Alicia, the modus vivendi at Deepwood Drive is not better but worse. I don’t want Isabel to cook meals for me, so I often go down town to eat and often naturally take her with me. So that’s not only a meal but an automobile ride and generally a shopping tour to furnish forth future meals, and thus given over two hours so that I myself then succumb and propose further additions to it, calls, etc. Moreover, since eating has become such a drama we both accept with alacrity all invitations to eat at the homes of others,—and of an evening that’s seven to eleven. It is sinking very low when one dines with friends in order to eat conveniently. On the train home I am going to mull this over and I think you can divine the announcement I must make.
Funny thing happened: the Modern Language Association held its vast annual Congress in N.Y. between Xmas and New Year, thousands of professors and instructors, listening to papers, from Beowulf to Guillaume Appollinaire, hour after hour. Well, on renaissance Spain day the head of the Spanish dept at Harvard170 read a paper on “The Investigations of Mr. Thornton Wilder.” I’d never met him; he was reta
ling material from my practically delirious letters. My academic friends claim it was a shocking breach of faith and etiquette. I on the other hand am proud and pleased. There is no flattery like piracy. Besides I have enough bullion in my cargoes to stock a dozen piratical papers.
In spite of the “bothers” I have described on the opposite page I am boundingly well and unjustifiably happy. Like a fatuous old uncle I continue to scold my callers for dejected and disheartened behavior and I broadcast trumpery advice like some columnist dispensing counsel to the love-lorn. But I can see also that I’m storing up “courage”—i.e. unrepentant assurance to say “No”—to evade a lot of claims and appeal (such excellent ones, such duty-heavy ones). Yesterday I seized a piece of paper and resigned from the P.E.N. Club a friendship whose highly artificial flowers had long since faded.
Isabel assures me that she’s very well. She wasn’t pleased with her interview with her doctor; he disagreed with her as to why she was so greatly improved. Like her mother and like a great many women she feels that she has an instinct for medical matters that is superior to eight years’ exclusive study of them. (I put that into the Ides of March, and I remember rocking with laughter in my chair while I wrote the lines.) So you see that she’s not only well in body but confident, nay even majestic, in mind.
So I’m withdrawing from circulation until the Goethe Festival in July. Thereafter I’m acting in the summer theatres a bit. Thereafter I think I may do that movie—a movie all movie ur-movie—with the great Italian Vittorio de Sica and that brings me to Europe.171
Isn’t this stationery beautiful? Isn’t this handwriting beautiful (I’ve lost my fountainpen)? And beautiful is the bubbling sensation that arises in me while I am writing to you and seeing and hearing you before me,—the only good thing that that wicked element AUDIENCE can give.
Devoted love
Thornton
224. TO SIBYL COLEFAX. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed The Hotel Raleigh / On Famous Pennsylvania Avenue at 12th St. / Washington 4, D.C.) NYU
May 15 1949
Dearest Sibyl:
Cross my heart, I was good as gold all last week at Atlantic City. Walks and work. The play talked to me and informed me of several structural changes that have set it off into growing again. Here too I am working. My only distractions being visits to great poets—Ezra Pound, Alexis Léger,172 and Czeslaw Milosz. (No, I don’t even pretend to read Polish, but many that do assure me he is a classic in his lifetime and he is a rare person.) A week here and then I don’t know where I go. Announcing I was to be in the South enabled me to refuse a battery of chores (honorary degrees which you are no more allowed to refuse than the invitations to be Best Man. …… etc, etc.)
No, I am not acting this summer.
At the Goethe festival I loathe my share: the brief opening address of welcome (assigned me by Jove) and another address; but I rejoice to hear Schweitzer, Ortega y Gasset, Curtius and the others and to sit by them at table. This time last year I had to give the baccalareate sermon (the screaming irony that I can’t now spell it) and accept a degree at Kenyon—the whole thing enchanting by the campus of the dear old Ohio college and the President’s family but raised to golden privilege by 3 days relaxed companionship of Jaeger, the greatest Grecian of our time. (Bob wept went Harvard stole him from Chicago.)173
By now you will have heard that Bob married his “secretary” a beauteous sloe-eyed divorcee with a six year old daughter.174 That’s probably why he’s not dining with you.
