American Express Co.
Kärntnerring<Kärtnerring> 14
Vienna1
Oct 2. 1935
Dear H. D.:
I am a contrary erratic urchin. Scarcely had I arrived in town, (after some splendid Tyrolian hiking and some great music at Salzburg) and been given the heaping schlagobers138 of Viennese hospitality, when I suddenly became a surly hermit and retired up here at the Hotel Cobenzl to work. It’s not really to work, yet, but it’s a mood, long walks in the autumnal woods, desultory reading of the Austrian classics—Grillparzer, Nestroy, Stifter139—and a pleasant non-dejected brooding. So I have not presented yet the letters you so thoughtfully enclosed. When in this solitude my inner monologue gets too loud and wants group-life again I shall descend from the hill and knock at doors again.
You ask which Greek plays America has had a look at in the last few years:
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex—bad productions every few years. Sophocles’ Electra (Mrs Pat Campbell as Clytemnestra. Also Eugene O’Neils Mourning Becomes Electra which was immensely successful rehashed the whole Agamemnon subject-matter.)
Euripides’ Medea, given by both Blanche Yurka and Margaret Anglin. It is about to be revived with a fine negro actress as the wild woman from Colchis.
Euripides’ Trojan Women was given a few matinées by a Peace Propaganda Society. The Yale University Dramatic Society with a woman guest-star gave Hyppolitus (G. Murray) so well that there is talk of reviving it in New York but perhaps not.
The public must by now have forgotten Granville Barker’s immense stadium productions (New York, Yale and Harvard) of The Trojan Women and Iphigenia in Tauris.
The Bacchae was a great success in two of the girls’ colleges, but has not been seen in New York. The Lysistrata of Aristophanes ran for two years all over the country.
So: how about the Alcestis? or the Iphigenia in Aulus? or perhaps a new Hyppolitus.
I have seen Dr. Modern from time to time and always with pleasure. And she has been very helpful in finding a room for my friend, Robert Davis.
If I return by London or Paris, I shall look forward to some good talks, and the pleasure of reading your MS.
Ever Sincerely
Thornton Wilder
American Exp Co Kärmtnerring<Kärtnerring> 14 WIEN1
Oct 14, 1935, a beautiful autumn afternoon.
Dear Friends:
So I shall see the Rue de Fleurus140 at last and my friends in it. And the pictures around them.
I still don’t know when. I beg you not to change your plans one jot—because I can come to you in either place perfectly well. I still haven’t the faintest notion when I’m leaving here. There’s so much in town here that vexes me, the kind assiduities of authors, playwrights and stage directors—such phone-calls, such<.> When can I talk to you about New York, and Perhaps you can tell me which are the best literary agents. Such meetings in café-houses. The way strangers call up and ask for an appointment is the limit. And even if I were hard as nails about putting them off what can I do, if at social gatherings every body wants to make an engagement for a good long talk, freighted with self-interest.
Excuse all this self-pity.
There are compensations. Prof Freud was told that I had expressed (under pressure, but certainly true) a wish to see him, and he asked me to go yesterday at 4:15 to his villa in Grinzing. I was all alone with him for an hour and a half, and it was fine. He’s seventy nine. He talked of many things: “I don’t do anything any more …. loss of interest … satiety … impotence.” “The poet we call Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford … the sonnets are addressed to Wriothesley who was about to marry Oxford’s daughter when Oxford fell in love with him himself.” “I could not read your latest book … I threw it away. Why should you treat of an American fanatic; that cannot be treated poetically.” “My sister-in law admires your Cabala the most; I do not think so.” (One of the characters makes a slighting reference to Freud in it!) “I am no seeker after God. I come of an unbroken line of infidel Jews. My father was a Voltairean. My mother was pious, and until 8 I was pious; but one day my father took me out for a walk in the Prater—I can remember it perfectly and explained to me that there was no way that we could <k>no<w> there was a God; that it didn’t do any good to trouble one’s head about such; but to live and do one’s duty among one’s fellow-men.” “But I like gods” and he pointed to handsome cases and cases full of images—Greek, Chinese, African, Egyyptian—hundreds of images! “No, my work did not require any particular intellectual gifts—many people could have done it—the quality I had was courage. I was alone, and every discovery I made required courage. Yes, the courage to publish it, but first the courage to think it, to think along that line.” “Just these last weeks I have found a formulierung141 for religion.” He stated it and I said I had gathered it already from the close of Totem and Tabu.142 “Yes,” he said, “it is there, but it is not expressed. Hitherto I have said that religion is an illusion; now I say it has a truth—it has an historical truth. Religion is the recapitulation and the solution of the problems of one’s first four years that have been covered over by an amnesia.” “No, I am as unmusical as I am unphilosophic.” “My daughter Anna will be so sorry to have missed you. You can come again? She is older than you—you do not have to be afraid. She is a sensible reasonable girl. You are not afraid of women? She is a sensible—no nonsense about her. Are you married, may I ask?”!!!
Really a beautiful old man.
What a lucky boy am I. My cup runneth over.
For my own help and for the pleasure of it I have begun a vast apparatus of pencilled glosses on the margin of your MS; but I shall erase it all before you can see it.143 That’s the way I close in on it and really digest. And the more I see, the more I see. ’Küss’ die Hand.144
Robert’s German goes on like wild fire. He has started at the University. He is reading the book, slowly, intensely and devotedly. I hope he’ll write you about it; but his awe of you and his distrust in himself have awful battles.
I have the courage to write, anyway—even if its such shifty, disorganized letters as these last. The trouble with me is that I can’t be soul-happy outside of my beloved U.S.A and that’s a fact. So I think I’m sailing from Havre or Southhampton on Nov. 2. But first I’ll have five days in Paris and every day I’m going to pay a call on two of my most loved Americans in the world. Oh, say can you see what I mean. So again Küss<e> die Hand, Küsse die Hande Thornton
50 Deepwood Drive
Dec 1. 1935
second snowfall of the season, Connecticut
very beautiful.
Dear Alick:
It was a great disappointment to find you gone, disappointment that practically ran to grievance.
Lot of things that happen to me take a sheen on them from the thought that they can someday be recounted to you.
Yes, my encounters with Picasso and my conversations with Freud and my idolatry of Daisy Fellowes and my account of Colette disciplining her cat, and certain confidentialissima about Gertrude Stein,—all these things have begun to fester within me for lack of your sardonic receptivity.145
Joe Hennessy146 tells me you’ll be back in January. I’m afraid that by that time they will <have> acquired that patina of fiction which pleases the undiscriminating,—the dinner table retellings before the unexacting have falsified the images. Only the very truth is good enough for you.
Max Beerbohm, Alexander Woollcott, TNW.
Max Beerbohm, Alexander Woollcott, TNW. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. 305
Anyway I’m so devoted to you that I think the stuff will be shocked into its pristine state for you.
My father is in extremis, surrounded by nurses.
Amos and his bride spent Th-ks-ng Day with us. Very happy.
Thursday afternoon I have been asked to tea with Eleanora von Mendelssohn147 who has a project to propose.
I am writing a work of humor, and am rereading Frank Stockton.148 Is he an emerging American classier
G. Stein has written a very good book. I don’t know yet whether it’s a very great book. She does. Bennett Cerf149 says the rewards of her previous ones were so slender that he doesn’t dare publish this one (“The Geographical History of America, or the Relations between Human Nature and the Human Mind”.) Gertrude and Daisy Fellowes and P. Picasso (and Bennett Cerf) want it to be published with the text on one side and my explanatory marginalia on the other, reproduced in my own handwriting. I don’t want to do that. It’s true that I can clarify many an apparently willful inanity and (by the help of those wonderful conversations show it to be brilliant phrasing and thinking, but there are long stretches I cannot; and its those stretches where the pretentious explicator ought to be strong<)>.
Sybil says that a number of Noël’s plays are very fine indeed.
I’ve been reading all your Reader, with great pleasure and your afterwords are happy as they can be, esp. the one about me.150
¶ Forgive me, but Lynne Fontaine is all wrong about Katharina.151 Slight as Shakespeare’s drawing may appear it has richer implications than that. (signed: Prof. Wilder.)
