Read The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder Page 14

  I long to hear you and Arthur doing the D’Indy Symphony211—I cannot even remember that great rhthmic figure; I cant even remember the Motto.

  Wouldn’t it be beautiful if my little book were published—eventually why not now? as they say of razors.

  Forgive me if I stop now. I am leaving this hot for my nightly vacation in my place of carpets and shrubs.—and great dignitary officers, very kindly and a little communicative.

  love

  admiration

  curiosity

  everything else good

  Thornton

  My best to Caroline

  61. TO AMOS P. WILDER. TLS 2 pp. (Stationery embossed War Industries Board / Washington) Yale

  August 14, 1918

  Dear Pops,

  Dings are going shplendidly. I took my Advisory Board Exam. and probably passed it. But this is not certain. However I think so. So I went today to the office of the Coast Artillery and put in my application for an induction into that service. IT ONLY TAKES MEN WHO ARE IN GENERAL MILITARY SERVICE OF THE DRAFT (and of course general enlistments.) and Men who have had at least one year of College. So that if they find out from my Branford office—the only people who are allowed to tell me the result of last night’s exam—that I am fit for general milit. service they will immediately call me to go to Fort Adams on Narragansett bay, Long Island or somewhere near Connecticut. But if the Branford board says “limited service” they will refuse to have anything to do with me and I will be left where I am. So you see either alternative is desirable; and the grand Mt. Carmel send-off with hot coffee and hymns is off the horizon. Besides this process does not introduce the ambiguities and uncertainties resting on the disposition of further medical exams, whose inter-se disagreements and conflicts has until now been my trouble. They take you as you come from the draft board and ask no questions.

  First thing we are sent to train until September—near the end of Sept.—when the bonny promising ones of us are selected by our own application to go into a training camp, the graduation of which, a one or two-month’s course—confers a Second Lieutendantcy on us. Then we go to France and deal with the very heaviest artillery, the Big Berthas etc. If this goes through as indicated and there are no hitches any where—the snow this winter should fall on me in France, and that before Xmas. This no doubt sounds incredible to you, but remember that it is only men with at least one year of College that are called, or others who pass bravely an exam in Plane Trignometry and Logarithms, both of which I had Freshman year in Oberlin, and can polish up.

  To make this letter really impressive I should stop here, but I am going on.

  I sent the enclosed too hastily written critique of a play to the Boston Evening Transcript which keeps a whole page open to Drama three or four times a week, after a scholarly analytical type. The reason this copy is so dirty is because it is the carbon copy and the erasures on the original turn up as smudges on the copy.212

  I wrote the producer Arthur Hopkins who is in town with this play, saying that I had a play of the China Coast and the effect of the war on the social and political exiles there, that might be of interest for the use of John Barrymore, and since he, Mr H. was in town perhaps he might have liesure to read it or have it read to him. I finished up saying that if I did not hear from him I would infer that he prefered the manuscript to be handed in to his New York office in the usual manner. But I did hear from his secretary in a very nice note saying that Mr.—but I will enclose the note.213

  I am being drawn into a Bohemian crowd here. The ladies dye textiles and write, the men serve in the Fuel or Food administration or the War Industries Board by day and write by night. And they meet at a tea-tavern called THE SILVER SEA-HORSE which you must confess is a happy stroke. They put on plays from time to time, want me to appear in a Chinese pantomime and insist that I hand in some of my playlets immediately to the play-reading committee. So you see the low company to which I must relapse if I am not called to Fort Adams in two weeks.

  All possible luck, my dear family, to he Maine trip. I am half mad to be going on with you. This hot weather makes every primitive pore of your body sing for the sea of one’s origin, which, by felicity, will be always near me, in the Coast Artillery.

  How soon can we tell Amos that little brother is in the Artillery—the unskilled emergency-rush section of it, to be sure? Tell little lady mother to keep her shears poised in air and her needle threaded for the sewing of the star.214 One knows not the day or the hour, except that it will come within a week and a half. It was something artful of me to avoid the terrible drilling camp-days during the worst days of heat. When I played at Camp Meigs they said that that afternoon about twenty soldiers had fainted during afternoon drill. Perhaps I would have fainted during morning drill.