The comments of peripatetic American prof’s on Bob H. as an enemy of humanism make my hair stand on end. It’s true that he doesn’t think that an “art school” is an important part of a University, just as he doesn’t think a school to make electrical engineers and sanitation experts, journalists, etc is the work of a university. But no one has done more to put the right value on the study of the “humanities”, to confront the students with the great books themselves, and not with books about them. It is even he who has revived the word “humanities”, divorced it from its impure relationship with the “social sciences” carefully distinguished it from its ancillary philology, etc. Why, now even Harvard and Princeton have imitated him and set up the Divisions of the Humanities, so that the professors of Greek and Romance etc will sometimes have occasions to meet one another.
I wish you to grieve with me that Basket, Gertrude’s and Alice white French poodle has been very ill. This is Basket III—the first (forever famed in song and story) was given her by Picasso, II by Picabia. You have not forgotten that it was the sound of Basket I lapping water that made clear to Gertrude the distinction between poetry and prose,—a distinction hitherto never never clarified.
I think I’m sending someone to see you. Someone so gifted and so nice. So rare these days to find someone as deeply gifted who is without fever and without assertion, who has his field of what he knows so deeply and soundly within him that it never occurs to him that his self is socially negotiable. This is Robert Shaw, the wunderkind of choral directing, Toscanini’s valued “preparer” of his IX Symphony and Verdi’s Requiem, and director of his own Collegiate Chorale. From him Bach and Palestrina and Purcell and the Madrigalists have no secrets. He will, I hope, prepare our great Handel Festival at Newport in the summer of 1950,175 revealing the great sunbursts which are the mighty fugal choruses of Judas Maccabeus, etc. I could wish that he simply had tea with you, but he will probably shrink from presenting his letter. I often think that the people we would most wish to see walk three times around the block and then decide not to call on us, fearing that they have nothing which could interest.
How I am hoping that the Tuscan and Ligurian sun has been of great benefit to you. Or whether you will embrace the Great Potential and come to Arizona this fall. If you don’t come here I shall cross to see you. That—as tart people say—is all there is to it. And don’t forget that other alternative: I have 100,000 irremoveable marks in Germany.176 We could go to Bad Homburg or Bad Nauheim or Baden-Baden and you could lie in the mud-filled copper baths where your sovreign, Edward VII, renewed his youth like the eagle.
Lots of love
Thornton
225. TO AMOS N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Goethe Bicentennial Foundation / 135 South La Salle Street / Chicago 3, Illinois) Yale
July 7. 1949
Dear Yamus the Bamus:
Selah!
Yes, it’s just wonderful being 52 because you can then be excited over things without being so excited that you’re incapable of absorbing ’em.
Batteries of concerts and lectures assault you—often three a day.
Eminent scholars call on you to come out of the large audience to make a comment on a lecture just delivered by an eminent scholar. It’s wonderful to have outgrown visceral panics about public speaking.
But I’ve become the pack mule of the convocation. br />
Dr. Schweitzer gave his lecture in French last night. Translation made in NY by some journalist hack or by one of those swooning ancillae that smother Mahatmas. Terrible. This English text was read antiphonally with Dr. S. from the platform.
Today I was sent for. Would I touch up the English text for its German presentation tomorrow and would I read it antiphonally for him?
Ditto: Don José Ortega y Gasset. Only for him I am to be first and sole translator of his Second Lecture and I am to read it with him from the Podium.
In addition, Bob H. who only arrived yesterday begs me (i.e commands me) to redeliver my own lecture to the Second Series Guest-Subscribers who are arriving by every bus, plain and train today.
