid about speaking up in class. There I wish I were back among the twenty-year-olds who write better stories and discuss them more spiritedly.
Nevertheless I’m enjoying the Summer term. I expected to be vexed and woeful because of the weather; but I find it not so bad after all. I enjoy the Fair, great silly American thing that it is; and I enjoy the visitors. Scarcely a day goes by without a letter or phone call to the effect that some old friend of mine (or my father’s<,> brother’s<,> sisters’) from China, California, Oberlin, Princeton, Lawrenceville, Yale, etc… is in town. I can’t take ’em all to the Fair, but I take some. And I enjoy it all.
Even Ruthie showed up.
(Gordon that is. 25 minutes between planes at the Air Field—two in the morning.
The finest girl in the world—sic—and the drollest and most original.)
Kit was here four weeks and Guthrie a day or two. Kit was finer than ever, but I had to see the play again—fifth time. I have the sensation of looking into the soul of Sidney Howard: just what he thinks about things; what he thinks about Art, and Love, and Men.71 That’s what repetition shows to me.
And if that is a very uncharitable remark on my part, please forgive it and put it down to the fact that my nerves are exacerbated by teaching for four months without one week’s intermission.
Aleck stayed for three days at our Quadrangle Club under my protection and was a great joy. After classes I would go over to his room and find him, immense and jocular, writing letters to his immense circle, reading in proofs all the books of his friends, doing this and doing that, perfectly happy and quite ready to tell some stories prodigiously well. Soon we would start off to the Fair and there in a Ricksha, his genial stomach pointing to heaven, he would weave about the grounds. He began by not liking the Exposition, but pretty soon it began to creep about his bones and he ended up loving it squarely to the square inch.
He and I went up to spend the weekend with the Lunts, and found them rested and busy and absorbed in little domestic momentous activities. Lynn learning French off gramaphone records—for what part?—and Alfred, rising at six to water the garden and weed it and simply to examine it judiciously. We lived practically Nudist, eating wonderful things playing anagrams and falling on the floor in coils over Aleck’s grave deliberations about Jed or Noel or Mrs Campbell or Dr Libmann or himself.72
I went up for another week-end at Janet Fairbank’s.73 Peggy Barnes was there and told me that you spent the Summers of your boyhood there, and I asked just where and took a walk toward it; and this, dear and incomparable Ned, is why I was so particularly moved:
The first weekend I spent at Lake Geneva I rose early Sunday morning and slipped out of the house for a long walk before breakfast. I took the path that ran along beside the lake at the bottom of the lawns. It was beautiful, of course, with early mist and horizontal sunlight and dew on the cobwebs, but I wondered why it was poignantly beautiful: and then suddenly I knew. It was more than that; it was the lake’s smell, and the particular seaweed moss on the stones at the water’s edge and the cray-fish holes beside the piers: that was my boyhood, too. Until the age of nine I lived in Madison Wisconsin and spent my Summers at Maple Bluffs on Lake Mendota, less than a hundred miles away. And though since then I have known lakes in England and China and Ohio—Carnegie Pond in Princeton and Lake Whitney and Lake Sunapee (very treasured, that one) and Lake Como and the Austrian lakes, none of them have that particular bundle of smells, nor those effects of light and air. My joy was an atavistic rediscovery.
And now to it has been added the news that you and I have the same standards for lakes; there we first heard waves lapping on shores with a sound that other lakes never quite repeat.
So call <us> cousins.
We’re related through the Lakes.
A great many grotesque things happen in my life.
One day I was working quietly away in my tower room when the phone rang.
“Thornton, darling, this is Texas. Thornton, I want you to do me a favor. But you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to—it won’t make any difference in our friendship; but if you feel you can, it would be a great favor to me.”
“Why, Texas, I’d be proud….”
“Well, lissen, do you know Colonel Moulton?”
[A former professor at the University, professor of astronomy, who went into business and finally became Director of Concessions at the World’s Fair—hot dog stands and Morrocan village etc.] I allowed I knew him slightly.
“Well, Thornton, I’m thinking of taking over the Dance Ship on the Midway, I and my Gang, and so, Thornton, he wants to know if I’m all right, if I keep an eye on my girls—and you know, Thornton, if they were my own daughters I couldn’t take better care of them. And all he knows is the worst about me, the headlines and all that ….. Now if you could write him a letter….”
So I wrote him a letter, making an honest woman of Texas Guinan74 and she got the job.
One day I found a telegram: “Have been trying to reach you by phone all day …. could you come to the Blackstone … Mary Pickford.”
There she was short, dumpy, speaking bad Kansas vowels, but still young and beautiful and inspiring tremendous confidence. Would I write a play with her; for Lillian Gish; a second part for her, if Miss Gish and I thought she could do it.
Then she told me the plot. The one kind of plot I couldn’t do anything with. She, whose sense of the theatre is sound as a bell in every department save one: now she must begin to be a heavy thinker and go in for theosophies and heavy-isms.
Contrast of the Orient and Ourselves. Two sisters in China. One goes to Paris and becomes “sophisticated.” We Westerners live nervous artificial lives; we drink too many cocktails.
And so on.
I went away very sad, but devoted to her.
September’s not far off. Save me an evening, Sir, about the 7th or 8th, because through all this diversity and spottiness and intermittence, I need to count more and more on the fixed and constant and unshakable friends of which rare community you are the Prince and high Example. And it is with that kind of dependence I sign myself
Your friend
Thornton
Hollywood Aug 29 1933
c/o Edington-Vincent, Inc. Equitable Building
After Sept 10 at Laos, thank God.
Dear Mabel:
How kind and patient you are with my apparent vagueness. You know that it is not mere shilly-shallying. The central enthusiasm of my Spring this year was that I was to spend August and September at Taos, under your humorous and disciplinary eye. Then came a telegram from Hollywood offering a salary that sent all the Wilders into yells of derisive laughter. No one was worth that much, no one. A month of it would have been sufficient to save Keats and Mozart combined from malnutrition to a happy old age. The Wilders don’t understand money, but they understand the fantastic. This money meant a trip to her ancestral Hebrides for mother; a relief from anxiety (imaginary, but real; imaginary, therefore real) during a protracted invalidism for father; summer in biological research stations for Janet; and for me, many warming little odds and ends to do during the six months at the University this Fall. For me also out here was always the invitation to look at and get into this gigantic hard-working “folk” industry.