  Give my love to every sloping wave, especially to the long low urgent ones that come in towards evening with a sense of distress, as though the whole long-sighing night tide were pressing even then upon them. Of it Gran manan215 you are going to, give your afternoons and mornings to the search for porpoises under the sky-line for the child-races felt that busy rolling of school of them in the distance was a religious thing, noting with simple quickness of the primitive mind that of all the animals of the world, these seem most to be moving in an inspired trance, with their heads always under the water and the solitary, self-sufficient, world-alone air. But do not interrupt them, for whther it be minnows they are pondering over, or whether it be The Divine Nature, it is best that we respect the folk-lore of the ruminative south sea-Islanders.

  Can you realize that Washington can see me perhaps no more in two or three weeks? We never know our fate; we never know our fate.

  Lots of love

  Thornton

  TNW as a corporal in the army’s First Coast Artillery Corps, 1918.

  TNW as a corporal in the army’s First Coast Artillery Corps, 1918. Courtesy of Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  62. TO AMOS P. WILDER. ALS 3 pp. Yale

  216

 

  Dear Papa,

  I have been so busy transferring fatheads preparatory to their discharge, and writing letters to your old friends, that I’ven’t been able to drop a stitch home.

  I have received and written two letters to Mrs. Weed, who is now an old fast friend of mine. And I have just mailed my regrets to Mr Chapman. These letters have been simple, my dear parent, but under their simplicity the very virtuosity of letter-writing. The gem-like salutations and valedictions will very likely die of faint admiration. In both cases the body of the letter contained a fanciful picture of the officials in Washington issuing the Bulla forbidding any personnel Officer or clerk, in any post, Camp, fort or Headquarters to be given any 24-hour pass, furlough or discharge until further notice. Then followed “to slow music” a depressing of we clerks after the last man has been discharged, “limp, overworked, disillusioned soldiers, dragging ourselves under the snows of February, joylessly home.”

  I have spoken to the Adj. about Yale’s Jan. 30 opening. He says no force as yet known can break through Mimeo 91, quoted above. The Gov. of R.I.<,> Beekman, sent a special telegram for the discharge of one of my fellow-workers, and was disregarded. However I think we may be out by New Year anyway. The Coast Defenses are supposed to be on a Peace Basis by next Sunday. This is laughably impossible. The slow sleepy Officers downstairs were suddenly shaken last Sunday by an irate phone-call from the Department Hdqrs. in Boston: “The U.S.A. has discharged 200,000 men: why have you not done your share?”

  We’ve been working like mad ever since. The red-tape and forms of the Government must be seen to be believed. Seventeen separate little paper forms for each discharge, where three years ago, there were only four operations. Now you have a little poster to account for the disposition of your very shoe strings.

  The spectacle of the great heavy-moving o
paque gov’t guarding itself against remote and inconsiderable frauds in its divine stupidity is so depressing that it affects one physically. The lucid, deft, swift French mind would make a wonderful facile channel of the process, and a million men would be discharged with bow and a smile

  love

  Thornton

  Part Two

  BRIDGES: 1920-1929

  WHEN THORNTON WILDER GRADUATED FROM YALE IN JUNE 1920, he was the only one of the five Wilder children who had never been to Europe. His youngest sisters, Isabel and Janet, lived in Italy and Switzerland with their mother from 1911 to 1913 while Thornton and his sister Charlotte were in school in China and then California. After her college graduation in 1919, Charlotte worked in a YWCA hostel in Milan, Italy. In June 1920, Thornton’s brother, Amos, who had served overseas during World War I, returned to Europe after receiving his Yale degree and began a fellowship at the University of Brussels. Thornton’s immediate future was decided when he was accepted as a paying visiting student and boarder in the School of Classical Studies at the American Academy in Rome for the term beginning in October 1920.

