Chapter 4

1 TNW misquotes the Latin phrase ad majorem Dei gloriam: to the greater glory of God.

2 The Merchant of Yonkers opened in New York on December 28, 1938, ran for thirty-nine performances, and then closed in January 1939. The Merchant of Yonkers: A Farce in Four Acts was published on April 13, 1939, by Harper & Brothers in an edition of fifteen hundred copies. Alexander Woollcott’s prediction came true when the rewritten version of the play, now called The Matchmaker, ran in New York from December 1955 to February 2, 1957, a total of 486 performances. The musical comedy version of the latter—Hello, Dolly!—ran in New York from January 16, 1964, to December 27, 1970, a total of 2,844 performances.

3 TNW wrestled with The Alcestiad for many years. In the summer of 1938, he had written to his dramatic agent Harold Freedman of his “dream” of having the play finished the next summer for presentation at Max Reinhardt’s festival in Hollywood, but that did not happen.

4 Italian: ideas (in this context, the word style would be a closer approximation of TNW’s meaning).

5 Beverly Nichols (1898-1983) was an English novelist and dramatist; he is best known today for his books on gardening.

6 Storrs (1881-1955) was a British colonial official and a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs.

7 Josephine Porter Boardman Crane (1873-1972) was a well-known patron of the arts and a founder of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; she was the widow of former Massachusetts governor Winthrop M. Crane.

8 Chicago philanthropist Elizabeth Paepcke (1902-1994) was involved in many cultural activities both in Chicago and, later, Colorado. In 1950, she founded the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival with her husband, Walter.

9 TNW is probably responding to Paepcke’s invitation to attend the performance on March 31 by the drama group at the Woman’s University Club of Chicago of his one-act play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden.

10 Day, a New Haven attorney, was a partner in Wiggin & Dana, the law firm that represented TNW

11 Film producer Sol Lesser had proposed a movie version of Our Town.

12 On October 5, Lesser sent TNW a “First Rough Draft” for an Our Town film; the draft was prepared by Frank Craven (the actor who originated the role of the Stage Manager) and screenwriter Harry Chandlee. A typescript carbon is in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

13 The first of the three films mentioned is titled Smilin’ Through; the play TNW refers to is titled The Bride the Sun Shines On.

14 Lehr graduated from the Yale Drama School in 1939; he later taught theater at Brooklyn College.

15 Hellman did not work on the script of Our Town, but Wood did direct the film.

16 TNW had begun work on The Beaux’ Stratagem in September, but he stopped in December, having completed only about half the adaptation. Holograph and typed versions are in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. TNW’s adaptation was completed in 2005 by American dramatist Ken Ludwig and was directed by Michael Kahn for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., in 2006.

17 Belley was the town where Stein and Toklas received their mail when they were at their house in Bilignin in the Rhone Valley.

18 Stein’s The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family’s Progress was published in Paris in 1925 and was reprinted in an abridged edition in the United States in 1934.

19 Haas was a graduate student at the University of California in Berkeley. After he heard Stein lecture there, he began corresponding with her about her work and wrote his master’s thesis, which was titled “An Analysis of the Present as an Aesthetic Process in the Critical Writings of Gertrude Stein.” Davis was the University of Chicago graduate to whom TNW introduced Stein and Toklas when TNW and Davis traveled to Europe together in the summer of 1935.

20 Sir Francis Rose was a twentieth-century English painter.

21 Charlotte Wilder’s second book of poetry had been published the previous year. TNW’s nephew, Amos Tappan Wilder, was born on February 6, 1940, in Boston.

22 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with Madame du Deffand and Wiart, edited by W.S. Lewis and Warren Hunting Smith, had been published the previous year.

23 Both the English and American editions of Stein’s Paris France were published in 1940.

24 In the film version of Our Town, Emily Webb lived.

25 Austrian writer, poet, and editor Herbert Steiner.

26 Latin: under the sign of Aristophanes (that is, comedy). The new play became The Skin of Our Teeth.

27 Italian: jokes.

28 French: interlude (French is intermède).

29 Alexander Keyserling’s South American Meditations. French: exalted.

30 American critic and biographer (1886-1963).

31 Irish poet and dramatist Padraic Colum (1881-1972). His wife, Mary (1884-1957), mentioned below, was a literary critic.

32 Jolas (1894-1952) was a poet, journalist, and founder of the literary magazine transition.

33 James Joyce never received the Nobel Prize.

34 Lady Colefax’s house on Lord North Street in London, where she was living during the German air raids.

35 On September 27, 1940, TNW participated in a radio program on the NBC Blue Network, moderated by Eleanor Roosevelt and presented under the auspices of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. He was one of eleven prominent writers and stage performers who discussed their support for Roosevelt in the upcoming election.

36 American journalist and political columnist Walter Lippmann.

37 French: muffled (French is sourd).

38 French: underworld.

39 Zoë Akins (1886-1958) was an American dramatist and screenwriter.

40 Akins’s play The Furies (1928).

41 TNW was in Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was invited to the White House reception.

42 Carl A. Lohman and his wife were New Haven friends.

43 Head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department at that time.

44 Glenn was the minister of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, opposite the White House.

45 Sara Delano Roosevelt, the president’s mother.

46 Julius W. Atwood was the former Episcopal bishop of Arizona.

47 Georgiana was the wife of C. Leslie Glenn.

48 Withington was a Wilder family friend from New Haven.

49 Coward’s play Blithe Spirit had opened in London in June 1941, with Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati, Kay Hammond as Elvira, Fay Compton as Ruth, Cecil Parker as Charles, and Ruth Reeves as Edith.

50 French: length (TNW no doubt meant it was a bit lengthy).

51 “London Pride” is a song Coward wrote in 1941. The “Destroyer picture” refers to In Which We Serve, which Coward wrote, codirected, and acted in. It was not released until 1942, but the British press had begun discussing the film in late August 1941.

52 TNW had met Myerberg at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos home in 1938. When Jed Harris declined to produce TNW’s new play, he turned to Myerberg.

53 In 1928, dancers Doris Humphrey and Charles Weidman had established a school as a dance company, which toured the United States in 1938. In 1933, the company performed Candide, choreographed by Weidman.

54 Matzenauer was an opera singer.

55 American producer, director, and writer Shepard Traube produced and directed Angel Street, which ran in New York from December 1941 to December 1944.

56 TNW had sent Lunt and Fontanne a completed script of The Skin of Our Teeth in January, hoping to convince them to play Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus and perhaps to convince Lunt to direct it. Lunt, who at first reserved judgment, ultimately found the play “very obscure” and declined the opportunity for both of them.

57 Janet Cohn, Harold Freedman’s assistant.

58 Elia Kazan did direct The Skin of Our Teeth, but at the time TNW wrote this letter, Kazan was scheduled to direct Paul Vincent Carroll’s The Strings, My Lord, Are False in May 1942.

59 Fredric March and his wife, actress Florence Eldridge, who frequently acted together, did originate the roles of Mr. and Mrs. Antrobus; but at this time, March was committed to star in the film I Married a Witch (1942).

60 During the first few months of 1942, TNW wrote the scripts for two army training films, Manuelito Becomes an Air Cadet and Your Community and the War Effort, an assignment arranged by Archibald MacLeish, who was assistant director of the Office of War Information.

61 French: fundamentally.

62 TNW is probably referring to Tallulah Bankhead, who did play Sabina in the original production.

63 At this time, TNW was working with Hitchcock on the screenplay for Shadow of a Doubt.

64 American dramatist and screenwriter Robert Ardrey had been TNW’Sm student at the University of Chicago, and TNW was his mentor thereafter. Ardrey’s wife was Helen. The play mentioned may be Jeb (1946).

65 Rosalie Stewart.

66 Herman Weissman was one of two people credited with the adaptation for the 1944 film of The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

67 Jack H. Skirball was the producer of Shadow of a Doubt.

68 Italian: Let’s hope.

69 Elia Kazan’s nickname was “Gadge.”

70 There was some discussion of Gordon playing Sabina, and she may well have been the actress TNW had in mind for the part when he wrote the play; but she was not offered the role. In December 1942, she opened in New York in a production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, playing Natalya Ivanovna.

71 Patricia Collinge played Birdie Hubbard in the film The Little Foxes (1941), as well as the role of Emma Newton in Shadow of a Doubt. Ruth Gordon played Hedwig Ehrlich in the 1940 film Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet.

72 From September 10 to 13, 1941, TNW and John Dos Passos attended a conference in London of the International Committee of PEN, the writers’ organization. TNW stayed past the end of the conference and was able to witness the war firsthand, not only in London but also as he traveled around the country visiting friends, military bases, bombed cities, and addressing meetings as far north as Glasgow. He returned to the United States on October 18.