Give my best to Scrivener Brown;152 and come back to a great big bear’s hug from your unestrangeaballe
devoted
Thornton
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven Conn.
Jan 23rd 1936
Dear Sybil:
Your letter was so good and interesting that I want to answer it at once.
I saw Aleck yesterday. He went off the air because his sponsors objected to his discussing “controversiable subjects,” meaning sundry polysyllabic slurs on Hitler and Mussolini.153 Aleck refused to promise to restrain himself and his contract was not renewed. He devoted his last broadcast to a fiery discussion of Free Speech. He became increasingly conscious of his vast audience (he let fall casually the words “eight million”) and was moving more and more into pathos, moral indignation and the righting of wrongs. He espoused the ‘Seeing Eye’ (training dogs for the blind); then a certain lady who collected cast off spectacles to distribute among the poor (his announcement of this good work practically crippled the postal service on Long Island); then poor Mr. Lampson, an administrator of Stanford University in California whose wife slipped and drowned herself in the bath, but who was sentenced to die for her murder.
His next book however will belie all this ethical responsibility. It will be called the Brotherhood of the French Poodle Owners, and will treat of Graham Robinson and his Mouton. Booth Tarkington and his Figaro, Gertrude Stein and her Basket, and himself and his Pip. He may be flying abroad in a few weeks to gather material for this work; if you see him, pretend that this is news to you.
The dejections of the Summer are all over, and he says that he never felt better in his life.
Two weeks ago I went to Philadelphia to be by at the opening of “Ethan Frome.” It was like a big three-day house party at the Hotel Ritz. Conversation until half past three every night. Pauline Lord, Ruth Gordon, Raymond Massey, Keith Winter, Helen Hayes’ mother, Guthrie McClintic (who staged it) and K. Cornell, vacationing between Juliet and Joan.154 The atmosphere was one of an assured success, since justified by the opening in New York two days ago. Ruth was sublime: every year sees the approach to final triumph of intelligence, will and character over a host of disadvantages. The disadvantages were voice, appearance, lack of a sense of “dress”, undependable taste arising from her environment when a girl, and the heart-wrenching and career-blocking association to Jed. All New York giggled fifteen years ago when she forced a doctor to break her knees in order to straighten her legs; well, it’s a sample, anyway, of the incredible determination. Fortunately, on top of it she has genius and intelligence. Within five years she’ll be the first actress here. Its Mrs Fiske, over again. It’s Rejane.155
I no longer get much pleasure from theatre-going but I never get tired of the atmosphere about theatres. The only other occasion that rivaled the Philadelphia visit was a hotel-house-party at Atlantic City surrounding the try-out of Mr. Gilhooly156 of Liam O’Flaherty: Helen Hayes, Charlie McArthur, Aleck Woollcott and Jed. Jed was then worth two million, insolent and brilliant. Charlie the greatest raconteur of dreadful long macabre stories of Chicago gangster death cells (and of the vie amoureuse157 of David Belasco); and all the while Aleck brilliant and waspish with envy of the only two better talkers than himself in America. Very funny.
In two weeks I say goodbye to the family for a long time: two months’ lecture-tour and then teaching at Chicago the whole Spring and Summer Quarters. The tour is an ignoble affair: I no longer believe what I say, no longer “hear” what I say. The only thing to my credit is that I manage to get through the tour without saying Capital I. The travelling involved is wonderful to me; I take endless long walks in the suburbs of the cities. This trip carries me all the way to Los Angeles and brings me two new cities, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Salt Lake City, Utah.
The Hutchins Christmas card: MPMH is Mrs Hutchin<s>, Maude Phelps McVeigh. She comes of the McVeighs of Virginia, a line of thrilling distinction she often tells us. The angel on the card was colored by her daughter Franja, aetat circa VIII.
(Boston Jan. 28 1936. Up here a few days to see my brother and new sister; and to take long walks through old streets and to see the Museum which is incandescent with Van Der Weyden’s St. Luke painting the Virgin)
Thanks for the suggestion of Miss Bowen’s A House in Paris.158 I shall get to it right off.
Broadway theatre is being described by its admirers as being “at its best” this year. I havent seen many of its successes. At Helen Hayes’ Victoria the box office feels itself insulted if one asks for a ticket before April.159 The wonder child of promise, Clifford Odett’s looked long at Chekhov and confused the Russian diffuseness with Jewish nervous-system fever. He offers the tableau as a demonstration of the spiritual bankruptcy of the American Middle Class. Bankrupt we may be, but our symptoms aren’t the same as those in the Gordon Family of “Paradise Lost.”160 At the final curtain there is his customary motto-speech to the effect that none of the exhibited anguishes would be possible under the communist state. Well, Leopardi161 in his journals, after hearing some Utopians talk all night wrote: “I seemed to hear them claim that out of a million contented citizens they could be sure of a million happy souls.” (I thanked you before, I hope, for calling my attention to the Marchesa Origo’s book162 and the reading that flowed from it.)
Jed has sent me Elizabeth Femme sans Homme. I am to report with the speed of light whether I think he ought to produce it. Dull scenes up until 10:15 and then two very interesting scenes, too interesting, illegitimately interesting.163
Your description of Sacha Guitry’s collection of letters164 is enough to make one weep. And the abbé Mugnier, too.165
Forgive these loose jottings. I’ll hope to do better on the tour.
Ever devotedly
Thornton
CHICAGO ILL MAR 22 <1936>
MISS CHARLOTTE WILDER=313 WEST 25 ST=
DEAR SHARLIE I THINK ITS SPLENDID POWERFUL AND GLORIOUSLY ORIGINAL HAVE NO QUALMS HOMAGE AND CONGRATULATIONS=166
THORNTON.
6020 Drexel
<Chicago>
Aug 15 1936
Lost my fountain-pen
Dear Alick:
I love you.
Troubling and preposterous fact.
But human nature being what it is, candor compels me to add that I love you for what you can do for me.
The soul of man is a sink-hole of greed, self-interest and malice.
But let us at least confess it and by robbing it of its deceptions, so rob it of half its terrors
As Edmund Burke said.
Today, I love you wolfishly because I have just rec’d my royalties from the Woollcott Reader and they’re enormous.
Can I lend you some, by any chance? Can I put you under obligation—to me in anyway? Just write me—simply and without hesitation—if I can.
MGM says it won’t invite me unless I promise to come for more than six weeks. So I said until Dec 5.
What do you suppose it is? Pride and Prejudice for Norma Shearer? There are rumors of a Benjamin Franklin for Charles Laughton.167
Oh, Aleck. I suddenly remembered your jacket. I’ve got the string—and I’ll get the box and paper Monday. Don’t be mad. All will end well.
I was sublime on the two Oedipuses the other day—sublime.
These last months I’ve been as happy; what do you suppose it is? Do you suppose the approach of forty is bringing me to my natural age? All my friends are nail-biting, full of alarms and most of them have cause; Spain and England are in a bad way; Germany and Italy are enjoying the brutish state of cattle—but nothing casts me down. I even enjoy my thoughts. Chicago—the only oceanic city in the world—is very beautiful these days.
It just occured to me: Perhaps its God!
If I count you not among my chiefest joys may my right hand lose it’s cunning.
Yr. devoted and cunning
Thornton
Port Castries St. Lucia British West Indies168
Nov. 16 1936
Dear Janet:
It’s beautiful here. Tropics—mahogonany, banyan, iguanas, mangoes, volcanoes, beautiful seas, noble blacks.
So hot that I can’t take very many of my long-walks.
Everywhere ants. Millions of ’em.
Sea-bathing is overrated; water so tepid. I yearn for the slap of a cold wave. Oh, to look at a snowflake.
How are you, sweetness?
