Tonight I had to deliver bills for the College annual—to the Assistant Business Managership of which my class in compliment elected me. So I took a long, wandering walk, as I went dropping envelopes onto the mail-tables of the boarding-houses. I have enjoyed the walk. In the streets is the smell of leaves burning, whence I know not. It is one of the things Rupert Brooke mentioned as loving:
“These I have loved:
White plates and cup, clean-gleaming
….. Wet roofs beneath the lamplight; the strong crust
Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food;
Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood.”162
And as I went along I thought of your beautiful letter to me, as good as any letter I ever received. I do not think it a less spirit in me to say that perhaps I liked it partly because you spoke well of my letters, in turn. There are two insidious ghosts in our family and this exorcised one of them away; we in our way are not abundantly generous to one another—think us all over in turn—we are a grudging family. And now let me take another shoo at the other ghost—the fear of poverty, abject.
But we all seven of us are so splendid individually (we are more like a case of blue weapons than a flower-bed) that it would be presumptious to as
for a sweetest ensemble. If we were a sober, New England, around-the-lamp, co-praying family I insist, we should be less. Amos would be more docile; I less modern, Charlotte less promising, Isabel less vivid, Janet more sophisticated, Mother less concentrated<.> You more demand-ative. We should be cut into pieces.
Love Thornton.
48. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Men’s Bldg
April 10—17
Dear Family—
We begin drilling tomorrow.163 All the honorary trustees of the College have been using their influence to try and secure us an Army officer for instruction, but they cannot obtain one, so we begin under some Seminary men who took four years of such training in the U. of Missouri. We are to combine Theory and Practice in three hours a week, and add to it extra marches and field-excursions. We have begun study in the little Government handbook. Only four boys in the whole College have enlisted, (one my friend Hankinson for the Navy)—and Those Who Know advise us to begin this work. Those who enlist now will be put in Concentration camps with the hoi poloi, whereas College boys, (with this advance we will make by June) will be recommended for non-commissioned officerships. It doesn’t seem to me to much matter whether one learns with their hoi-poloi now—I suspect its a survival of Eligance. ¶ This is to say that I have to buy a pair of shoes tomorrow. Trust me! I buy nothing without counting a hundred.
This drilling does not mean that I have committed myself to enlistment. I have committed myself to something severe in the physical way—I should smile. It seems to me now that I must go. Putting aside that odd insistant self-ridicule that I am not meant for this: not made of remotely heroic grain, a mere wisp whom the first shock will shrivle to a cinder; putting aside to the feeling of responsibility and bewildered solicitation for my Little Gift; putting aside, as I can most of the time, the feeling that the issues for an American are not great enough to risk everything for. The only way I see going is for what it can do to me in sudden maturing, completing; and what it can do to put greatness into my Little Gift. From such sights and sounds; and from the conviction that I am suffering for great ends I will come or live long enough—deo certe volente164—to leave a great little thing somewhere. Other fight for their country or for their sheer love of great action, but the artist is the great egoist, and counts the world well lost for one created perfect thing
Love-in-a-hurry- Thornton
49. TO ELIZABETH LEWIS NIVEN. ALS 4 pp. Yale
The Men’s Building,
Oberlin, Ohio
April 29, 1917.
Dear Grandmother,
This month—stirring, exciting month, tho’ it is!—shall not go by without my thanking you warmly for your remembrance. At this time when we young men are being commissioned to represent the whole country, we begin individually to feel the joy in relatives and family, the solid background to our perplexities. So now in addition to my personal love for you, you may feel my veneration for you as my Tradition.
What is being planned for me? I do not know. Perhaps in two or three weeks the machinery of conscription will be set in order and I will be tested and examined. It is likely that they will not consider my eyesight good enough to “fix” a spiked helmet at twenty yards. But if I am passed I think by that time I will be reconciled to the soldier’s life. In my funny, sensitive way of being distressed and despairing over my life and my fitness, I am always at odds with life; I am a personality perculiarly isolated. And to me in my dark (and true) mood the simplification of a soldier’s life—the reducing of the jangling wires to an orderly routine—offers sweet compensations. But let no one mistake my acquiesence with the positive fire of patriotism.
Perhaps Father will soon put me on a farm. Seventy boys have left College already (with credit for College work given them) to “serve the agricultural need of their country and their countries’ allies.” Another thirty has enlisted in the Mosquito Fleet, a subdivision of the U.S.N.165 Gradually the Male Student Body is breaking up—or rather petering out. A dozen boys leave every day. I had better try a farm until the Govnt ferrets me out.
In reality I am not as upset and excited over all this as I should be. I suppose I am built along the lines of The Artistic Temperament (Oh, perilous sea!) and for such the stress and tossings of wars, domestic and national, can be shut out as secondary to the process you so charmingly referred to as “my catching of wild ducks.” To slay or be slain in battle will always be of less consequence than the turning of an expressive phrase; and one story achieved is more satisfying than the taking of a strong city.