Sam Goldwyn (Jupiter) called me out to add words to a former silent picture of Ronald Coleman’s<Colman’s> called “Dark Angel”. The other day however he asked me to write a new climatic closing scene to Anna Sten’s “We live again” (Tolstoi’s Resurrection).75 I did three scenes of it in all; the<y> have been “shot” and so I have had my baptism on the films.
Naturally I can hardly work because of the absorbing pressure of the contacts in town; imagine for instance my surprise and pleasure when Adrian76 showed us his movies of Taos.
So much to tell you.
I came here for four weeks, but Jupiter took up an option on two more, and implied that he would beg me to stay beyond. I work furiously to get it done so as to leave by the 8th. In the meantime the publishers press me to send the last unwritten chapter of my novel; and that must wait until I get into the glorious air of New Mexico.
I guess I’m the craziest most unstable least sérieux of your friends, but I <am>
devotedly and affectionately yours
Thornton
TNW and Mabel Dodge Luhan.
TNW and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Here
Today.
<Chicago>
<August(?) 1933>
Dear Aleck:
Enclosed Mr. Knickerbocker’s letter. In the same mail I received Martha Dodd’s thoughts about him. La belle Still-Waters-Run-Deep looked at him hard, I assure you.77
What! Not one creditable letter from the whole ricksha fleet?
No, not one.
[Generalization deduced: There is one race that is not to the swift. We homely hunchbacks, phthisic and bespectacled, learn to write so that the invisible readers think that in life we must be “Pard-like spirits beautiful and swift.”—Parenthesis ended.]
Please write and thank Joe Foster (Temple University, Philadelphia—now Daggett Roller Chair Co, C. of P.) for his letter. I told him I’d ask you to. Probably you’ve done it already, in which case forgive my bossy tone.
Friday came around and you weren’t in the New Yorker. Five days’ anticipation is really stunned by such a disappointment and the thought that your strength had gone into “The Snake in the Grass” was not consolation enough; nor was the appearance of the September Cosmopolitan with some pages that fatten without enhancing my Big Treasured portfolio of your work.78 The Fridays are lately so surpassing one another that to miss one seems a loss that later regularity cannot repair.
Is your play going to be put on at the Music Box Theatre by Sam Harris with one of those smooth productions that smell of Valspar79 or is a bit of it here and there to be left to the imagination of the audience? My students (yes, in the Dante-Cervantes class) stop at the end of the hour to tell me how they loved “Dinner at Eight” and asking me to comment on it in class, and all I can think of is an Italianate chauffer hissing his jealousy to a lady’s maid up in the boudoir.80
I guess I’m cranky today.
Jed telegraphed me to meet him at the airport Saturday for a twenty-minute talk, but I was at Lake Geneva and missed him. I’m doubly sorry, because I’ve found the actor to play Mr. Dulcimer.81
Aleck, did I ever tell you about that American sixteen years old who stopped to see some friends in Dublin; the friends were helping make scenery at the Gate Theatre, so he helped swab a flat or two; when the part of the Duke in Jew Süss82 couldn’t be filled they persuaded him to take it and he was so wonderful that the whole town was staggered; so they had him play Othello and it was wonderful beyond belief: the Abbey then broke all tradition and asked him to play Lord Porteous in The Circle83 to continued consternation. He—still sixteen—was so confused and humiliated by all the praise and interest (It’s not hard to act: all you do is have fun putting on a make-up, then you go on the stage and say the lines) that he resolved to leave town and never act again. So he said goodbye to the Gate, playing both Hamlet’s father and stepfather and such power and authority and fascination had never been seen.
He left the stage to become a writer. He’s now eighteen; has a long play about John Brown. I gave him one of those galvanizing talks (that are really directed at myself) and now he wants to act again. Armed with my letters he is soon going to New York. Apparently its something daemonic: he is a rather pudgy-faced youngster with a wing of brown hair falling into his eyes and a vague Oxford epigrammatic manner; the pose is from his misery and soon drops under a responsible pair of eyes like mine. The name is Orson Wells84 and it’s going far. Are you interested?
That’s not the only wunderkind either. The just-graduated Senior John Pratt85 who did the wall decoration in the Tap Room of Alpha Delta Phi (did I show you those) came in last night with two portfolios of wonderful witty macabre drawings that would throw you into an ecstacy. There’s one of a Greek candy store with a soda-fountain in fake marble and a trellis full of paper roses and a stack of candy boxes with red silk ribbons that would throw you into an (—I said that before). And an Ascension in which some very odd angels are heaving a soul up to Heaven with the greatest difficulty.
Harvard and Yale and Princeton stew in their sad defeatist juice. These boys matured from inside outward instead of vice versa. They come from Wisconsin and Indiana respectively. And in ten years the United States will be the most stirring, comic, gay and truthful country in the world. ¶ Have a happy time working, and every now and then look out of the window in a sudden abstraction and remember that I am devoted to you and my name is
Thornton
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven Conn
January 18 1933<1934>
Dear Dwight:
This is a belated report. I am back from Hawaii. They paid me on the spot, though it required some special transaction on their part to prevent my being paid in script or something.
Boni knows that I expect to put most or all of my MS in their hands by April first; but they also know me well enough not to go forging ahead with promotion until they’re sure I’ve finished.
Cass Canfield of Harpers’ moans about, hoping that something will happen that will bring the text to him. If Boni’s can’t pay a just advance etc.
You’ll be horrified to know the money I have been turning down. The Chicago Herald Examiner wanted me to come out and do a daily report of the Wynkoop Murder Trial.87 The Holliday Tours want me to go on a very de luxe yacht trip of the Greek Islands—seven weeks from New York to New York. The Spring Tour has Mrs Astor and Dowager Vanderbilt—that kind of tour—me to give half an hour talk every morning in the lounge on things Greek. Expenses and.