At St Thomas in the Virgin Islands where I spent four weeks, there was a Miss Lilienfeld, official geneticist to the Emperor of Japan. She works on the exceptions to Mendel’s Law. Do you find her name in your learnéd journals?169
Dearie, in the Virgin Islands the early Danish planters introduced the Mongoose to kill the snakes, which they did. They also tormented the rats which promptly took to the trees and have ever since made their homes up among the coconuts. The mongooses also killed off most of the birds. On Dominica the planters introduced the fer-de-lance so that their slaves would not run away into the bush. Now the fer-de-lance abound and the planters’ children sitting in the public park with their governesses are bitten and die. MORAL: do not interfere in nature’s ecological equilibrium rashly.
I arrive in NY Nov. 30; Dec 6-10 at Berea; then Chicago.170 Save me a meal.
I miss Chicago and the campus, honey, and you in the middle of it. Whatjadooin? Are you well? Are you heart-whole? I feel a thousand miles away; I don’t even know if you’ve received yet the inheritance of your pa. Lordy, if you get much richer you’ll be wearing evening gowns by day. ¶ Give my best to Gladys;171 keep some of the Fine Arts ventilating your scientific life; when you’re hesitating as to whether to buy a new dress or hat, swallow hard and do it. ¶ My love to the Lillies.172
It won’t do any good to answer this letter because I’ll be there in no time and will wring more facts out of you than you would choose to put down on paper.
Be gentle as the serpent and wise as the dove. Like the Bible says.
Your
Thornton
Hotel Buckingham 43 rue
des Mathurins. <Paris>
July 20 1937
Dear Ones:
Imagine!
Meetings opened today. The morning was devoted to a very French Ouverture Solennelle. A ministre; Herriot; compliments and abstract nouns.173
After a great luncheon given by the secretary-Adjoint of the League at the Grand Hotel, we returned to begin the real work.
Scarcely had an hour gone by when a secretary whispered to me: “M. le Président (Paul Valéry) espère que vous prendrez la parole après M. de Madariaga.”174
It was about language and the American enormities had been touched upon.
I spoke and though it was against the rules of the conference I was applauded!
It was a Defense of the American Language. The entirely different psychological character of the American has led to a long struggle to refashion a language that was built up over centuries to describe another type entirely. I gave some illustrations of these profound differences and when I struck off the formula: “an Englishman hopes that tomorrow will be like today, though a little better; an American even when he’s happy hopes that tomorrow will be very different from to- day.”—then, Mr. Gilbert Murray175 and “Passage to India” Forster were delighted and M. Valéry turned with pleased surprised<surprise> to his right and his left.
Anyway, all the ideas were Gertrude’s.
At six o’clock, reception and sit down buffet with champagne at the Hotel de Ville, and speech from the Mayor. We sign the livre d’or de Paris.176
Tomorrow lunch at the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères.177 As for me, I’m a boy that likes champagne.
Delightful time at our end of the table at lunch today: M. Oprescu, Prof of history of art at Bukharest; Paul Hazard of the Collége de France (a charmer)<;> Dr. Yu Ying, of the Univ. of Peking, and a Signor Pavolini, president of the Fascist Confederation of Artists and Writers, who was given my book by his best friend on the very day that friend was to be killed in the Abyssinian War!!! We had a dandy time over that succession of wines and were very witty indeed.
I had a good long heart-to-heart tea with Sibyl at Armenonville in the Bois; then she took the train back to London and work, work, work.
This year the only fault with Paris is that I don’t sleep very well.
Now I go out every night at twelve and get a tisane. Mother, Isabel—make yourself a tilleul178 out of that box up in my study window.
¶ The only people who looked sour at my offering today were Mssrs Jules Romains and Georges Duhamel.179 Je m’en fiche.180
I’ll hope<hold> my tongue all tomorrow and then speak again on Thursday.
Ran across Malcolm Cowley in the American Express and took him to a meeting. Awfully nice fellow. Had been down to Madrid.
More soon.
Haven’t I been good about writing?
Thine
Thornton
Mme Bousquet of the enclosure is the Lady Colefax of Paris. Great friend of Proust, Anatole France and Henri de Régnier.181
Poste Restante Salzburg
Aug. 25 1937
Dear Isabello:
Got your letters an hour ago—you know, the Post Office by the Cathedral.
Telegraphed you both to come over.
Why not?
Some rooms in a little pension; by the Riviera. Cheap. Sunlight. Walks. Make Ma work hard at French. Make Ma loaf. Little train trips up and down the little coast. Would even help my work.
If Ma resists leaving the house you might come for two months to a Zurich pension.
Sure.
If I get a telegram from you favorable, I telegraph Fritz Wiggin to release you all due moneys and don’t skimp. Be comfortable.
And don’t think its chilly of me if I don’t come to Paris to meet, that’s all. I’ll wait for you anywhere else, but I won’t go to Paris.
Now re Situation.182
Your shock will have 3 phases:
To pride.
To your View of your Future.
Real affection.
Only the third is worth suffering.
Separate the strands and stamp on the first two.
Suffer the third, purely and honestly until it gets done with.
The Second:
Again separate 2 strands.
Don’t overdo that notion that a woman has nothing to say or be or give unless she’s wife-mother-and-home-decorator.
We’re all People, before we’re anything else. People, even before we’re artists. The role of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.
Don’t insult ten million women by saying a woman is null and void as a spinster.
You say you’re old plain and poor.
A. You’re not old. Rhetoric. Self-pity; Old is not a term of disparagement even if you were old. A woman of 36183 is old only <on> the verandah of a country-club dance. And only there.
B. You’ve not only an attractive characteristic extraordinarly like-yourself face, but you have the mysterious gift of dressing to it, realizing it. When you enter a room the others are every time arrested, charmed & engaged afresh over your delightful presence and its delicate harmony with your personality.
If you want to see some women cursed with plainness I’ll show you some.
So 
is theatrical. Rhetoric self-pity.
POOR? Think it over. Yes and no. And Yes because you allow it to gnaw you.
Lots of its Pathological.
Does pathological mean that anyone’s to blame?
He’s a big healthy male? Why isn’t he married?
What’s he do about sex and the owning-four-walls instinct?
Believe me: There’s a psychic fear of going thru with a thing. He’s ill.
And you, too. From some deep infantile Father-love-and-hate you brought up a lack-of-confidence in that realm that colored the air without you’re knowing it.
Otherwise a Command would have shone through you.
What of it?
Out of these infantile conditionings we make our strengths as well as our weaknesses.
In the long run its not important.
The Self is more important then the Social or Amatory situation; more important than hereditary obstructions.
Digest the experience by reasoning; accept the suffering insofar as it is not crossed will and false pride—convalesce and start thinking of other things.
I’m writing a letter to Ma at the same time about Salzburg. It would look bloodless to put that into this same letter. Read her the first page of this.
As for Insomnia: don’t try to fight. Relax. Read a little. Play solitaire. Keep your thoughts of<f> thatta.
Better take a trip to Europe. There’s plenty of money.
love!!!
Thornton
Gertrude Stein and TNW.
Gertrude Stein and TNW. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Poste Restante Salzburg
Aug 26 1937
Dear Endeared Dears:
So at last I decided to buy some stationery and resume correspondence.
I’ve changed unrecognizably.
For the worse.
I’ve decided to live entirely for pleasure.
Yes.
Never try to think again. Never try to write again. Just pleasure.
The other night after a performance of Falstaff. wonderful, too, I went, as one must, to the Mirabell Bar. Went into the Casino and gambled a little, cosÎ cosà,184 then sat drinking and talking with friends until the Bar closed. No one wanted to go home; so we went, as all true Dedicated Drinkers must after curfew, to the IIIrd Class waiting-room at the Railway Station, and there we sat until eight in the morning. The party was slightly mixed. It consisted of Erich Maria Remarque, the author of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and Carl Zuckmayer, author of Der Hamptmann von Köpernick, an elegant play; and a wonderful German Archbishop—incognito and in civil—on obligatory vacation; and Frau Tal,185 my German publisher; and a Swedish streetwalker. Just us. At 4:45 every morning Mass is read in the Station for the line workers, and the Host was solemnly carried among the outstretched legs of us dogs, no disrespect to Pèpé.186
Pleasure comes in all shapes and sizes and its now what I live for. For instance: there are two polychrome baroque archangels on the altar of the Peterskirche in poses of flight and ecstacy that no human body could ever assume, and as far as I’m concerned they’re my definition of ART. For instance: the meals in Austria are deplorable, deplorable, but the Sacher-torte and the cup of chocolate that goes with it at the Cafe Tomaselli (founded 1704—Mozart as <a> child, played with the little Tomaselli’s and no doubt lingered about when the cakes came out of the oven)—pleasure, that’s what they are, pleasure, and that’s what I live for.
