Thornton Wilder (112 page)

 

25: THE VILLAGE AND THE STARS (1930S)

1.
TNW, preface to
Three Plays
, xxviii.

2.
TNW, “A PREFACE FOR OUR TOWN,” 100–103

3.
Ibid.

4.
TNW to Family, October 21, 1920, TNW Collection, YCAL.

5.
TNW, “Aphorisms,” manuscript fragment, [1920s?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

6.
TNW,
Our Town,
act 1.

7.
TNW, manuscript fragment, n.d., TNW Collection, YCAL.

8.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, May 30, 1937, YCAL.

9.
TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, June 24, 1937, YCAL.

10.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, June 24, 1937, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1776), HLH.

11.
Ibid.

12.
TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, June 24, 1937, YCAL.

13.
TNW to Dorothy Ulrich (Troubetzkoy), November 21, 1936, Private Collection.

14.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, September 25, 1937, New York University.

15.
Ibid.

16.
TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, March 22, 1937, YCAL. While TNW does not name
Swing Time
in this letter, he went to see the film in question for the second time in March 1937.
Swing Time,
directed by George Stevens, was released in 1936, and the plot centers around the need to raise money. The only Astaire-Rogers film in 1937 was
Shall We Dance,
which was not released until May of that year.

17.
Ibid.

18.
TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, June 24, 1937, YCAL.

19.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, March 26, 1937, YCAL.

20.
Ibid.

21.
See TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 9, 1937, YCAL, for instance.

22.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, Memorial Day 1937 [May 31, 1937], AWC, MS Am 1449 (1775), HLH.

23.
TNW to Mabel Dodge Luhan, June 24, 1937, YCAL.

24.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, March 26, 1937, YCAL.

25.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, June 24, 1937, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1776), HLH.

26.
With his appointment as the American delegate, TNW decided he should become a more active voice in the community of American writers. In 1937 he attended the Congress of American Writers meeting in New York, where he saw Hemingway, MacLeish, and Van Wyck Brooks and gathered ideas to take to the conference. He also became a more outspoken advocate for the work of other writers: In June, for instance, he heard Robert Frost read and encouraged Woollcott to include some of Frost's poems in his forthcoming new reader.

27.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, June 22, 1937, YCAL.

28.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, [July 1937?], YCAL.

29.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder and Isabel Wilder [“Dear Children”], August 9, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL.

30.
Gertrude Stein to TNW, [July 18, 1937?], TNW's transcription of Stein's letter, YCAL.

31.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, October 29, 1937, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1776), HLH. This is a continuation of a letter begun on October 24, 1937.

32.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder and Isabel Wilder, [“Dear Children”], August 9, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL. In
Everybody's Autobiography
Stein wrote briefly of meeting TNW, and of their time together in Chicago, Paris, and Belignin. She praised their conversations, and wrote of making TNW her literary executor, but had second thoughts about whether he would make firm, clear decisions about her papers. She wrote about her concerns in
Everybody's Autobiography,
310. Stein later made Carl Van Vechten her literary executor.

33.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder and Isabel Wilder, [“Dear Children”], August 9, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL.

34.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, August 29, 1937, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1776), HLH.

35.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, October 24, 1937, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1776), HLH. Sibyl Colefax's papers, records, diaries, and drawings may be found, for the most part, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Her letters to TNW are, for the most part, housed at New York University, as Richard Goldstone bought the letters for use in his biography of Wilder, and later deposited them there. He was an English professor at the College of the City of New York, and the author of
Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait.

36.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, August 25, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL.

37.
Isabel Wilder to Janet Wilder [Dakin], May 3, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL, uncataloged letters.

38.
Ibid.

39.
TNW to Isabel Wilder, August 25, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL.

40.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, August 26, 1937,
SL
, 319
–
20. Years later TNW would use this scenario, with slight changes, in his semiautobiographical, semifictional early manuscript drafts for
Theophilus North.

41.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 3, 1937, YCAL.

42.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 9, 1937, YCAL.

43.
TNW to Samuel Steward, [September 9, 1937?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

44.
Samuel Steward,
Chapters from
an Autobiography
(San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1981), 75.

45.
Ibid.

46.
Ibid., 45.

47.
Ibid., 46.

48.
Ibid., 73.

49.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 13, 1937, YCAL.

50.
Steward to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 15, 1937, YCAL.

51.
Steward,
Chapters from an Autobiography
, 74.

52.
Ibid., 75.

53.
Ibid.

54.
Owen Keehnen, “A Very Magical Life: Talking with Samuel Steward,” Summer 1993, http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Keehnen/Steward.html.

55.
Samuel Steward,
Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 32.

56.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, June 24, 1937, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1776), HLH, quoted in part above, and TNW to Sibyl Colefax, January 2, 1938,
SL
, 328–31.

