{"id":109989,"date":"2017-04-17T17:32:02","date_gmt":"2017-04-17T21:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=109989"},"modified":"2017-04-17T18:12:39","modified_gmt":"2017-04-17T22:12:39","slug":"the-quarreling-gondoliers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/04\/17\/the-quarreling-gondoliers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Quarreling Gondoliers"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

John Singer Sargent, Gondoliers\u2019 Siesta<\/i>, ca. 1904.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

From a 1952 letter by the playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder, who was born on this day in 1897. \u201cA dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it<\/a>,\u201d Wilder told\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review\u00a0in his 1956\u00a0Art of Fiction interview. \u201cOn the stage it is always now: the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity.\u201d Read more of Wilder\u2019s correspondence in\u00a0<\/em>The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Where do I go next? I don\u2019t know \u2026 I don\u2019t want to go to Paris. I want to go to a little hotel in St. Moritz (already under snow) and work at what only pleases me. What is there to confer about? Let them come to me. I think that Monday or Tuesday I will entrain for Milan and there at 1:25 take the autobus arriving at 6:10 in St. Moritz \u2026 Think of that drive, past Como, up up the dramatic Italian alps and then in the evening light in the square of that Swiss village.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Oh, how badly I run my life. How I postpone from year to year the establishment of those conditions under which I can work. And I don\u2019t mean work<\/u> in the sense of producing volumes, I mean work in the sense of working on and in and with myself. I am a slow digester and a slow ruminator, altho\u2019 I carry some of the external signs of a \u201cbright\u201d and a fast one. No, no,\u2014I am a monastic and an umbratical type who long since went astray among the volatile and the worldly. This has been my complaint for many years and yet I do nothing about it: you may well say that there must be something about it that I like.<\/p>\n

It has been raining all day. The gondoliers under my window have been quarreling with one another, loud, loud, all the time. A barnyard of angry raised voices. There is a beautiful passage in the Wings of the Dove where James describes Venice in bad weather; he does not mention this effect.<\/p>\n

This letter shows my incoherence and ill-humor. I shall not be myself until I am settled in Switzerland. And now my ink has given out. I shall go to the Piazza San Marco to buy some ink!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A melancholy 1952 letter from Thornton Wilder describes \u201ca barnyard of angry raised voices.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1900],"tags":[5733,28395,182,28396,14371,8467],"class_list":["post-109989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-correspondence","tag-correspondence-2","tag-gondoliers","tag-letters","tag-self-loathing","tag-thornton-wilder","tag-venice"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u201cI Want to Go a Little Hotel\u2026and Work at What Only Pleases Me\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A melancholy 1952 letter from the playwright Thornton Wilder describes his self-loathing and \u201ca barnyard of angry raised voices.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" 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