The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder by Thornton Wilder
transported with joy and at your side. Father says the Adams are urging you to take their house for the Summer months, and in combination with the reduced fare to Mamauguin52 it seems a good start. Turn it over for yourself however, carina53; I’m behint you.
Great long stretches of my Roman Memoirs are now done, and I’ve a good mind to group together the Society sections and try and send them out into the world first, under the title: Elizabeth Grier and her Circle. To many readers they will seem (this show of the low-life and ecclesiastical material with which in the ultimate version they are relieved) too gossipy and feminine. Many passages however are of a valuable mordant satire, and others drenched with restrained pity; I am not ashamed of it. You would be a great help, but I cannot send my forlorn unique text across the ocean.
Charlotte’s essay in the Atlantic54 has made a pretty stir in Lawrenceville. She has been sending me some sonnets of her writing that will make you hold your breath. If she keeps on right she may discover herself as something of a very high order that will scatter our magazine poetesses, as a hawk does the hens. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. What is the secret, madam, of having astonishing children? thousands of pretty, intelligent mothers growing old among their dull prosperous and un-appreciative sons and daughters ask you that question. Their life threatens to be a decrescendo; have you any advice as to how young mothers can guarantie themselves a crescendo?
Albert Parker Fitch55 of Amherst spoke at our School service today admirably. I met him here last year and twice this year; Stark Young56 had told him about me too,—we had fine talks. He spent the Summer at Fiesole in perfect quiet at a nuns’ nursing home. I have a letter from Gwynne Abbott57 full of how charming you and Isabel are. She has gone on to Merano in the Tyrol.
Anybody care to know what I’ve been reading. I’m now in the XIII’th tome of Saint-Simon,58 more adoring than ever. This influence, believe me, arrived most à propos—henceforward whenever I am endangered of falling into silken felicities and jewelled or flute-like cadences I have only to remember this memoirist whose three greatest virtues are energy and energy and energy. I have just read also “Siegfried et le limousin”59 by Giraudoux which I like for the rather weak reason that it is interested in the same things that interest me. The second instalment of your Xmas present has come and I have just derived a vast amount of pleasure from Doormats and Outcast. Who is Janet that you mention in your letters? some Y.W. worker doubtless; you say she enjoyed The Mollusc—send me a photograph.60 I can’t abide women who aren’t pretty; must I advance money for milk baths and electric exhilirators to make her more presentable? Is she by any chance interested in horses? When my book’s published, and I’m very rich, I’m going to live in the Connecticut hills and own a large stable of horses that can tell time and play bridge etc. I shall need a capable women, sympathetic (and pretty) to put over them. If you know anybody who might suit, have her write me at once and enclose a photograph. You can see how my ink is turning quite red with eagerness, and quite illegible with fear that such a valuable woman can’t be found.
—Quite a time has gone by since I began this letter and I want to add that my Eliz. Grier and her Circle is almost finished—watch and pray
love from a drying aging schoolmaster
Thornton
78. TO EDITH J. R. ISAACS. AL (Draft)61 3 pp. Yale
May 3 1923
Dear Mrs. Isaacs:
Please take your time over the four acts I sent you.62 When reckoning comes do not spare me: I learn meekly. Besides they are from a closed chapter; after them came Dada.
Last night I shook hands with Max Reinhardt.