After the close of the Festival on the 31st I’m going to linger in town a week.
Do you think I will ever regain my Former Viewpoint?
Anyway New or Old I count you among my Pleasures, and that’s what I live for.
Your
Thornton
American Express Co. Zurich
Wed 11:20 A.M. Sept 15th or 16th 1937
Dear Ones:
In an hour or two I’m taking a train for Sils Maria or Sils-Berseglia (the sunny side). I get to St. Moritz at about half past 6: tonight. Lord, I was almost chilled off the whole excursion when I found I had to pass thru St Moritz and probably spend the night there. However, a good 3rd class pass. I’ll go to the whatever-little-hotel by the Station, honey. You know me. Anyway this is the “Worst Season” of the year for St. Moritz, tho’ the most beautiful.
Kinder,187 I’ve finished the Second Act of Our Town and its just lovely, as is the opening of Act III. I’m just a dandy dramatist, looks like.
What do you think of this enclosure?188 If the fella who had been collecting Reinhardt statistics five years ago had seen that he’d have fainted dead away.
Ma, there’s simply nothing doing in my life, but I’m—there’s only one word to describe it—happy. Now isn’t that funny. I do an hour’s work every morning, like silk off a spool and then I mosey the rest of the day. Walks toward all parts of the town and country; its a darlin restful place. To be sure it rains most of the time, but don’t wet much. Swiss rain’s different.
And I take it back that there are no mts here—they’re at the other end of the lake and they’re awfully big they shock you, they look so big, but they aren’t in sight much of the time.
Seems like I’ll finish Our Town by Friday and then I’ll polish up Nestroy-Molière for Reinhardt. (If Jed hears about that, he’ll be terrific.) Then I do the Prince of Baghdad which is the best of em all and the minute I finish that I’ll get on a boat and come home to you, everything forgiven.189
Stay just as sweet as you are, because that’s the way echoes of you are all thru the play and I don’t want to find that its unhistorical. Sure, one remark esp. that you made to us years ago is in the Second Act and it radiates the whole play.
Your loving son
Thornton
In the Post office, Zürich.
Thursday night. Oct 28 1937
Dear Girls:
Saturday night I leave for four nights in Paris to confer with Jed. Jed telephoned from London for 20 minutes the other night. He wants to know if “Our Town” would be a good play for the Xmas season in New York. Would it?!! And guess who might act the lanky tooth picking Stage-manager? Sinclair Lewis! He’s been plaguing Jed to let him act for a long time; and there’s a part for his famous New England parlor-trick monologues.190 Don’t tell anybody anything about it, but Ma, would you like to file into a New York Theatre with me to see Our Town—think it over. ¶ Heavenly autumnal weather here.
love to all
Thorny.
As from: 50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven, Conn.
Dec. 9 1937
Dear Prof. Reinhardt:
Just before Miss Adler called me up in Zürich I had been to Paris for a few days and there read to Jed Harris one of the two plays that I had been working on since the Summer. It goes into rehearsal next week and as it is still not yet quite finished, he has installed, or rather imprisoned me, in a house on Long Island and the work will be finished in a few days.
All this arose much earlier than I had intended and is now delaying further my opportunity to finish the play based on Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen.
My plan is to go away—possibly to Tucson, Arizona,—and finish it, as soon as “Our Town” opens in New York, which will be around New Year. How long that will take I do not know but I should think about a month.
It is still the height of my ambition that it would interest you.
As I told you in Salzburg, it is in no sense a translation. My second most important character does not appear in Nestroy at all. Into the middle of the First Act I have inserted the wonderful scene from Molière’s L’Avare where Frosine the marriage-broker tries to interest Harpagon in a young girl.191
I told Jed Harris firmly that you were to have the first “refusal” of the play, but I asked him to give me some help and advice on a certain difficulty I had met in the Third Act. To prepare him for it I read him the Second Act which he said was “a perfect piece of farce-comedy writing.”
At all events, I have grown very fond of it and am very impatient to resume work. If you liked I could send you the first Two Acts by January first; but I presume that you would rather receive the whole at one time.
Naturally, I may be mistaken about my fitness to write that kind of play; but I will never lose my desire of being some day able to offer you a text which it will interest you enough to produce.
Kindly give my regards to Frau Reinhardt.
Very sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
Two days in New Haven.
Monday Dec 20 1937
Dear Dwight:
Theatre business is funny.
Especially Jed’s.
Went out to Chicago and saw 3 performances of Doll’s House. Enormous Opera-House packed with people.
Yet Jed’s losing money. 2 of the 4 stars are getting a thousand a week and percentages. Some performances (Mon & Tues. nights) sink to gross of 1100.
Jed says I get $150 a week, but it’s still to come—retrospective, too, on 10 weeks of tour.192
As to the new play, he mentions the (Dramatist Guild’s) contract; but still no contract.
I feel partly responsible for the delays because the play up until yesterday was still not all written.
He’s undoubtedly in money-trouble but:
It doesn’t prevent him from snatching me off the dock and imprisoning me in a cottage on Long Island—swankiest section, Roslyn and Cold Spring Valley—to finish the play.193 Butler and Cook and everything.
Theatre business is funny.
Frank Craven, our “star” has a contract, but I haven’t.194
However, I’ll insist on it from the first day of rehearsals—presumably after two postponements—the middle of this week.
I now live in New York at the Columbia University Club—(circa 6) West 43rd St.
I realize that all this contract delay is highly irregular, but I’m in such of <a> mess of friendship-collaboration sentiment with Jed, and with the sense of guilt about the unfinished condition of the play that I can’t pull myself together to insist.
One way would have been to have asked Harold Freedman of Brandt & Brandt to serve as agent, but that would have hurt Jed’s feelings mighty bad.
There’s a possibility that the play will be a smashing success—an old theatre-hand like Frank Craven seems to be thinking so.
Maybe not.
In the meantime Max Reinhardt in California telegraphs all the time to see play No #2—also still unfinished.
So I guess I’ll be financially all right if I can tide over this interium—including the various cheques I’ll have to draw for Xmas favors.
The Austrian Govt came through with that 56 dollars.
Enclosed the recipes for Mrs. Dana. Alice Toklas “prepared” one whole dinner. They look mighty elaborate to me; but good. And look at the extravagant materials they require. With the exception of the salad which is creole, they are old French family “secret cuisine.” The typist unfortunately bound them up in the wrong order—straighten’m out and it’s a dinner.
Until I can get the exact address for the Columbia U. Club I get my mail in NY at the AΔΦ Club 136 W. 44th St.
I got so many irons in the fire that here’s hoping one of them pans out o.k.
Cordially ever
Thornton
P.S. Of course I won’t sign the contract until I’ve sent it down to you.
<p.m. December 20, 1937>
Dear Grace:
Just returned from the most rewarding trip I ever made abroad, to find myself in a turmoil of work: my own play goes into rehearsal next week—after divers rewritings I am doing every day—; and my adaptation of A Doll’s House opens Dec. 27 with continuous conferences and alterations.195
So I can only steal a few minutes to send you again all my most cordial greetings. Another year has gone by without my being able to go to Oberlin. I’d love to see every inch of it again and especially with Emily pointing out her favorite places and naming the new ones.
We’re all well. My niece, Amos’s little Catherine, is her grandmother’s joy as well as everybody’s.196 Charlotte stays in NY. working on some vast novel we’re not allowed to see. Isabel’<s> found a good reception for her 3rd.197 Janet is at the University of Chicago, all absorbed in Biology and moving on to a PhD. Mama doesn’t look a day older to me; but she claims she’s an old lady. She’s active and diverted, and still serves as dog on whom her writing children (Charlotte excepted) try their stuff.