Now telegrams are passing to the effect that I go to Hollywood and write up Joan of Arc for Katherine Hepburn (Merion Cooper-George Cukor set-up—very choice, the group that did “Little Women”.)88 Rosalie Stewart agent, very superior, will get the money she thinks I deserve and a three months guarantee. Presumably Mid-June to Mid-Sept. I shall take that if it’s offered to me.
Lee Keedick will send you in a few days the money from the St. Louis lecture. Enclosed (sep. cover) divers chicken-feed, forgive my delay. I have five hundred dollars in the Chicago Bank, if you need any of it to ciment the cracks in the New Haven Bank.
If the movie plan doesn’t turn out, Mabel Dodge Luhan of Taos, New Mexico, has offered me a house for the summer near her, with the invitation to meals up at her ranch.
Isabel’s novel will also and more certainly be done April first.89
Greetings etc.
Sincerely yours
Thornton
Railroad: approaching Lamy <New Mexico>
May 15 1934
After April 2, Univ. of Chicago
Dear Mabel:
Here I am again, hanging out of the window, looking at the country I already claim as “well-known” to me. I wish I could stop, but I’m off on one of those loony unsoundly-motivated errands of mine. I’ve been called to Hollywood for two weeks of “conversations” about Joan of Arc (Jeannette D’ay, to her). We’re to assemble a movie about her for the use of Katherine Hepburn. Then I take train again and rush from the station to take up my first classes. I’m craw-crammed with lore about the Maid; she certainly was wonderful beyond words, but I don’t know whether I’m very excited about the projected movie. I accepted the call because it appealed to all that’s worst in me, I suppose,—the love of <the> trip, the joy of accepting an interruption and evasion from duty (the completion of my novel), the curiosity of seeing new faces and new moeurs.90 I agree with Muriel that the Lord has turned his face away from Southern California and laid upon it the punishment that Friedell said He laid upon the Renaissance: he <has> taken their souls away. But how interesting that makes it; worth going these thousand miles to see.
If the forty page outline of the movie which I am required to prepare after these conversations, inspires the Powers with any confidence that I have a knack for such things I am to be recalled in the early summer to write the picture and be present during its shooting. And that news came just as I was on the point of writing you that I was willing to override my feeling of obligation to the MacDowell Colony, and was asking you to let me come to Taos.
It still seems likely that I may. During these two weeks they can pick my brains and throw me away like a squeezed orange. I’m willing. Then some other hands can come in and show Jeanne falling in love with the Due d’Alençon (Percy MacKaye) or Dunois (Schiller), doing what neither the British goddams nor Cauchon himself ventured to believe.91
This leaves my coming to Taos in doubt, but do not let it inconvenience you in the matter of the disposition of the guest-house. All I will ask of you, if it will be possible for me, will be your encouragement to come to the town.
Very little has happened since I saw you. For the most part I sat up in my study playing solitaire, keeping strict the statistics of the Viennese theatres and writing my novel. I took one “unsoundly-motivated” trip to an adventurous little college in North Carolina. (22 students and 14 faculty members, none of the latter receiving a cent of salary. The college broke away from Henry Holt’s in Florida with a loud academic scandal.)92 Every now and then I sallied into New York for a few days among the New York wits (Alex Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, Marc Connolly) or the theatre people (Jed Harris, Ruth Gordon).
Muriel93 had lunch with me one day, but I had something contrary on my mind that day and I must have been a wretched companion. She seemed very well and full of life, though in suspense about the publisher’s opinion of her book.
¶ When Jeanne was assembling her armor she told some of her company that they would find her sword behind the altar of the Church of St. Catherine of Fierbois at Tours. And sure enough there it was covered with dust. They asked her if she had ever seen it: she said no, but that her Voices had told her about <it>. She carried <it> in many engagements, and guess where it suddenly broke into pieces: while she was whacking with the flat blade of it, the poor prostitutes who hung about the camp. Even Tolstoi couldn’t have thought up that detail.
As a person she was certainly a saint; as a historical phenomen<on>, she was certainly a case of supernatural intervention.
Well, I wish I could stop off here and talk to you all evening about her, you knitting beside the fire of piñon wood. Perhaps late Summer we can climb into the car and go down and see it.
Give my regard to Tony; and count me among your happiest and most devoted visitors.
Sincerely yours
Thornton
University of Chicago
May 16 1934
Dear Dwight:
Thank you for the annual statement. Contents noted.
Enclosed find FIRST MOVIE contract. I submitted the treatment within the date indicated. Telegram rec’d from head of Agency Firm (Edington, Vincent, Inc. Equitable Bldg. Hollywood.) “Entire office enthusiastic about your magnificent treatment of Joan of Arc.” They passed it on in twenty mimeographed copies to the firm of RKO which is now, under Clause 4, ¶ 2, required to notify me as to whether they liked it enough to call me back under the option. If they rec’d the treatment, say on May 5th, they must get word to me within two weeks—that is: by Sunday. Then I have ten days to decide whether I want to go back and work on it for a measely $13,500. And I guess I will. It will be a good picture.
Clause 4 troubles me a little. I must furnish completed work within sixty days of their notifying me. I meant: within sixty days of my being at liberty from University work. However if by the letter of the contract I could do it by July 18, although I would prefer doing it by 60 days from June 17. Anyway they’re a very friendly and enlightened firm (Merion C. Cooper, Lawrenceville School, is King; and 1st Lieut. is Kenneth MacGowan,94 long one of the best dramatic critics in N.Y.)
I sent Bonis and Longman’s the first six chapters of my novel and am now polishing off the next six; after that two more to follow.
Many thanks as ever
Sincerely yours
Thornton.
P.S. Last week Ickes offered Bob H. the post of Commissioner for Education for the U.S.A. Bob refused, partly because the salary was insufficient even to pay his insurance. N.B. He ought to have a J. Dwight Dana in his life to give him the sensation of having private means. ¶ P.S. 2: my regards to your partner and my best wishes for the new firm.95 P.S. 3: Last week I turned down Thousands. Sixty four of the greatest banks in the country have taken a nation-wide radio-hook-up hour. Music—Tibbett, Bori etc.96 and talks to persuade a singed public that the banks are nice kind institutions that love their depositors. I was to deliver pocket sermons and tabloid success stories of farmers’ boys who ROSE. I felt I had your permission to refuse that “opportunity for usefulness.”