In the summer of Sixteen I spent a week on the lonely island of Monhegan, off the coast of Maine. In the colony of surf-painters and solitaries, human sea-gulls, that such an island would attract I frequented a group of Germans that gathered every evening in the draughty pine-board studio of I no longer know what musician, There was Herr Doktor Kuhnemann, University of Breslau, author of a standard life of Schiller; a Fraülein Schmidt or Müller, head of the German department at Bryn Mawr or Smith (one could verify these in an hour); and a Viennese dramatic critic named Rudolph Kommer, who answered with unfailing good humor and wit my thousands of questions. Even while I was on the island I heard that the group was suspected of espionage, but, after I left, my Aunt says they were convicted of midnight signalling to a submarine base nearby, and interned. All these years go by and I see in the Sunday Times of two weeks ago that the article therein on Reinhardt is by Rudolph Kommer now travelling with him as interpreter and agent. Just after I had made my plans to go to The Cherry Orchard in Philadelphia last night I saw, again in The Times, that Reinhardt was running down from New York to see the same performance. Sure enough, at the close of the first act, there he was in a stage box (with a gloriously beautiful actress setting off her face with the waftings of a huge feather fan in Paris green), and there behind him sat Rudolph Kommer. They did not leave the box until the next intermission, when I pushed down the alley. Kommer was very cordial; declared that he had been wondering how he could find me, etc. He introduced me to Reinhardt, with a rapid, “nur als knabe er kannte mehr vom deutschen Literatur als die meisten Deutschen.”63 You know that the producer is astonishingly young and homely, but with bright eyes, and with a pretty, deferential manner. After a few polite changes, he said in good English that he was with a lady and must go; and went.
Kommer then said that it was all settled that he would return for production in the Fall; that he would begin with a big pantomime spectacle (though he is no longer fond of them); and that he ultimately hoped to do Strindberg’s The Dream Play and Shakespeare. He is excited about America, stunned and bewitched by the Ziegfeld Follies, and by the negro entertainers (he mentioned The Plantations). Kommer said that they had been to many plays and that Reinhardt was always pointing out actors in roles of fourth and fifth importance who were full of possibilities; he added that some of the actors for his Fall season were selected already.
Perhaps you have met them yourself these days and know a great deal more than this.
In the afternoon I saw Henry Miller, Blanche Bates, Laura Hope Crews and Ruth Chatterton in The Changelings a jumbled comedy by a New Haven friend, Lee Wilson Dodd; a quilt of contrasted intentions—ten minutes of drama about misguided ladies stealing to bachelors’ apartments; sudden rush for chairs and a poor Shavian badinage about morality; Blanche Bates suddenly turns farcical and does Hermione64 (just before the curtain she will return to her Noble Mother tune); stretches of preachment about pretty wives who shirk light-housekeeping and on studious young husbands who do not admit their wives into their enthusiasms and Ph.D. theses. Oh, how bad it was; even Laura Hope Crews was bad. And in the intermission Blanche Bates made a speech about how they all loved Henry Miller, how they knew they were out of the beaten track of the theatre, but that they were glad and proud to be with him, who had always led out in the direction of the Best Things in the Theatre …….. and Stanislawsky65 and Reinhardt both in town!
I should love to write you for seven days and nights, but I shall see you soon—unless you leave for Europe before the third week of June. You will have a glorious trip, but you will not regret too much arriving back in New York for the finest season in our history.
Give my very best to your husband and children. I hope I can see you when I come up from graduation, but I shall not force you to choose between me and Italy.
Affectionately,
P.S. I forgot to say that Kommer mentioned by name Bel-Geddes66 as one of the younger artists Reinhardt hoped to work with.
79. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Davis House,
June 5 1923
Dear Mother;
Just a page to supplement the letters Father and Uncle Thornton wrote you about Grandmother’s last days.67 Father asked me if I could come up Sunday. I arrived at about two and turning into 44th St. from
Broadway came upon Father leaning against the area-railings. He had waited in and around the hotel for three days, it seems, and was to be relieved that night when Uncle Thornton arrived on the midnight from St. Louis. He took me right up to Grandmother’s room, nodding to the various people in the lobby all of whom were very concerned. She had been moved into a larger and lighter room, with a big bed and was attended by a homely middle-aged nurse whom Father claimed to find “superior,” but who gained my confidence only by her stolidness. Father leaned down to Grandmother’s ear and said that ‘little Thornton from New Jersey had come up to see her’. She opened her eyes wide and I am sure she recognized me, for she framed with her lips the elongated O, and uttered the tremulous cooing noise with which she always greeted me when I knocked at her door for a visit. Father continued to repeat that it was grandson and not son Thornton, whereupon she broke into a musical but incoherent flow of words in which I read a reproach at his presuming her capable of such a mistake. Her words in themselves were clear and even beautiful; the difficulty lay not in speaking but in thinking. When after a few moments we made a motion to go, it distressed her, for she raised her hand and wrinkled her forehead in a characteristic expression of humorous reproach; so we sat down, until from fatigue or content she had closed her eyes and forgotten us. Somehow the interview was anything but painful; it seemed to breathe Grandmother at her best, sweetness and a touch of humor. Father has probably told you the many beautiful and characteristic incidents of the days he watched by her.