73 German: world history (German is Welgeschichtliche).

74 German: In the beginning was the deed. (TNW misquotes Goethe’s line from Faust:: (“Im Anfang war die Tat!”)

75 German: Beginning and end, old and new.

76 The postcard was postmarked June 30, 1942, which was a Tuesday.

77 Winthrop Saltonstall Dakin (1906-1982), who had married TNW’s sister Janet on March 22, 1941, before entering the U.S. Army Air Force.

78 French: drudgeries.

79 Novel (1926).

80 Maude Hutchins published four poems—“I Asked Her,” “Absent-Minded Poet in Washington,” “Suitor,” and “Gold”—in the September 1942 issue of Poetry.

81 Latin: God is concealed.

82 TNW is probably referring to “The Hell of the Vizier Kabäar” (see letter number 156).

83 When The Skin of Our Teeth was published in 1943, it appeared with no dedication.

84 Ruth Gordon appeared in two movies that were released in 1943, Edge of Darkness and Action in the North Atlantic.

85Shortly after The Skin of Our Teeth began its pre-Broadway run in New Haven on September 15, TNW received telegrams from both Reed and Bankhead telling him that Myerberg had fired three actors and was sabotaging the play.

86Frohman was a well-known Broadway producer.

87The Skin of Our Teeth had one-week runs in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., after New Haven and before its New York opening.

88Apparently, Frost had wanted to attend the New York opening of The Skin of Our Teeth on November 18.

89A 1928 poem by Frost.

90The date and the place of origin appear at the end of the original letter.

91In its issues dated December 19 and February 13, 1943, The Saturday Review of Literature published a two-part article by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, “The Skin of Whose Teeth?” The authors called TNW’s play not an entirely original creation, but an Americanized re-creation, thinly disguised, of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake.’ Not wanting to dignify the accusations by answering them and further inflaming passions, his attorney and family advised against replying; TNW’s letter in response to the December 19 article was never mailed. Either TNW saw an advance copy of the article or the issue appeared before December 19.

92 Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744).

93 This is a transcription of TNW’s letter; the original has not been located.

94 Clift played the role of Henry Antrobus in the premiere production of The Skin of Our Teeth.

95 This is a transcription of TNW’S letter; the letter has not been located.

96 In June 1943, Tallulah Bankhead, Fredric March, and Florence Eldridge took advantage of clauses in their contracts and left the play. They were replaced by, respectively, Miriam Hopkins, Conrad Nagel, and Margalo Gillmore. The play ran through the summer, to decreasing audiences, and closed on September 25. The next week, it opened in Boston, prior to a planned national tour; but after one week of a two-week run, now with Lizabeth Scott as Sabina, it closed and there was no tour.

97 Gordon was a theatrical producer.

98 Tallulah Bankhead starred in the premiere production of Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes (1939).

99 Harold Freedman.

100 TNW means hegira.

101 French: a housekeeper.

102 French: a pearl.

103 Delia Lyman Porter’s inspirational gift books, published in the early 1900s, offered quotations for every week of the year.

104 Evelyn Scott (1893-1963), a Southern novelist, poet, and essayist, met Charlotte Wilder at Yaddo in 1933, corresponded with her thereafter, and was one of the two women to whom Charlotte dedicated her first book of poetry, Phases of the Moon.

105 In late February 1941, Charlotte Wilder had had a mental breakdown in New York City. She was hospitalized in private hospitals in New York City and White Plains, New York, for several months, where she received the accepted treatment of the day—electric-shock and insulin-shock therapy. When she did not show any improvement, it was decided that she had a deep-seated condition that would require continued hospitalization. She was transferred to the Harlem Valley State Hospital in Wingdale, New York, where she received drug therapy. After an initial positive response to the drug she was being given, Charlotte became depressed and distant. In January 1945, the family would move her to a smaller, private facility in Amityville, New York.

106 TNW’S British intelligence counterpart, Roland Le Grand, was married in Rome in October 1944; TNW served as the best man.

107 Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants, a three-volume work, was published in the 1940s. Italian historian and philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952) was born in Naples and lived there for most of his life.

108 Rebekah Higginson met TNW when he was in Arizona in 1936-1937. She had three children, none of whom was named Eliza. TNW may have meant her daughter Sally, with whom he became a close friend and correspondent.

109 TNW may be referring to film actress Helen Hawley.

110 TNW is probably referring to Little Coquette: The Story of a French Girlhood (1944), by Renée de Fontarce McCormick. In referring to tepid linden tea (tilleul), TNW means uninspiring reading material.

111 Probably Margaret MacDonald, a friend of the Le Grands.

112 Julian Le Grand was born on May 29, 1945; TNW was his godfather.

113 This is a transcription of TNW’s letter; the original has not been located.

114 In 1943, Michael Myerberg made a secret deal for the British stage rights to The Skin of Our Teeth with a little-known English actress and producer without informing TNW’S agent. This option expired in July 1944, and Myerberg resold the British rights, this time with TNW’S knowledge and enthusiastic approval, to Vivien Leigh, Olivier’s wife.

115 For various contractual reasons and because rehearsals were too far advanced, this arrangement did not take place.

116 The English production of The Skin of Our Teeth, directed by Olivier and starring Leigh as Sabina, ran at the King’s Theatre in Edinburgh in March 1945 and opened in London at the Phoenix Theatre in May 1945, receiving favorable reviews.

117 Traugott had met TNW in North Africa in 1943, when he, as an enlisted man in the air force, was assigned to be TNW’s clerk. He went to Italy with TNW in 1944 as his chief clerk. At the time of this letter, Traugott was in Italy, awaiting reassignment and hoping to be promoted to the rank of staff sergeant.

118 Other clerks with whom TNW and Traugott worked in Italy.

119 French: obligatory scenes.

120 For earlier references to this unfinished play, see letters numbers 156 and 194.

121 Wartime prime minister Winston Churchill and his Conservative party had been defeated in the national election in July 1945 by the Labour party and its leader, Clement Attlee.

122 The title was Philosophical Fragments.

123 Farwell met TNW in Capri during the war. In 1946, he was beginning his studies for an M.A. in English at the University of Chicago.

124 Robert Maynard Hutchins.

125 TNW is probably referring to American stage actor Emmett Rogers.

126 Byron Farwell’s wife was Ruth Saxby Farwell.

127 TNW is referring to what became his novel The Ides of March, published in 1948.

128 Latin: ennui.

129 Pank refers to Leonard Thomas Pankhurst, TNW’S commanding officer at the MAAF headquarters. Mike Morgan and Leonard Trolley were RAF servicemen with whom TNW had worked in Italy. Isabel Wilder went to England as her brother’s representative when Our Town opened at London’s New Theatre on April 30, 1946, with Marc Connelly as the Stage Manager. The London production received mixed reviews.

130 Gordon had married Kanin in 1942.

131 Sartre asked TNW to translate his play Morts sans sépulture (1946), which opened in Paris in November 1946, to great controversy. After meeting with Sartre in February 1948, TNW did the translation. The play, now titled The Victors, opened in New York on December 26, 1948, and ran until January 22, 1949, Off Broadway at the New Stages Theatre.

132 United Nations Organization.

133 Jones Kelly Harris, who was born in 1929, was Ruth Gordon’s son by Jed Harris.

134 TNW may be referring to a discounted travel ticket for his brother, who was an ordained minister.

135 German philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) emigrated to the United States in 1933 and taught at Harvard and then Dartmouth. Amos Wilder may have recommended Rosen-stock-Huessy’s The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun (1946).

136 Italian: the most serene.

137 Latin: lust.

138 TNW is referring to the passage in Matthew 5:22, thereby meaning contempt of others.

139 Although only thirty-nine, Olivier played Lear in a production he directed. King Lear opened at London’s New Theatre on September 24, 1946.

140 Isabella Niven Wilder died on June 29, 1946, on Nantucket.

141 British theater manager Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont.

142 TNW played the Stage Manager in Our Town at Westport, Connecticut, August 5-10; he played Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth in Cohasset, Massachusetts, August 19-24; and he played the Stage Manager in East Hampton, New York, August 26-31. Among those with whom he performed, several had been involved in the original stage production of Our Town. Doro Merande had played Mrs. Soames, a role she also played in the film version. Philip Coolidge had played Simon Stimson. Thomas Coley had played a baseball player and had also served as one of the assistant stage managers of the original production.

143 TNW is referring to Gordon’s autobiographical play, Years Ago, in which Fredric March and Florence Eldridge played Gordon’s parents, Clifton and Annie Jones. The play, directed by Kanin, ran in New York from December 1946 to May 1947.

144 Several companies performing Kanin’s highly successful stage comedy Born Yesterday (1946) were going to tour the country. Alexander Woollcott had died in 1943. Layton went on to have a successful career as an actor, a director, a teacher, and a writer. He moved to Spain in the 1960s and became important in the theater world there.

