The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

  Hence, I do not look back at my works; do not re-read them. I even become ill at ease when I recall them. “Forward!” “Let’s make another.”

  These last months I have been called to duties, from place to place, so swiftly that much of my mail has not yet caught up me. Your paper on Goethe will probably arrive here soon—though I must sail for Rome on the 18th to have long conferences with the composer who is setting my new opera-libretto to music.105 I shall look forward to reading it, however, when I return.

  One comment I will make—since you have asked for it!—on the “style” of the Bridge—on a relatively superficial aspect of the style. During the years preceding the writing of my first two novels I had been reading intensively in the literature of the French grand siècle. The Marquesa de Montemayor is “after” the Marquise de Sévigné—the colors heightened in the Spanish colonial atmosphere. Those formal portraits with which I introduce the principal characters are in the manner of Saint Simon and the memoirs of the Cardinal de Retz, La Rochefoucauld, and even the portrait-making in the sermons of Bossuet and Bourdaloue. Hence the “removed” tone, the classical, the faintly ironic distance from the impassioned actions is an expression,—even a borrowing—from the latin thought-world. Thence comes also the occasional resort to aphorism.

  I have read and reread your Herbstnacht in der Grosstadt with grateful pleasure. As to the story, I feel that dreams,—real or supposed—are a perilous art-form. They “invite” a certain irresponsibility.

  All best wishes to you and many regards,

  Sincerely yours

  Thornton Wilder

  255. TO THEW WRIGHT, JR. ALS 2 pp. Private

  Hotel Vesuvio Naples, Nov. 28

  Dear Thug—

  Just about the only ocean crossing I failed completely to enjoy. Don’t quite know why. First my digestion and my sleep failed to function. I thought it was too much drinking maybe—i.e. a little at 5; a little at dinner; a little after dinner; a little at midnight. So I substituted coca cola in the later hours (horrible); no improvement. The ship’s company was less than galvanic, but that never puts me off; I can be attentive to anybody. (Had to sit at the Captain’s Table with various State Dept and Amexco V.I.P.s and their ladies.106) Myerberg put Alan Schneider on the boat to pick my brains about their forthcoming production of Waiting for Godot (Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell!) and sure—free gratis for nothing I retranslated by dictation the whole play… rather enjoyed it but it took time and mind and energy from other things.107 No, the root of the whole trouble was the damned air-conditioning. Hermetically sealed in a room with that

  LATER: Feel better already Oh, Naples. … nothing like it. Sun today… Reporters; refused to do radio and TV… pleading.

  I want to stay on here a few days—besides, I’m not ready to present Louise with her finished text

  Mon. I was sort of crazy to think that I could ever have done all that: returned from Switzerland for the Matchmaker,108 returned to Rome for Louise, returned to America for Mexico. (I should begin to know now after a hundred experiences that my judgment of what is possible in future time is always ALWAYS wide wide of the mark. Especially in writing I should never set any kind of dateline.—I’m inclined to think that I can only write “fast” when there is no pressure.)

  LATER: Happened to see a Hamburg paper with a review of The Matchmaker—so beautiful a review that for the first time in life I wrote the critic, on a Xmas card. The same play opened in Zurich yesterday. That play sure is giving pleasure in central Europe. I tell myself that some day it’ll get a production in USA of which I would approve every bit of it.109 Its of no importance that I may not be there to see it. To hear these Germans talk about it, you’d scarcely guess that it was the same play. ¶ A sixteen page letter from that young woman who (with her mother) ran the bar Mimosa at Baden Baden and who was undergoing psychoanalysis. An extraordinary letter: women can be at the same time both boundlessly happy and boundlessly unhappy at the same time and get it all understandably down on paper.

  Well, I’ll never get this letter off if I go on adding desultory items like this.

  Give my love to Danda and to the other bright and beautiful girls in your home110 and a world of Xmas greetings and new year greetings to you all—

  your old

  Thornt

  256. TO ERIC BENTLEY.111 ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Penn State

  Jan 5. 1956

  Dear Bently—

  Greetings.

  Yes, I’ve spent all those countless infatuated hours over Lope. My attention was mostly absorbed in finding the clues that would help to date them, an extra-literary preoccupation; but I was constantly aware of the genius, too. There are several hundreds of plays which I have read many times. Even in the most mechanical of them, there is somewhere the mark of the lion. And always a wonderful relation to theatre and to the ways his contemporary audience “followed” a story. And by 1610 every play is a masterpiece or near it—and that’s a great many.

  I’ve long despaired of any ability on my part to make a translation. The problem is despairful enough in the case of Molière and Schiller and Racine, but rendered far more difficult still in that of Lope. (As it is more difficult still in that of Calderon112 who was a really great poet and a great spiritual myth-maker, in addition—which Lope was not.)

  If Shakespeare were suddenly discovered in 1956, in an old Warwickshire chest,—would the modern world be willing to accept that Viola-Cesario Rosalind-Ganymede business—Portia’s caskets, the first act of Lear and the last of Measure for Measure? I feel certain that it’s only the fact that they have been played continuously, generation after generation, that makes the conventions work. Lope employs all those (and those with an added fantastication from the Spanish temper) and heaps on them a great many more.