After that Father and I walked for a few hours in Central Park, and I left for School. I went up again for the Service on Thursday. There seemed to be quite a number of people in the Bible Study room behind the Church Auditorium (she and I had once sat there waiting for Church to begin). Father led me up to sit beside Charlotte; it had never occurred to me that she would be there and dressed in complete black. Dr. Kelman,68 whom Grandmother admired so and had taken me to hear during my Christmas vacation, the great Dr. Kelman, opened with a wonderful prayer; it wasn’t just good, for it was perfect. Then the Dobbs Ferry minister who conducted with him read some lines of your father’s that Grandmother had once found for him. Then just the six of us drove out to the cemetery, to the knoll amid countless columns marked Lewis and Nitchie.
I shall miss her a lot, especially when I am in New York and suddenly realize that we cannot take up again our modest little lunches and expeditions (she so fearful lest I be ruined with the price of street fares) and our little accumulation of jokes and comments we had in common. To you who only received news of it by the cruelty of cablegrams it will seem more tragic than it has been for us who saw an end as gently disposed as is possible among us.
Lots of love
Thornton
80. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Sagawatha Lodge69
Lakeside, Litchfield Co. Conn.
July 2. 1923
Dear Mother:
I suppose I’ve made a mistake in coming here; it’s not terrible, but its hard in the queer duties laid on you and in the monotony. The whole problem of these camps is to keep the urchins amused on five acres for fourteen hours a day: nothing more difficult. They are pursued by boredom and fretfulness and homesickness. They practically desert their own baseball-games in the middle of an inning; no game (however passionately and stridently acclaimed at first) can hold them long; they adore singing, but their minds wander after twelve minutes of it; only story-telling can enthrall them long, and I hold that monopoly here, sitting on a piano-stool and narrating with my wiry hands and the changing horrors of my face. Two months of this and I see where I’ll get thinner yet.
Passing through New Haven I picked up two second hand books, two by Couperus. Where was it that you and I used to read Small Souls and Dr. Adriaan? One of these Old People and Things that Pass promises—one of his complicated semi-aristocratic families of the Hague with at least five generations gradually revealing their not quite plausible secrets. The other The Inevitable I got because it was about foreigners in Rome, and its one of the poorest stories I ever read; I cant say a thing for it. Besides it has an erotic notion to proclaim that is untrue and revolting. It is surprising that there is not a single brilliant portrait among all the minor characters—one can hardly believe it’s Couperus.70 I have also just finished another amorous novel about modern Rome, Robert Hichens’ The Fruitful Vine.71 written with tremendous superficial cleverness (under that Paul Bourget-Edith Wharton bedazzlement in the presence of hotels and coronets)72 but the love-love itterations are silly; nothing convinces; the humblest page of Dostoevsky would burn it up in a trice; I wonder why I read them. “Il y a trois choses” said La Bruyère “òu la mediocrité est insupportable: la musique, la poesie et…..” I forget his third, but propose le roman.73
TNW at Sagawatha Lodge, July 1923.