T.
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven Conn.
July 1 1934
Dear Mr. Albers:
It was fine to hear from you and to know that your work goes on (and now in oil and in wood carving!) and that you have been finding continual audiences for the work here and abroad.
I am very ashamed of not having written you before. My delay was due to the fact that so far my efforts had been met with disappointment. The approaches I made to introduce your work in Chicago (The Arts Club and a dealer of modern art) were met always with the greatest interest, but with the word that one must wait: all the long difficult fight to persuade people to learn abstract painting has been done in the French school; and that they are not ready yet to adjust their eyes to that wholly new series of approaches which is the German abstract. Braque, Picasso and Gris and Léger have only recently become “classics” in Chicago, and the “Governors of the Public Taste” are going to consolid<at>e those victories first.
Similarly, I have talked with Daniel Rich of the Art Institute School of your distinguished teaching gifts. I shall have an opportunity to repeat and insist during the Summer for I hear that he will be in New Mexico when I am there.
However I am very happy to help you approach Mr. Harshe.98 I don’t remember ever having met him, but I probably must have at one time for a minute at some function or other.
It is only a matter of time and patience until you find the audiences and appreciation over here that your gifts have found in Europe. I shall continue to work on the matter in such ways as my contacts permit and hope someday to have a small share in the pride of having been useful to you.
Please give my regard to Mrs Albers and receive my thanks again for the help your methods and your work gave me in understanding the modes of art that lie ahead of us in the next century.
Sincerely yours
Thornton
<Hollywood, California>
Aug. 25 1934
Dear Gairls
Suddenly there was a flurry Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Goldwyn wanted Paul Green and me to see the just finished “We Live Again”99 (Tolstoi’s Resurrection). Something was wrong with it; and we were to tell him what it was. Well, we told him,—the ending was suddenly, cheaply unpreparedly happy. “Gentlemen, I throw myself on your mercy. I want you each” (including Praskins the original author of the script) “to write a big closing scene. We have only one day to shoot it—Friday, because Fredric March” (who plays Dmitri) “is going to Tahiti and can only give us one day’s work.”
Well, we all went off into different corners and wrote the scene. I appeared with mine at 3:00 on Thursday. The plan was to pool the best points of all three scenes, but the final scene was almost entirely mine. But it took from 3:00 to half past eleven to cut it and shape it in endless long conferences <and> at last it was done; we were all dog-tired but happy. Then one of the under-executives entered with the expression of greatest gloom: “Miss Sten has just telephoned that she has a pimple on her nose.”
It wasn’t funny; it was tragic.
The shooting took place the next day. The pimple was indubitably there, right on the end of her nose. Her close-ups could be taken after March’s absence, but the shots with them both in couldn’t be taken closer than eight feet, which greatly damaged the intimacy and intensity of the scene.
As usual they took the scene twenty-thirty times. March had had to memorize my lines at 8:00 o’clock and play them at 10:00 and kept forgetting them.
Anyway, I am baptized in the movies. My first lines have gone over, directed by Reuben Mamoulian.
Mr. Goldwyn met me in the corridor and said he had seen the film; that it was a very beautiful scene; that it topped everything that preceded it; that he was very grateful to me.
Draw your conclusions.
Charles Laughton was rushed off to the hospital and operated on for an abcess in the rectum.
I am calling on him this afternoon.
Today is Sat and I am driving up to the Mt Wilson observatory to see the nebula in Andromeda. (Going with Dick Hemingway an ex-pupil at Lawrenceville: I gave him 28 on the final exam: he is now a contract player at Columbia.)
Ruthie-the-Pooh leaves for N.Y. next Tuesday and a wonderful part in the first Guild Play.100 In the meantime she is being given very elaborate tests at Metro—four of them.
I think I leave for Taos Sept 10.
I just got your letter about Isabel’s being up and about again. Never to swim? All yesterday I thought about her book’s coming out and have orders in 3 stores here, but they are slow getting here.
A thousand salutes & best wishes.
Ever
Thornt.
Chateau Elysee Hollywood
Sept 2 1934
Dear and splendid Charles,
No wonder they discourage visitors when the visitors are as excitable as I was on my last visit, one minute enthralled by medical stories and the next minute overcome by something plus forte que moi.101 At any event I earn my living by my imagination and if every now and then it takes things into its own hands, it’s not for me to complain.
I have been very eager to come and call on you to show you these two clippings from the Neues Wiener Journal (Sept. 12 and 19th).
You said you admired Raimu102 and here is Raimu admiring you. He is being interviewed in Paris by an unnamed correspondent:
<clipping pasted into the letter:>
Und was sagt der Schauspieler? “Ich gehe gern ins Kino,” erzählt Raimu, der unbestrittene Liebling der Pariser, ”um mich zu sehen. Auch gestern sah ich mir den Korda-Film “Das Privatleben Heinrichs VIII.” an.”—“Wieso?” frage ich erstaunt, “Den Heinrich im Korda-Film spielen doch nicht Sie, sondern Charles Laughton!”—“Pas Possible!” entsetzt sich Raimu. “Ich sagte mir während der ganzen Dauer des Films: das kann nur ein einziger Schauspieler so blendend spielen und dieser Schauspieler bin ich…”
“And what does the actor say? ‘I enjoy going to the movies,’ says Raimu, the uncontested favorite of the Parisians, ‘in order to see myself. Only yesterday I was looking at myself in the Korda film The Private Life of Henry VIII.’ ‘What!’ I cried, amazed, ‘it wasn’t you who played Henry, but Charles Laughton!’ ‘Not possible!’ replied Raimu, ‘the whole time the film was going on I kept saying to myself: there’s only one actor who can play as dazzlingly as that, and that one actor is myself.<’>”
The second clipping is from an interview with Stefan Zweig:
<clipping pasted into the letter>
“Das Privatleben Heinrichs VIII.” etwa, in dem sich Charles Laughton zu einem der populärsten Schauspieler der Welt emporarbeitete. Laughton, der übrigens in der Verfilmung meines Buches über “Maria Antoinette” mit Norma Shearer die führende Rolle spielen wird, könnte heute selbst in der europäischen Hauptstädten Haftspiele bei vollen Häusern veranstalten, ein Wagnis, das sich vor ihm kein anderer englischer Schauspieler leisten konnte.
