Even American tourists—they’re crazy to talk to other Americans. Give them the outgoing warmth, too. You may find some tedious sides of the hosiery manufacturers from St. Louis—but you’re a beautiful young woman. Get to know them: you can brighten their voyage.
x
Mural painting is one of the greatest of all art-forms. It’s dead in Europe and in Boston (Sargent and Abbey and Puvis de Chavannes—in the Library—dead.). But it came to life in Mexico (from the Indian blood—how to cover a wall—)<.> We now know the once-fashionable Rivera was merely a gaudy illustrator; but Siqueiros and especially Orozco are magnificent.
x
The great betrayal, the Tragedy of Montezuma—
x
The charm and felicity of the folk-arts,—taste. Taste always resumes centuries of high culture—that the Mexican Indians have.
x
Maybe you’ll have time to read D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent—a lot of it is downright silly, Lawrence’s Messianic complex—but the description of Mexico City at the beginning and of the village life on the lake later—is masterful.
x
There are hundreds of travel books, mostly ephemeral. A good travel book doesnt date: Flandreau’s Viva Mexico158 is still as telling as though it were written this morning.
x
A trip to a foreign country can also be a renewal of oneself. Go to Mexico as a new Dixie. Be audacious, daring, fun-loving, vulgar, “Mexican”—I send you my CHRISTMAS PRESENT in advance—have (create) the hell of a time. I sail for Europe next Monday (Isabel follows me soon to Paris and Switzerland) but wherever you are you are my treasured niece
sez with love
Old Uncle Thornton
316. TO JAMES LEO HERLIHY. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed Post Office Box 862 / Edgartown, Massachusetts 02539) Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Last day at
(Martha’s Vineyard.) until after Labor Day. But my sister will be here and will be forwarding mail.
July 25
Dear Herlihy
Selah!
Here’s the dope you asked about:
I got fed up with academic and cultured society. (As I put it: “if one more person asks me what I think of T.S. Eliot, I’ll shoot). May 1962.
I decided to go to the desert and be a hermit. From the map I picked out Patagonia, Arizona. (As children we didn’t say “Go to Hell!” but “Go to Patagonia!” I drove across the country for the sixth time—love the Road, the gas stations, the motels—the fried egg sandwich joints.
My car began to stagger and poop out as I came to a hill and a sign saying WELCOME TO ARIZONA. I just managed to get to the bottom of the hill: DOUGLAS, ARIZONA. 1 ½ miles from the Mexican border. I stayed there 20 months. No phone. Made my own breakfast and lunch. Closed* the local bar (midnight in that State.). 5,000 people—¾ of them Mexicans come over the border to put their children in our schools. A once pretentious hotel for T.B’s and asthmatics and arthritics—on its last legs, breaking up. A few small ranchers. Local airport staff. Bar “help”, restaurant “help.” (There was a bit of “society” there; engineers at a smelting works, with a country club, etc. but I never went into their homes and was never asked.) There was a vague notion that I “wrote”, but whether it was phony Westerns or books for children no one gave a damn. Once a week I drove 60 miles to Tombstone for dinner or Nogales; once a month to Tucson or Phoenix. Some casual and agreeable friends—no attachments, no claims or demands either way. JUST WHAT I NEEDED. Took me three months to blow the cobwebs of self-conscious genteeldom out of my head. Then I started the novel (I thought it would be a short novella.) A record player—I worked under the clouds of Bach motets and Mozarts last string quintets—just about the tops of all music.
So after 20 months I left, reluctantly, but I knew that inevitably the blessing of change that it offered would in time cease to be change.
Ever since I keep hunting for another “Douglas.” Nearest to it are SPAS out-of-season. (I’ve never stayed here so late before but the give-and-take of hospitality is beginning to overwhelm any idea of work: all pleasant people: Lillian Hellman, the Feiffers, Mia Farrow,—like that. I return in Sept, Oct—nobody here but the chowder-makers, the sea gulls and me. … St. Moritz out-of-season—Saratoga Springs out of season.
