Aunt Grace17 roasted an enormous bird and we had a nice four hours or more. I forgot to say a word about their Xmas present to me, and as I hadn’t made any to them, they must have thought my conduct very strange. However am thanking them in a letter and trusting the rest of the oddity to kindly bewilderment.
I wish I had come Santa Fé. I looked out of the windows all day, especially all night and at dawn from my Lower, and liked it, but the Santa Fé would have repaid such gazing even more. And the fellow travellers were sad. Beside we all draw dividends from Santa Fé.18
There’s no Ray or Pauline Hanna19 in the telephone book.
There’s going to be a very small crowd at the Pasadena lecture because there happens to be two big rival social events at the same moment. Ishkabibble.
I don’t see how I can get to know Charlie Chaplin, though I was so confident I could do it before. He looked awfully nice the other night; his hair is all gray, or rather white, at the edge of his ears.
Well, sufficient to the day is the Lawrence thereof.20
(A telegram was just brought me to the door and I tore it open and it was a New Year’s greeting signed Contessa and then I saw it was addressed to a James Wilder. Yeah?)
Well, I love you more than Tunkantell. Mrs Johnson (Bill Hinckle’s mother) sends you her best, and many pretty thanks. Tell Papa that Southern California is thataway; I still think that Florida, except for the dearth of concerts and lectures, is a better place to live.
love and pinings,
Thornt.
113. TO T. E. LAWRENCE. ALS (Stationery embossed Hotel Palliser / Calgary / Alberta) 4 pp. Private
As from: 75 Mansfield St.
New Haven, Conn
Jan. 20, 1930
Dear Mr. Shaw:
Your letter gave me great pleasure.21 I too live so much in the great books and great music I admire that it becomes a sort of mortification to talk about my own books to people whom I value. The dejections of writing drive me to various Second Strings. I wildly sign contracts to teach or to go on lecture-tours (as now), and all to escape the self-assignments of my literary hope. At present I am cursed with the wish to write a beautiful play for Edith Evans and her wonderful voice—before she is too old or too discouraged.
If I talk for a moment about your comments on my work, it is not that I am trying to justify my shortcomings. The inadequacies of one’s book are the inadequacies of one’s self and they have no surprises and no palliation from me. But I do not recognize the attitudes of mind you describe: the choosing of an easier subject in order to attain ease; and the determination, as though it were a matter of choice, to be in a given book, experimental or not experimental in language. I am too timid, without and within, ever to cast myself into the tradition of the stormy self-revealing books; all I can do is to mutter over and over to myself as I work: Mozartian form: Mozartian form.
But what book is it you refer to as your last in which you deliberately limited your intention? A paper I bought today says you have prepared a translation of Homer22 which is wonderful news. I imagine the introduction you might do for it (though I have no doubt you refused to)—a long profound debate on the differences between living such actions and singing them. You are one of the few persons in the history of the world who has stood with a foot in each kingdom—Sophocles fought, and Dante a little.
It will be a long while before I arrive in England, but I hope to attempt what you have proposed, that I see whether it would be possible for you to leave the camp for a few hours. In the meantime know the pride I feel that you have written to me and my great admiration for the pages of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom & for yourself.
Sincerely yours,
Thornton Wilder
¶ From the window here I can see, though seventy miles away, the sudden barrier of the Canadian Rockies. The area of the greater peaks is fifty times the area of the Alps.
¶ Five days ago it was 40 degrees below zero in Calgary.
¶ Lecturing is an ignoble profession but it has these compensations.
114. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Hotel Palliser / Calgary / Alberta) NYU
Atlanta Georgia
Feb 20 1930
Dear Lady Colefax:
This letter pretends to be written you from Calgary. I have always hoped to write from some remote and colorful place that you have never visited. I did sit down to write you there (the thermometer fallen to thirty-five degrees below zero; and, seventy miles away, the frieze of the Canadian Rockies rising in a sudden barrier on the horizon), but the telephone kept ringing, the local lecture committee swept through the room and letters had to be postponed. It is always possible that you too have been to Calgary, have had lunch at the Ranchmen’s Club and met the tremendous Mrs Winter.
I am still trying to make amends for teasing you about penman-ships. The chief sacrifice I can make just now to solicit your forgiveness, the olive branch that costs most to pluck, is to write a letter myself—you remember how I disclaimed any possibility of correspondence while ‘on tour’. Well, I am very much on tour, with ten close-packed engagements just ahead of me. So please begin to forgive me.
It is no news to you that America is stirring in its sleep. The other night, Monday, Hugh Walpole and I were announced to debate on whether Fiction or Non-fiction throws more light on experience. It was at Washington, D.C. and four thousand people attended. It looked like a football game. It was not a very good debate, Heaven knows, and you with your resources would have found your mind wandering to other things under the flood of truisms but the four thousand scarcely coughed—catarrhal February, too—while our humble little abstract ideas advanced and retreated in a very sedate combat. In all we furnish four great cities with that debate! I hope you are smiling more in amusement than scorn.