57.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder and Isabel Wilder, September “16 or 17,” 1937, YCAL. Steward gives this account in
Chapters from an Autobiography,
74, in the section titled “Thornton and the Touch of Eros,” 70–77. In a slightly different, thirdhand account in his earlier book,
Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
, 32, Steward quotes Alice B. Toklas, repeating what she said that Gertrude Stein said to her: “And Sammy, do you know he [Wilder] liked you? He was writing
Our Town
in Zurich and was stuck at the end of the second act, and you walked all night in the rain with him and he struck a match on you, he said, and wrote the whole third act the next day while you were sleeping.”

58.
TNW to Georg Wagner, “A ‘European in the New World': A Conversation with Thornton Wilder,”
Freude an Beuchem
(Vienna) 4 (June 1953): 126–28; reprinted in Bryer,
Conversations with Thornton Wilder,
59.

59.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder, November 5, 1922, TNW Collection, YCAL.

60.
TNW to Edward Howard Marsh, [June 1, 1931?], Berg Collection, New York Public Library.

61.
TNW, Journal, February 9, 1939, TNW Collection, YCAL.

62.
Steward,
Chapters from an Autobiography,
76–77. Steward's recollections about Wilder were first published in a slightly different version as “The Secret Citizen of ‘Our Town': Thornton Wilder: Sam Steward Remembers the Man,”
The Advocate,
May 29, 1980, 24–27, 59. Steward later wrote pornographic novels under a pseudonym—Phil Andros, one of many pseudonyms he used as a writer. He also had a long, colorful career as a tattoo artist under the name Phil Sparrow. He was interviewed and filmed as part of the studies of homosexuality conducted by Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana. Late in his life, using his real name, Steward wrote two mystery novels starring Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as detectives. He died in 1993. For a full-length biography of Steward, see Justin Spring,
Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).

63.
Quoted in Jerry Rosco,
Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 143.

64.
PEN conversation with Arthur Laurents, University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Winston-Salem, May 2007; Paul Gregory to PEN, November 19, 2010. Jerome Kilty is quoted as saying, “I would have heard rumors and I heard none; he was a most fastidious man.” See Harrison,
The Enthusiast,
168–69. See Acocella,
Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism
, for a relevant and astute discussion of the literary implications of sex and gender and the critical perspectives thereof.

65.
TNW, Journal, Entry 649, July 20, 1953, TNW Collection, YCAL.

66.
TNW, Journal, Entry 33, October 29, 1940, TNW Collection, YCAL.

67.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 13, 1937, YCAL.

68.
Quoted in TNW, introduction to Stein,
Four in America
.

69.
TNW,
The Woman of Andros,
197.

70.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, September 22, 1937, YCAL.

71.
Gilles Deleuze, “Commentary,” in Kaufmann,
Basic Writings of Nietzsche
, 858.

72.
Gertrude Stein,
The Making of Americans
(London: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 743.

73.
TNW,
The Woman of Andros,
148–49.

74.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder and Isabel Wilder, “September 15th or 16th 1937,” TNW Collection, YCAL.

75.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, September 25, 1937, New York University.

76.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, October 24, 1937, AWC, MS Am 1449 (1776), HLH.

 

26: “CHALK . . . OR FIRE” (LATE 1930S)

1.
TNW to Isabella Niven Wilder and Isabel Wilder, October 28, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL.

2.
Ruth Gordon to TNW, August 18, [1937?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

3.
Bibi Gaston,
The Loveliest Woman in America
(New York: William Morrow, 2008). Bibi Gaston is the granddaughter of Rosamund Pinchot (Gaston).

4.
TNW to Max Reinhardt, December 9, 1937,
SL
, 323–24.

5.
TNW to Amy Wertheimer, November 24, 1937, TNW Collection, YCAL.

6.
TNW to J. Dwight Dana, December 20, 1937,
SL
, 324–26.

7.
Ruth Gordon to TNW, August 18, [1937?], TNW Collection, YCAL.

8.
TNW to J. Dwight Dana, December 20, 1937,
SL
, 324–26.

9.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, January 2, 1938,
SL
, 328–31.

10.
Ibid.

11.
TNW to J. Dwight Dana, December 20, 1937,
SL
, 324–26.

12.
TNW to Sibyl Colefax, January 2, 1938,
SL
, 328–31.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Ibid.

15.
Readers interested in seeing these variations can read the entire letter from TNW to Sibyl Colefax, January 2, 1938, in
SL
, 328–31
,
and compare it with the text of the play in TNW,
Our Town
(New York: HarperPerennial, 2003), 47–48.

16.
TNW to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, January 12, 1938, YCAL.

17.
TNW to Alexander Woollcott, January 27, 1938,
SL
, 333–37.

18.
TNW to Edward Sheldon, quoted in Eric Wollencott Barnes,
The Man Who Lived Twice: The Biography of Edward Sheldon
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956), 219.

19.
Ibid.

20.
TNW, 1926 Journal, TNW Collection, YCAL.

21.
Edward Sheldon to TNW, quoted in Barnes,
The Man Who Lived Twice: The Biography of Edward Sheldon
, 220.