No, I didn’t say the couch was the writer’s enemy but I quoted George Moore: the writer must resist the writer’s temptation—the desire to go out and find someone to talk with. Desultory conversation—gassing—is the enemy.
We have a hippy population on this island. But ours are “well-to-do” ones. It costs $5.50 to get on and off the island by ferry. The Police cracked down on them last week and jailed a dozen or more (there had been an FBI informer among them for months); they put their finger on the pushers. We have also a stratum of drop-outs—girls “waiting” in the bars and restaurants—very nice some of them. And men who talk your ears off about how they’re learning from LIFE,—“the school of hard knocks” (laughter.) The girls are fine—the men are awful. Insecurely boastful; great intellectual pretension and bone-ignorant. Here’s “Wilder’s Law”—a man between 18 and 25 who for several years has done nothing becomes a misery to himself and a bore to others. It is written into the human constitution that MALENESS means work: homo faber.159 The British aristocracy is no ball of fire, but it would long ago have struck out but for the law of primogeniture—only the oldest son got any dough: his brothers had to go into Army, Navy, Church, Diplomacy, or “running the Estate.”
Look about you.
Went to Boston for 3 days.
Saw Midnight Cowboy. Much to admire. Some splendid performances. Something’s missing. I shall read the book to find out. (There were Long Lines at the Box-office)
Mia was delighted to receive that book from you and with its inscription.
She’s a very interesting girl. In my opinion her career is in great danger if she plays any more of those hex’d girls.160 Her directors don’t seem to distinguish between girls conditioned to neurosis and mentally arrested. She’s strong healthy and intelligent and she’s being forced into the straight jacket of an “image” which the public will soon weary of.
At present she is overwhelmedly in love. In a few weeks she will marry Maestro Previn.161
I returned Monday from Boston to find this community like a cow that’s been hit on the head with a mallet.
They’d had to go through their exaltation about the moonwalk and their learning of the squalid Edward Kennedy behavior on their own doorstep.
Tough.
JLH,—you’re as crazy as a coot, if you think I could enjoy conversation with the knowledge that someone was “taking notes.”
So start reshuffling what you take to be your image of me.
I suspect you of being deficient in a sense of humor.
We’d better not meet—I’d constantly distress you.
As it say in you-know-what book when other people are bellyaching about the incommunicability* of human-to-human, about their “loneliness”, about the bondage to a technological civilization I get more and more elated, euphoric, happy, frivolous, trivial; and when others are in ecstasy about their halucygenic visions and their love-of-all-mankind and their kinship with the universe I get more and more sombre and metaphysically depressed. I’m terrible.
Arrange the flowers, sure; pet the cat, sure; but also do a number of hours daily of relaxed but single-minded work.
Glad to hear from you.
Old
TNW.
317. TO MIA FARROW. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Last five days at Neues Posthotel, St Moritz,
Feb 2. 1970
Dear Mia:
Ruth has given me your address and suggested that I write you—and I always do what Ruthie suggests, especially if it’s something that I want to do, too.
I hesitated a bit, but then I said to myself: January and February are
the two most cheerless months in the year—especially in England and New England—sunless, heart-in-your-boots months—and a letter from a friend that loves you is a cheerful thing on your breakfast tray.
My thoughts often return to the radiant gifted FRIEND you’re waiting for (gifted by Papa and gifted by Mama).162 My niece is to have a baby in April. You know the Spanish idiom for having a baby—dar luz a: to give light.163 So Spanish! I’ve seen you with your own niece and an unforgettable sight it was.
I try to imagine what your life’s like while you’re waiting. I follow the London papers and saw Andre’s concert there and read the news of his forthcoming American tour. I wish Ruthie had told me what your plans are. Well, mine are fairly set: go to Milan Friday—two weeks—then to Genoa (stay in nearby Rapallo a few weeks)—take ship to Curaçao (Central America)—go slowly up the Carribean (I spelled that wrong, I think)—visit my mother’s sister, 88—in Florida—then to Martha’s Vineyard, end of April, with only a few days in New York and at home. I’ve been working hard—some stuff that’ll make you laugh, I hope. With the years I’m getting less gloomy.
