ALS signed “T. N.,” four pages, 6 x 7, personal (Hamden, Connecticut) letterhead, May 27, 1970. Lengthy and reflective handwritten letter to “Leo,” ostensibly novelist and playwright James Leo Herlihy, in part: “Wonderingly (I mean: filled with wonder – not filled with doubt) delighted that you had also contemplated and even made mandalas. I must hurry and finish a solid draught of the half-dozen pages of my new book and xerox them for you. It’s only one horse-stall in a very large barn (you may pursue the metaphor further). Let me share with you again the train of thought:
Every creative artifact is an assemblage in free association of elements from the stream of heterogeneous elements about us of experience (existence). Every creative artifact is a probe into the question: why are we alive? What is being alive. (Except dead ‘academic’ novels and paintings which are soulless un-understanding copies of previous works. This does not necessarily mean best sellers and popular ‘trash’ which are often fine examples of asking the basic question, vide Ben Hur and Little Women and Gone with the Wind).
The writer of a creative artifact is (overt or concealed) in the center of the book or picture – gazing inquiringly at the cosmos. Sometimes he becomes a she (Flaubert: I am Madame Bovary); sometimes she or he becomes several persons (in Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte is both Heathcliff and Cathy). Shakespeare is all over his plays, condensed in Hamlet, present in Viola gazing at a gallery of straw-people. So there’s mandala: you and I sitting squatting at the center of High and Low, of ‘Nature’ and communities of darkness and light.” In fine condition. A wonderful letter from Wilder rife with classic literary associations.
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