God forgive me, but I was pretty good, and I know now where I can improve it.
And the music we’re hearing, and the endowed hands I’ve been shaking: Rubinstein in Beethoven’s IV, Milstein and Piatagorski in Brahms’ Double; Erika Morini in the Mendelssohn; and that dear brown angel Dorothy Maynor177 in songs.
TNW and Albert Schweitzer at the Goethe Bicentennial Celebration in Aspen, Colorado, July 1949.
TNW and Albert Schweitzer at the Goethe Bicentennial Celebration in Aspen, Colorado, July 1949. Copyright Ferenc Berko (1916-2000), Estate of Ferenc Berko.
I had two hours rehearsal with the Old Man this afternoon. He can’t get into his head who I am, so when I begin Mon frère, Amos, le reverend Amos Wilder, that’s more than he can cope with, but I’ll get there yet.178
I love the Convocation, and the colleagues, esp. Fairley of Toronto and Simon of Israeli.179 I love the mountains
I love the schoolteachers who stop me on the street, and the students who’ve hitchhiked across the country to sample this. But most of all I love Goethe. Nobody ever loved anybody like I love Goethe. And this is the poem I analize & translate at the close of the lecture, finally reading it in German.
Jawohl! Das ewig Wirkende bewegt
Uns unbegreiflich, dieses oder jenes,
Als wie von ungefähr zu unserm Wohl,
Zum Rate, zur Entscheidung, zum Vollbringen.
Und wie getragen werden wir ans Ziel.
Dies zu empfinden, ist das höchste Glück,
Es nicht zu fordern ist bescheidne Pflicht,
Es zu erwarten, schöner Trost im Leben.180
Not a dry eye in the house. And I slay ’em by pointing out the implications of the penultimate line. We are not permitted to ask Nature to be unnatural.
There are a number of flies in my ointment but I shall not stoop to recall them.
When our festivals are over, I shall stay on here and finish my play.
Bob’s mother and daughter leave tomorrow. I’ve scarcely seen him.
Dinner this evening with Paepke’s, Nitze’s et alii.181 A great pleasure seeing the N’s again. Isn’t it awful not having got back to Chicago for so many years which I love so and which has so many people I value (including Abou Ben Adhem182 and family).
I realize this letter sounds like euphoria and you are putting it down to the altitude or to drink,—no, no, mostly it is Goethe. Perhaps too it is the elation of plain brute fatigue. Pack-mule fatigue.
Lots of love to Kay,183 and to the children.
The Spaniards (imagine what the French would be without vanity and combine it with what the Italians would be without excitability) have a thousand expressions of spiritual cortesïa<.>184 One of them
“You owe me love”
Thornton
226. TO HERBERTH HERLITSCHKA.185 ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Goethe Bicentennial Foundation / 135 South La Salle Street / Chicago 3, Illinois ) Yale
Until Sept 2.
Hotel Jerome,
Aspen, Colorado.
Dear Herberth:
Your recommendations for the contract with Burmann-Fischer186 have been thought good by the Wiggin and Dana firm and will have been forwarded to those concerned. As usual I can’t follow them. Play-contracts, radio, acting, movie-work contracts are hard enough for me to read, but they’re crystal-clear compared to these. And those are read by others for me.
I’m sorry about the misunderstanding re William Faulkner. I’ve never met him and never corresponded with him. I’ve always heard that like Eugene O’Neil he’s even worse than I am: he never answers letters at all. For twenty years Ernest Hemingway also tore up all letters except those from his girls and from his hunting, bullfighting and skiing pals. Max Perkins handled all his publishing business.