“The Private Life of Henry VIII. for example, in which Charles Laughton has elevated himself to being one of the most popular actors in the world. Laughton, who moreover will, with Norma Shearer play the leading rôle in the picturization of my book Marie Antoinette would be able today to fulfill guest performances to full houses in all the capitals of the Europe, a venture which before him no English actor could undertake.”103
I’m not so sure of my words in this translation, but that’s the general idea.
I hope you’ll be out and well again before long. I’m as eager to see the Ruggles as I am the Barrett.104 When I realized the other day that it was your Epikhodov I saw, the breath went out of me in my pleasure at adding a new item to my collection:
Cherry Orchard
Silver Tassie
Pickwick
Payment Deferred
Fatal Alibi
and the movies:
Payment Deferred
(in a submarine with Tallulah Bankhead and Cary Grant)105
Henry VIII
But then what a lot I’ve missed.
Bella Gordon got off, leaving Bella Hayes106 terribly solitary. Bella Gordon’s tests at MGM dazzled the powers over there and I think something big will come of them. Bello Wilder’s life goes on much as usual. Tuesday he must turn in a WHOLE SCRIPT of an intermittently interesting movie to Jupiter Goldwyn. Tell Bella Lanchester107 that Wednesday night I am going to Jupiter’s dinner for Prospero Reinhardt and then I shall get the man’s own ear to sow the 20th and last of my urgent persuasions that God and Shakespeare’s own Puck is right in town. Also tell Bella Lanchester to call me at once if there is any book you want, any errand I can do, etc.
I hope earnestly that you are already well restored, that you are tranquil in mind, that in the long stretches when you are alone you turn over in your mind all the wonderful creations of the imaginations that you were sent into the world to perform, and that you realize that you are surrounded by the thoughts of so many that admire you as an artist and love you as a person,—among whom remember
Your devoted friend
Thornton
1934 SEP 8 PM 6 48
HOLLYWOOD CALIF 8 31 8P
MRS AMOS WILDER =
50 DEEPWOOD DR NEWHAVEN CONN = WAS OFFERED AND TURNED DOWN SOLO JOB ON NEXT GARBO PICTURE STOP ROLLER SKATED WITH WALT DISNEY TAOS NEXT TUESDAY LOVE = THORNTON.
September 29, 1934
Harper & Brothers
49 West 33rd Street
New York, NY.
Dear Sirs:
I hereby consent to the assignment and transfer by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., to you of the book rights in the United States and Canada, first serial rights and the manuscript so far as it has been completed, of my new novel entitled “Heaven’s My Destination”, it being understood that in consideration of such assignment and of my consent thereto you assume and agree to perform all of the undertakings of said Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., contained in the written agreement between said Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., and myself, dated July 18. 1934, in so far as they relate to the rights thus assigned to you.109
Very truly yours,
Thornton N. Wilder
The best University
Oct 7 1934
Dear Mabel:
You will be astonished to hear that I am happy. Yes, ma’am,—partly the after-effect of the breadth and clarity of the days in your valley, and the breadth and clarity of your nature, and partly the warming absurdity of two things that happened since I returned here. The first of these (confidentialissimo) was that President Roosevelt asked Bob Hutchins to leave the university for nine months and assume the directorship of the whole NRA.110 The absurdity of that call does not lie in any inadequacy on Bob’s part; nor in any difficulty of the job itself. It lies in the spectacle of how the world works; how merit finds its own level; how the threads of life—I first knew Bob as a gangling evangelist’s son being elected to the presidency of my Freshman class at Oberlin, Ohio, and have known him ever since in hot water with a large company of bystanders continually predicting his downfall,—cross and recross. There is something beautiful and lyrical to the Comic Spirit about the emergence of certain threads from the shuffling and reshuffling of apparently aimless circumstances. And for that something I can only find the word Absurdity. Bob wrote the President a letter of acceptance asking however for a more distinct statement of his powers. We will know today or tomorrow whether it is settled. Then Bob and Maude, two rather lonely young souls, beautiful as pards, articulated like race-horses, will move to Washington,—Bob indifferent to the fact that the post is unlovely, doomed to checkmate at best, dangerous,—grateful aware only that it is difficult, unboring. C’est beau! C’est tres beau!111
Similarly I was called up from New York the other day. William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies have just arrived in the country, filled with an impassioned idea: Marion Davies wants to do Twelfth Night in the movies.112 Will I prepare the script? Will I assume the audacity of writing additional dialogue? Of course, I will. I’m an adventurer; that means: that all the values of life fluctuate. One minute honor and decorum seem to be a worthy price to pay; the next minute impulse seems superior to society’s respect; One minute art’s discipline; the next minute, observing and interfering. The fact that such a curious nexus as an ex-follies girl and a newspaper millionaire who pathetically adores her and Wm. Shakespeare and myself should appear is more interesting than all the dignity and artistic honor in the world. Uncle Pio is the most loving portrait I ever made of myself—not Chrysis.113 ¶ Since in the 20th Century the Sublime has departed the earth, let us at least cherish the beautiful image of the ridiculous.
The next night.
In a few minutes I shall call New York to ask Ruth Gordon how her great opening tonight went.114
A few weeks ago Maude Hutchins was in New York. Leonard Hanna115 invited her out to lunch. He inquired whether she would like to meet anyone else. She, Marie-Antoinette-disdainful said: “No, no—I don’t want to meet anyone else.” Later Leonard told her he had thought of having her meet Ruth Gordon; and Maude was cut to the heart with regret and remorse: that was the one person in the world she wanted to look at. ¶ For years I have jokingly said goodnight to Maude with the words: “You’re the second finest girl in the world”, and she always knew that I meant she was only surpassed by Ruth.
I told all this to La Gordon adding: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a second best crown.”
She telegraphed back: “I loved your letter.”