My thoughts keep returning to the time when the Chichester Festival approached you about doing a play. Romeo and Juliet would be best, but London and New York have been—for the time—surfeited with that in both film and ballet. I still dream of The Wild Duck for you, but your idea of A Doll’s House is fine. I’ve never seen a very young Nora—who has? It’s about maturing: it’s about deepening spiritual insights. She’s made some frightening mistakes—but through ignorance, through love of her husband and children. Now she resolves to live correctly, truthfully,—but the person who is nearest and dearest to her doesn’t understand this “new Nora”, this moral urgency.
You’re a born actress. I dream of you constantly returning to the theater. And that’s best in London with all those companies with that continual variety of good parts and plays. Look at Irene Worth—two years ago a great success in Heartbreak House (Chichester and London); then with the National Theatre with Gielgud in Seneca’s Oedipus; now there> with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Tiny Alice.164 Well, she writes me that she’s to play Hedda in Stratford-on-Avon, Canada (where years ago she did All’s Well that ends Well and As You like it with Alec Guinness.) She’s just written me asking for my “ideas” about Hedda. All my life I’ve had ever-changing ideas about Hedda, but I haven’t any more. I don’t like plays about clinical cases, especially destroyer-women. But I love Irene’s clear pursuit of “good plays in good companies.”
But that’s not the important thing just now. Now I see you sitting before an open grate in Eaton Square, gazing into the live coals and dreaming. From time to time you put on the record of Albinoni’s Adagio—but that’s too sad. A Mozart—have you Klemperer’s recording of Mozart’s Serenade for Thirteen Wind Instruments? Maybe Andre has recorded it, in which case forgive me recommending another. At intervals you turn the pages of one of these “art books” that have reached such a perfection in our time. Your eyes fall on Giotto’s The Virgin’s meeting with St. Anne. Both are very pregnant and there is such a hushed solemn gravity in their faces, in their embrace, as takes your breath away. Don’t take time to answer these rambling thoughts, dear Mia. I put an address on the back of the envelope that will reach me for the next four weeks, on the chance that there is some way in which I could be useful to me.
LOVE to all three of you
your devoted
uncle Thornton
318. TO JAMES LEO HERLIHY. ALS 2 pp. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
Milan Feb 12 1970
Dear James-the-Lion:
I don’t know whether you’re still a Roman Catholic in good standing, but I’ll tell you a story that will reawaken old pieties. Yesterday was Ash-Wednesday. The carnival season came to an end,—carne = meat; the season before Lent when you could eat meat.
But we in Milan can eat meat for three more days—the only place in the WHOLE DEVOUT WORLD where one can eat meat without sin. Because we are enjoying the Carnivale de Sant’ Ambrogio. Centuries ago this city had been smitten by the plague; we died like flies. Finally as Lent approached the pestilence abated. And our good Archbishop—later our Patron Saint—St Ambrose passed a miracle. The survivors of that terrible time needed to eat meat to keep up their strength. So our wise and tender father and leader announced that fasting would be postponed for three days. So ever since the City goes wild with feasting and rioting and civic pride while the rest of the world goes into sackcloth and ashes.
I hope the tears are rolling down your cheeks like marbles.
Pass the wine and have a little more of this steak; it’ll keep up your strength.
x
I’d go crazy, if I weren’t pursuing some hobby—absorbing, totally occupying train of inquiry. At present it’s Greek Vase-painting. I’ve lived 72 and 10/12 years without giving it a thought. For something I’m writing I needed just a small bit of knowledge about it.165 (Not what they call research: I don’t do research—that’s why I make so many bloomers.) Just enough to make a bit of literary magic about it. Couldn’t get any books up at St Moritz, so I came down here and picked up a few. Fun? yes and more than that—exaltation. Also, for what I’m reading I felt I should know something about the Tibetan mandala. Before that it was Levi-Straus and structuralism. I think I told you about that. Now for these hobbies I hook on to a subject and read what the authorities have to say and then I start and construct my own theories. Every hobby is also an exploration, a constructive question-answering journey of my own,—“creative”, as they say in college classes. Within no time I’m saying that those authorities, those professors are blind, stupid, academic-obtuse. These glorious objects were painted at a time when Athens was at its pinnacle—the great architecture, and sculpture, the tragedies were being written, the lung-expanding comedies. And yet: Athens was in mortal danger—the Persians were advancing; the war with Sparta was ultimately inevitable.