The summer abroad taught me regular work and solitude. I was 2 ½ months in a little hotel five <miles from?> Zürich.
And as soon as the present flurry is over I’m going to try and recreate the same hideaway somewhere in America: Quebec or Arizona, and write plays #3 and #4.198 (No #2 is practically finished and Max Reinhardt is very interested in it.)
I hope you’re all fine, and would love to hear from you on the details. I thought of you all with particuliar affection when I spent a day in Lawrenceville last Spring. It takes an hour or two to recover our Lawrenceville among the smart new buildings and plantings but it’s there … and especially in the Chapel.
My new play is full of the sentiment of past time and old friends—though it’s laid in a New Hampshire village—and I think you’ll like it. I’m not having it published for the general public until I’ve done a lot more; but I shall probably have a number of copies printed off for my friends, and I specially hope it will give you pleasure.199
All my best to your household; my deepest interest and affection to Emily; and I hope you’ll think of me always as
Your devoted friend
Thornton
January 2 1938
(the first time I’ve written the date of the new year.)
Dear Sibyl:
Day after day has gone by and I’ve kept putting off my report of these new developements.
The first thing to tell is that On the Whole everything has been pleasant, exciting and friendly.
There was one night when under an angry insomnia I planned a long letter, practically withdrawing my play from the producer’s hands; but the thoughts of 3:00 a.m are very unreasonable things and in the morning I knew it had been nonsense.
Jed had made some admirable alterations in the order of the scenes, and some deletions that I would have arrived at anyway, and proposed the writing of a transitional episode that seems quite right. He has inserted a number of tasteless little jokes into the web, but they don’t do much harm and they give him that sensation of having written the play which is so so important to him. The main tendency of his treatment is to make the play “smoother” and more civilized, and the edge of boldness is being worn down, that character of a “primitive” with its disdain of lesser verisimilitude; but I guess the play remains bold enough still.
Rehearsals began last Wednesday. (today is Sunday). When the actors (sitting about a table) first read the Third Act to one another they all wept so that pauses had to be made so that they could collect themselves. Frank Craven will be superb as the Stage-manager; and he loves the part. The chief danger is that the mothers are being played by experienced and well-known “character women” who seem unable to get the dry understatement of a New Hampshire housewife. They drip sweetness, and cannot understand anything between the extremes of nagging mean old rural women and ministring angels. Jed keeps saying: “No, darling, dryer, dryer.”200
We’re having trouble putting the Second Act (“Love and Marriage”) into good shape. The difficulty doesn’t seem to be where I expected it: in the wedding ceremony and the “hallucinatory” episodes, but in the scenes that lead up to it. Undoubtedly that Act is the least solid of the three; but it has some good moments. It now opens thus:
Stage manager
Three years have gone by in Grover’s Corners.
Yes, the sun’s come up over a thousand times.
Winters and Summer<s> have cracked the mountain a little more and the rains have brought some of the dirt down into the valley.
Some children who weren’t born before have begun to speak regular sentences; and a few people who thought they were mighty young and spry have found they can’t bound up a flight of stairs like they use-ta, without their heart flutterin’ a little.
Some older sons are settin’ at the head of the table; and some people I know are now having their meat cut up for them.
All that can happen in a thousand days.
Nature’s been pushing and contriving in other ways, too. Yes, the mountain’s been reduced a few fractions of an inch; and millions of gallons of water have gone by the mill; and some young people have fallen in love, and got married, and here and there a new home has been set up under a roof.
Almost everybody in the world gets married,—you know what I mean? In our town there aren’t hardly any exceptions. Almost everybody climbs into their grave married.201
etc. etc.
That’s setting it in the frame of “cosmic reference”, yes?
The opening night of Doll’s House was very brilliant. Attention close; applause emphatic. Jed disappeared and I went home with Ruth (ushered from the theatre by two detectives, because of an autograph-crowd at the stage-door) in a taxi loaded with boxes of flowers.
All the signs of a smash.
So everybody was surprised to find a very mixed reception in the press. Some said Ibsen’s stage technique creaked; some that Ruth had not been able to harmonize the frivolous Norah at the beginning with the raisonneuse202 Norah at the close.
But Wednesday did $1800 in two performances, very good.
However there’s some doubt. The expensive orchestra seats are sparse; and the balcony is always sold out. So the rear seats downstairs are sold out at balcony prices; but the $3:30’s won’t go. The Four-star cast doesn’t permit Jed to lower the prices through-out and make it a frankly economical intellectual’s play. We don’t know what’ll happen. The two performances yesterday—New Year’s day, were damaged by an ice-blizzard.
I love the money side of the theatre; just disinterestedly love it.
Ruth’s fine, gay and gallant and throws herself into every performance—and what an exacting part; on the stage almost every minute—only one short scene in the IIIrd Act when she isn’t there—and that Tarantella!203
Behind Jed’s back I’ve been working on the play for Reinhardt. I promised him the First Two Acts by today.
It’s going to be very good. And full of riotous acting opportunities.
And now I long to retire into some hinterland—Quebec or Arizona—and get down to Baghdad. My play opens 3 weeks from last night in Princeton, New Jersey; perhaps an advance performance in New Haven, too. Probably for New York in the Henry Miller’s. (all wrong; that’s a drawing-room theatre; my play should be in a high old-fashioned echoing barn of a place with an enormous yawning stage on which is built the diaphanous “Town”.)
I’ve scarcely seen a soul. Aleck is entering the Sam Behrman play, to play the role based on the character of Rudolph Kommer—(ungraciously described in the advance publicity as a “Long Island parasite”). He was to have played it for the first time in Philadelphia a few night’s ago, but Miriam Hopkins illness has postponed the opening. Rumors from the Chicago tryout say the play is so ill-constructed that rewriting has been very drastic; and maybe the whole venture is to be discarded.204
I’m a New Yorker now. Only three nights at Deepwood Drive since I came back. Mother’s fine; but Isabel is shaken; surprises herself by bursting into tears too often. She’s coming up to New York for a week next Sunday and maybe convalescence can be hastened with a complete change of place and tempo.
What you tell me about the repercussions of our Recession on the English retail trade makes me wince and cry out; but I’d rather be told bad news than not.
Jan 3 1938
An entire day up in my room at the Club. Polished off Act One of the Nestroy play (still no title) for the typist. It’s just glänzend205 now. I wasn’t “needed” at rehearsal; they’re still reading around a table. As soon as they get on their feet, I’m going to be present.
Now I’m going to walk almost down to the Battery to get some air and exercize. Oh, to be a long way off, but I did have a fine day of working even here.
I’m coming over to read to you late next Summer. If the Bagdad play is good, it’s going to be dedicated to you,—so you’ll want to be hearing your own play. Stay well; and count me as your devoted friend
Thornton
<January 1938>
Dear Jed:
Now it’s time for me to retire for<from> the play for a while and get a “fresh eye.”
My eye has become so jaundiced that I can no longer catch what’s good or bad.
I’m going to New Haven tonight and sleep for a couple of days.
I’ve got a whole set of Nature’s Warnings = twitches, and stutterings and head aches. I’ll rejoin whenever you think best and when I’m pepped up again. Did you see me trying to hold on to consciousness during Marc’s play?206 You seemed as fit as a fiddle, and fresh as a daisy.
Ever
P.S. Friday afternoon—
I shall be at the hotel from 6-8 working on some closing lines. Shall bring them to the theatre at 8.20. I hope to take the 9:00 train. If you feel seriously that I can be useful here of course I shall stay—Leave word at hotel or theatre. If I go Ed. Goodnow207 will notify me by telegram of where we are next week so I can rejoin.
Jed Harris, Frank Craven (the Stage Manager in the original Our Town production), and TNW.
Jed Harris, Frank Craven (the Stage Manager in the original Our Town production), and TNW. Culver Pictures, Inc.
Boston, Copley-Plaza, Jan. 27 1938
Dear Aleck:
To me it’s quite simple.
Success is accorded to a work of art when the central intention is felt in every part of it, and intention and execution are good.
Jed lost courage about my central intention and moved the production over to a different set of emphases. The result is that the vestiges of my central attention that remain stick out as timid and awkward excrescences.