145 During an operation for cancer, Gertrude Stein lapsed into a coma and died on July 27, 1946.

146 In some of his correspondence from early March through early June 1945, TNW had indicated that he looked forward to an expected assignment as cultural attaché at the U.S. embassy in Paris; however, upon his return from Europe, he was advised by the Wilders’ family physician to rest for a period of six months to a year.

147 Two days before she died, Stein made a will, in which she directed her executors to provide Carl Van Vechten with the funds that he deemed necessary for the publication of any of her unpublished works.

148 Four in America was published by Yale University Press in 1947, with an introduction by TNW, which was a contractual precondition to its publication.

149 TNW wrote the salutation in large letters.

150 French: partners.

151 Probably Charles Henry Alexander Paget, earl of Uxbridge (1885-1947).

152 London hostess Ava Bodley, Lady Anderson (1896-1974), wife of British politician Sir John Anderson.

153 Leonard “Tom” Trolley served as a clerk to TNW and Roland Le Grand at the MAAF headquarters in Caserta, Italy. He met his future wife, June, while both were acting in the RAF Players group there; and his nickname was taken from the name of a character he played. Since she was an officer and he was not, there were great difficulties regarding their marriage; TNW helped them surmount military red tape, gave away the bride, and arranged the wedding reception.

154 A production of Priestley’s play An Inspector Calls did have a New York run from October 1947 to January 1948, but it was not produced by John Golden.

155 Arthur “Wilkie” Wilkinson, an RAF flight lieutenant who was instrumental in opening Caserta’s Royal Palace Opera House for repertory plays open to all service branches during the war. He was a professional actor in civilian life.

156 Gish contacted TNW about doing a film version of his 1930 novel, The Woman of Andros.

157 Cecil B. DeMille was not involved in either Quo Vadis (1924) or Ben-Hur (1926), but he did direct The Sign of the Cross (1932), in which Laughton portrayed Nero. Claude Rains played Julius Caesar in the film Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).

158 Traubel was an American opera singer.

159 American writer and sometime actress; there is no record that Macht’s work was ever published.

160 Barrault and his wife founded their own acting company in 1946 at the Théâtre Marigny in Paris.

161 Bérard was a well-known costume and set designer, as well as a painter.

162 French: make-up.

163 TNW is responding to Wescott’s praise of The Ides of March, published on January 16, 1948.

164 TNW misuses the French term exquise esquisse, or exquisite sketch.

165 French: preconception (French is parti pris).

166 TNW never published a book about Lope de Vega but he did publish two essays based on his research: “New Aids Toward Dating the Early Plays of Lope de Vega,” which appeared in the book Varia Variorum: Festgabe für Karl Reinhardt (1952), and “Lope, Pinedo, Some Child Actors, and a Lion,” which was published in the journal Romance Philology (1953). Both essays were reprinted in TNW’s American Characteristics and Other Essays, ed. Donald Gallup (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).

167 Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (ca. 1581-1639) and Tirso de Molina (1584-1648) were Spanish dramatists.

168 Pound was confined from 1946 to 1958 in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., after having been found psychologically unfit to stand trial for treason.

169 See letter number 67, which describes this time in 1921, although Pound is not mentioned in that letter.

170 Professor Courtney Bruerton.

171 De Sica had expressed interest in collaborating with TNW. In 1952, TNW prepared for him a treatment of a film about Chicago, based on a Ben Hecht story, but the project was abandoned. TNW later salvaged some of the script for his one-act play Bernice (1957).

172 French poet and diplomat Alexis Léger used the pen name Saint-John Perse.

173 Robert M. Hutchins, who was now chancellor of the University of Chicago, was the chairman of the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Festival in Aspen, Colorado, one of several worldwide commemorations of the writer’s birth. TNW who was a member of the Goethe Bicentennial Foundation, gave the brief opening address and delivered a formal lecture, “World Literature and the Modern Mind” (reprinted in American Characteristics and Other Essays [1979] as “Goethe and World Literature”). Ernest R. Curtius was a German literary scholar and critic; Werner Jaeger was a German philologist and classicist.

174 Hutchins, who was now divorced from Maude, married Vesta Sutton and adopted her daughter, Barbara.

175 TNW attempted, with the support of Rudolf Bing, to establish such a festival in Newport, Rhode Island, but he did not succeed.

176 Under postwar occupation currency regulations, TNW’s German money earned from royalties could only be spent there.

177 Maynor was an African-American opera singer.

178 TNW is referring to Albert Schweitzer. TNW’s brother was a graduate student in theology at Mansfield College, Oxford, when Schweitzer went there in February 1922 to deliver the Dale Memorial Lectures. Because Amos Wilder knew French and Schweitzer’s English was not strong, Amos helped him with his correspondence.

179 Scholar, critic, and painter Barker Fairley and educator and philosopher Ernst Simon.

180 TNW’s translation of this passage appears in “Goethe and World Literature” in American Characteristics (1979).

181 Chicago businessman and philanthropist Walter Paepcke (1896-1960), chairman of the Container Corporation of America, made Aspen, Colorado, the site of the Goethe Festival. In 1950, Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth “Pussy” Paepcke, created the Aspen Institute; Elizabeth was the sister of Paul Nitze, who held major positions in several presidential administrations and was instrumental in establishing Cold War policy. His wife was Phyllis Pratt Nitze.

182 TNW is referring to the poem “Abou Ben Adhem” (1838) by James Leigh Hunt. TNW obviously means his brother and the latter’s family in this regard.

183 Amos’s wife, Catharine.

184 Spanish: courtesy (Spanish is cortesia).

185 Austrian-born translator Herberth Herlitschka (1893-1970) was the German-language translator of TNW’s early plays, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and all his subsequent novels except for Theophilus North, which was published after Herlitschka’s death. TNW shared his German-language royalties equally with Herlitschka, an unusually generous arrangement.

186 TNW’s contract was with the German publisher Bermann-Fischer.

187 The Hohenlohes were a German noble family.

188 TNW’s story “The Warship” had appeared in the Yale Literary Magazines Centennial Number in February 1936.

189 TNW wrote this letter on lined paper.

190 Grant and Howard Hawks had contacted TNW about writing a film adaptation of Jonathan Swift’s satiric masterpiece. This project was never realized.

191 American dramatist Avery Hopwood (1882-1928).

192 The New Gulliver, a 1935 Russian animated film using the stop-motion technique, directed by Aleksandr Ptushko, in which puppets were used extensively.

193 German journalist and editor Heinrich Walter, who had emigrated to the United States after World War II, had met TNW in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1948. At TNW’S invitation, Walter interviewed him thereafter in New Haven and subsequently submitted further questions to him by mail.

194 This hotel in Rüschlikon is five miles from the center of Zurich.

195 Brahms’s Neue Liebeslieder was composed in Rüschlikon in 1874. Swiss novelist and poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived in the nearby town of Kuchberg. His Balladen was published in 1867.

196 The golden age of Spanish literature extended from the early sixteenth century to the late seventeenth.

197 TNW is referring to The Alcestiad, or A Life in the Sun, as it was titled in its premiere production at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1955.

Chapter 5

1 A professor of Spanish at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, de Mayo met TNW in Aspen at the Goethe Bicentennial in July 1949. She arranged for him to give a lecture, “The Spanish Theatre of the Seventeenth Century,” at Vassar on January 12, 1950.

2 The Netherlands (1948).

3 The term grandes machines is usually used to refer to large French history paintings, although TNW uses the term in a more general context.

4 Isabel Wilder had fallen in her home and suffered a concussion.

5 TNW probably is referring to the seventeenth duke of Alba, Jacobo Stuart-Fitz-James y Falcó (1878-1953).

6 Copland wrote TNW on March 23, asking him about doing the libretto for an opera version of Our Town, with the music to be composed by Copland. Copland had been asked to do so by Rudolf Bing of the Metropolitan Opera.

7 Latin: against music.

8 Valladolid, a city in central Spain, is famous for its Holy Week procesiónes, or processions.

9 Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria.

10 Olivier and Leigh were going to Hollywood, where Leigh was going to play Blanche DuBois in the 1951 film version of Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947); Olivier was going to play George Hurstwood in Carrie (1952), a film version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900).

11 Garson Kanin’s play The Live Wire, directed by Kanin and produced by Michael Todd, ran in New York in August and September 1950. Kanin’s play The Rat Race ran in New York from December 1949 to March 1950.

12 Faraway Meadows was the Kanins’ country house in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

13 Gordon was scheduled to appear in the pre—New York tryout of Jane Bowles’s In the Summer House at the Westport (Connecticut) Country Playhouse during the week of August 2321, 1950, but the engagement was canceled; she did appear at Westport during the week of September 11 in Garson Kanin’s adaptation of the French play The Amazing Adele, by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy. The two original movie scripts Gordon and Kanin sold to the movies may refer to The Marrying Kind and Pat and Mike, both of which were released in 195232.

