Thornton Wilder first met Gertrude Stein in 1934, when the latter was lecturing in Chicago on the topic of her new work, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. They maintained a frank and adoring correspondence for ten years afterward.
TO THORNTON WILDER
October 26, 1936, Bilignin par Belly
My dear Thornton,
Our book[1] has just come and I am just pleased with the introduction and my only trouble is that there are not enough commentaries I love commentaries and I love your commentaries and I would like a whole book of your commentaries please Thornton won’t you sometimes for Christmas or for Thanksgiving make me a whole book of commentaries, we had a Thanksgiving lunch yesterday, turkey mince pie celery and just as American as possible and all for the Daiguys and Madame Pierlot and we talked a lot about you and wished you were here, we all wished you were here, they may only have been polite but we were in deadly earnest, and then the Chinese book came [The Flight of an Empress: Yale Press] and Alice and I are both loving it, you know we always [?took] on the old empress very much and it brings her very near, and one likes her near if not too near. We are still here and the sun is shining and we are gardening but they all tell us it will rain soon and then we go. The text of our book kind of made me home-sick for the flat lands, I dream of wandering around them in a Ford car and you with us and when we got tired of driving a nice young Universitarian would come along for the pleasure, it would be nice, and perhaps with [?prosperity] somebody will pay us enough just so we can have the pleasure, we live in hope, it would be fun though wouldn’t it almost more than Washington Square, but New York’s [?prosperity] might run to both, well anyway things are as calm as they can be here which is not too calm, I am writing the narrative book which we talked about that last night,[2] it goes slowly and simply perhaps too simply, I always want to be commonplace perhaps I have managed it this time well anywhere there is nothing commonplace about our love for you Thornton and always
[1] Stein’s Geographical History of America.
[2] Stein described the night in Everybody’s Autobiography (pp 302-303): “But Thornton and I like walking around even so, and we walked around the last evening, he was going away to America the next day and I walked home with him and he walked home with me and we talked about writing and telling anything and I said I had done things I had really written poetry and I had really written sentences and paragraphs but I said I had done things I had really written poetry and I had really written sentences and paragraphs but I said I had not simply told anything and I wanted to do that thing must do it. It would simply say what was happening which is what is narration, and I must do it as I knew it was what I had to do. Yes said Thornton.
And now I almost think I have the first autobiography was not that, it was a description and a creation of something that having happened was in a way happening not again but as it had been which is history which is newspaper which is illustration but is not a simple narrative of what is happening not as if it had happened not as if it is happening but as if it is existing simply that thing. And now in this book I have done it if I have done it.”
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