Our reviews say that it is a nostalgic, unpretentious play with charm.
But what I wrote was damned pretentious.
The subject of the play now is: homely, humorous, touching aspects of a village life; of a wedding there; on to which is added a sad and all but harrowing last act. At the matinee yesterday there were storms of nose-blowings and sobs. A lady who called for a friend at five o’clock saw emerging a crowd of red eyes, swollen faces and mascara stains.
That can be attended to. And one of the reasons that it is so abrupt a change of tone is that all the strength of the earlier acts has been devitalized.
The subject of the play I wrote is: the trivial details of human life in reference to a vast perspective of time, of social history and of religious ideas.
It’s too late to change it into a genre play. The succession of brief scenes can only be justified against the larger frame; if it had been written as a picture of rural manners it would have been written differently.
The First Act (“A day in our Town”) has two interruptions—columns, pillars, set there throwing lights of “cosmic reference” on to the surrounding scenes.
“We want to know more about our town. I’ve asked Prof Walton of our State University—”
And we get the Geological position—Devonian Basalt—two to three hundred million years old …. The Anthropological report: Early Amerindian stock … tenth century of this era … Migration 17th Century English brachiocephalic blue-eyed stock … Some Slav and Mediterranean. Then from Editor Webb: the Sociological “Middletown.”: 85% Republic. 10% Democratic etc. Not long, but trenchant. Then questions from the audience.
“All right now we’ll go back to the life in Grover’s Corners. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon … <“> and so on.
Jed has done that without conviction. The Professor (adored by the audience and always clapped to the echo) is a caricature. Editor Webb, instead of a shrewd ironic Yankee … is a garrulous Irish mugger, Tommy Ross.208
The afternoon goes by. Boy and girl back from High School. Mother and Daughter. “Mama, am I good looking?”
Then the Second Interruption.
Now we want to look back on it from the future.
What became of some of these people. The Milkman. The Druggist.
What shall we put in the corner stone of the new bank for people to read a thousand years from now. “Y’know, Babylon once had 2,000,000 people and all we know is the names of the royal family. There the father came home from work. The smoke rose from the chimney, same as here. We’re putting a copy of this play in so people’ll know more about us than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh Flight….. This is the way we were in our living and our doctoring and our marrying and our dying.”
Jed says those things interrupt the affectionate interest in the family lives before us.
Frank Craven is embarrassed by them.
But that’s the central intention of the play. And it is picked up everywhere.
At the height of the Wedding Scene, the company freezes while the minister (Frank Craven) says over their heads:
“I’ve married 200 couples in my day.
Do I believe in it? I don’t know.
M marries N. Millions of them.
The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday afternoon rides in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed … <“> etc.
<“>Once in a thousand times it’s interesting. Let’s have Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.<”>
Yes, Alec it’s a great play. And all good people are deeply rejoiced by it. But from what’s there now they have to guess and grope for that side of it.
The first mistake was in the casting of Frank Craven, Tommy Ross, and the Professor.
The dangers of Irish blood.
Frank is lovable and we’re grateful for that. But oh, for that deep New England stoic irony that’s grasped the iron of life and shares it with the house.
The rest of the play is beautifully cast and superbly produced.
A great packed house in Princeton was deeply absorbed. Applause interrupted scene after scene. Laughter swept the house. Here, too, that is happening tho’ to thin business. And always something is the matter at the heart of the play.
Jed didn’t sleep or eat for days. Rosamond Pinchot’s death209 fell like a bomb into the middle of everything. She had loved the play and was at rehearsals. Jed has been kind and controlled to all the actors, except in overtiring them with interminable rehearsals, delays and all night work. The girl Martha Scott will be the next great actress in America.210
I’m all right.
I fight for the restoration of lines and for the removal of Jed’s happy interpolations of New Jersey-New Hampshire.
Lord, I’m remote from it <in> many ways—wrapped up in Play #2, a beauty; reading, walking.
Until last night at 1:30 Jed wouldn’t listen to a suggestion from me.
Ishkabibble.
But I continue fighting.
But I’d rather have it die on the road than come into New York as an aimless series of little jokes, with a painful last act.
At the opening night here a deputation of 41 small-town people from the skirts of Mount Monadnock—from Peterboro and Jaffrey and Keene—came down and presented me with a gavel of Cherry Wood and an eternal membership in the Mt. Monadnock Association. The faces. And they’d seen a play that was about something they knew.
Jed’s thinking of closing here Saturday night; rehearsing again, and picking up the New Haven dates that you abandoned.211
It’s fine that you feel that your play is now all right.
In Vermont we will look back on these unrests.
As soon as this is on or off I shall dash out to Tuscson, Arizona; recreate the solitude, long walks, and happy work which I knew in Zürich; plays no #3 and #4 are coming in sight.
How proud I was to be told by Ned212 that I had the resources of a playwright well in hand. And I learn. I am an apprenti sorcier.213 That’s all the<that> matters.
love, dear Alec, as ever,
Thornton
Jan 29 1938
Sat. morning.
Dear Dwight:
Enclosed the first cheque—$100.00 advance-money.
Boston reviews cautious but not unfavorable.
“Variety” has (I’m told) a ferocious review of the play, from the Princeton opening.214
Business in Boston very bad; but even so better than Julius Caesar215 which had rave reviews.
Curious situation.
Many enthusiasts. My fan mail. Charles R. Codman216 (whom I don’t know): In thirty years of playgoing one of the most absorbing plays I ever saw. Edmund Wilson: last act the most terrific thing I ever saw in the theatre.
Marc Connolly came down and told Jed it was magnificent.
So with all those plus and minus marks Jed cancelled the second week in Boston (losing, he says, ‘2500 on the two weeks) and opens at the Henry Miller Theater in New York on Thursday.
I suffered plenty this week in Boston, over cuts and alterations.
But it was a lot of fun, too.
Came back to New Haven to rest.
In any event, my pulse is calm, and I’m learning plenty.
Ever
Thornton.
P.S.
Rê Doll’s House
You see I thought I was making the translation as a present to Ruth Gordon.
Never mentioned it, however, as such to her or Jed.
Never mentioned money.
Similarly Ned Sheldon gave his translations of The Jest and Tolstoi’s Redemption to John Barrymore; his adaptation of Camille to Ethel Barrymore.
If Doll’s House really turns into a big hit now, maybe I’ll be able to move toward some payments.
At present it’s turn for the better has enabled Jed to make some daring expenditures on my play. Our Town looks cheap but is very expensive. 45 actors; and not two but five electric switchboards.
T
Sunday night.
<February 6, 1938>
Dear Dwight:
Funny thing’s happened.
Ruth phoned down it’s already broken a house record.
In spite of the mixed reviews when the box office opened Saturday morning there were 26 people in line; the line continued all day, and the police had to close it for ten minutes so that the audience could get into the matinee; and that $6,500 was taken in on that day—the two performances and the advance sale.
Imagine that!
Friday night both Sam Goldwyn and Bea Lillie were seen to be weeping. Honest!
It was very expensive being a dramatist.
Three opening-nights—telegrams to some of the actors, bouquets to leading ladies; a humidor to Frank Craven; gift of seats to a few friends; hotel expenses at Princeton & Boston (the contract says Jed should have paid.)
Now I’m going to be momentarily expensive—leaving for Arizona about the 17th, with a week in Chicago—and after that, very economical.
Isn’t it astonishing, and fun, and exhausting?
Ever
Thornton
March 1 1938
Dear Earnest:
Should’ve written you long ago; but it would only have been repeating what I said over the phone.
However something new has come up.
Jed told me he was stipulating that if he does this play, he must ask you to accord him first option on your next three.217
Don’t do that.
You’ve seen him now, and know that extraordinary bundle of lightning flash intuitions into the organization of a play; vivid psychological realism; and intelligence, devious intelligence.
But maybe you don’t know the rest: tormented, jealous egotism; latent hatred of all engaged in creative work; and so on.
Use him for his great gifts—one play at a time only. But don’t presuppose a long happy collaboration.
