The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder by Thornton Wilder
And yet! There’s always the chance that a manager about to put on a British play would snap you up. For instance, John Golden plans to put on J. B. Priestley’s The Inspector Calls.154 I imagine there must be several roles in it that you could do; but Golden would have been interviewing hosts of young actors, British or pseudo-British
TNW with June and Leonard Trolley following their wedding in Rome on February 12, 1945.
TNW with June and Leonard Trolley following their wedding in Rome on February 12, 1945. Courtesy of Harry Traugott.
b. Movie work and radio would I think be out of the question until you had a number of engagements to point to as “experience”. Entrance to those fields is dark and mysterious. I know some awfully bad actors who flourish in them, and some excellent ones who can’t get a look in.
c. However, if the English stage is as blocked as our
I’m including two letters, one to Larry and one to Hugh Beaumont. [That crossing out is because at first I thought I’d not include covering envelopes; but I’ve decided to send them also, for maximum efficacy.]
As part of my malaise, dear children, I gave up working on the Alcestiad, though it was well into the 3rd Act and was very beautiful. But my ideas about life had changed and I felt it to be sentimental. Instead I’m working on my novel about Julius Caesar, told in letters exchanged between the characters.—and such characters!! Caesar, Cicero, Catullus and Cleopatra!! And that’s what I shall be doing in Yucatán next week. Letters will be forwarded to me promptly from Hamden and I promise to reply promptly and faithfully. Forgive an old bungling misfit of a foster-father; I’m better already and know that I shall be all my better self by Spring.
Write me your thoughts on these things.
Ever devotedly though undeservedly
your old pal
Thornton
P.S. My regards to Wilkinson.155 I rec’d a cable from him and am delighted that he used my name and hope good came of it.
218. TO LILLIAN GISH. ALS 2 pp. Billy Rose
New Orleans, La.
April 1. 1947
Dear Lillian:
It’s a joy to get a letter from you and to think about you.
Now as to this proposal, I don’t say yes or no, but I call your attention to the following points:156
The plot-lines have no real tension. The novel combines two famous well-tried plot motives<:> the Magdalene-Thaïs story (or Fallen woman with heart of gold) and Camille (Fallen woman barred by social opinion from achieving a happy union). But my novel has robbed both of these stories of their popular pull. Chrysis is helpless silent and dies having won a success only in her mind. And Glycerium-Pamphilus story is a matter of waiting helplessly and then coming to very little.
All the characters are externally passive and engaged in waiting. (b) Have you ever noticed that the one costume that always looks phoney and corny on the screen is the Graeco-Roman? Modern man cannot wear that dress and appear real. Think of the “Passion Plays” and the De Mille Quo Vadis, Ben Hur and The Sign of the Cross. The only way to get away with it is by extreme “character” types, like Charles Laughton as Nero or Claude Rains as Caesar.157 Otherwise, everybody looks like dead chromo illustrations of ancient history.
Readers of Andros write me all the time. The thing
Suppose you hopped up the plot for the screen. Contrived real clashes between the characters. Then I think you’d run into another danger,—in those unconvincing costumes, no one would believe it. Lots of action and crisis but all looking like wax-works charades or a Sunday School pageant. To bring any vitality to Ben Hur they have to work up a vast spectacle and was there any real vitality? And to make Quo Vadis come alive don’t they crown the picture with a mighty orgy? (In Hollywood I used to have lunch with the script writer who was trying to think up a sensational item to “top” the orgy. I think he ended up with naked women bound to the backs of bulls. All concerned knew that the “story” wasn’t holding the audience, so that they had to inject sensation and spectacle).
But, dear Lillian, I don’t say yes or no. I’ve always believed that you have a magnificent sense of all aspects of movie and theatre. At various times Pauline Lord and Blanche Yurka approached me about a play from it; an opera for Helen Traubel158 was written from it (she sang arias from it at concerts, but the opera was never put on). I feel that it is just about material for a short novel, some word-landscapes, and some semi-philosophic reflections: to expand it would break its back; to transfer it to the stage would reveal the fact that none of the characters really pull themselves together to do anything until it’s too late; and to picturize it would reveal that it falls into a series of melancholy tableaux.
All this is merely subject to your judgment and intuition. And it comes with
devotedly
Thornton
219. TO EVELYN MACHT.159 ALS 2 pp. Yale
en route to Mayfair Inn
Sanford Fla.