  Worried about his second son’s employment after college, Wilder’s father encouraged him to enter the teaching profession as a prep school Latin instructor. The elder Wilder believed that his son’s enrollment in the School of Classical Studies would enhance his credentials on job applications. Despite the family’s limited resources, the foreign exchange rate was so favorable that nine hundred dollars—which the senior Wilder doled out in installments—fully covered his son’s year abroad. Before Wilder sailed for Italy on September 1, he completed six weeks of work in the last of five farm jobs he had held over the past seven summers.

  Wilder arrived in Rome on October 14, 1920, and remained at the American Academy for seven months, taking graduate courses and participating in student social life. His social circle widened due to informal introductions to young American embassy personnel and more formal introductions from family and friends that provided him entrée to the large English and American community in Rome. He especially enjoyed his visits to the home of the Italian poet Adolfo de Bosis and his family, where on one occasion he met Ezra Pound. Wilder continued his writing, focusing on playwriting. He hoped to complete “Villa Rhabini,” a play with strong Jamesian overtones, and to read it to some of the literary ladies whose tea parties he frequented. He made short trips to other parts of Italy, such as his “Umbrian week” in Perugia and Assisi. After leaving the American Academy in Rome on May 18, 1921, he explored Florence and nearby Siena and stopped off in Milan to see his sister Charlotte.

  From the time Wilder learned he was to go to Rome, he longed to spend time in Paris. He wanted to see a close friend who was studying music there, and to attend performances at the Vieux-Columbier, a theater established in 1913, whose founder, Jacques Copeau, employed novel stage techniques Wilder had read about and wished to experience firsthand. In early June, Wilder arrived in Paris, where he spent two and a half months. Although he had initially planned to stay there a shorter time, his father cabled him to say that the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey had offered Thornton a position as a French teacher. Once Wilder accepted the offer, he felt it necessary to study and immerse himself in French grammar and conversation.

  While Wilder was in Paris, his mother and two youngest sisters sailed for Southampton, England. They spent time in London with Wilder’s maternal aunt, Charlotte Tappan Niven, and visited Amos, who had completed his fellowship year and was living and working at Toynbee Hall, the oldest settlement house in London. When Amos matriculated that fall at Mansfield College, Oxford, to study for a degree in theology, Mrs. Wilder and her daughters took up residence in that academic community. While the foursome settled down in Oxford, both Thornton and Charlotte left the Continent at the end of the summer. Charlotte gave up her job in Milan to work in Boston, and Thornton left Paris on August 31, 1921, on board the French liner Roussillon, to begin his teaching job at Lawrenceville, a private boarding school for boys. Their father had remained in New Haven, where he was now associate editor of the New Haven Journal-Courier. Once again, the Wilder family was separated by an ocean.

  From September 1921 to June 1925, Wilder taught French and served as the assistant housemaster of Davis House, a dormitory at Lawrenceville. The school and the surrounding community provided a congenial place for Wilder to earn his living and continue his writing projects. He became especially close to Edwin Clyde Foresman, the housemaster at Davis, his wife, Grace, and their young daughter Emily, and to C. Leslie Glenn, a young math teacher who later became a distinguished Episcopal clergyman. Glenn remained a close friend for the rest of Wilder’s life. Nearby Princeton University had a wonderful library and kindred groups of musicians and literary figures. Lawrenceville was also only a short train ride from Trenton, Philadelphia, and New York City, where the off-duty schoolmaster could easily enjoy the current theatrical fare. As a result, during this time, Wilder broadened his ties to literary and dramatic circles in New York. These associations fostered his writing life, provided informal but professional criticism of his work, introduced him to Off-Broadway theatrical groups, and opened doors to residential programs for aspiring writers.