14 William Inge’s Come Back, Little Sheba, starring Booth, ran in New York from February to July 1950.

15 TNW did not adapt this 1934 play by Jean Cocteau.

16 Eliot’s play ran in New York from January 1950 to January 1951.

17 Latin: Either Christ or no one.

18 Notley Abbey was the couple’s home in Buckinghamshire.

19 TNW first met Stallman during the Depression when the latter was an able but poor undergraduate at the University of Chicago. TNW anonymously assisted him financially. Stallman got a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin and was, at this time, teaching at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. He approached TNW to write him a letter of recommendation to the Guggenheim Foundation for a volume of Stephen Vincent Benét’s letters. This project was never realized.

20 William Rose Benét, Stephen Vincent Benét’s brother and fellow poet.

21 Secretary of the Guggenheim Foundation.

22 Lowry was president of the College of Wooster (Ohio) at this time.

23 French: You will forgive me; that’s your profession (TNW is playing on “Le bon Dieu me pardonnera: c’est son métier,” a quote attributed to Catherine the Great).

24 German: Beautifully spoken, badly printed.

25 TNW received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the College of Wooster in May 1950; the idea in the address he made on that occasion, “The American,” about the essential loneliness inherent in being an American, was one he expanded upon in his Norton Lectures at Harvard.

26 TNW titled his Norton Lectures series “The American Characteristics of Classical American Literature” and delivered five of the required six before he became ill. He revised three of the lectures and they were published in The Atlantic Monthly as “Towards An American Language” (July 1952), “The American Loneliness” (August 1952), and “Emily Dickinson” (November 1952). All three were reprinted in TNW’s American Characteristics and Other Essays (1979).

27 Besides being involved with his ongoing study of Lope de Vega and of Finnegans Wake, TNW was studying the music of the Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. The new comedy he was working on was probably “The Emporium” which remained unfinished at his death; incomplete holograph sketches, acts 1 and 2, and a story summary are in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

28 Lowry had edited several books on Arnold, so it is difficult to determine for which one TNW was thanking him; but the second book he mentions is Lowry’s The Mind’s Adventure: Religion and Higher Education (1950).

29 Alma was married to Mahler, Gropius, and finally to Werfel. She never married Kokoshka, although she had a three-year affair with him prior to her marriage to Gropius.

30 TNW is referring to Egeria, the water nymph in Roman mythology, who was King Numa’s consort and provided him with advice. Her name became identified with any woman who was an adviser to or a supporter of a famous artist or political figure.

31 At this time, William C. Craig was a professor of speech at the College of Wooster and Peyton was a professor of Spanish there.

32 Yale English professor Chauncey B. Tinker was now seventy-five years old. He and Lowry had collaborated on The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (1940).

33 This book may have been presented to TNW during his stay at the College of Wooster.

34 After her serious mental breakdown in 1941, TNW’s sister Charlotte had not responded to treatments. In 1947, she had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy at the Neurological Institute of Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Two and a half years later, she had appeared so much improved that, with financial assistance from TNW, she began to live independently in September 1950 in an apartment in Greenwich Village, her former neighborhood in New York City.

35 Mira Rostova, Clift’s close friend and acting coach.

36 Elizabeth Taylor had married Conrad “Nicky” Hilton, Jr., heir to the Hilton hotel business, in 1950, but the marriage lasted only nine months.

37 These, privately printed, were later published as Letters and Verses of Clara Boardman Peck (1951).

38 Rose Jackson, Catherine Coffin, Helen McAfee, and the Withingtons were New Haven friends.

39 Donald Gallup was curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature. Because of his friendship with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, he was instrumental in obtaining their papers and artworks for Yale. Gabrielle was Toklas’s maid.

40 Upon Dwight Dana’s death in 1951, Wright became TNW’s attorney.

41 TNW and his brother, Amos, both received honorary degrees from Oberlin College in June 1952.

42 In 1926, John D. Rockefeller had begun restoring the town of Williamsburg, Virginia, to preserve its eighteenth-century past.

43 Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh played on alternate nights in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in New York from December 1951 to April 1952.

44 The Joyce essay, “James Joyce, 1882-1941,” had originally appeared in the March 1941 issue of Poetry. It was reprinted as a chapbook by the Wells College Press in Aurora, New York, in 1944. It was later reprinted in American Characteristics and Other Essays (1979).

45 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (1952).

46 Benjamin Constant’s novel Cécile was probably finished in 1811, but it was not published until 1951; Constant’s best-known work was his novel Adolphe (1816).

47 TNW had met American journalist and biographer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant (1881-1965) in the late 1920s.

48 Italian: softness (TNW is referring to Mann’s Death in Venice [1912]).

49 Guthrie was not involved in the production of The Merchant of Yonkers that opened at London’s Embassy Theatre on December 27, 1951, but he did direct the revised version of the play, The Matchmaker, which opened in Edinburgh on August 23, 1954, and in London on November 4, 1954.

50 TNW is referring to Sergeant’s book Willa Cather: A Memoir, which she had worked on at the MacDowell Colony. It was published in 1953.

51 French: completely devoted.

52 Amos Wilder’s poem “Autumn Fires” was later published in his poetry collection Grace Confounding (1972). It was the custom of Amos and his family to send one of his poems as a Christmas greeting, but on this occasion they sent the poem at Thanksgiving because they were in Frankfurt for the year, where Amos was at the University of Frankfurt-am-Main as an exchange professor. The two children were at boarding schools—Catharine (“Dixie”) at the coed International School in Geneva, Switzerland, and Tappan (“Tappy”) at the all-male Ecole des Roches in Cléres, France.

53 French: hard-heartedness.

54 Higginson met TNW in Tucson, Arizona, in 1938, when she was nine or ten. TNW had a letter of introduction from a mutual friend to Higginson’s recently widowed mother, who had taken her three young children from Boston, Massachusetts, to spend several months in a dryer, milder climate.

55 American dramatist Bates (1884-1977) met TNW at the MacDowell Colony in 1924, where she was known for being able to transcribe Edwin Arlington Robinson’s minuscule handwriting into readable manuscript form.

56 Bates was a close friend of American poet and critic Winfield Townley Scott (1910-1968), whose essay “ Our Town and the Golden Veil” appeared in the Winter 1953 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

57 TNW’s talk at the Amos Fortune Forum in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, was titled “Modern Literature and the Inner Life.”

58 French: My beautiful and good one.

59 Latin: and so forth. Higginson lived on Ware Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and invited TNW to tea or drinks. He suggested she invite some friends as well, which she did, and there was a group of about ten people.

60 After having graduated from Radcliffe College, Higginson wanted to be a writer and go to Paris.

61 Mansfield’s journals and letters were edited after her death by her husband, John Middleton Murry: The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (1927) and The Letters of Katherine Mansfield (2 vols., 1929).

62 Cobb’s Mill Inn is on the Saugatuck River in Weston, Connecticut.

63 Their youngest sister and her husband lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.

64 TNW’s father had lobbied his Yale classmate Frederick Scheetz Jones, dean of Yale, to get TNW admitted there in September 1917.

65 TNW’s concern about his sister’s eating habits stemmed from Charlotte’s bout with a hemor-rhaging gastric ulcer, brought on by irregular eating and a general disregard for her health and physical surroundings. That illness resulted in a six-month hospitalization in 1952 in a halfway house at the institution in Amityville, Long Island, New York, where she had lived from January 1945 until September 1950, when she had begun to live independently. She returned to her Greenwich Village apartment after her convalescence and after assuring her doctors and her siblings that she could take care of herself. But she was unable to do so; the ulcers recurred and she required an operation that involved removing most of her stomach. On July 18, 1953, she was readmitted to the house in Amityville and her apartment was vacated. She spent the remainder of her life in institutional settings.

66 A summer inn in Brooklin, Maine, approximately six miles from TNW’S brother’s family home.

67 TNW’s nephew was racing a Brutal Beast class sailboat in Blue Hill, Maine.

68 “(Sept. 10, 1953 from McDowell Colony)” supplied here in another hand, probably that of TNW’s brother.

69 The Gotham Book Mart in New York City, a popular gathering place for writers.

70 Daughter of William Sergeant Kendall, dean of the Yale School of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1922.

71 Catharine Dix Wilder entered Dana Hall School, an all-girls boarding school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in September 1953.

72 TNW met Albee at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1953, when Albee was there to visit his partner, American composer William Flanagan (1923-1969), who had a fellowship there. When Albee showed him the poems he’d been writing, TNW reportedly advised him to try writing plays. As a result, Albee began writing a verse play, “The Making of a Saint,” and wrote TNW asking if he would look at it and enclosing a poem he had written.