April 7. 1947
Dear Evelyne:
I’ve known unpublished writers who thought their work was very great indeed and I’ve known unpublished writers who’ve feared they were very bad,—but you seem to be both.
When you ask me for the name of a Columbia University teacher who would read them over—what am I to think? That idea would never occur to a reader
I repeat what I told you before—if you are a writer of assured powers the first thing to do is to try and sell it through the usual channels,—that is agent or publisher. It may be that your work is so highly original that they won’t be able to appreciate its merits, but at least you try them first.
I wasn’t condescending to you. I was paying you the compliment of assuming that you would at least begin by sounding out the professional ways of doing things. Readings by Columbia Univ. professors are not professional.
x
Your letter is very angry with me.
I don’t think I deserve it.
But not only is your letter angry at me, but for the second time, you get in some sideways sneers at me. Don’t do that.
If you have a friend whose singing, or painting, or writing you don’t like you either drop the friend entirely tell him roundly you don’t like the work, and discuss it as far as he wishes to discuss it adopt the plan of never mentioning the work at all—(that’s what I do in hundreds of cases). But the one thing you don’t
Thornton
220. TO HELEN HAYES. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed The Century Association / 7 West Forty-Third Street / New York 18, N.Y.) Billy Rose
As from: 50 Deepwood Drive
Hamden 14, Conn.
Feb 28. 1948
Dear Helen:
I would be ashamed to take up your time with any request of my own, but I am doing it on behalf of a great actress and a gracious delightful woman.
I have just returned from Paris where I saw much of Jean-Louis Barrault and his wife Madeleine Renaud.160 They are at the Marigny—on the Champs-Elysées—having a great success in a repertory which includes “Hamlet”; Marivaux’s <“>Les Fausses Confidences”; Molière’s “Amphytrion”—with glorious scenery by Christian Bérard161; and the Gide-Kafka “The Trial”.
I met them first at a friend’s home and then I used to sit and eat and drink with them after the performances. And I noticed that Madame Renaud had a most unfortunate hand at make-off
Finally, I felt that I knew her well enough to mention it. She received my remarks with gratitude and anxiety. I then told her that I was once present when one of our first actresses gave to another of our first actresses—you to Ruth—your “formula”, worked out from a long experience on both stage and screen. I said that naturally such a thing required great readjustment from person to person, etc, etc. All that she understood. I told her I would see whether such a formula could be obtained. At our leave taking her last words were an imploring repeated “You won’t forget.”
It seems surprising that a Frenchwoman would be so unskilled. I think the explanation is that she rose from the Conservatoire, to the Odéon, to the first place in the Comédie Française and that the French (innovators in so many things; conservative in others) were still passing on a maquillage162 suitable for gaslight.
Mme Renaud is not tall; has light brown hair, and a complexion neither strikingly white nor pink. I think she could adapt any suggestions given to her.
Could your secretary type out that “plan”, together with the names of the ingredients which I would forward to her?
Maybe this is all impractical, but I know you will not mind my having tried to further a good service in the sisterhood of great actresses.
with devoted admiration ever
Thornton
Hamden, Conn.
221. TO GLENWAY WESCOTT. ALS 2 pp. Yale
As from: 50 Deepwood Drive, Hamden,
Conn.
Princeton Inn, Princeton, N.J. en route
April 7. 1948
Dear Glenway:
To be so generously commended by you sets off such a hurlyburly of self-examination and self-reproach, mixed with the delight, as you can hardly imagine.163 I am suddenly reminded of all the negligences and shortcuts, of the fact that I go through life postponing the book I shall really “work at”, as you so dedicatedly do. You are the only writer of our time who sovreignly means every word and weighs every word’s relation to every other. The thought of you reading mine aloud to your friends is very exciting to me because I can imagine you—as good actors do for our plays—subtly repairing balances and tactfully filling hiatuses. To all but the most attentive the book looks like a sedulous array of erudition and painstaking assembled mosaic,—Lordy, it’s what the architects call an esquisse-esquisse,164 an impenitent cartoon. It was, in fact, my post-war adjustment exercise, my therapy. Part almost febrile high spirits and part uncompleted speculations on the First Things.