My distrust of him is bad enough, but others go far farther than I do and insist on a malignant daemonic force to destruction in him. Anyway, his professional career is one long series of repeated patterns: trampling on the friendship, gifts and love of anybody who’s been associated with him.
I feel something like a piker to write such a letter as this. Because he has done, in many places, a fine job on my work. But the friendship’s over all right. He’s the best in NY, Ernest, but after this I’m ready to work with duller managers, if only I can get reliability, truthfulness, old-fashioned character, and coöperation at the same time.
So … one play at a time.
This afternoon I’m leaving for 2 ½ months in Tucson. Long walks, solitude and work. Perhaps some amateur Indian-remains archaeology on the side.
All my best to you. The play is stunning. Jed’s suggestions sounded good—only arrive at the moment when you think the text is set and then stick to it. Be sure you get a Dramatist Guild contract; that gives you full power over the “words”.
The best agent—and with Jed you must have an agent (I haven’t rec’d a red cent yet! I will—its not dishonesty on his part; its just bad mental habits of deviousness) is Harold Freedman<,> Brandt & Brandt, 101. Park Ave.—agent for Sidney Howard, Phil Barry<,> Sam Behrman etc.
All my best to Mrs Hemingway; salute Capt. Dart218 for me.
Regard & admiration
Thornton
General Delivery.
Tucson Arizona
March 27 1938
Dear Mrs. Baker:
Many thanks for your kind and helpful letter.
I never foresaw for a minute that the Last Act would, for some people, approach the harrowing, nor that it would even seem to so many to be a fairly “new” point of view.
Lordy. I’d built my house with those ideas so long that they seemed to have the character of simple self evidence.
I suppose that I got it from Dante. I had to teach the Inferno and the first half of the Purgatorio at Chicago. I had in mind especially the Valley of the repentent Kings in about the 8th Canto of the Purgatorio. Same patience, waiting; same muted pain; same oblique side-glances back to earth. Dante has an angel descend nightly and after slaying a serpent who tries to enter the Valley every evening, stands guard the rest of the night. Most commentators agree that the allegory means: from now on the Dead must be guarded from memories of their earthly existence and from irruptions of the old human nature associations.
Catholic doctrine holds that, I think, though the custom of prayers for the dead has been built up to a shade of If-we-think-urgently-of them, they-will-think-gratefully-of-us.
At all events I do not mind from critics the charge of immaturity, confusion, and even pretentiousness. It’s a first play; it’s a first sally into deep waters. I hope to do many more—and better—and even more pretentious. I write as I choose; and I learn as I go; and I’m very happy when the public pays the bills.
At present in this wonderful desert air and penetrating sun light I am finishing a big long four-act low comedy. To me it seems just as hard to do and just as exciting. Max Reinhardt is very pleased with the first two acts I sent him and says that he wants to put it on.
I hope to be back in New Haven in the early weeks of May. There’s another aspect of Our Town I’d like to ask you about,—some people find in it an embittered pessimism about human nature and its “being in the dark.” Maybe that did slip into it without my noticing it; and then Jed Harris heightened it by certain cuts he made in the text.
I wish the great and good Professor were still alive—there are so many things I’d like to ask him, too.
In the meantime, my thanks again for your word.
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
General Delivery. Tucson, Arizona, April 4 1938
Dear Dwight:
I was about to mail you the enclosed card, when your second letter arrived with the contract.
Item (I) in my letter is now taken care of.
I think the contract is fine, an exemplary contract. I shall return it as soon as I can find someone to witness my signature.
Now I have a very interesting thing to lay before you:
A letter from Richard Aldrich, last Summer’s director of the festival at Central City, Colorado, that presented “A Doll’s House.”
“Dear Thornton,
I’ve just heard from Denver that a check for $450 made out to you personally on July 25th was endorsed “Thornton Wilder, for deposit, Jed Harris,” and deposited in the Irving Trust Company, New York. In other words, Harris or his manager must have forged your name and stolen this money which was due you for three weeks royalties on “A Doll’s House” at Central City.
This is, of course, a prison offense and I suggest that you turn the matter over to your lawyer here in New York provided Harris does not pay you $450 immediately.
We have all stood a great deal from Jed Harris but I don’t feel that any of us need stand for outright thievery as this appears to be.
If I can help in any way please feel free to call on me.
As yet I have not heard from Harold Freedman so I think I shall telephone him today. All good wishes.
Sincerely yours
Dick Aldrich
(The Cape Playhouse, Inc. 67 West 44th St. NYC)
I telegraphed at once:
Dear Dick, for former friendship’s sake I don’t want to challenge Jed on this yet & will approach indirectly through Sidney Hirsch.220 Thanks and Regards.
And I have just written Sidney Hirsch:
“Dear Sidney, An unpleasant thing has come up which we can smooth over by acting as quickly and quietly as possible. ¶ For the sake of my long friendship with Jed, I want it to be cleared up as soon as it’s possible and before the other people start to make any noise about it. ¶ The people in charge of a Doll’s House Festival at Central City last Summer have found out that I never rec’d any royalties. ¶ They say that a cheque ….. for $450 was made out in my name and that it was endorsed and deposited in the Irving Trust Co, N.Y. ¶ God knows I never endorsed it. ¶ They are very angry and might raise a serious charge. ¶ I just telegraphed them asking them not to do anything about it and saying that I would approach you on the matter. ¶ If it were merely a matter of my money I’d let the matter run until you and the office felt it was convenient, but now the only way to quiet it down would be to pay it to Dwight Dana of New Haven. Sorry, Sid, to have to write you a letter that sounds so ill-natured, but you can see how much worse things are at stake. ¶ Cordially ever, Thornton.”
That’s all pretty sweet and diplomatic, but I can imagine that Jed caught in the Lie Direct might be a very violent fellow, and the other uncontracted royalties of Doll’s House may still be saved from the fire.
Now, I’ve got to apologize to you for writing long letters, but damme I wager this one isn’t boring.
Ever
Thornton
June 21 1938
Tues. at 5:15 p.m.
sitting upstairs waiting for the telephone call to say that Rosalie Stewart221 has come to tea with me.
Dear Ruth:
I keep wondering how are you, whether you’re enjoying yourself. I see you at Wilton, at Qualigno’s, at the Moat House in Kent, at St. Tropez with the René Clair’s, at “Le Corsaire”. Here’s hoping that you’ve blown all the layers of fatigue from Doll’s House.
I got here Sunday afternoon and saw that Helen Hayes was giving her only performance of The Merchant of Venice that night,—so I went.
Well, Ruthie, to begin with: the production and picture in it was that of a fatigued 1899 Baltimore stock company. Tasteless, empty-conventional. Doublets and hose picked out of the costumers just after they’d been returned from serving at a Masquerade at the Masonic Temple. Tasteless, tasteless. The moonlight slept upon the bank in the shape of a disk of green light down Stage Right. The supporting company—the Salanios, Gratianos<,> Jessicas and Nerissas were bad beyond belief.
Helen spoke distinctly, a fact which stood out so conspicuously that you knew at once that she had been on the stage before. But her charm, and her six graceful comedy gestures were so thin, so little-girl, and so far from breadth and womanliness and deep inner spontaneity, her love for Bassanio was so smiling-matter-of-course, her assumption of bossy authority in the Court room was so snippety, that all you could say was: she has no imagination, she has no music, she has no mature woman-nature.
Forgive me, Ruth, I just tell you what I think. Destroy this letter.
And Shylock.
He looked well, and spoke clearly.
But imagine a Shylock without hysteria, without understandable forgivable fury. A Shylock in his senses.
The pound of flesh exaction becomes a hateful ugly cold calculating bitchiness. And an audience 70% Jewish, with the headlines from Europe burned into their minds could only sit in horrified grief. A Shylock who is not frantic with his wrongs and eloquent, is an insult to a 1938 audience. Sofaer222 was so afraid of ranting that he sold his race down the river.
And yet, Ruth, I was glad I went. Shakespeare is wonderful, wonderful. Next to Homer the greatest natural storyteller that ever lived. Under all those obstacles the scenes would each begin to collect its eternal vitality. Even there as each scene came to a close I’d sigh with intellectual pleasure.