73 American poet Marcia Nardi (1901-1990) most likely had met TNW in the summer of 1953 at the MacDowell Colony.

74 A poem by Nardi that she sent to TNW; it was published in the October 1964 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

75 Read (1893-1968) was an English poet and literary and art critic.

76 American dramatist Michaela O’Harra (1911-2007) founded New Dramatists in 1949 as a monthly craft seminar for young playwrights. She apparently asked TNW for suggestions to be given to fledgling playwrights and she then printed his reply in the bulletin or newsletter that New Dramatists sent to its members. TNW’s original letter has not been located; this appears to be a secretarial transcription.

77 Among the students George Pierce Baker taught in his ‘47 Workshop at Harvard University between 1905 and 1924 were Eugene O’Neill and Thomas Wolfe. After moving to Yale University in 1925, he taught American dramatist Paul Osborn (1901-1988).

78 Henrik Ibsen served as a stage manager with the National Stage in Bergen, Norway, before beginning his career as a dramatist.

79 Anglin, Adams, and Matthison were among the most popular stage performers of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

80 Shaw’s earliest plays were produced by Harley Granville-Barker at London’s Court Theatre, which was managed by J. E. Vedrenne. English actress Ellen Terry, English actor-manager Sir George Alexander, and American actor Arnold Daly all appeared in plays by Shaw.

81 Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real had opened on Broadway. Its run at the National Theatre from March to May 1953, a total of sixty performances, was a significant failure.

82 MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Huntington Hartford Foundation’s colony in Pacific Palisades, California, afforded artists short-term residences.

83 French: Very good and very dear ones.

84 After ten weeks on the road, The Matchmaker opened at London’s Haymarket Theatre on November 4, 1954.

85 French: gaming rooms.

86 Nardi’s Poems was published in 1956 by Alan Swallow, which was based in Denver, Colorado.

87 French: a great lover.

88 Actress Irene Worth played Alcestis in the world premiere of TNW’s The Alcestiad (retitled A Life in the Sun), which opened at the Edinburgh Festival on August 22, 1955, directed by Tyrone “Tony” Guthrie.

89 In mid-January, the Seine rose to flood level, necessitating removal of artworks on the ground floor of the Louvre and causing the evacuation of thousands in the suburbs of Paris.

90 French: Isn’t God French?

91 Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, whose company, H. M. Tennant, coproduced A Life in the Sun with the Edinburgh Festival Society.

92 Sir Ian Bruce Hope Hunter was the artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival.

93 The quotation is from act 2, when Jack indicates that his brother Ernest had “expressed a desire to be buried in Paris” and Chausuble observes, “I fear that hardly points to any very serious state of mind at the last.”

94 Irene was the Greek goddess of peace and the name derives from the Greek word.

95 Wright had wired money to TNW

96 TNW’s “Notes on The Alcestiad” was published in the program for the Edinburgh Festival production; it was reprinted in volume 2 of The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder (1998).

97 Alan Schneider (1917-1984), who, while teaching at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., had directed a production of TNW’S The Skin of Our Teeth in 1952. In 1955, he directed a major revival of the play, starring Helen Hayes as Mrs. Antrobus, George Abbott as Mr. Antrobus, and Mary Martin as Sabina. The production, produced by Robert Whitehead (1916-2002), ran in New York for twenty-two performances in August and September 1955 before going to Paris as part of the American National Theatre and Academy’s Salute to France program.

98 On April 18, 1955, TNW read the first two acts of The Alcestiad at the Library of Congress; on May 2, he gave a lecture/reading, “Culture and Confusion,” at the YM-YWHA in New York City.

99 The Alcestiad.

100 Wynn was known for his “Perfect Fool” character.

101 This play (1896) by French dramatist and novelist Alfred Jarry is a stylized burlesque and had a great influence on Dada and surrealism.

102 Bankhead played Sabina in the original 1942 production of The Skin of Our Teeth.

103 TNW’s niece graduated from the Dana Hall School in June 1955 and entered Radcliffe College that fall. The date was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Catharine Dix Wilder.

104 Link (1924-2001) was a leading German scholar of American literature during the postwar period.

105 TNW was working with Louise Talma on an opera version of The Alcestiad.

106 TNW went to Europe for the Paris production of The Skin of Our Teeth, which was partially funded by the State Department and by American Express.

107 Schneider directed Beckett’s 1952 play. Produced by Michael Myerberg and starring Lahr and Ewell, it opened at the Cocoanut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida, in January 1956, to negative reviews. Wilder’s dictated translation was not used in the production and has not been located.

108 The Matchmaker was scheduled to open in New York on December 5, 1955.

109 Although TNW was always loyal to Ruth Gordon and pleased at the success she made with The Matchmaker, he appears to have favored an ensemble interpretation of the play, closer to the European farce tradition than to the more rambunctious, star-driven American version.

110 Danda was Wright’s second wife, but whether TNW is referring to Wright’s children by his first wife or to daughters his second wife had from a previous marriage cannot be determined.

111 Bentley had asked TNW to provide a translation of or an introduction to a Spanish play for the third volume, Six Spanish Plays (1959), of his four-volume The Classic Theatre (1958-1961).

112 Spanish dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681).

113 Spanish stage actress Margarita Xirgu (1888-1969) was a friend of and a frequent performer in the plays of Spanish dramatist and poet Federico García Lorca.

114 German art historian and essayist Erwin Panofsky’s Norton Lectures were published as Early Netherlandish Painting (1953).

115 Luce’s wife, editor, journalist, dramatist, and politician Clare Boothe Luce (1903-1987), had been appointed U.S. ambassador to Italy in March 1953. In 1956 she was forced to resign because she contracted an illness diagnosed as arsenic poisoning, attributed to paint chips that had fallen from the decorative ceiling in the bedroom of her official residence.

116 American novelist and journalist John Hersey was born in China to missionary parents and spent several years there. Hersey’s 1956 novel, A Single Pebble, deals with an American engineer who is sent to China in the 1920s and falls under the spell of Chinese culture.

117 TNW is referring to his epistolary novel The Ides of March (1948).

118 TNW’s reference to Wardour Street relates to archaic language used for effect. The expression derives from the London street where a large number of antique shops were once located.

119 TNW is referring to Tallulah Bankhead, whose father, William Brockman Bankhead, was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and whose paternal grandfather, John H. Bankhead, was a U.S. senator.

120 The date for this letter was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

121 French: always equal to herself (by which TNW means she is always up to the task at hand).

122 TNW salvaged Bernice from the scenario he sent to Vittorio de Sica in 1952. That scenario was based on Ben Hecht’s 1943 novel Miracle in the Rain, and TNW retained “the returned convict” and “the Negress as advisor” from the scenario in writing Bernice.

123 German: Please do not let yourself be tortured by work, gracious and heavenly-gifted lady

124 German: Your.

125 In his Journal entries for December 2 and December 13, 1956 (The Journals of Thornton Wilder: 1939-1961, ed. Donald Gallup [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985] 257-259), TNW noted the dates of six one-act plays he had begun. On November 9, he began a play “reflecting my reading in Zen and Mahayana Buddhism” (this play may have turned up in another form); on November 12, what became The Drunken Sisters, the satyr play for The Alcestiad; on November 17, The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five; on November 23, Bernice; on December 2, “The Attic Play,” which he noted lacked an “all-shaping idea” and which was probably discarded; and on December 9, “Shakespeare and the Bible,” which was never completed to TNW’S satisfaction. Bernice and The Wreck on the Five-Twenty-Five premiered as part of a program of short American plays presented to dedicate the new Congress Hall in West Berlin in September 1957. The casts included TNW Ethel Waters, Lillian Gish, James Daly, Hiram Sherman, Cynthia Baxter, and John Becher; the director was Lamont Johnson. In 1958, TNW began working on a series of short plays based on the seven deadly sins, with Bernice representing the sin of pride. He did not complete the series, and Bernice was not staged again in his lifetime.

126 Dr. Graham Francis was in charge of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary and was married to Roland Le Grand’s sister Noelle.

127 TNW is referring to the French translation of The Matchmaker.

128 Le Rosaire (1926), a play by André Bisson; La Bonheur de Jour (1926), a play by Edmond Guiraud; Mon Curé Chez les Riches (1925), a novel by Clément Vautel.