TNW at Sagawatha Lodge, July 1923. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Guess whom I at last met in New Haven? Sherman D. Thacher. I never pass through without calling on the Whitney sisters and this time (as one of their million cousins) he was staying with them. I had a long talk with him. He had the idea that I hated his school, and he was even a little ready to apologize for its inflexibility in regard to me & I hurried to reply that the school had been perfectly right and that (especially with my sharpened professional eye) I looked back upon it with increasing admiration and affection. While we were talking Pres. Hadley74 came in with some books “for Marian”75 (Father hints they were almost a match and what a match it would have been); he recognized me and said he was sorry not to have seen me the week before (when he was giving us our Commencement address at Lawrenceville), and left us gobbling adorably in the throes of fifty adieux. In parting S*D* said distinctly that he hoped someday I could give him a year in the Ojai. You can’t estimate all that’s implied there—though he hardly meant it and I wouldn’t considerate it—the very fact that he could commit himself so far must mean that I’ve thrown off and fought off and outgrown so much. He used to despise me and shudder at the very sound of my high voice.
Tuesday.
Endless games of Flags, Authors, Birds, Flinch, Jack Straw, Dominoes, Checkers, Parchesi. Teaching stupid boys the simplest rules. Soothing the contempt bright boys feel for duller competitors. Moving Olympianly amid the shrill whirlpools of running games. Rebuking little Turks with a passionless firmness that must have come instinctively to “an experienced worker with boys.” Sleeping in a log cabin with six youngsters and hearing their perpetual nagging of one another: “You dumbell”. “It’d take a ton of dynamite to get through your head, you nut.” “Aw, his head’s ivory.” “You come from a hick-Town, you hayseed—Hemstead is only a hick-town<.>” “It is not.” “It is. Only one train goes to Hemstead everyday and that’s a day late.” “Gee, if I had a face like you got, I’d try an’ get smallpox.” In swimming three times a day, warmish water, like swimming in tea; supporting boys’ stomachs while they try their first strokes; taking out wide-eyed ten year-olds in canoes, in rowboats, drifting through lily-pads with the mysterious noise of stems and leaves brushing against the bottom of the canoe. You tell them its drowned men’s fingers. They laugh and hold their breath.—Getting ready beds for Inspection; perfect neat corners. Shoes all in a row. Our little cabin Kwasind has twice won the prize. Everybody’s thoughts are on prizes, medals, banners, honorable mentions.—Good food at table prepared by a cook who used to be at Lawrenceville, Winters, and now is at Miss Masters’. Endless announcements between courses—the self-importance of adults giving orders to ten-year-olds. “I don’t want to see any boy without a sweater at meal times …. keep away from the Office unless you have special business…” Nobody impressed.
Thank you for The Adelphi; full of good things—poor hysterical D. H. Lawrence, soupy one minute and fine the next.76 Did Isabel ever get the Molnàr plays77—I gave the money to a Philadelphian bookseller who hadn’t them in stock,
but promised to forward them in a week—was he honest?—A nice note from Lola Fisher.78 If I were away from this Camp I could write her a perfect a little play.—Added some handsome brocades lengths to my Roman memoirs, vital, rich, crowded. Conscious of that inexhaustible invention that is so lacking these days where they can give you a thousand details without giving you a thousand lights; my portraits rise from my own pages to surprise me, solid, three-dimensional, speaking. All of them a little eccentric and all frustrated, wretched, but forceful, combative.
Lots of love, more soon
Thornt.
81. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Davis
Mon. night
Oct 29, 1923
Dear dear
But don’t I know just what you mean!
One has a low opinion of one’s family and yet one is angry at oneself for appearing at a disadvantage before them at some public function.
Of course in the end you passed through the Williams’ dinner like a charm, but I know what you felt.
Great long stretches of my Roman Memoirs are now done, and I’ve a good mind to group together the Society sections and try and send them out into the world first, under the title: Elizabeth Grier and her Circle. To many readers they will seem (this show of the low-life and ecclesiastical material with which in the ultimate version they are relieved) too gossipy and feminine. Many passages however are of a valuable mordant satire, and others drenched with restrained pity; I am not ashamed of it. You would be a great help, but I cannot send my forlorn unique text across the ocean.