No wonder!
After I left you in Santa Fé I went to the Santa Fé Art Gallery and then took a nap. I bought my ticket for the Chief that night, and went to dinner at Witter Bynner’s.116 There was a considerable company: The Knees, McCarthy, that writing woman, etc.117 After dinner Witter read from his satirical sonnets. The reception was sycophantic and tongue-tied. I grew more and more sombre. Finally my opinion was asked. You would have been proud of your little Thornton (né Caspar Milquetoast). For once in my life I spoke up. I said they were not only monotonous in form and cadence, but in attitude. The average reader—in spite of the brilliant verbal coinage—would finally push out his lip in repudiation. “You have invective without passion and yet analysis without objectivity.” I tried not to be too harsh to Witter among his idolators but he got the idea that the portrait of the portraitist emerges from the portraits as even more unlovely than the sitters.
The Knees drove me to the train,—Mrs Knee is a gracious very-young presence.
The observation car of the Chief takes on the quality of the smoking-car of an ocean-liner. I played craps with John Boles, Francis X Shields and Jacques Catelier.118 If you don’t know who these world figures are, ask Spud.119
Tomorrow at nine I give a lecture on the Second Canto of the Inferno—Beatrice, the Virgin Mary and Virgil. Isn’t that ridiculous? The earth is old; the mind of man is crammed with a strange hodgepodge; let us extract from it what intellectual delight we may from a sheer admiration of its strangeness.
Give my deep regard to Tony. I sincerely hope he can call on me when he comes to town. The telephone in my new apartment is Midway 7030. If I’m not in, telephone messages can be left for me at the office of the apartment house downstairs Dorchester 7080.
Today I mailed some Bach-Stokowski gramaphone records to Brett,120 in your care. Do play them over before you pass them on: they represent my religious ideas: sentimental, personal anthropomorphic, intimate. My notion of God is much like that of a negro revivalist, and Bach’s wasn’t far from it. There are two pieces of music I would like to be performed at my funeral (Westminster Abby) Weelkes’ madrigal “ ‘Happy, oh happy he’ who despising earth’s rewards, lives far from<”> etc and Bach’s last choral prelude “Schmucke dich, oh meine Seele”—’adorn thyself, oh my soul’—
Well, it’s two o’clock in New York and Ruth hasn’t got home from her curtain calls yet.
I have been scouring the town for some very good chocolates to send you.
Ma’am, I am bound to you in great admiration and affection all my life and am
devotedly yours
Thornton
Faculty Exchange
University of Chicago
Oct 13 1934
Dear Mrs. Frantz:
What’s become of all my hopes and plans to come into New Jersey, look at my old homes, take my accustomed walks and greet my friends again? Apparently this division of my life between Chicago and New Haven is cutting down my chances of free impulsive excursions. I no longer get to Peterborough in the summers, either; and now a new element has entered: I work in Hollywood a few months every year. I am very interested in the movies as a form; I am working very hard at its peculiar technique, and after a few years of apprenticeship I hope to be allowed a chance to write one that is all myself and all deeply felt. Besides it has fallen upon me to sustain several members of my family and the earnings out there are a great help.
The Fall Quarter has been going for two weeks. I enjoy the teaching as much as ever; am very proud of the university and its wunder-kind president.
I was so dilatory in handing in the closing pages of my novel that I am afraid the publishers will not be able to get it out by Xmas. Once a book is written I lose all interest in its further journey—its cover, its promotion, its appearance. The publishers go insane over my delays; at heart they enjoy that kind of worry and all the scheming that goes with salesmanship.
A good deal of the book is tough, full of bad words and life’s unlovelier traps; but I hope you will see that none of the coarseness is there for cheap display. The subject of the book goes quietly on under the surface din: the earnest humorless undefeated hero trying to live an extravagantly idealistic life in the middle of a cynical defeatist world—a Gideon-Bible travelling salesman. On the title page I placed the motto from The Woman of Andros so that readers wouldn’t think it was merely a rowdy comic book—“Of all forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age”—namely priggishness, preachiness, confusion etc. I hope it will be somehow useful to a lot of troubled young people.
Has your St. Bernard grown up to be enormous? Have you grown accustomed to the High Church ritualism at the First Church?
Give my best to Janet and Alison. When my Greek gets better I shall write a letter in it to Alison and she can return it with red-pencil corrections.
When Sunday evenings you sing the Blake hymn or the one about “The day thou gavest now is ended” with its long loping melodic line, remember me and my great pleasure in being at any time in your company.
Always devotedly and affectionately yours
Thornton
University of Chicago
Oct 25 1934
Dear Da:
Many thanks for your notes.
Please do not think I am sensitive about which secretaries share our correspondence. I am grateful also to anyone who is kind enough to help you.122 I have never had any sense of secrecy about any of my affairs.
I am glad you say you are pretty well. I am feeling fine—but by Friday afternoon of every week I am ready for a rest. ¶ I wish I could get back to the geneological shelves of the Yale Library and polish up that Houghton ancestry. ¶ Rumors have begun to tell me that my new book will find friends. ¶ Am looking forward to Isabel’s visit. Mrs Hobart Johnson asked us both up to Madison for Sunday night, but Isabel will arrive too late for it. Mrs Johnson spoke of you with great regard and affection and sends cordial greetings
Isabel will sleep in the bedroom of my nice little apartment and I shall snooze away in the sittingroom. I leave the house for WORK at seven and I hope she’ll sleep until ten and get a big rest. ¶ I will talk to her on the subject you mention; and then she can talk to me on the subject you dictated to her. We are both over THIRTY years old, but we will talk to one another as tho’ we were seventeen and we will come out very sensible, cautious, joyless and shrewd.
Bob Hutchins spends much time in earnest talk with Pres. Roosevelt. What’s going to come of it, I don’t know. ¶ Good Alex Woollcott is in town and I’m going down to dinner with him. ¶ I love my classes, and my classes like me. ¶ I’ve given up worrying
anxiety
nail-biting
and I hope you have too.
I hope my twelve sons will one day remember me as smiling and serene. In my house no one will be permitted to mention MONEY. ¶ The view from my window is very beautiful,—mostly sky.
yr. loving son
Thornton
The University of Chicago
December 9, 1934, a Sunday.