129 French: fade, bland; plat, dull; niais, vacuous.

130 Louis Ducreux was the French translator of The Matchmaker.

131 French: strong woman.

132 French: fascinantes, fascinating; crueles, cruel.

133 French: the eternal feminine.

134 French: is the most beautiful woman in the world.

135 French: You have a lover whom you hide in the closets.

136 The year was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

137 Novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

138 TNW enclosed with this letter the program for the Edward M. Gallaudet Memorial Dinner of the St. Augustine Chapter of the Gallaudet College Alumni Association, held at the Dolphin Restaurant in Marineland, Florida, on February 7. Gallaudet (which is now a university) in Washington, D.C., is the only institution of higher learning in the United States devoted exclusively to the education of hearing-impaired students. The “adjacent College for the Deaf” to which TNW refers is the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, but it was not their alumni who were meeting.

139 François Delsarte (1811-1871), a French acting and voice instructor, emphasized the importance of gestures and poses to the act of expressing oneself.

140 Fowlie’s Mallarmé was published in 1953.

141 Charlotte Tappan Niven had retired in Winter Park, Florida.

142 The Alcestiad.

143 This project was never realized.

144 Because no U.S. company would produce it, Albee’s play premiered at the Schiller Theatre in Berlin in September 1959 on a double bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. It was produced in New York, again with Krapp’s Last Tape, in January 1960, at the Off-Broadway Provincetown Playhouse.

145 American writer Kay Boyle (1902-1992) had written TNW to enlist his support in getting Samuel Beckett elected to honorary membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

146 Cross was the author of The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne (1909) and The History of Henry Fielding (1918). Tinker was the author of Young Boswell (1922) and the editor of the two-volume Letters of James Boswell (1924). TNW’S point is that Sterne, Fielding, and Boswell were all recognized for the earthiness of their writing.

147 Georges Simenon’s novel Le Fils was published in 1957. The passage quoted from his book deals with the fact that any couple comprises two distinct individuals, both of whom bring to the relationship their own history and way of life, and thus the nature of the relationship is always one of compromise.

148 American journalist, humorist, and author Sullivan (1910-1972) lived in Saratoga Springs, New York. He wrote humorous articles for The NewYorker for many years and was a member of the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s.

149 At the annual ceremony of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters on May 20, 1959, Dorothy “Dottie” Parker was inducted as an academician; Truman Capote received a Grant in Literature; and Arthur Miller received the Gold Medal in Drama. Miller’s then wife was actress Marilyn Monroe.

150 The Colonial Tavern in Saratoga Springs, which Sullivan wrote about in his collection Through the Looking Glass (1970).

151 Hungarian goulash.

152 The year was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

153 German: To whom are you saying that?!

154 Talma indicated in a handwritten footnote appended to the letter that this referred to Elizabeth Goodman Freiman.

155 The Troxells lived on Lincoln Street in New Haven and were part of a group to which TNW often read his plays in progress.

156 The date was supplied in another hand, presumably that of Louise Talma.

157 In a note appended to this letter, Louise Talma indicated that Rudolf Bing had asked TNW to lunch to discuss The Alcestiad.

158 The New York City Center of Music and Drama on West Fifty-fifth Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues opened in 1943. From 1944 until 1964, it was the home of the New York City Opera.

159 Eleanor Robson Belmont (1878-1979) was a major patroness of the Metropolitan Opera and the founder of the Metropolitan Opera Guild. TNW attempted to get her to intercede with Rudolf Bing on behalf of The Alcestiad opera.

160 Vanessa, an opera by Samuel Barber, with a libretto by Gian-Carlo Menotti, was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera in January 1958.

161 French: birth.

162 Gertrude Hindemith, the wife of composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963), had written to TNW to express her husband’s interest in composing an opera version of TNW’s one-act play The Long Christmas Dinner. The opera, with score and German libretto by Hindemith (translated from TNW’s English version of the libretto), had its world premiere in Mannheim, Germany, in December 1961.

163 The wife of Richard Donovan, who was on the faculty of the Yale School of Music at the time.

164 English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947).

165 German: grunt work.

166 Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), Swiss historian of art and culture.

167 German: Praise the Lord!

168 TNW is referring to his brother-in-law’s hobby of sketching in pencil and ink.

169 This was the germ of TNW’S novel The Eighth Day (1967).

170 Bonnie and Jingle were his sister’s Morgan horses; Brava and Grey-y were the Dakins’ cats.

171 Olivier had apparently asked TNW whether a stage version of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel would be feasible. The project was never realized.

172 Do Re Mi, a musical for which Garson Kanin wrote the book and which he directed, ran in New York from December 1960 to January 1962.

173 Famous New Orleans restaurant.

174 In 1959, TNW had started, but then put aside, a libretto for a second short opera, titled “July August September.” It was never completed; holograph manuscript fragments survive in the Beinecke Library at Yale Library.

175 Probably English stage and film actress Joan Plowright, whom Olivier would marry in 1961; he and Vivien Leigh were divorced in 1960.

176 TNW went to see Olivier in the New York production of Jean Anouilh’s Becket (1959), which ran from October 1960 to March 1961. It was produced by David Merrick, who may be the “Mr. M.” referred to in the letter.

177 The University of Basel was founded in 1459, and thus was celebrating its five- hundredth anniversary.

178 The last words of William Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! (1936), spoken by Quentin Compson (who is also a character in Faulkner’s 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury) in response to the question “Why do you hate the South?”: “I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!”

179 The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (2 vols., 1960), edited by Jay Leyda, who also edited The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891 (1951).

180 Lawrenceville School English teacher Thomas H. Johnson edited the three-volume The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955); wrote Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography (1955); and edited The Letters of Emily Dickinson (1958).

181 French: semantic portion.

182 Italian: fearfulness.

183 Susan Gilbert (1830-1913), Emily Dickinson’s closest friend, married Emily’s brother, William Austin Dickinson (1829-1895), in 1856. Susan and Austin lived next door to Emily for the rest of the poet’s life.

184 In a note appended to this letter, Louise Talma indicated that this referred to the full score of acts 2 and 3 of The Alcestiad.

Chapter 6

1 American composer and diarist Rorem wrote TNW to ask permission to set to music some of TNW’s three-minute plays; this project was never realized. In March 2006, Rorem’s opera version of Our Town, with a libretto by American poet and librettist J. D. McClatchy, premiered at Indiana University in Bloomington.

2 Verse play (1919) by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

3 Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama (1932) was an uncompleted experimental verse play.

4 At this time, Niemoeller was a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, writing an M.A. thesis on the influence of Noh plays on some modern authors.

5 After the death of American art historian, author, educator, and Orientalist Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908), his wife gave his notes and papers to Ezra Pound, asking him to be her late husband’s literary executor. Pound published two books of Noh plays based on Fenollosa’s manuscripts: Certain Noble Plays of Japan (1916) and a study of Japanese classical drama, Noh, Or Accomplishment (1917).

6 Mei Lan-Fang (1894-1961), the best-known singer, actor, and dancer of the Beijing Opera, toured the United States in 1930.

7 Paul Claudel’s L’Oiseau noir dans le Soleil Levant (1927) was a collection of essays and prose poems written during his tenure as ambassador to Japan (1921-1927).

8 French director, producer, and theater critic Jacques Copeau (1879-1949) was a founder in 1913 of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in Paris, which introduced such innovative techniques as the use of minimal, suggestive set designs.

9 TNW was reminiscing about earlier times spent at the Hotel Taft in New Haven, where the Schubert Theater was a major venue for pre—New York tryouts. Among the productions he remembered were Saturday’s Children (1927), a play by Maxwell Anderson that starred Gordon; Born Yesterday (1946), a play written and directed by Kanin that featured Holliday in a role that had been intended for Jean Arthur, who had to leave the out-of-town tryouts due to illness; The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), TNW’S play starring Tallulah Bankhead and produced by Myerberg; The Eagle Has Two Heads (1947) by Jean Cocteau, starring Bankhead, who insisted that Marlon Brando be fired from the production before it went to New York; and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) by Tennessee Williams, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Brando.

12 Gustav Eckstein was a professor of physiology and psychiatry at the university of Cincinnati; “Kit” refers to Katherine Cornell.

10 “Alec” refers to Woollcott; American illustrator Neysa McMein; English novelist and biographer Nancy Mitford; English literary scholar and biographer David Cecil; English novelist E. M. Forster; and French academic Bernard Fäy, who was head of the Bibliothéque Nationale during the Pétain era and was imprisoned after the war for his role as a collaborationist.

11 The main character in TNW’s novel Heaven’s My Destination (1935).

13 French: dry.

14 This letter was printed in facsimile in the program of the Würtemburgische Landesbühne 1961/62; the program was for a production of André Obey’s play Vom Jenseits Zunuck. TNW’S letter was in answer to a letter from Helmensdorfer, who was a director at that theater and had written TNW to tell of the production and to request a statement from him about Obey and the latter’s influence on his work.

15 In addition to Obey’s Noé, the Compagnie des Quinzes staged his play Le Viol de Lucrèce (which TNW translated in 1932).