Charlotte’s essay in the Atlantic54 has made a pretty stir in Lawrenceville. She has been sending me some sonnets of her writing that will make you hold your breath. If she keeps on right she may discover herself as something of a very high order that will scatter our magazine poetesses, as a hawk does the hens. Don’t say I didn’t tell you. What is the secret, madam, of having astonishing children? thousands of pretty, intelligent mothers growing old among their dull prosperous and un-appreciative sons and daughters ask you that question. Their life threatens to be a decrescendo; have you any advice as to how young mothers can guarantie themselves a crescendo?
Albert Parker Fitch55 of Amherst spoke at our School service today admirably. I met him here last year and twice this year; Stark Young56 had told him about me too,—we had fine talks. He spent the Summer at Fiesole in perfect quiet at a nuns’ nursing home. I have a letter from Gwynne Abbott57 full of how charming you and Isabel are. She has gone on to Merano in the Tyrol.
Anybody care to know what I’ve been reading. I’m now in the XIII’th tome of Saint-Simon,58 more adoring than ever. This influence, believe me, arrived most à propos—henceforward whenever I am endangered of falling into silken felicities and jewelled or flute-like cadences I have only to remember this memoirist whose three greatest virtues are energy and energy and energy. I have just read also “Siegfried et le limousin”59 by Giraudoux which I like for the rather weak reason that it is interested in the same things that interest me. The second instalment of your Xmas present has come and I have just derived a vast amount of pleasure from Doormats and Outcast. Who is Janet that you mention in your letters? some Y.W. worker doubtless; you say she enjoyed The Mollusc—send me a photograph.60 I can’t abide women who aren’t pretty; must I advance money for milk baths and electric exhilirators to make her more presentable? Is she by any chance interested in horses? When my book’s published, and I’m very rich, I’m going to live in the Connecticut hills and own a large stable of horses that can tell time and play bridge etc. I shall need a capable women
—Quite a time has gone by since I began this letter and I want to add that my Eliz. Grier and her Circle is almost finished—watch and pray
love from a drying aging schoolmaster
Thornton
78. TO EDITH J. R. ISAACS. AL (Draft)61 3 pp. Yale
May 3 1923
Dear Mrs. Isaacs:
Please take your time over the four acts I sent you.62 When reckoning comes do not spare me: I learn meekly. Besides they are from a closed chapter; after them came Dada.
Last night I shook hands with Max Reinhardt.
In the summer of Sixteen I spent a week on the lonely island of Monhegan, off the coast of Maine. In the colony of surf-painters and solitaries, human sea-gulls, that such an island would attract I frequented a group of Germans that gathered every evening in the draughty pine-board studio of I no longer know what musician, There was Herr Doktor Kuhnemann, University of Breslau, author of a standard life of Schiller; a Fraülein Schmidt or Müller, head of the German department at Bryn Mawr or Smith (one could verify these in an hour); and a Viennese dramatic critic named Rudolph
Kommer then said that it was all settled that he would return for production in the Fall; that he would begin with a big pantomime spectacle (though he is no longer fond of them); and that he ultimately hoped to do Strindberg’s The Dream Play and Shakespeare. He is excited about America, stunned and bewitched by the Ziegfeld Follies, and by the negro entertainers (he mentioned The Plantations). Kommer said that they had been to many plays and that Reinhardt was always pointing out actors in roles of fourth and fifth importance who were full of possibilities; he added that some of the actors for his Fall season were selected already.
Perhaps you have met them yourself these days and know a great deal more than this.