March tenth brings my trip to a close. It began January 6 at San Diego, California, and has covered a great deal of country. I begin to think I know why I am doing it. It is partly of course to assemble money to pay for the new house and its Steinway; partly to buy the thirty-five volumes of Saint-Simon in the edition grands écrivains de France. All that is true but only vaguely felt by me. I know now that the tours are Preparation. I don’t know quite what they prepare for: I prepare and Circumstance fulfills. Sometimes I think I would like to be a College President: collect moneys and buildings and hospitals from millionaires, and once a week breath urgency into fatigued, limited and mostly jealous-hearted professors; and once a week (very successfully) excite my assembled students, wide-eyed, bewildered and so easily-excited students.
Another minute I think I want to be the head of a New York Burgtheater.23—bewitch money out of millionaires and build a repertory with Edith Evans, Haidée Wright,24 Walter Huston and so on.
Do you like that?
At all events, I am burning out a host of awkward adolescent fears and maladjustments. I am actually serener. And the more people I meet the more I like people. I know America down to every absurd Keep Smiling Club, every gas station, every hot-dog stand.
April first I start teaching for two and a half months at the University of Chicago. Ten to twelve thousand students under President Hutchins, age 30 and an old friend of mine. “Tradition and Innovation—Aeschylus to Cervantes.” 40 lectures (including Dante) with the students writing a 6-minute paper every morning to prove that they read the long assignment for homework. It’s absurd, but its very American and is exactly what I want.
Do be patient with me and find a minute to comment on all this turmoil.
Ever sincerely
Thornton
50 Deepwood Drive, “The House The Bridge Built.”
50 Deepwood Drive, “The House The Bridge Built.” Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
115. TO CHARLOTTE E. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) Yale
Dear Sharlie:
I h
ear you are delighted about Yaddo, that you did a lot of fine work, and that you are looking very handsome.25
I hope from time you will come to Deepwood Drive, not only to cheer Mama, but to take advantage of the friendships you have arouséd in Mrs Canby,26 Helen McAfee et alii et alliae (those should be in the Ablative.)
If your New York life becomes expensive, do not hesitate to call on me. Do not crowd your soul by living on sandwiches and sausages
Amos has finished his thesis, and is far cheerfuller. Isabell has made much progress in her novel and is cheerfuller.27 Mama is beginning to be aware of a home-economic-security and is cheerfuller. I am full of new wonderful thoughts and am cheerfuller, so your new well being should sustain ours—less wilder nail-biting, fears, and scruples and distrusts.
Ever thine
Thornton
Enclosed a small birthday present.
116. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed The Quadrangle Club) Yale
Monday morning
Dear Mom:
Forgive my being so long in telling you all about it.
I arrived none too early. I filled in the time with all kinds of things and assembled a lot more notes on the Iliad. Then on Tues and Wed I had to sit in the Gym which for those two days is turned into a Registration Hall. Representatives of each department and teachers with special classes sit under large placards bearings their names and the students approach them as though they were choosing dishes at a cafetaria. Its a great bazar of education: it is very interesting and very funny. All kinds of applicants came for my advanced comp.—some had been out in business for years; one had taught it at Mt. Holyoke; a man had been selling General Motors appliances at Kobe: a woman who had left a husband at Grand Rapids to work three months with me on her deathless novel and who submitted as earnest of her genius an essay called Motherhood: A Vocation for Women. Well, you know me. Instead of saying with firmness that they are unsuitable I got all tangled up telling them they were too good for the course, that all they needed was to follow their own lights etc. Some cried; some argued; some phoned and returned and hung about and pleaded. But at last I picked a good eighteen. One negro who writes violent prose poems about Industry and the spilled blood of his people.
Classes met Thursday morning and I loved it. I was as nervous as though it were my first time. “Your assignment for tomorrow….” I began in a loud voice.
Then Thursday a noon a telegram came from Stanton Kennedy of Omaha (and Yale Law Sch.—I suppose you remember him)—“If I arrive Friday morning with manuscript will you receive me?” He arrived all right with his novel Proust-cum-Joyce. I’d read a few chapters while he mooned about by the lake. He was terribly nervous. ALL depends on the novel. Unless it is the greatest novel since War and Peace he will have to go into his uncle’s law office or his father’s construction work. He was somehow both nervous and lumpish, parasitic lumpish. And besides he was defeatest sneering fatigued. It comforted to tell how awful Omaha’s social life and its pretences to culture are. It comforted him to see in Chicago or in my beloved University little things that bespoke America’s stupidities. It also comforted him to save money and to accept too many meals from me. Enfin—as Mme de Sévigné said—-j’ai vu qu’il me préparait les délices d’un adieu.28 So he went off Sunday afternoon with a letter to Cass Canfield.
So I stole off to Prof Rafe Lillie29 and played Four Hands and began to convalesce. When I got home at six I was told that the Pres. wished to speak to me on the phone. So I went to a little tray-on-your- knees supper, just the three of us upstairs, and I told them about Jed and Ruth30 and Isabel; and about Reinhardt and Du Schöne Helena31 and he forgot his troubles and I forgot mine. And then I read them The Happy Journey and they were deeply moved32 —And it was one of the nicest evenings we had ever had together. And no harm was done when I left them at nine because we were all dead tired.