You’ll be surprised to hear that the best acting of the evening came from Pedro de Cordoba223 who as the Prince of Morroco deliberated over the caskets, you could see him thinking, spoke richly, paused significantly, and took his departure with manly regret and Renaissance breadth and the audience burst into grateful applause.
Had dinner at the Reinhardts last night and read them the play.
Helene Thimig called for me here, driving her car. That dear wonderful face and exquisite voice.
They’ve lost everything, live frugally. Obstacles arrive every day. The Chamber of Commerce has just vetoed the Blue Bird224 in Hollywood Bowl and may cancel the Faust. Only my play will be left. The Max Reinhard<t> Workshop opens next Monday (Faculty includes Paul Muni, Walter Huston, etc). Difficulties there every moment. Think of what their daily mail must bring them as news of Vienna every day. Think of what they once knew, the palace on the Tiergarten in Berlin. But they never wince or sigh or allude to all that. I simply love them. He made a few suggestions: the stolen supper party in Act III should come to a moment of hilarity and abandon; when the stage is divided by the screen with two plots going on simultaneously there should be one more moment at which both halves are related. In some trembling I read him the (new) monologue that Mrs Levi has in Act IV and asked him whether it was not too earnest for the play. When I was finished he looked at his wife and said in German: You see, he is a poet and turned to me and said: No, I have always said that in a comedy—and near the end—there should always be one moment of complete seriousness and by that the audience can see that also the comedy parts are not just pastime.
Well, I’ll report to you, best of soldiers, from time to time. Don’t trouble to answer; enjoy yourself.
Ever your old
Thornton
Texas in a small way
<early July(?) 1938>
Dear Aleck:
You shall be the first to know.
I’m entering into a very tender union and both of us think that you should be the first to know.
I’m going on the stage.
I’m replacing Frank Craven for 2 weeks.225
That is to say: I’m memorizing the lines. I’m insisting on two days’ rehearsal with the stage-manager before Jed sees me. (You can imagine how even the most shy and considerate suggestion from Jed would dry up my hypothetical art).
[Besides I have a far better and more experienced and congenial coach in Dr. Otto Ludwig Preminger of Vienna’s Josefstadt226 who is waiting at the Ambassador Hotel to encourage & guide me.—Confidential]
I’m going to make Jed pay me 300 a week which I shall give to the Actors Fund.
Of course, maybe I can’t and won’t do it. But there’s a chance that I can transfer the best of the lecturing experience and the result might be a pleasure to me and to them.
The memory hazards are immense.
Anyway: what’s life if it isn’t risk, venture, taxes on the will-power, diversity, and fun?
My only real fear is that I may make the play spineless and boring and Dr. Preminger—honest as the day—will tell me, if I do.
= I leave The Merchant of Yonkers during its casting week. And I dote on you
Thornton
TNW as the Stage Manager in Our Town.
TNW as the Stage Manager in Our Town. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
5959 Franklin Ave
Hollywood, Calif.
Aug. 18 1938
Dear Dwight:
Many thanks for the good long letter and the enheartening statistics.
Yes, here I am still sitting around.
However the Faust opens on Tuesday, and then the Professor can give his attention to my play.
Delos Chappell (of Denver; Yale, about <’>17; producer of Father Malachy’s Miracle) is flying to town to see me and Reinhardt; perhaps he will be the Manager of Reinhardt’s production of the play. It will be a great help,—financially, and personally.
You will be interested to know that I have been turning down many offers to write for the movies. Harry Cohn of Columbia offered me $5000 a week (sic) to finish off the script of “Golden Boy” and De Mille today wanted me to do some work on “Union Pacific.”227
It’s good to know that those monies are still a possibility, but it’s better to know that one doesn’t have to call on them yet.
For I certainly have been spending,—life here, the summoning of Isabel, the trip to New Mexico, and just now (to Mother’s violent protests) I sent Mother $500 for her trip to Scotland with Janet. I am especially glad to do that, because Mother has not budged from Deepwood Drive for many years and Janet, winter and summer, has leaned over microscopes in the fumes of a laboratory.
And now my clothes are falling to pieces and next week I am going to get a suit of clothes.
However I have faith that there will be considerable income next year and nothing I do (except an occasional dinner at these dazzling restaurants) is really wasteful.
My friends tell me that all the expenses of this trip can be deducted from income-tax as necessary concomittents of a professional course. The other day a typist made six copies of my play and when I paid the bill ($25) he automatically leaned over, receipted it, and said: “For your income-tax report.” And now others tell me that I should do the same for the apartment rental. As well as the $25 a week I paid Isabel as my secretary; and all our combined transportation.
I used to think it was painfully hot here, but it must have been far worse there; so may you and Anna228 have a delightful vacation, and I shall see to it that Fritz will be dragged into an unbroken succession of unsavory Broadway-gutter litigations, breach of promise cases, embezzlements and mayhem.
To think that I might have been in New England all these months!
Ever
Thornton
As from:
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven, Conn.
Sept 19. 1938
Dear Prof. Einstein:
Your letter229 made me very proud and happy,—for many reasons most of which you can divine. But one of them is that I know your love of great music and I like to link your generous word with that. It is from a life-long devoted listening to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Palestrina that I draw, as best I can, certain aspirations towards form, breadth, and expressiveness.
Your letter reached me in California where I was working with Prof Max Reinhardt on the production of my next play, a broad farce with social implications, based on Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen. It will be produced in New York in November. There too I dream of catching the “folk” vivacity of Figaro, Leporello and Pa-pageno,230 and the on-rushing high spirits and vitality of the close of a Brandenburg Concerto. I hope you will not feel it to be presumptuous that we beginners say that we work in the shadow of such glorious examples.
I hope that I shall retain your good opinion in my future work, and again accept my thanks for your kind word.
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
Sunday midnight
Nov. 20 1938
Dear Mrs Reinhardt:
Last night I sent you a jubilant telegram; tonight I am still more jubilant. This afternoon the Professor, for the first time, ran through the Fourth Act. Even in a first reading like that what one saw was dazzling virtuosity in direction. Wonderful! As each character and situation developed all of us involved—including the Professor—would be shaken with laughter. Then this evening he returned to the First Act: the play opens like a scene from Charles Dickens.
TNW and Max Reinhardt in rehearsals for The Merchant of Yonkers, November 1938.
TNW and Max Reinhardt in rehearsals for The Merchant of Yonkers, November 1938. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
As I said in the telegram there are still some hesitations in casting; but the Professor was so pleased with the good progress of two of the actors that I think he will decide to retain them. Because of certain contract reasons tomorrow—Monday—is the day he must decide. After the fifth day of rehearsal a rejected actor must be paid two weeks’ salary.
The whole matter of Jane Cowl,231 her fitness for the part, her willingness to receive direction, her relation to us all,—that is all a comedy in and around this comedy. Very funny and a little touching:
ACT ONE: “I cannot play a part if I am directed; the part must grow up within me in my solitude.”
ACT TWO. “He seems to know his business; and he’s getting some very effective acting out of those others. But when my turn comes, I’ll just read my lines quietly; I don’t have to give a performance at rehearsals. I am who I am.”
ACT III “I’m terrified. I can’t possibly be as dull an actress as I’ve been these last three days. What’ll I do? How can I play this part, with all those riotous scenes surrounding me? I’m terrified. Shall I ask him for help….?!!?”
ACT IV “Prof. Reinhardt, I want you to direct me, just as you do the others.”
ACT V Joyous coöperation.
So far, we’re only half-way through Act IV of the above Scenario, but I know the rest will come before long, and will be very good when it does come.
The Professor seems very well to me; but for myself I am surprised at the hours we must all keep for four weeks! The one hour for dinner between six at<and> seven would be all right, but the Professor never gets the full hour—there is a stage-designer, or costume designer, or music arranger, or an actor delaying him with questions! = However I didn’t mean to cause you any concern: he looks well and works with ever new fresh energy.
But the important thing is to tell you again that he is doing glorious things with the play—among actors that are on fire to please him—and with the happiest author one could find.
Sincerely, devotedly
Thornton Wilder