So I go doggedly about my peculiar life, at variance with other peoples ideas as to how I should live and yet not conforming to my own—but thankful and grateful for tokens and kind wishes from you
Your loving grandson
Thornton.
50. TO RUTH KELLER. ALS 3 pp. Private
Mens Building Oberlin,
May—about the 8th or 9th
Dear Ruth,
I can’t understand your card. It sounds snappish. As though perhaps you were doubting my sincerity in wishing you back to see me. “Ah, Seraphina, you do me wrong.”
I suppose you want a frank statement of what you (so distressingly) call the-person-who-would-not-demand-too-much-attention who succeeded you, I will furnish it. Miss Nina Trego166 and I—(I began the sentence wrong.)
I am often found plaguing and worrying the life out of Miss Nina Trego. Our conversations consist of that same sharp commentary on passing events that I enjoyed so with you; and our friendship takes place on the same high, independent, Platonic plane. But I am often reminded by contrast that compared to you she is merely clever and sharp-tongued; whereas you were more human, and something of a philosopher too.
Now, Ruth, treat me straight. Perhaps soon you will write me a letter offering me up to my country, closing characteristically enough—for I first came to know you thru Latin poetry.
“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”167 I irresistably think of you on Sunday morning, but no other Senior girl ever dares to take walks with me then. You and I were unique in a delightful way—we were like characters of a mock-heroic novel, touched with fantasy. I will besides always remember the tea-room in connection with you
Nina Trego.
Nina Trego. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
TNW at Oberlin.
TNW at Oberlin. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Afftly
Thornton.
51. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
May 10
/> Dear Papa—
This receiving of two letters a day is very brightening and encouraging. It gives me the thrilling impression that you are doing nothing all day but stoke the furnace of my interests. But there are two kinds of coal that are impractical as fuel:
I could never take the Yale entrance exams in the subjects I have covered in the last three years. Tutors and thumbscrews could not effect. You and I have a tacit agreement, a common law, that I am not in College to learn any subject per se except English and Languages; that Chemistry, Economics, Civics, Botany have been only the pegs on which to hang the COATS of spiritual qualities: Persistance, fidelity etc. The pegs have lost all individuality—they are cold steel to me.
If I must be examined in the virtues—let my literary work be scanned.
Imagine giving me an examination in Botany or even special textbooks in German. Assiduous study avails nothing then or now.
I do not want to go to Yale. My aims in life lie clearer before me everyday; they reach me every day as the complaints of the Engineer float up to the Captains deck from the hidden energies.
One is that there is no conviction stronger in me that when I sit under Prof. Wager “it is good for me to be there.” I might say of him what he says in his only revealed poem—from Atlantic Monthly—“the thought that runs along thy brain is mine.” The situation (paradoxical enough) is simplified by the fact that he is not particularly fond of me. He likes the great, boyish, naive, accepting boys, and I am odd, over-learned, distressed and adrift, but ruddered by my own conceit. So I remain no less fond of him than ever but with a subdued deference that is not satisfying, but is best for what I really want. I have been attending two of his classes regularly now; one just finishing Cardinal Newman,168 and now the other on Dante. When I consider what I know of Phelps and Tinker, Copeland and Baker169 I admit they may be brilliant and literary but they have not got that spiritual almost ascetic magnetism of Mr. Wager. His great background of St. Francis Literature and the Newman, Erasmus and St. Augustine periods are always making themself felt. If you can find me another mystic for my Gameliel170 I will come but better I live in an ordinary routine College and Mr. Wager than in a World-famous University without him. Albeit if you hear well of some Catholic college I will discuss that seriously. I think that after all I am an acutely religious temperament and that beside it nothing else matters.
I have reconciled myself to staying here and going to Berea.171 If my age is drafted I shall acclaim its compensations since nihil humanum me alienum puto—172
Love Thorny.
52. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
May 15 Wednesday
Dear Papa,
I have received the beautiful the supreme letter, and the check for twenty. You have referred to me as noisily expressing my love to you; it is what I have so often intended to do and never felt that it was reaching you with sufficient intensity; there is that ignoble restraint that civilization and middle youth brings that ties me tongue before it has spoken the heart’s pourings. If I loved you less I could find it in my conscience to express it more showily; but you must gather my depth from the short declarations and stray hints that I leave lying about. If you are soon in New York you will see the case put on the Empire Theatre stage in a one-act by my Sir James Barrie.173 A boy before leaving for the trenches comes in his khakis to say goodbye to his father. They have been tongue-tied all their lives but in this last moment they arrive at a new understanding. It is a wonderful, touching, dialogue, and an example of the greater Barrie; the same performance contains another little warplay even greater, of a wonderful pathos and tenderness, but not concerned with the subject of this paragraph.