In the afternoon I saw Henry Miller, Blanche Bates, Laura Hope Crews and Ruth Chatterton in The Changelings a jumbled comedy by a New Haven friend, Lee Wilson Dodd; a quilt of contrasted intentions—ten minutes of drama about misguided ladies stealing to bachelors’ apartments; sudden rush for chairs and a poor Shavian badinage about morality; Blanche Bates suddenly turns farcical and does Hermione64 (just before the curtain she will return to her Noble Mother tune); stretches of preachment about pretty wives who shirk light-housekeeping and on studious young husbands who do not admit their wives into their enthusiasms and Ph.D. theses. Oh, how bad it was; even Laura Hope Crews was bad. And in the intermission Blanche Bates made a speech about how they all loved Henry Miller, how they knew they were out of the beaten track of the theatre, but that they were glad and proud to be with him, who had always led out in the direction of the Best Things in the Theatre …….. and Stanislawsky65 and Reinhardt both in town!
I should love to write you for seven days and nights, but I shall see you soon—unless you leave for Europe before the third week of June. You will have a glorious trip, but you will not regret too much arriving back in New York for the finest season in our history.
Give my very best to your husband and children. I hope I can see you when I come up from graduation, but I shall not force you to choose between me and Italy.
Affectionately,
P.S. I forgot to say that Kommer mentioned by name Bel-Geddes66 as one of the younger artists Reinhardt hoped to work with.
79. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 2 pp. Yale
Davis House,
June 5 1923
Dear Mother;
Just a page to supplement the letters Father and Uncle Thornton wrote you about Grandmother’s last days.67 Father asked me if I could come up Sunday. I arrived at about two and turning into 44th St. from
After that Father and I walked for a few hours in Central Park, and I left for School. I went up again for the Service on Thursday. There seemed to be quite a number of people in the Bible Study room behind the Church Auditorium (she and I had once sat there waiting for Church to begin). Father led me up to sit beside Charlotte; it had never occurred to me that she would be there and dressed in complete black. Dr. Kelman,68 whom Grandmother admired so and had taken me to hear during my Christmas vacation, the great Dr. Kelman, opened with a wonderful prayer; it wasn’t just good, for it was perfect. Then the Dobbs Ferry minister who conducted with him read some lines of your father’s that Grandmother had once found for him. Then just the six of us drove out to the cemetery, to the knoll amid countless columns marked Lewis and Nitchie.
I shall miss her a lot, especially when I am in New York and suddenly realize that we cannot take up again our modest little lunches and expeditions (she so fearful lest I be ruined with the price of street fares) and our little accumulation of jokes and comments we had in common. To you who only received news of it by the cruelty of cablegrams it will seem more tragic than it has been for us who saw an end as gently disposed as is possible among us.
Lots of love
Thornton
80. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Sagawatha Lodge69
Lakeside, Litchfield Co. Conn.
July 2. 1923
Dear Mother:
I suppose I’ve made a mistake in coming here; it’s not terrible, but its hard in the queer duties laid on you and in the monotony. The whole problem of these camps is to keep the urchins amused on five acres for fourteen hours a day: nothing more difficult. They are pursued by boredom and fretfulness and homesickness. They practically desert their own baseball-games in the middle of an inning; no game (however passionately and stridently acclaimed at first) can hold them long; they adore singing, but their minds wander after twelve minutes of it; only story-telling can enthrall them long, and I hold that monopoly here, sitting on a piano-stool and narrating with my wiry hands and the changing horrors of my face. Two months of this and I see where I’ll get thinner yet.
Passing through New Haven I picked up two second hand books, two by Couperus. Where was it that you and I used to read Small Souls and Dr. Adriaan? One of these Old People and Things that Pass promises—one of his complicated semi-aristocratic families of the Hague with at least five generations gradually revealing their not quite plausible secrets. The other The Inevitable I got because it was about foreigners in Rome, and its one of the poorest stories I ever read; I cant say a thing for it. Besides it has an erotic notion to proclaim that is untrue and revolting. It is surprising that there is not a single brilliant portrait among all the minor characters—one can hardly believe it’s Couperus.70 I have also just finished another amorous novel about modern Rome, Robert Hichens’ The Fruitful Vine.71 written with tremendous superficial cleverness (under that Paul Bourget-Edith Wharton bedazzlement in the presence of hotels and coronets)72 but the love-love itterations are silly; nothing convinces; the humblest page of Dostoevsky would burn it up in a trice; I wonder why I read them. “Il y a trois choses” said La Bruyère “òu la mediocrité est insupportable: la musique, la poesie et…..” I forget his third, but propose le roman.73
TNW at Sagawatha Lodge, July 1923.