  Take the sonnet directed, at crisis, to the audience. They loved it, and Lope uses it most beautifully. As: In the openings of his two finest play Fuenteovejuna and Peribánez the lovers play a sort of renaissance game: I love you with an A… with a B… with a C… It must be cut (do you realize that probably Fuenteovejuna is probably the most frequently played play in this decade? since the USSR commanded that it be played in every theatre in Russia) and when it is cut the balance on which the play rests is shattered: the agony is turned into mere melodrama.

  But I believe that English-readers should have the opportunity to divine what the lion’s work was like.

  I cannot write a preface. (I go through life writing as little “non-fiction” as possible—since I do it badly and with excruciating effort<.>) But I send all my best wishes to the venture.

  I suggest that the following plays would be the most accessible: Fuenteovejuna

  Peribánez

  Los Commendadores de

  Córdoba (but not the three together, because of certain resemblances in the plots.)

  and for comedy

  La discreta enamorada (the only play I ever saw on the stage—at Stuttgart, where they had robbed it of almost all of its enormous charm.)

  one or the other; there is a resemblance in plan. The former much played—by Maragunta Xirgú Garcia Lorca’s actress.113

  The Barraults have been doing El perro del hortelano which I admire boundlessly but I dont think that in translation it puts Lope’s best foot forward. It is very delicate chamber-music,—until the closing scene. For pictures of customs and manners there is Santiago el verde or La vallana de Getafe<.> His power in making vast heroic “epics” from Spanish history—each one that I can recall has some elements that would seem infantile to present day readers.

  Lopistas are generally agreed that La Estrella de Sevilla—which passed in Germany for a century as his masterpiece—is not by Lope. “Finely designed and poorly versified.” Perhaps a thief’s reworking of a lost original (stolen to sell to another manager.)

  Again—all best wishes—and my sister joins me in sending many regards

&n
bsp; Sincerely yours

  Thornton Wilder

  257. TO HENRY R. LUCE. ALS 1 p. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) LofC

  Moving gradually north

  Mexico City

  August 14 1956

  Dear Harry:

  Been in the wilds of Mexico—where often mail is brought by donkey—slow and not always certain.

  Yes, I’ve been working on that bundle of notions about America (The Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, 1950-1951; Panoffsky was only seven years late in delivering the printable text to the Harvard Press.114)

  I shall keep my promise of letting your staff see them; but its doubtful whether you can find them serviceable. I’m casting them into unconventional forms—following certain ideas of Gertrude Stein—in an effort to renew “exposition.” There’ll be dialogue and catechism and inner monologue and interruption and oddities of pagination: anything to give to the didactic pretended-omniscient essay some of the character of thought itself: process not stasis; journey not rest.

  Anyway, even if it doesn’t lend itself to excerpt-publication I hope old HRL gets some lively agreement and disagreement out of it and some laffs.

  You can imagine how distressed I was to read about Clare’s illness. To think that she—who is fortitude and courage and total commitment to so exacting an office should have had that burden added to it—all the worse for being puzzling and inexplicable. Do convey my sympathy to her, my wishes for full restoration, and my ever-admiring affection.115

  All cordial best to you ever

  Old Thornton

  Isn’t it a pleasure to see in Hersey the “tone” of us Old China hands.116

  258. TO MAXWELL ANDERSON. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Gideon Putnam Hotel / Saratoga Springs / New York) Texas

  Returning to.

  50 Deepwood Drive

  Hamden, Conn.

  Nov. 13

  1956

  Dear Max—

  All right, if you say so.

  But I’d have been mighty proud to find and send you a copy of the book from me.

  Of all the works I’ve done that book comes nearest to what one could call fun.117 Fun to shift from voice to voice; to build up the complicated time-scheme (there are several howling boners in it); fun to parody the apparatus of a work of scholarship; fun to force the reader to assume that people have been much the same in all times and ages (that society dowagers, for instance, babbled, then, much as they do at their committee meetings now; and the figures now known to every schoolboy regarded one another as anything but lasting historical giants).

  I turn purple whenever I think of my translations of Catullus. It’s not the first nor the last time that I go into a sort of tunnel of deluded bad judgment. Had I read those in a book by someone else (even at the time I was doing them!) I’d have burst out into howls of derision. I seemed to have combined the worst effects of plaster-cast classicism with those of what England calls Wardour-Street.118 Ouch! The tricks that subjectivity overstrained with good intentions can play on oneself.

  I’ll give you 2½ guesses as to what lady well known to the U.S. public—daughter granddaughter descendant of senators, governors etc etc gave me some “lights” on how a Clodia ticked (the revolt against being duped by society’s genteel facade).119 For a Caesar I was richly fed by a great admiration for the thousands of pages of Simón Bolivar’s correspondence: a lofty smiling half-sad unshakenness in the face of the betrayal of friends and beneficiaries. …

  One of these days I want to recapture that mood of having sheer fun in writing a thing—which is no where near the same thing as writing a funny work.