You ask me where I got a quotation in my letter, and quote: “until he reached a place of considerable comfort.” I do not remember seeking aid elsewhere, in that letter, altho I remember dimly taking down from the shelf for a previous letter. If not too much trouble please copy out the passage in full and send back. Be gorry perhaps I said something and unconscious too. Please be frank and send it me. The only context I imagine it in is where Dr. Donne began to recieve livings and deaneries, like plums falling into his lap.174
I try to assure that since I saw myself in one illumined and flaring hour as a soldier, I have taken pains to read the most elevated literature. The sermons of Newman, three dialogues of Plato, “Macbeth” St. Augustine (unsuccesful). Ike Marvel175 long ago proved too mellow and unarroused for me; there is no mood more distasteful to me than the regrets and pipe-dreams of a reminiscent bachelor. Perhaps when I am older. At present I am ordering a golden trumpet from the forge, built on designs of those in the lower circles of Paradise; not shrill however but persuasive of those sempiternal lawns and the pulsating radiance that bathes them. ie legands of the saints in bliss shall be my theme, and the manner in which they gloriously won that desired rest.
Thornton
53. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Men’s Bldg—
Oberlin, O.
May 26—17
I drilled for 2 hours this afternoon. Corporal again. Send me a photo of you in kahki. Some very nice Oberlin boys coming out to you. I am associate Editor of Hi-O-Hi; want to resign.176 Monday night I appear in Dramatic Assoc. play. The Poet in Lord Dunsany’s one act The Lost Silk Hat.177 Chem class visited grand Lorain steel plant yesterday. Am I going to get thru Chemistry? Lots of love
T.
Dear Amos,
I got your beautiful letter ten minutes ago and hurry to go over it with you.
All the fever about my going into the army has passed—there were moments perhaps hours when it seemed to me the perfect thing for me to do—but with the news that the Registration age is from 21-30, the fever has passed with the necessity. For the present Fathers plans carry. For seven weeks beginning about June 7 I go to work on farm at Berea College, Ky, among the Mountain Whites. It will be hard but I face it this year with a new motive, and with some anxiety about Father. Our domestic life approaches the piteous. But I would not allow blame to be thrown on Mother—her undemonstrative temperament wreaks greater havoc than she knows; but what eats at the happiness of them both is their preoccupation with money and economy. They admire the generous mind that refuses to harbor prying obsessions, but about their own souls stalk wolves and lynxes! Neither of them will age prematurely for all their cares, but when they do it will be unwillingly—no acquiescence.
Oh, to be with you in the Lake country, or to have you with me on Monhegan.178 But most I would like to have you here now—tho, more to myself than your return to Oberlin would really allow—among the little waves of this cove. Perhaps it is with the thought I may not come back next year that I look upon Oberlin now as a forest of paths I have not ventured: the friendships I have omitted to seek out, the experiences I have failed to fling myself into, the habits I have avoided forming. Noble boys like John Allen, the runner Fall, Farquhar, men like Prof. C. B. Martin and Ian Hannah.
Will I find a compensating variety at Harvard or Yale for these few unworked mines?
Your religious self-examination I cannot duplicate. I am a less conscientious nature and do not examine my faith. I fling myself upon my knees as though at a divine compulsion, mostly when I am happy, tho also in extremis. I am happiest in loving and being loved by human people and next to that in writing words and being commended for them, and next to that in mysteries of the spirit, into which I penetrate I believe more every year, until perhaps God will be my whole life. I suppose that everyone feels that his nature cries out hourly for it knows not what, but I like to believe that mine raises an exceeding great voice because I am a twin, and because by his death an outlet for my affection was closed. It is not affection alone but energy and in it I live and because of it I believe I seem to see life as more vivid, electric and marvelous than others so placidly do. I am continually surprised at people
’s lukewarmness; I am perpetually enthusiastic over some composition or book, some person or some friend.
I thank you for the photos. I thank you for your assurance of “backing me up” in my ideas on fighting; the issue may yet rise to face me. It will never confront you, will it, who have your duty marked? In war one says that the lives of young men are on the knees of God and that only such bullets as he permits ever strike the human heart. [Alas, those times when one thinks one is on the verge of a new thought and then sees that it nothing but an old platitude!]
I am glad you received my letter, and more glad to receive yours—always in love
Your loving brother
Thornton.
54. TO AMOS P., ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND JANET F. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Men’s Bldg Oberlin O
June 3—17
Dear Family,
This is my last Sunday in Oberlin, perhaps for a long time? A mixture of leaves overburdened with sunlight and of blue, benignantly threatening clouds. As I leave Oberlin I do not find myself regretting my commissions so much as my ommissions. I hear father telling me that I should groan for the evasions I have learnt, the sidestepping of duties through which others have had to plow, but I don’t—I justify them completely to myself. But I regret intensely acquaintanceships I have not made, and friendships I have not improved. There are three names that seem to call me back to Oberlin as much as imagined openings beckon me elsewhere. The brown study, Prof Martin darkened but not embittered, whose wife is my Tante. We not only have much in common—which is not necessary anyway—but we appeal imaginatively to one-another, for I have been told