TNW at Sagawatha Lodge, July 1923. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Guess whom I at last met in New Haven? Sherman D. Thacher. I never pass through without calling on the Whitney sisters and this time (as one of their million cousins) he was staying with them. I had a long talk with him. He had the idea that I hated his school, and he was even a little ready to apologize for its inflexibility in regard to me & I hurried to reply that the school had been perfectly right and that (especially with my sharpened professional eye) I looked back upon it with increasing admiration and affection. While we were talking Pres. Hadley74 came in with some books “for Marian”75 (Father hints they were almost a match and what a match it would have been); he recognized me and said he was sorry not to have seen me the week before (when he was giving us our Commencement address at Lawrenceville), and left us gobbling adorably in the throes of fifty adieux. In parting S*D* said distinctly that he hoped someday I could give him a year in the Ojai. You can’t estimate all that’s implied there—though he hardly meant it and I wouldn’t considerate it—the very fact that he could commit himself so far must mean that I’ve thrown off and fought off and outgrown so much. He used to despise me and shudder at the very sound of my high voice.
Tuesday.
Endless games of Flags, Authors, Birds, Flinch, Jack Straw, Dominoes, Checkers, Parchesi. Teaching stupid boys the simplest rules. Soothing the contempt bright boys feel for duller competitors. Moving Olympianly amid the shrill whirlpools of running games. Rebuking little Turks with a passionless firmness that must have come instinctively to “an experienced worker with boys.” Sleeping in a log cabin with six youngsters and hearing their perpetual nagging of one another: “You dumbell”. “It’d take a ton of dynamite to get through your head, you nut.” “Aw, his head’s ivory.” “You come from a hick-Town, you hayseed—Hemstead is only a hick-town<.>” “It is not.” “It is. Only one train goes to Hemstead everyday and that’s a day late.” “Gee, if I had a face like you got, I’d try an’ get smallpox.” In swimming three times a day, warmish water, like swimming in tea; supporting boys’ stomachs while they try their first strokes; taking out wide-eyed ten year-olds in canoes, in rowboats, drifting through lily-pads with the mysterious noise of stems and leaves brushing against the bottom of the canoe. You tell them its drowned men’s fingers. They laugh and hold their breath.—Getting ready beds for Inspection; perfect neat corners. Shoes all in a row. Our little cabin Kwasind has twice won the prize. Everybody’s thoughts are on prizes, medals, banners, honorable mentions.—Good food at table prepared by a cook who used to be at Lawrenceville, Winters, and now is at Miss Masters’. Endless announcements between courses—the self-importance of adults giving orders to ten-year-olds. “I don’t want to see any boy without a sweater at meal times …. keep away from the Office unless you have special business…” Nobody impressed.
Thank you for The Adelphi; full of good things—poor hysterical D. H. Lawrence, soupy one minute and fine the next.76 Did Isabel ever get the Molnàr plays77—I gave the money to a Philadelphian bookseller who hadn’t them in stock,
Lots of love, more soon
Thornt.
81. TO ISABELLA N. WILDER. ALS 4 pp. Yale
Davis
Mon. night
Oct 29, 1923
Dear dear
But don’t I know just what you mean!
One has a low opinion of one’s family and yet one is angry at oneself for appearing at a disadvantage before them at some public function.
Of course in the end you passed through the Williams’ dinner like a charm, but I know what you felt.