The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder by Thornton Wilder
I used to think it was painfully hot here, but it must have been far worse there; so may you and Anna228 have a delightful vacation, and I shall see to it that Fritz will be dragged into an unbroken succession of unsavory Broadway-gutter litigations, breach of promise cases, embezzlements and mayhem.
To think that I might have been in New England all these months!
Ever
Thornton
168. TO ALBERT EINSTEIN. ALS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed The Graduates Club / One Hundred Fifty-five Elm Street / New Haven, Connecticut) CalTech
As from:
50 Deepwood Drive
New Haven, Conn.
Sept 19. 1938
Dear Prof. Einstein:
Your letter229 made me very proud and happy,—for many reasons most of which you can divine. But one of them is that I know your love of great music and I like to link your generous word with that. It is from a life-long devoted listening to Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Palestrina that I draw, as best I can, certain aspirations towards form, breadth, and expressiveness.
Your letter reached me in California where I was working with Prof Max Reinhardt on the production of my next play, a broad farce with social implications, based on Nestroy’s Einen Jux will er sich machen. It will be produced in New York in November. There too I dream of catching the “folk” vivacity of Figaro, Leporello and Pa-pageno,230 and the on-rushing high spirits and vitality of the close of a Brandenburg Concerto. I hope you will not feel it to be presumptuous that we beginners say that we work in the shadow of such glorious examples.
I hope that I shall retain your good opinion in my future work, and again accept my thanks for your kind word.
Sincerely yours
Thornton Wilder
169. TO HELENE THIMIG REINHARDT. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive, New Haven, Connecticut) Theatermuseum
Sunday midnight
Nov. 20 1938
Dear Mrs Reinhardt:
Last night I sent you a jubilant telegram; tonight I am still more jubilant. This afternoon the Professor, for the first time, ran through the Fourth Act. Even in a first reading like that what one saw was dazzling virtuosity in direction. Wonderful! As each character and situation developed all of us involved—including the Professor—would be shaken with laughter. Then this evening he returned to the First Act: the play opens like a scene from Charles Dickens.
TNW and Max Reinhardt in rehearsals for The Merchant of Yonkers, November 1938.
TNW and Max Reinhardt in rehearsals for The Merchant of Yonkers, November 1938. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
As I said in the telegram there are still some hesitations in casting; but the Professor was so pleased with the good progress of two of the actors that I think he will decide to retain them. Because of certain contract reasons tomorrow—Monday—is the day he must decide. After the fifth day of rehearsal a rejected actor must be paid two weeks’ salary.
The whole matter of Jane Cowl,231 her fitness for the part, her willingness to receive direction, her relation to us all,—that is all a comedy in and around this comedy. Very funny and a little touching:
ACT ONE: “I cannot play a part if I am directed; the part must grow up within me in my solitude.”
ACT TWO. “He seems to know his business; and he’s getting some very effective acting out of those others. But when my turn comes, I’ll just read my lines quietly; I don’t have to give a performance at rehearsals. I am who I am.”
ACT III “I’m terrified. I can’t possibly be as dull an actress as I’ve been these last three days. What’ll I do? How can I play this part, with all those riotous scenes surrounding me? I’m terrified. Shall I ask him for help….?!!?”
ACT IV “Prof. Reinhardt, I want you to direct me, just as you do the others.”
ACT V Joyous coöperation.
So far, we’re only half-way through Act IV of the above Scenario, but I know the rest will come before long, and will be very good when it does come.
The Professor seems very well to me; but for myself I am surprised at the hours we must all keep for four weeks! The one hour for dinner between six at
But the important thing is to tell you again that he is doing glorious things with the play—among actors that are on fire to please him—and with the happiest author one could find.
Sincerely, devotedly
Thornton Wilder
Part Four
WAR AND AFTER: 1939-1949
AT THE END OF JANUARY 1939, JUST A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE short run of The Merchant of Yonkers ended, Wilder embarked for Veracruz, Mexico, on the S.S. Siboney. He traveled in Mexico and crossed the border into Texas, stayed in Corpus Christi for a while, and improved his Spanish significantly. By mid-March 1939, he was back in New Haven and New York, attending to business before sailing for Europe, where he spent time visiting friends in France and England during May and June. From early July through early September, he was back at work playing the Stage Manager in summer-stock productions of Our Town in Massachusetts and in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Between rehearsals and performances, Wilder became engrossed in James Joyce’s recently published novel, Finnegans Wake. Already a great admirer of Joyce, Wilder was keenly involved from the first in an attempt to track down clues and word puzzles and to tease out meanings and intent in this complex and difficult book. His absorption in Finnegans Wake was to become a source of mental recreation for the rest of his life.
After spending a short time working in Atlantic City in October 1939, Wilder rented an apartment in New York City for four months. That fall, he wrote two nonfiction pieces, “Some Thoughts on Play writing” (published in 1941) and an introduction to a new translation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (not published until 1955). At the request of producer Cheryl Crawford, he began an adaptation of The Beaux’ Stratagem, an English Restoration comedy by George Farquhar, but he completed only half of it before putting it aside in the late fall. During this period, he took on another project, which unexpectedly required a great deal of energy and time: He became a consultant on the film version of Our Town after refusing to write the screenplay. Because Wilder declined to be paid for his services, the film’s producer delivered a surprise Christmas present to Wilder’s door: a Chrysler convertible with a rumble seat.