Dear Dwight:
This is your crazy client speaking.
Sometime before Christmas you’ll get a long distance phone call from New York; a certain John Ely will want to make an appointment with you.
He wants me to be the editor of a class woman’s magazine. Like Good Housekeeping, only with the new unstuffy realistic smartness that is coming across the urban mind and that has been developed by the New Yorker and Time. There have been countless disasters in the effort to bring out a new magazine; only two have succeeded since 1900, the two named above. All the rest, especially in the woman’s world, are old and are gradually slipping and getting out of touch with the new mentality. Mr Ely’s will be forwarded for a selected superior clientele, beginning gradually.
Ely’s own business is selling advertising and promoting schemes. He claims to be the last word in the engineering power of space-selling to advertisers. He claims complete ignorance about the editorial end; but how he can sell space. We’ll make a million in no time; yes, sir.
He has all the figures to show you, with the plans for selling stock and so on. He claims I would have to put no money in it myself, beyond buying one of the four hundred shares. All profits he divides equally with me. He has a complete staff of women under me experienced in food products, fashion ad<v>ice etc. All I do is lend my name, build in ideas, select the fiction, and have an editorial talent in choice of illustrators, jokes, and so on.
There’s no pressure on you or me to accept it. But I wish you’d listen to him and look over the diagrams.
Why should I even consider it? For the same reason that I go to Hollywood: adventure, color, the exhilaration of even pretending that I have a part to play in the immense bright stream of Twentieth Century activities. These things have no relation to my midnight secret life of literary composition. I’m Jekyll and Hyde. With the side of me which is not Poet, and there’s lots of it, I like to do things, meet people, restlessly experiment in untouched tracts of my Self, be involved in things, make decisions, pretend that I’m a man of action.
We have made no commitments. Listen to his story; see if its sound as business; the only thing we risk is its being dull.124
(Thornton Wilder)125
<Chicago>
<March 1935>
Dear and royal Les:
What a louse I am.
But the Bible commands you to forgive me 70 × 7 and I, the louse, greedily point to it and profit.
“I think,” “as far as I know”, “probably” “very likely” I shall be back April first 1936 to teach the Spring Quarter. The University has now given me one year off—April to April. Maybe with plays on Broadway or something or other I shall not return. But I don’t know any reason now why I shouldn’t, except that I teach worse and worse in the classroom itself—tho’ if I do say it, I get better and better as a “campus character” in general circulation, accessible to all comers. Some mornings I rise up and swear that I shall never teach again, that I must go away and become a writer etc. Other days I rise up and love it, the everything, the classes, the tumult on the stairs of Cobb Hall.
What a silly pathless creature I am.
People are still writing to tell me of their contempt for my book “that I made fun of religion to earn money for myself.”126
Amos had a kind of nervous breakdown. CONFIDENTIAL. Phobias and tics. Started off by intestinal flu. He feels much better now.
I didn’t give Geo Brush enough of the intermittent moments of joy and reassurance. They are his due. The diagram of goodness was falsified by not exhibiting also its occasional inner reward. That was very bad of me; I was so intense about his troubles that I didn’t think of it. SO my next book won’t be harrowing: it will give pleasure. ADSIT DEUS.127
At present I am the secretary, errand boy-companion of Gertrude Stein who is teaching here for two weeks—a great, sensible, gallant gal and a great treat.128
Yes, yes, we’ve been narrowing religion. I’ve been reading Goethe.129 For a time we can go out among the vaguer theists and pan- theists and borrow for a while the Alpine airs of their cosmos-wide views; then come back to our personal aspects again without being harmed. It will be the right pendulum swing from the 19th century thing, that was so closely “God told me I should give up tobacco.”
It’s twelve-thirty. I must lecture on the Antigone at 800 tomorrow. I must send you back to your spiritual exercize of “forgiving”. All my best to Georgie & the chillun.
Love me beyond my desserts or however it’s spelled.
Ever
Thorny
University of Chicago
April 9 1935
Dear Dwight:
Don’t be mad.
I gotta do this.
There’s a very brilliant student here, in philosophy and metaphysics.
His father’s a superintendant in Swift’s, but he has a large family and can’t do very much for the young man who must go abroad for a year’s study rather than stew along in our Grad. School which is very poor in Philosophy.
I would like you as soon as possible to send $60000 to
Fred. R. Davis
6827 Dante St
Chicago
with a word that you had been asked to do it by Wilder for the further education of his son Robert.
Mr. Davis, Sr, and Mrs Davis have already talked this over with me and know that it is coming.
I assure you this is a very brilliant investment in the future. Two of his profs have already told him that he has struck upon a developement in the theory of Time that seems extremely important and Gertrude Stein had a talk with him on it (metaphysics is one of her preoccupations, too) and she told me she thought he was remarkable.
So concede me this.
I’m sending you some other material on other matters, (royalties etc) tomorrow.
Ever sincerely
Thornton
University of Chicago
April 16 1935
Dear Mr. Gannett:
I’ve had a minor nervous shake-down lately and dare not fling myself into a long letter about my enthusiasm for this university. I went to Yale and did graduate work at Princeton; through some friends I have seen a good deal of Harvard. The classical American education as viewed on the Eastern seaboard is really all wrong: it trains (in imitation of England) for a ruling class; America has no such thing. It trains for a 19th Century image of what is Important, True and Beautiful. Their very buildings as architecture educate badly. And the faint steam of money that rises from everything, (the Morgan Bros partners among the trustees—Yale spent 33,000<,>000 on buildings alone during the depression), the gentility tone, the dilettante radicalism, the unvital view of taste,—all 19th Century.
We live in the 2nd most beautiful city in the world; and the city most characteristic of what the next 50 years will be like. We are very contemporaneous. Hutchins has drawn a curriculum directed squarely at his picture of a gifted, realist, excited student. North, West and South of us are great universities with over 10,000 students each—Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Illinois—we have 3,000 undergrads and 3,000 grads.—They are free, famous for their football and fraternity racket-ting and for their laxity in class-grades. We cost 100 dollars a quarter; have long had lamentable football and have a reputation for being difficult in studies: so by natural selection only those students who have heard about the intellectual life come to us. We have had 5 Nobel prizemen on the faculty and the atmosphere of no-nonsense austerity in the Grad schools has drifted down through the whole mass. Hence we are a slightly cold-hearted university; of a laboratory unsentimentality.