The lake is more beautiful than you can imagine and the frieze of skyscrapers is as fine as ever. The Midway at my door is a perfect green lawn. My rooms are still pretty bare, though they have given me two rugs for the sitting room, two leather chairs etc. Do I dare ask you to send me the map of Scotland Lady Astor gave me—in the shelves at my right as I sit at the desk in my study. There is a big roll for mailing with it. I think. I could frame it and it wld solve the problem of the space over my fireplace mantel. Next time you are in N.Y. you must see The House of Connolly33 and tell me about it.
Give my regards to Helen, to Phyllis, to Dr. Williams and to the Fultons. I haven’t see Percival Bailey yet but will today. 34
Love to all
Thornton
117. TO ISABELLA N., ISABEL, AND AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Feb 2 1932
Dear Mom, dear Isabel, dear Pop, dear Astrid,=35
Tomorrow morning at eight I give my annual rendition of Ugolino in the Tower.36 Yes, that class now meets at eight. My alarm clock goes off at 6:30. When the doors open for breakfast at 7:00 there I am waiting with such impatience that I fall forward on my face like an eavesdropper. At ten o clock I give my other class the works with a psychoanalytical interpretation of La Rochefoucauld. Usually after two lectures I’m so tired, I go down town just to be away from people. I lunch in railway stations or somewhere, then gradually seep back to the Campus about 3:00 and begin to go into training for the two lectures on the morrow. I don’t “go out” during the middle of the week; but when Friday comes around I get gay and “go out” in a big way. But all the time I’m worried about next week’s lectures. I worry in my sleep and wake up wondering if I have enough notes to pull me through these eternal fifty-minutes. It’s extra hard this term because both my classes are “preparation” engagements for me. Previously the ten o’clock class was Advanced Comp. and did not require anything but talent of me; now it requires diligence. Toward the middle of Feb begins a series I am giving in our “downtown college”, that is 5 lectures on Tuesday evenings at the Art Institute (Chicago’s Metropolitan Museum) on Sophocles for English Readers. It is billboarded all over town, and all the North Shore ermine dames are preparing to go, so there’s some more lectures. SO you see I’m longing for March 19th. Am I!! And I think I’m taking a year’s leave from the University. I haven’t told Bob yet.
Bob was thirty-three the other day. Maude’s birthday is Thursday. Little dinners in the bosom of the family. The family consists of June Preston and me. Franja37 finally had her tonsils out, but has had a long dragging temperature: so Franja simply lives in the children’s hospital of our Clinics. Its just next door and so very convenient. She’s not really ill; Franja likes it: it’s merely more convenient so. The Doctor says she ought to be in another climate, but Maude won’t leave Bob so what can you do about it but leave the baby in the hospital where the climate is practically Bermudan.
Cornelia Otis Skinner is performing for two weeks in town. I met her “out”; we talked of Helen Andrews etc; I dread going to see her show; her phlegm bores me.38 And speaking of monologuists I sent a cable to Ruth Draper and received a friendly cable in reply.
The wife of the Governor of Wisconsin writes to ask me when I am coming up to stay with them. She says she is polishing up Ole Bull’s bed39 for me. I shall go up in two weeks I think for a Sunday night. Moral: home town boy makes good.
Girls, please do me a favor. See, if on my desk you can find my two volumes, Everyman’s Library, of Don Quixote with my marginal jottings. Perhaps you can only find Volume One. If its there please send it to me with kisses.
Tomorrow, dearies, you are going to see Charles Laughton as Detective Poirot. Perhaps this very evening Isabel was to rehearsal for hours.40 He’s a fine actor and a delightful person. Has Mama got to know him. His accent alone will be enough to slay her and then comes his charm. Hoop-wow-zowie. I bet you he’s wonderful in that part; I saw ten photographs of his facial expressions in it.
Its now 11:30 and I must get to bed out of respect for my alarm clock. Isabel: Write the German agent that I would sell him The Woman of Andros cheaply enough, but only on condition that it is:
for Elizabeth Bergner41
for German speech alone
She is coming to America soon I hear to play for English-speaking audiences and films. If she wanted to use it in English it would require a different contract and with an American film company.
See you all before long.
Love me hard
Thorny.
118. TO KATHARINE CORNELL. ALS 3 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / New Haven, Connecticut) SUNY-Buffalo
April 8 1932
Dear Miss Cornell:
I should be proud to translate Le Viol.42 It is an eloquent play in itself and the freedom with which it overrides the conventions of the stage should make it very fruitful and additionally important. It is full of little difficulties of literary tact and I hope to come and see you during your Chicago engagement, about May first, to ask your help on some of those passages.
The University of Chicago allows me to teach two Quarters a year and then absent myself two Quarters. My vacation has just begun. I am sorry I cannot be there during the whole engagement in order to see The Barretts43 many times, but I shall be able to make up some of my loss.
I hope you are well and the continued performance of so exacting a part is not too trying.