Yes. I recognize with regret that its perfectly possible that—without meaning to—I’ve been bloodily heartless in relation to you and your rights. But why? I’m not bloodily heartless to others. Just yesterday I signed a responsibility for hotel debts up to 250 dollars and gave another 100 dollars to a granddaughter of a Furstin Hohenloe187 and the daughter of a knight who’d got stranded in town and a sort of high class vagrant and who had to get out of town or she’d be jailed. Two weeks ago another case. Why am I a lynx for human trouble wherever I see it and apparently blind as a bat in regard to you? Because your statement of your interests always comes wrapped up in such a network of contractual negotiation. I try to support justice and I try to recognize human need, but negotiation-details tend to represent for me neither necessarily justice nor need. They represent bartering and the marketplace and that’s something I know nothing about. For a long time I had to earn my living by jobs and I taught-taught-taught, but I never came anywhere near the problems of commerce and that will always remain a great big blind-spot with me.
I hope you do not mean the same thing by sneers that I do, for I’m sure that in letters to you I never employed them.
I enclose another letter about that plagued Warship Story. It’s a miracle that they dug it up out of an old edition of the “Yale Literary Magazine”. 188
I’ve written ’em:
It may circulate until Dec. 1950 without charge, that it then reverts entirely to me.
That you are my sole translator, and
that Burmann-Fischer is now in possession of German rights to my works.
If indeed you will be going to Vienna there is a much greater chance of my seeing you than in London—a great great city but uncongenial to me—to the same degree that Vienna even in distress remains and always will be my favorite capital in Europe.
All my very best wishes to you both
your old friend
Thornton
P.S. My English protégés the Leonard Trolleys have returned to 37 Ladbroke Square after a year and a half’s trial of NY. and the hope of establishing themselves in the New York theatre and taking out citizenship. The NY stage is going through an awful crisis, the rising demands of the combined unions making —as it also does in publishing–increasingly difficult to bring a product to market.
TW
227. TO CARY GRANT. ALS 2 pp. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Hotel Jerome
Aspen, Colorado
August 23 1949
Dear Mr. Grant:
Excuse this working paper.189 In fact, it is a sign that I am taking a thing seriously.
x
There is no possibility that I should undertake work on a movie-script of the first two book of Gulliver’s Travels, but I enjoy discussing and offering my suggestions for whatever value they may have. If ever I work on a movie again it will be an ‘original’ Vittorio de Sica has approached me on the matter and when my present play is finished, I’m going to try and find a subject and a treatment that would suit him.
x
But the Gulliver’s Travels is a fine idea and—certain difficulties mastered—should make a film that you and Mr. Hawks would be very proud of and which would delight millions.190
x
The first thing that occurs to me is this:
Don’t treat it as a fantasy. Treat it as dead-pan sober-serious travel-experience.
Such it was
for Swift’s first readers (Gulliver’s journeys 1701-; book published 1726). It was for them, as we say, in modern dress). It belongs to the catalogue of great farces and great philosophical works that say: grant me one big preposterous premise and I will develope the consequences in cold logic, and without any further strain on credulity (Don Quixote; Robinson Crusoe, and the best farces of Avery Hopwood191). From such a treatment comes the real explosive force of the humor and the social criticism. In this way, your picture would have a real superiority over the Russian puppet-treatment192 which was constantly adding conscious drollery to the basic text.
x
The ideas in the book—over the telephone you mentioned the high and the low-heeled and the Big-Endians and the Little-Endians—would not be as effective as on the page. Discussed from the screen or photographed they would appear labored,—simply because the continual spectacle of Little Men and Enormous Gulliver would be so overwhelming that it would dry up every interest except itself. There is quite sufficient and terrifying social significance in the view of civilization by pygmies or giants to take care of itself.
x
Your real difficulty lies in the question:
Do you need to add some plot? Love-interest (given the difference of size!) is out of the question; but what is lacking is any person-to-person relation between anybody and anybody.
Can you hold the interest of audiences for two hours on the situation GIANT-PYGMY?
Gulliver’s Travels is not a work of narration; it is not even a travelbook; it is a work of exposition. It is almost entirely without movement.