All this is why it was so warming to know that falling into your heart and mind, you could see all that and understand all that, and yet, as you say, love it. Because with all its incompleteness it urgently asks to be loved. And that so many have denied it. It’s been called frigid,—when its all fun and about the passions; it’s been called calculated,—when its recklessly spontaneous; it’s been called hard,—when it’s almost pathologically tremulous.
This fact that (and about the plays!) everybody “gets me wrong” has made me accept the fact that I’m a very funny fellow. And it extends to my personal self and is reflected in your letter. The notion that a parti-pris165 could have prevented my seeing you in New York is unthinkable. Were you in New Haven, I should be importuning you continually to talk the night out over beer. Why, no month goes by but what I remember and profit by things you let fall at Villefranche,—on Beethoven’s style compared with Mozart’s, an extraordinarily enlightening remark on James’s The Golden Bowl,—those are extraordinary resources and if I were not inertia in person I would long since have travelled far to tap them. But here I am this very funny fellow, glad to drop in at cocktails anywhere in New Haven, speaking at any Veterans Wives sewing circle, if it’s in New Haven; going to New York “on business”, then getting a fit of shyness rather than call up friends, and eating alone at little boites in the West Forties and dropping in alone at whatever trembling pianist may be coping with a début at Town Hall.
Look, for instance, at what I am doing now, and what has delayed my reply to your letter. Idiotic!—I’ve been working all day and far into the night on the chronology of the plays of Lope de Vega (but out of the 500, only those between 1595 and 1610). Passion, fury and great delight. Yes, a compulsion complex. Sherlock Holmes as scholar. I am certainly the world’s authority and can correct all the scholars before me, but cui bono? only 20 people in the world would be interested. It is perhaps my harbor from the atomic bomb. In the meantime, letters mount up; duties neglected;—this is the funny fellow.
Next day—New Hope, Pennsylvania. There are lots of ways in which I’ve watched you these years,—for instance, in those sideshows (sometimes called duties) of an author’s life, prefaces, translations, recommendations, political statements. Next to you, I do it least of our colleagues; and I think you are right that we shouldn’t do it at all. (Ernest Hemingway used to do
This is only one of a score of matters that I would like to submit to you some day. I’m about to be fifty-two years of age, but I still have an enormous appetite for advice; I seek it out and I act upon it; and you have always held for me the character of a sage.
So that’s one of the reasons why your letter was so much more than gratifying, and I thank you a thousand time
Ever most cordially
Thornton
222. TO MAXWELL ANDERSON. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed 50 Deepwood Drive / Hamden 14, Connecticut) Texas
July 5 1948
Dear Max—
Don’t have to tell you how happy your letter made me.
Yes, I by-passed large quantities of the material that, given the title, should have been there,—the political life behind the conspiracy. For that I took refuge in—and overexploited the most exciting element of a letter-novel: the “jumps”, the hiatuses. Similarly, the Girls are harrying me about what they feel to be an omission,—what did Caesar feel about Cleopatra after he surprised her with Marc Antony? To that question I feel, smugly, that I gave the indications sufficiently. But the full picture of why Brutus did what he did I skimped.
x
Max, for over two years I’ve been working on Lope de Vega,—often 10 hours a day in happy contentment. It’ll be a short book “The Early Plays of L. de V.” for scholars only, all footnotes, no “literary” appraisal.166 I’ve been able to date play after play through observing his theatre practice, rôles tailor-made for the performers, etc. But some day I’d love to tell you about himself. At certain periods of his
Mylabors have been sheer PhD work and I should have done it in my twenties, but I’m still living as though we were to live until a hundred and fifty.
That we all wish for you.
Thanks again and cordial regard
Thornton
223. TO ALICE B. TOKLAS. ALS 4 pp. (Stationery embossed Century Club / 7 West Forty-Third Street / New York) Yale
March 19 1949
Dearest Alice:
Passing through New York after three days in Washington. Am discontented with myself because of (the customary) dispersal of interests. Went down there to be photographed in the “T. W. Suite” at the Hotel Raleigh, at the request of the manager of the Hotel Raleigh,—only it turned out that Life Magazine had changed its mind and was not proposing to publish the series of photographs of the titular suite incumbants in their respective suites, and to address a (for Washington, pathbreaking) writers’ club made up of white and Negro members,—that turned out to be very pleasant, but more sociable than earnest.
However I improved the visit by going to call on Ezra Pound in what he energetically call