16 In his “Notes for the Producer” in the 1934 acting edition of The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden, TNW wrote, “Although the speech, manner and business of the actors is colloquial and realistic, the production should stimulate the imagination and be implied and suggestive.” These short plays, written in 1930-1931, eschewed conventional scenery, used pantomime to simulate activities without the use of props, and, in The Happy Journey, introduced a Stage Manager, TNW’s version of “the two commentators” about which he had read.

17 TNW was on the S.S. Ryndam, on his way to Europe to meet Louise Talma for the Frankfurt production of The Alcestiad opera.

18 In Puccini’s opera, the principal male character is Lieutenant Pinkerton.

19 The Japanese Sandman was a 1920 song.

20 In 1942, TNW met Richard Goldstone during officers’ training in Miami. Goldstone became an academic; in December 1956, to help him with his career, TNW arranged for Goldstone to interview him for The Paris Review. The interview appeared in the Winter 1956 issue.

21 Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (1960).

22 TNW is referring to the Kennedy administration—sponsored program “An Evening with Thornton Wilder,” which would take place the following month in Washington.

23 German: Your old Friend.

24 William Empson’s Milton’s God (1961).

25 Worth played in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth during the 1962 season at Stratford-on-Avon.

26 A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), a play by Thomas Heywood; Lady Teazle is the leading female character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play The School for Scandal (1777).

27 Worth played Queen Elizabeth I of England in the Italian film II Dominatore dei sette mari (1962), which was released the same year in the United States under the title Seven Seas to Calais.

28 Lucius D. Clay, who was serving as the representative of President Kennedy to the citizens of West Berlin during the construction of the Berlin Wall.

29 Dominican diplomat, polo player, race car driver, and international playboy Porfirio Rubirosa.

30 Wescott’s Images of Truth: Remembrances and Criticism (1962) included a chapter titled “Talks with Thornton Wilder.”

31 Smythe (1858-1944) was an English composer and suffragette.

32 French composer, conductor, and teacher Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), whose students included Louise Talma.

33 By the end of May, TNW would settle in Douglas, Arizona, a small town on the Mexican border.

34 TNW’s one-act play Someone from Assisi, with Lee Richardson as Father Francis, had opened in New York at the Circle in the Square on January 10, 1962.

35 Reinhardt’s book, which concerns Homer and the Iliad, was published in 1961.

36 Beulah Hagen, Wescott’s sister, was an assistant to Cass Canfield at Harper.

37 Talma indicated in a footnote to this letter that if she had been rejected by the MacDowell Colony, TNW and Isabel would have offered her their house in Hamden.

38 Leonard Bernstein.

39 TNW was a guest at the White House dinner on May 11, 1962, honoring French author and critic André Malraux, who was France’s minister of cultural affairs at this time.

40 Frances Scott (“Scottie”) Fitzgerald Lanahan, whom TNW had met in February 1928, when he spent the weekend at the Fitzgeralds’ house in Delaware (see letter number 107); she was six at the time of TNW’s visit.

41 Robert Penn Warren and his wife, the writer Eleanor Clark.

42 Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Avis Thayer Bohlen, the wife of Charles “Chip” Bohlen, the American ambassador to France at this time.

43 French: (Friday, light). TNW is referring to the fact that since the dinner was held on a Friday, meat was not served.

44 Violinist Isaac Stern, cellist Leonard Rose, pianist Eugene Istomin.

45 Elza Heifetz Behrman, wife of playwright S. N. Behrman.

46 Francis Biddle, a lawyer and former U.S. attorney general, and his wife, the poet Katherine Garrison Chapin Biddle.

47 TNW means Deo gratias (Latin: Thanks be to God).

48 In a footnote appended to this letter, Talma explained that she mentioned to TNW that during certain “somewhat frivolous” parts of the fugue she was working on she was reminded of the night the two of them danced at Rumpelmeyer’s in Frankfurt.

49 TNW’S aunt was visiting Isabel in Connecticut.

50 American writer (1811-1859), whose only fictional works were a collection of short stories, Tales of the Puritans (1831), and a play, The Bride of Fort Edward (1839).

51 French: overwhelming.

52 French: solitary retreat.

53 TNW’s aunt had moved from Winter Park, Florida, to a retirement home in Saint Petersburg, Florida.

54 Willkie’s 1943 book, an entreaty for international peacekeeping after World War II.

55 Sergeant was working on her autobiography, which she failed to complete before her death in January 1965.

56 The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 2 vols. (1962).

57 Talented English stage and film actress (1899-1923), who, at the time of her premature death, had already showed great promise.

58 French: indecisiveness.

59 TNW’s essay “Giordano Bruno’s Last Meal in Finnegans Wake” was published in the Spring 1963 issue of the Hudson Review.

60 Peperharow is a small hamlet near Godalming, Surrey. Roland Le Grand was head of the Department of Modern Languages at the Charterhouse School, located in Godalming. A reprint of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson was published in 1961.

61 French: exhausting.

62 The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859), a novel by George Meredith.

63 French: a contained despair, a disguised rage.

64 Actor Renzo Ricci (1898-1978) was married to actress Eva Magni (1906-2005).

65 Mabel Dodge Luhan died on August 13, 1962; Tony Luhan died in January 1963.

66 French: thought.

67 TNW’s nephew was in New York to study at Union Theological Seminary.

68 TNW had rented an apartment in New York City from November 12, 1939, to March 12, 1940.

69 TNW is referring to Charles H. A. Wager with regard to Oberlin; at Yale, he studied with Chauncey B. Tinker, George A. Baitsell, and Richard S. Lull.

70 Erwin R. Goodenough was professor of the history of religion at Yale University; TNW may be referring to Eliot’s 1932 essay “Modern Education and the Classics.”

71 Wright’s third wife.

72 TNW is referring here to Hello, Dolly!, the musical based on The Matchmaker. It opened the following year, directed by Gower Champion and starring Carol Channing.

73 Albee’s play ran in New York from October 1962 to May 1964.

74 French: the little humdrum routine.

75 English actress Estelle Winwood was Bankhead’s best friend from the 1920s until Bankhead’s death; they frequently costarred on the stage. Here Today is a 1932 play by George Oppenheimer.

76 Judith Anderson, one of whose most famous performances was as the heroine in American poet Robinson Jeffers’s 1947 adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, which Jeffers wrote for her.

77 The Juilliard School was going to produce the Hindemith opera of TNW’s The Long Christmas Dinner in March 1963.

78 From “The Garden,” by Andrew Marvell.

79 Although Kilty’s adaptation of TNW’s 1948 novel was somewhat successful in Berlin in 1962, it failed in London in 1963.

80 Mozart’s Quartet in C Major, which apparently was one of the recordings Coffin had sent TNW.

81 Catherine Coffin’s children, William Sloane Coffin, Jr., of New Haven, Edmund Coffin of Long Island, and Margot Coffin Lindsay of Massachusetts.

82 TNW’S sister, as his representative, had attended the Juilliard School opera production of The Long Christmas Dinner and reported her disappointment in the opening-night performance. She said the orchestra was too loud, the tenor could not be heard in the sextet, and there was a general nonprofessional air to the whole production. She found the second night better, however.

83 The opera version of The Alcestiad had had its world premiere in Frankfurt on March 1, 1962.

84 Arizona Democrat Isabella Greenway served in the House of Representatives from 1933 to 1937. She also built the Arizona Inn, a well-known hotel in Tucson.

85 A fashionable address in New Haven, noted for its large and beautiful old houses.

86 The Eighth Day (1967).

87 Mrs. Ana “Tia” Bates was the American proprietor of Quinta Bates in Araquipa, Peru, an inn that became famous throughout South America and attracted famous visitors from all over the world. TNW had visited there during his South American trip for the State Department in 1941.

88 Claire Dux Swift was married to Charles H. Swift, of the Chicago meatpacking family. TNW knew the couple from his days at the University of Chicago in the 1930s.

89 Alice B. Toklas died on March 7, 1967, three weeks before The Eighth Day was published.

90 Lee Strasberg, the artistic director of the Actors Studio, had expressed interest in producing The Alcestiad.

91 Cheryl Crawford, who had cofounded the Group Theatre with Strasberg and Harold Clurman in 1931, also cofounded the Actors Studio in 1947.

92 Sam and Elza Behrman.

93 May was Freedman’s wife, and Bobbie was his son. Sam cannot be identified.

94 French: How elegant! How beautiful.

95 French: life on the edge.

96 French: Let’s get on with it, then.

97 The line is spoken by Lady Bracknell in act 1. The correct quotation is “Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”

98 Shakespearean scholar Hotson’s Mr. WH (1964) identified the individual to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed as William Hatcliffe.

99 Laurence Olivier was one of the founders of the National Theatre Company, which was established in 1963.

100 Elective affinities was the 1854 translation of Goethe’s 1809 novel, Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Stendhal’s Oeuvres Intimes, edited by Henri Martineau, was issued by the French publisher Gallimard in 1955.