It seems never to have occurred to the scholars to ask what is the relation between the scene pictured on one side of the pot and the scene picture on the other, why Bacchus and his frantic women-followers on one side and Hector taking leave of Andromache on the other. God damn it … in times of mortal danger (which is also any time in life, if you’re really alive) you must encompass both poles—life and death (Bacchus’s vine-plants which renew themselves annually—the life-enhancing force—and the death of Hector, the great and good. That’s where the mandala comes in, too. James-the-Lion, see to it than in every novel you write (NOVEL: a window on Life—and on all life] you touch all bases: death and despair and also the ever-renewing life-force, sex, courage, food, the family. I think you’ve always done that anyway, but know that you’re doing it. Touch all bases to make a home run.
x
I’m shy of writing you because you want to make me into a guru of some kind. More and more I see the havoc that’s made in life by overvaluation. After overvaluation there’s always a bitter disillusioned morning-after. Marriages are wrecked by it; father-and-son relationships are wrecked by it. It’s popular name is idealization. It would be terrible if we didn’t have it—it’s present everywhere around us, but oh, if we could only guard ourselves against OVER-valuation, we save ourselves a lot of shipwreck.
x
This is the Beethoven anniversary year.166 He’s not my topmost music-maker but he sure was a wonderful man. Now that you’re as rich as Croesus, give yourself a journey from the early Septet through the quartets and violin sonatas to those last quartets. (I’ve never been able to hook on very much to the piano sonatas.)
x
I’m soon starting home by the slowest ship on the sea.
I’ve been writing some stuff that’ll maybe make you laugh. You don’t hate laughing, do you? Remember true laughing requires a wide departure from the self and its self-preoccupation. But, after all, I don’t know you and maybe you’re a buoyant roaring boy.
If Tennessee’s167 still there, give him my deep deep regard. Forgive this long-delayed answer to your letter and be sure that I’m always glad to receive one from you—now it must be via Hamden. I just got a buoyant letter from Mia—she reports that she and André are sitting in London happily awaiting the baby that’s kicking boisterously within her. She just rec’d the British Academy Award nomination for best actress.168 hope all’s going great with you and the work.
Your old friend
319. TO AMOS TAPPAN AND ROBIN G. WILDER.169 ALS 2 pp. Private
Last day in Miami Fla.
April 18 1970
Dear Robin and Tapper
The great-uncle is as impatient as you are for the entrance on the scene.
I know you’re looking about for a baby-sitter. Well, as you know, I’m a stay-at-home. I don’t mind yelling and screeching as long as I’m certain that baby hasn’t swallowed a string of beads or something<.> I’ll assume the child is merely practicing to be an opera singer.
So when you’re invited out to dinner just bring the bassinet up to my study (with the bottle and a page of instructions—your phone-number and the phone-numbers of the half-dozen best pediatricians in town (headed by my old friend, Dr. Betsy Harrison> who can always soothe me, too)
My terms are very high but I offer these services gratis to great-nephews and double-gratis to great-nieces.
So lots of love to dear little Gloriana or sturdy little Augustus.
And thanks for the birthday greeting.
love
Uncle T.
Wilder family, Thanksgiving 1970, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Left to right: Amos N. Wilder, Isabel Wilder, Robin Wilder (holding Amos T. Wilder), Amos Tappan Wilder, Catharine Dix Wilder, TNW, Arthur Hazard Dakin, Winthrop S. Dakin.