After Wilder gave up his New York apartment in mid-March, he returned to Hamden, Connecticut, for a short time. While there, he took lessons in order to brush up on his driving skills, and on April 1, 1940, he set out on an auto trip to Florida. During that trip, an idea for his next play began to take shape, in part because of world events. On April 9, 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway. Before he drove north in May to attend the Our Town film premiere in Boston, Germany had invaded France, and the British army was now preparing the evacuation of Dunkirk. By the time he began a monthlong writing residency at the MacDowell Colony in June, Italy had declared war on Britain and France. On June 14, 1940, the German army occupied Paris, and on June 22, France surrendered. He had given his new play the working title The Ends of the Worlds; while he was at MacDowell, he drafted act 1 of the play, which he was now calling The Skin of Our Teeth.
After a short respite at home and on Neshobe Island in Vermont, the summer retreat of his good friend Alexander Woollcott, Wilder again performed in Our Town in summer theaters in Massachusetts, this time from mid-July through mid-August. After a second trip to Woollcott’s island home, he paid a visit in October to Madison, Wisconsin, his birthplace, to speak on “Religion and Literature” at the centennial celebration of the Congregational church his family had attended there. He made a detour to Chicago to visit friends before settling in for a month and a h
It was not until a year later that Wilder finished The Skin of Our Teeth. Teaching and professional obligations occupied the hours that might otherwise have been devoted to his writing. In January 1941, he attended President Roosevelt’s inaugural festivities, but he was also in Washington to study contemporary Latin American literature at the Library of Congress and to hone his Spanish-speaking skills. He had accepted a State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs assignment for a three-month, three-country goodwill trip to meet with literary artists in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. Upon completing this mission, he delivered a twenty-one-page handwritten report to the State Department and then began teaching three classes at the University of Chicago in June. As soon as he gave his last examination on August 28, he was off again, this time to London as a delegate to a PEN (an international association of poets, essayists, and novelists) conference, which began on September 10. He visited his aunt Charlotte and Sibyl Colefax and experienced the London blackout. After the conference ended, he toured several bombed-out cities in Great Britain and gave talks and lectures as far north as Glasgow.
When he returned to America in mid-October 1941, he lingered in Hamden, then drove to Quebec, spent Thanksgiving with Woollcott in Vermont, and secluded himself in Newport, Rhode Island. Against the backdrop of the December 7 attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. declaration of war against the Axis powers, he worked on act 3 of The Skin of Our Teeth, which he finished at his home in Hamden on New Year’s Day 1942.
With the United States at war, Wilder was asked to work on two military training films for the government, which he did. However, he wanted to do more than just write for his country. Despite his age (he was then forty-five), he wanted to be part of the military effort. At the same time, he was seeking a producer and director to mount his new play, which employed even more experimental theatrical techniques than had Our Town. By May, he had found a producer and had passed the interviews and physical examination for acceptance into the U.S. Army Air Force. About the same time, he received a telegram with an offer from Hollywood film director Alfred Hitchcock to work as a consultant and screenwriter on a projected film about a murderer’s involvement with a small-town family. Although he was not initially enthusiastic, he accepted the job, because the promised salary of ten thousand dollars for five weeks’ work would provide financial security for his family if his play turned out to be unsuccessful while he was away at war.
He was solely responsible for financially supporting his mother and two middle sisters, Isabel and Charlotte. The author of three novels published in the 1930s, Isabel lived with her mother in the family home. She had become increasingly involved in helping Wilder manage the details of his writing life; with his absence for military service, she became his personal representative during the premiere production of The Skin of Our Teeth. Charlotte had left her teaching position at Smith College in the mid-1930s, then worked as a journalist and published a second book of poetry, Mortal Sequence, in 1939. In February 1941, she suffered a severe mental collapse. After a year’s hospitalization, during which she had not responded to treatment, nor had her condition improved in any way, Wilder undertook to provide the expensive long-term care that it was indicated she would require. His eldest and youngest siblings were married and financially independent. His brother, Amos, was beginning what would become a long and distinguished academic career as a New Testament scholar. His avocation as a poet would be confirmed in 1943, when his third volume of poetry appeared. Janet, the youngest sister, had completed her doctorate in zoology and was teaching at her alma mater, Mount Holyoke, when she married in the spring of 1941.
Wilder enjoyed his association with Hitchcock on Shadow of a Doubt. The screenplay had to be completed on a cross-country train ride from California in order to ensure Wilder’s arrival on June 26, 1942, in Miami, Florida, where he was scheduled to report for basic military training on June 27. After completing his course in Miami, Captain Wilder was sent to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for six weeks of intelligence training. He was next ordered to Hamilton Field, north of San Francisco, where he joined the 328th Fighter Group. While he was there, The Skin of Our Teeth opened in New York on November 18, 1942, to favorable reviews; but shortly after the opening, a controversial article appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature. Written by two men who were engaged in writing a key to Finnegans Wake, it accused Wilder of borrowing ideas and details from Joyce’s novel for The Skin of Our Teeth, and though they did not use the word, they made a thinly veiled accusation of plagiarism. Wilder chose not to reply publicly.