Think it over.
We are bad for certain kinds of students, I confess; but hundreds of them thrive on it.
Yours for the whistling high airs of the 20th Century.
Selah!131
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
July 5 1935
c/o American Express Co
Rue Scribe
Paris, France
Dear Mr. Frazier:
Please forgive my delay in answering your letter. My teaching schedule all Spring at the University of Chicago was so hard that I finally got a little shaken in health because of it. I obtained a year’s leave of absence and am now sufficiently recovered to take up my correspondence again.
Your letter interested me very much and on the whole I am sympathetic with your & George Brush’s position. I hope that in a rereading of the book you have been able to see that I am not making fun of the hero. His instinctive goodness and his instinctive view of what is essential in living is far superior to the groups among which he moves. But I hold that he has been badly educated—badly educated even in religion. The fundamentalist tradition in American protestantism has made into fixed hard unimaginative laws the substance of the Gospel. All that is censorious, literal and joyless in the Calvinistic-Methodist-Baptist tradition is based upon a misreading of the New Testament and a failure to see that most of that tone in the Old Testament is expressly superceded in the New.
However I meant George Brush to be seen as learning in episode and episode better how to render his instinctive goodness and unworldliness effective. It’s an Education Novel. I didn’t write the close clearly enough, I see now: I meant to show George Brush disappearing into the distance still doing many things that are absurd in the eyes of the average hardboiled citizen, but nevertheless exhibiting the advance he had made over the position he held in the opening pages.
I intended that everyone should find something of his or her self in George Brush,—and of the best of themselves, too. I know that much of my father and my brother and myself is there, and many people recognize themselves in him. I was very glad to get your word to the same effect, and hope a second reading will remove your feeling that I wrote it to make fun of great and good qualities
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
Salzburg Austria. Sept. 13. <1935>
Next Tuesday (and then until Xmas) c/o
American Express Co.
Vienna.
Dear Mabel:
I’m not only a silly fellow; I am downright crazy.
How could I have written you the enclosed letter and then never mailed it.
Now you will have reams of letter and that is no favorable light for any letter writer.
Paris was no more lovable than I had expected; but the Italian Art Show132 was very wonderful indeed.
I stayed eight days with Gertrude Stein at Bilignin. Automobile trips in the environs; an intense preoccupation with two dogs; Alice B Toklas’s sublime housekeeping; and Gertrude Stein’s difficult magnificent and occasionally too abstract and faintly disillusioned alpine wisdom about the Human Mind, identity, the sense of time and How we Know. I am devoted to both of them, but in the presence of Gertrude’s gifts one must occasionally scramble pretty hard to realize one’s self, collect it, encourage it, and trust it. (All that is of course, very confidential.)
The Salzburg Festival was an unprecedented success this year. The tiny streets rocked with Rolls-Royce’s and English accents. The central point was the incredibly elegant tense and diamond-sharp figure of Toscanini calling out the horns. Time after Time Heaven was taken by violence and capitulated. Bruno Walter alternated on the Mozart evenings and wooed the ensemble, like a gentle and grieving father, begging the musicians to give him the next ten bars quite perfectly, please.
Reinhardt’s production of Faust has ghosts of circus and Ziegfeld, but commits the mistakes that it requires genius to commit.133 And at the heart of it there is a little simple wonderful Gretchen who grows from gentleness to terror and madness and builds the greatest performance I have ever seen.
My philosopher-friend and I have hiked through scores of vallies between Dolomites and peaks and passes and glaciers.134 But at last I am very restless to settle down and work—horrified that so much of my vacation has gone by
“And my late Spring no bud nor blossom sheweth.”135
Vienna is <a> very gossipy—intriguing—personality immersed capital and already from contacts made at the Festival its networks of hospitality-cum-self-interest have begun to stifle me.
I shall probably have to go to that hill forty-five minutes away to live. I dont pretend that the temptation to waste the weeks in going and seeing and grouping comes entirely from without; its within too, and I must manage it. At all events, it <is> very unlike the wonderful lucid hours in your valley, when the hours fall one after another, invitations to one’s best expectations of one’s self and enhanced not interrupted by your splendid self.
All my best to you both.
Ever
Thornton
American Express Co.
14 Kärtnerring Vienna1
Sept 22 1935
My dear Brother and Sister:
A thousand greetings.
Selah!
Just a word to you before the war breaks out and before I have to slip across borders by night dressed as a Rumanien jewelry peddler.
I think of you as having everything I haven’t got. You have a home, a continuity, a job. I’ve loved my European trip, yes’mam, the boat; the stay at Fontainbleau, the walks in those woods, the stay with the wise and kind G. Stein, and the hikes through the Tyrol, and The Festival at Salzburg with the giant activities of Toscanini and Reinhardt, and now Vienna with its bewildering hospitality—but I’m longing to settle down, as you have, and start a routine of working and reading and of quiet evenings at home. I think I can begin it about next week, but until then I remain a hotel-room boy surrounded by cracked and overflowing suitcases.
My German, anyway, is coming on apace, and the Hong Kong-Shanghai beginning apparently placed the vowels and consonants correctly in my mouth. My reading-German has likewise so far improved that I can tear up and down Goethe and Thomas Mann and Freud like they was English.
I guess there’s going to be a War soon. Italy had 500,000 men in manoevres in their northernmost mountains when I was there and now your Geneva136 is on pins and needles. How you two must be watching that: the immense gain in prestige that is possible; the irreperable loss that is possible. Amputated, strangled Austria hasn’t money enough to buy a cannon even, so the Austrians sit in cafés all day over one mokka and wax witty about dictators and empires. Delightful people with something both oriental and mediterranean in their attitude to leisure.
So you see there is no real news to tell you, but I send you my cordialest fraternal affection.
Ever
Thorny