  All devoted best to you both

  Ever

  Thornton

  259. TO LOUISE TALMA. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Yale

  Thursday

  120

  Dear Louisa—

  Well, an unforgettable time. The French have a phrase for it: toujours égale à elle-même.121 You may have each morning’s panic for yourself, but I won’t be a party to it. Do remember—you who are so often victimized by self-doubts—that the achievements of any given moment are not that moment’s sudden taking hold of strength, but are the results of a lifetime’s choices and rejections, a lifetime’s discipline, a lifetime’s adherence to what one admires and what one relegates. You are still haunted by some notion that each good idea is a haphazard descent from the skies—yes, it is also that—but in addition to gratitude to the skies one has the legitimate expectation that all the dedicated work of one’s previous years are also there as support and incitement. This is the popular misunderstanding of the word “inspiration”: all work is breath from without, but it is also the reward of being ready—for years—for hundreds of previous inbreathings. You are a wonderful composer because you were an unobstructed listener to just such promptings in the past.

  In a hurry

  Just ate.

  Now I gotta take Isabel downtown to the movies.

  More tomorrow.

  That play about the criminals has grown and grown. It’s called Bernice now. It’s bigger and more terrible. … it’s sort of darkly grand.122

  Be a goooood girl and a lassen Sie sich nicht quälen bein Arbeiten gnädigte und Himmel-begapte Frau.123

  Dein124

  Thornt

  260. TO EILEEN, ROLAND, AND JULIAN LE GRAND. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Private

  December 19. 1956

  Dear dear Friends—

  This is the Grasshopper speaking.

  That foolish fellow who never settles down, who fiddles away, neglects his debts of affection, procrastinates, and assumes that every tomorrow will be sunny. And that every tomorrow will be a splendid letter-writing day.

  His only excuse is that from time to time he can borrow some qualities from his antagonist the Ant, and burrow down and do a little work. I’ve just finished five new one-act plays and am deep in two more. My hope was to send a privately printed copy of these as a Christmas momento to a few friends. But with them I fell into another old failing—the inability to draw finis: three of them still await one last touch, one last real right brushstroke.125

  Anyway, you shall have them in time. (Of several of them the subject-matter is heart-rending and far from suitable for the season.)

  Enclosed please find an item to decorate your tree. … I wish I knew Julian’s tastes now and could participate in the conspiracy to surprise and delight him.

  There is little news of me except work. “A Life in the Sun”—hateful title imposed upon him—is going on journeys. A wonderful composer is making an opera of it—in the “12-tone series” style—now difficult listening for many, but to be the normal musical speech of the next generation; and as Die Alkestiade is to be played at the Zürich Festival in June, from whence it will probably travel the German language countries.

  I am coming abroad late spring. I do not know yet whether I can come to England. If I do, we shall have a joyous reunion.

  TNW with godson Julian Le Grand, Edinburgh, 1955 or 1956.

  TNW with godson Julian Le Grand, Edinburgh, 1955 or 1956. Private collection.

  Give my deep regard to Dr. Francis126 and all the family there.

  And lots of love to you all and a Merry Christmas

  and

  A happy New Year

  To

  Dear Julian—and Dear Eileen and Dear Roland

  Thy

  Thorny

  261. TO RUTH GORDON. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Private

  AM DEAF AGAIN

  MY WINTER

  COLD—MUST’N’T see anybody

  Wed. Jan 23

  Dear Ruthie—

  The French translation:127

  Rueful regret: that that’s what it is: an unusually faithful translation.

  I had hoped for a fasc
inating gallic transmogrification.

  x

  I changed myself—I fancied—into a French theatregoer; and I say with confidence that—unless you are playing in it—would be a prompt, lamentable failure.

  x

  It has, in itself, no qualities that arrest the attention of the French.

  Each country has its own cherished tensions: The Germans like to hear behind the play Destiny-and-Fate—and vague philosophical allusions to Last Questions (my Alcestiad is going on at the Zurich Festival in June and will go like wildfire all over the German municipal theatres.)

  The French love florid language (Giraudoux) and sharp eyes about our deplorable human failings (Anouilh) and above all the cat-and-mouse game of sex-impulse versus sexual legal and religious conventions. (The French Theatre would collapse if the Church and State ceased to presuppose monogamy. The Russians don’t think that adultery is even interesting.)

  The French have also some of that Latin emotionalism about the family. They can be caught by excruciating sentimentality about paternity and maternity (1000 performances of Le Rosaire, and La Bonheur de Jour and Mon Curé chez les Riches.)128

  But our play has no “knowing” consciousness of sex; it has no family relationships whatever.

  Without you in it,—it would utterly bore them. It is fade; it is plat. Worst of all, all the characters, except Dolly, are niais.129 Ducreux130 cannot cope with Cornelius. You can see him trying to make Cornelius somehow interesting.