  In the fall of 1925, Wilder, the successful teacher and housemaster, took a two-year leave of absence from Lawrenceville to enter the graduate program in French at Princeton University. The three siblings closest to him in age had either completed degrees or were about to enter graduate programs. Charlotte, who had received her M.A. in English from Radcliffe in June 1925, began teaching at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Amos returned from England in 1923 (as did Mrs. Wilder and her two youngest daughters) and completed his B.D. degree at the Yale nity School in 1924. After a year of tutoring and travel in the Middle East, Amos was ordained in 1925 and became the minister of the First Congregational Church in North Conway, New Hampshire. When Isabel returned from England in 1923, she worked for two years in New York before entering the three year certificate program at the Yale School of Drama. The youngest sister, Janet, now fifteen, attended high school and lived with her parents, who had moved from Mount Carmel, Connecticut, to Mansfield Street in New Haven. In the fall of 1925, the members of the Wilder family were not only all together on the same continent but living near one another in the Northeast.

  Thornton Wilder’s commitment to graduate studies did not affect his determination to pursue a writing life, nor did it stifle the ideas, characters, and plots that filled his imagination. During July 1924, when he was awarded his first residency at the MacDowell Colony, an artist’s retreat in Peterborough, New Hampshire, he concentrated on a group of “Roman Portraits” he had begun in 1921, probably in Paris. He had worked on these pieces intermittently, but there was a new impetus to complete them. In March 1925, he had received welcome news from a Yale classmate who was working at a publishing house. He had requested a copy of Wilder’s manuscript months before and had shown it to the directors of his firm. Now they were interested in publishing it. Wilder expanded and revised the manuscript, and in November 1925, a month after he began his graduate studies, he signed a contract for his first novel. The Cabala was published in the United States by Albert & Charles Boni in April 1926 and in England by Longmans, Green in October of that year. Most reviews were positive and sales were strong, although not sufficient for Wilder to live by his pen alone.

  After Wilder received his M.A. degree from Princeton in June 1926, he returned to the summer routine he had followed since his second year of teaching, dividing his vacation into two parts. He reserved one month to write and another to earn money tutoring at a boys’ camp. In July 1926, he was accepted for a second residency at MacDowell, where he began a new book. In August, he returned to Sunapee, the tutoring camp where he had been employed for the past two summers. From late September until the beginning of December, Wilder toured Europe as the paid companion of a boy he had tutored the previous spring. By December, he was in Paris, where
he remained when his duties as companion had ended. There he met another young American author, Ernest Hemingway, whose second novel, The Sun Also Rises, had been published that year to excellent reviews, and whose writing Wilder admired.

  Wilder enjoyed a banner year in 1926: In addition to the publication in April of his first book, on December 10, 1926, The Trumpet Shall Sound, a slightly revised version of a play that had won a Yale writing prize in 1920, was directed by Richard Boleslavsky at the Off-Broadway American Laboratory Theatre. Although it did not receive favorable reviews, the play remained in repertory for several months. Wilder was not overly concerned about its reception, because he was then deeply engaged in a new work, a novel set in Peru. He worked on it over the Christmas holidays, which he spent at a pension on the French Riviera with some Yale friends who were now studying at Oxford. There he met Glenway Wescott, another contemporary author he admired.

  On January 31, 1927, Wilder sailed for New York on the Asconia. He rented rooms in New Haven, where, away from the hubbub of family life, he would have a quiet place to work on his second novel. Shortly thereafter, to supplement his small income, he accepted a six-week residential tutoring job in Briarcliff, New York, from February to early April, and also agreed that spring to translate a French novel for his English publisher. In July, at the urging of his father and the headmaster of Lawrenceville, he accepted the position of housemaster of his old dormitory, following the untimely death of Edwin Clyde Fores-man. Throughout this period, Wilder worked on his Peruvian novel. In July 1927, a year after he began it at the MacDowell Colony, Wilder delivered the final manuscript of The Bridge of San Luis Rey to his publisher. In August, he resumed his tutoring position at the camp in New Hampshire.

  The academic year 1927-1928 at Lawrenceville began inauspiciously. The new housemaster, with his three-thousand-dollar-a-year salary, settled into his six-room quarters and prepared for the customary trials and tribulations that punctuated residential life at a boys’ school. The first trial, however, had nothing to do with his charges. A few weeks into the fall term, Wilder had a mild attack of appendicitis but was able to return to his duties. Another flare-up later in the fall required surgery and an absence from teaching.