101 O’Hara received the Award of Merit Medal for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (not the Academy’s Gold Medal) on May 20, 1964.

102 Canadian-born American poet (1905-1978).

103 English translator Constance Garnett (1861-1946), whose translation of War and Peace was first published in 1900 and was, for many years, the only English version of Tolstoy’s novel.

104 Classic Japanese work believed to have been written by noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu (978-1014), which is considered to be the world’s first novel. TNW was reading the translation (1960) by English sinologist Arthur Waley.

105 Pierre Bezukhov and Konstantin Levin, principal male characters in Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, respectively

106 Spanish: dear niece.

107 Spanish: the language of kings. TNW’S niece was going to take a course in Spanish at Harvard Summer School in order to meet further requirements for teaching credentials.

108 A comedy (1635) by Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca.

109 TNW’s niece was teaching French at Wellesley Junior High School in Wellesley Massachusetts.

110 Archibald Hobson, the son of TNW’s first cousin Wilder Hobson; Archie’s mother was Verna Harrison Hobson.

111 TNW had had a cancerous growth removed from his cheek.

112 French: to repair the years’ irreparable damage (from act 2, scene 5, of Jean Racine’s Athalie [1691]).

113 The teacher and companion of Dionysus, the god of wine.

114 Spanish: (on first line) With much love, my child; (on second line) Your uncle.

115 TNW is quoting from Sartre’s 1944 play.

116 Wertheimer was a bookbinder.

117 TNW is referring to the musical Chu-Chem, which Crawford was coproducing at the time. The play concerns Jews who migrated to China in the tenth century

118 The two plays and the novel TNW mentions also deal with Jewish characters.

119 Günter Grass’s Die Plebejer proben den Aufstand (The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising) opened in West Berlin in January 1966. The character of the Boss in this play represents Bertolt Brecht.

120 Lukács (1885-1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic.

121 Volume 1 of Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, edited by Dan H. Laurence, was published in 1965.

122 Charlotte Payne-Townshend Shaw was an active member of the Fabian Society and a patron of the London School of Economics.

123 In 1888, English social reformer and Theosophist Annie Besant was one of the organizers of a strike of women workers against the Bryant and May match factory in London’s East End. The Match Girls, a 1966 English musical, tells the story of that strike.

124 Ruth Norman was Crawford’s companion.

125 Princeton University English professor Lawrance Thompson.

126 The Eighth Day, which had been published on March 29, 1967.

127 The Foresmans’ daughter, Emily, had been married to John K. Tibby, Jr., who worked at Time-Life. See letter number 305, which mentions the divorce. The couple, who had three children, later remarried each other.

128 Henry R. Luce had died in February 1967.

129 Briton Hadden, TNW’S and Luce’s classmate at Yale and one of the most admired men in their class, cofounded Time magazine with Luce in 1923. They served in alternate years as the company’s president until Hadden’s untimely death in 1929.

130 The line, which reads, “O ciel, que de vertus vous me faites haïr,” is from La Mort de Pompée (1644) by Pierre Corneille, not his less-famous brother.

131 American novelist and dramatist (1927-1993) Herlihy was the author of the novels All Fall Down (1960) and Midnight Cowboy (1965), both of which were adapted into films, and the play Blue Denim (1958), which was also made into a film.

132 Among the stars of the 1962 film of All Fall Down were Eva Marie Saint, Angela Lansbury, Warren Beatty, Karl Malden, and Brandon de Wilde.

133 Herlihy was born in Detroit.

134 James T. Farrell (1904-1979) was best-known for his three books about Studs Lonigan, a native, like Farrell, of Chicago.

135 TNW is referring to locations and a character in All Fall Down.

136 Herlihy wrote several plays prior to and after Blue Denim.

137 At this time, Chapin was in charge of programs at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, which includes the Vivian Beaumont Theater. He had expressed an interest in producing Our Town there.

138 TNW is referring to Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play.

139 American stage director Ball (1931-1991) had founded the American Conservatory Theatre in Pittsburgh in 1965, then moved it to San Francisco in 1967.

140 Composer William Schuman (1910-1992) was president of Lincoln Center at this time.

141 Producer Morton Gottlieb (1921-) was involved with many plays at Lincoln Center.

142 TNW was awarded the National Book Award in Fiction for The Eighth Day, but he did not attend the ceremony.

143 TNW met Canadian novelist, dramatist, and actor Timothy Findley (1930-2002) in 1954, when the latter played Rudolph in the Edinburgh Festival production of The Matchmaker. Through TNW Findley also met Ruth Gordon, who, with TNW encouraged Findley to consider a career as a writer. Findley enjoyed great success, eventually publishing eleven novels, three collections of short stories, six plays, and three books of memoirs.

144 Findley’s second novel, The Butterfly Plague, was published in 1969 by Viking.

145 French: at the height.

146 TNW probably meant en fieffé, French, describing those who wandered and had no home.

147 German journalist and publisher Axel Springer (1912-1985), whose German tabloid Bild was attacked for its conservative viewpoint.

148 American biographer Swanberg (1907-1992) was researching his biography of Henry R. Luce at this time (Luce and His Empire [1972]).

149 TNW had a hernia operation on July 2.

150 Chinese diplomat and scholar (1891-1962).

151 English stage director and producer Browne (1900-1980) was putting on a production of Our Town at this time.

152 Actress Henzie Raeburn (1896-1973), Browne’s wife.

153 Our Town (1938).

154 Goldstone’s 1960 Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University was titled “The Pariah in Modern American and British Literature: An Illustration of a Method for Teachers of Literature.”

155 The phrase “the yellow lakes” occurs in the first sentence of TNW’s short story “The Marriage of Zabett,” which appeared in the June 1917 issue of the Oberlin Literary Magazine. TNW’s play “The Trumpet Shall Sound” was published in the October 1919, November 1919, December 1919, and January 1920 issues of the Yale Literary Magazine, and was produced in a slightly revised version in 1926 by the American Laboratory Theatre.

156 From < >chapter 6</link>, “The Portrait of Thornton Wilder,” of Stein’s The Geographical History of America (1936).

157 TNW’s niece was planning a vacation trip to Mexico.

158 Viva Mexico! A Traveller’s Account of Life in Mexico, by American writer Charles Macomb Flandreau, was first published in 1908.

159 Latin: the working man.

160 TNW is referring to Farrow’s role in the 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby.

161 Farrow did not marry André Previn until October 1970.

162 Farrow and Previn’s twins, Matthew and Sascha, were born twenty-four days later.

163 TNW means the Spanish idiom dar a luz.

164 Worth had played Miss Alice when Albee’s play premiered in New York in 1964.

165 TNW is probably referring to one of the semiautobiographical sketches he was writing during this period.

166 The bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth.

167 Tennessee Williams.

168 Farrow was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award as Best Actress for her role in John and Mary (1969); she did not win.

169 TNW’s nephew married Robin Gibbs on June 15, 1968; their first child, Amos Todd Wilder, was born on April 22, 1970.

170 TNW met heavyweight boxing champion Tunney in Florida in December 1927 and spent time hiking with him in Europe in the summer of 1928, an excursion covered extensively by the press. This is a secretarial transcription of TNW’s letter; the original has not been located.

171 Polly Lauder Tunney, Gene Tunney’s wife.

172 The quotation is from act 3, scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, in corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies”

173 Polly Tunney’s goddaughter.

174 TNW’S godson was working on a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

175 English novelist and dramatist (1889-1981).

176 English word for a porkpie hat, derived from the Yorkshire term for pie made with pork.

177 TNW is referring to the heroine of Arthur Wing Pinero’s play The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893).

178 Italian actor, dramatist, screenwriter, and poet (1900-1984).

179 Italian librettist and poet Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749-1838), who wrote the librettos for The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and CosÎ fan tutte, is buried in Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, New York.

180 Gordon played Dolly Levi in The Matchmaker for ten weeks on the road, then for eight months in London, and then in New York from December 1955 to February 1957.

181 Minnie Maddern Fiske.

182 Bagnold’s first play was Lottie Dundass (1941). The production in Santa Barbara starred Geraldine Fitzgerald.

183 TNW is referring to the last stanza of Goethe’s “Phänomen” (1814), written when the poet was in his mid-sixties. However, TNW has misspelled certain words and misquoted the final line.

184 Bagnold lived in Rottingdean, near Brighton, Sussex.

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

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

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

188 French: Where is my head?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

198 Glenn’s second wife.

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

200 Theophilus North was published in October 1973.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

209 A friend of TNW’s niece.

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

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

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

213 French: in his skin.

214 Empson’s “The Theme of Ulysses.”

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

216 Joyce’s wife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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