That December, and during the second half of Wilder’s first year in the military, he was assigned to the Pentagon. He was sent to various bases around the country and was charged with writing an air force manual. During this time, he continually sought to be sent abroad. At the end of May 1943, just after he had received his second Pulitzer Prize in Drama, the newly promoted Major Wilder received orders to Constantine, North Africa, with the Twelfth Air Force at the headquarters of the Mediterranean Allied Air Force (MAAF). He was a staff officer working with the British, with duties that included interpreting the use of reconnaissance photos for the planned invasion of Sicily in July 1943. Shortly before the invasion, he was transferred to Algiers. He had served almost a year in North Africa by May 1944, when he was moved to Caserta, Italy, where, in August 1944, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel. For his military service, he was awarded the Bronze Star. In the spring of 1945, Wilder was ordered stateside to Miami to await his discharge, which came in September. The results of a health assessment by his family physician precluded his accepting the job he had been offered, U.S. cultural attaché in Paris.
Wilder exhibited some restlessness upon his return to civilian life, and by the end of October, he was off in his car to Florida. During the journey, he began writing an epistolary novel, The Ides of March, which dealt with Caesar, Clodia, Catullus, and Cicero. Despite interruptions both pleasurable (an acquaintanceship with Jean-Paul Sartre in New Haven and a continuing immersion in existential philosophy) and necessary (attendance at committee meetings in New York), he had written the first sections of his novel by May 1946. This productivity came to a halt at the end of June, when his mother, vacationing on Nantucket island with Isabel, became ill and died. She had cancer, had refused to see a doctor, and had concealed the gravity and extent of her condition from her sister and her children. After his mother’s death, Wilder spent July on Nantucket with Isabel, then left to act in previously scheduled summer-stock productions. From the fall of 1946 through that Christmas season, Wilder remained, for the most part, in Hamden with Isabel. During those four months, he kept busy, writing an introduction to the translation of Jacob’s Dream by the Austrian poet and dramatist Richard Beer-Hofmann, composing a short play for his fellow members to celebrate the centenary of New York’s Century Club, and playing the Stage Manager in a recorded radio broadcast of Our Town for the Theatre Guild in New York.
In January 1947, Wilder drove down the Gulf Coast, boarded a tramp steamer for the Yucatán Peninsula, and resumed writing his novel. When he returned to the United States in mid-May 1947, he continued work on The Ides of March and began to write a promised introduction for Four in America, a book written by his recently deceased friend Gertrude Stein. Wilder finished the introduction in July and his own novel in October. The Ides of March, his first novel in thirteen years, was published in January 1948 and received generally positive reviews. At the time, Wilder was in Europe on a two-month visit, staying with old friends in London and then going to Paris to see his new friend Sartre, who had earlier asked him to translate his play Mort sans sépulture for an American audience, a task Wilder was now ready to undertake. During the spring, with no writing project of his own at hand, Wilder became engrossed in a scholarly endeavor that vied with his devotion to unraveling the puzzles in Finnega
After two months playing the role of Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth in summer theaters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and intervals of Lope studies, Wilder embarked with his sister Isabel in September 1948 for a six-month stay in Europe. At Robert M. Hutchins’s request, he had agreed to give a series of lectures in Germany. The first of these would be given in Frankfurt-am-Main in November. He and Isabel made stops in Dublin and Paris before he delivered his Frankfurt lecture, “The American Character as Mirrored in Literature.” From Frankfurt, he went on to lecture at the universities of Heidelberg and Marburg. His final stop in Germany was Berlin, where he spoke with students for two days during the period of the Berlin Airlift. While his sister and he were in Switzerland on Christmas holiday, The Victors, Wilder’s translation of Sartre’s play, opened Off Broadway, to mixed reviews.
At the beginning of 1949, the two Wilder siblings, seeking a warmer climate, traveled down to Italy and then to Spain, where he pursued his Lope studies. In February, they sailed back to the United States. Beginning in 1948, and throughout 1949, Wilder worked on a play he called “The Emporium,” but a third act continually eluded him. He put the script aside for a time in order to write an address to be given at the Goethe Bicentennial Festival, a celebration of music and talks to be held in Aspen, Colorado, from June 27 to July 16. Goethe was one of Wilder’s intellectual heroes, and his old friend Robert M. Hutchins, as chairman of the celebration, had asked him to join the roster of distinguished speakers and had also placed him on the committee. Wilder delivered his lecture, “World Literature and the Modern Mind,” and assisted two other speakers, one of them extemporaneously, by translating their addresses from German and Spanish into English as they delivered them. Wilder remained in Aspen through September, then returned to the East Coast for some solitary work time in Newport. After a more convivial stay in Saratoga Springs, New York, he joined his family for Thanksgiving. Following a few excursions to New York and Washington, D.C., he ended 1949 in Hamden. With both his parents deceased, he was now the head of his Connecticut household.