The Eighth Day (60 page)

The work's critical success was a partial surprise. The country was becoming unglued over urban race riots and the Vietnam War in 1967, and books exploring often savage emotions—Truman Capote's
In Cold Blood
, William Styron's
The Confessions of Nat Turner
, and Bernard Malamud's
The Fixer
, for instance—were much of the moment. Clifton Fadiman observed in the
Book-of-the-Month Club News
that readers schooled in the work of Norman Mailer, James Jones, and John Barth might find Wilder's characters “so un-neurotic” that they might have “a little trouble” adjusting. Fadiman added pointedly, “I suppose many critics and readers, naturally influenced by the bleakness and blackness of our time, will object to
The Eighth Day
on the ground that it presupposes faith in the future of the human race.” (The B.O.M.C. publication also contained a photograph of Wilder with Carol Channing in full “Dolly” regalia.)

For two reasons, however,
The Eighth Day's
critical record has long been categorized as “mixed.” First, the book did in fact receive more mixed notices than any other Wilder novel. But more important, this saga of two families from Coaltown caught damning notices, several at influential addresses, among them
The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Time
magazine, and the
New York Times
(Sunday edition).

In general, negative critics attacked the novel's story, style, and sermons or philosophy. Words such as “dull,” “shallow,” “verbose,” “contrived,” “preachy,” and “pedantic” catch the spirit of what critics disliked about the book. Lines from two pieces suggest the range of critical unhappiness: “Wilder's didacticism is, in its way, as innocent and as uninteresting as the ignorance of the characters he has created.” [
New York Daily News Record
] “Wherever the narrative demands confrontation, the author turns remote, reverts to brief explorations of life's enduring verities; and the reader's deprived of vital particulars.” [
Time
] Finally there was Stanley Kauffmann's famously ugly dismissal of
The Eighth Day
in
The New Republic
as “sophomoric,” “shockingly and unredeemingly bad,” and “a book that means nothing.”

But the negative views in the country and throughout the English-speaking world were greatly in the minority. Perhaps no one put the pleasure of the moment as dramatically as the critic of the Sydney (Australia)
Morning Herald:
“It is rather as though a monument—one of those august figures in bronze, staring at some far place—were to climb down from its pedestal and begin to speak.” Newspapers and magazines were full of happy notices praising the story as a “rattling good yarn,” as one reviewer put it. Words that capture the views on this side of the critical fence include “beautiful,” “glowing,” “classic,” “luminous,” “moving,” “absorbing,” and “full of wisdom”—a term typically tied to a special appreciation for Wilder's exploration of good and evil, faith and love.

Much was made of Wilder's deployment of aphorisms and irony, often with reference to Dr. Gillies's oration on the first day of the new century, and many a piece quoted the author's suggestion that “It is the duty of old men to lie to the young.” “[The novel] ranges over a vast and varied tableau with a self-confident ease that makes
The Eighth Day
a work of great distinction,” noted the critic at
The Spectator
of London. The reviewer at
The Christian Science Monitor
called Wilder's novel “a major work of the imagination” in which “he has raised the ultimate questions and sent them whirling their deep spirals with a wit and intelligence no other American novelist of the moment can match.”

That Wilder had offered a summing up in the novel (what he had failed to do earlier with his
Sins
and
Ages
, of course), was also clear to many critics, and, depending on space and knowledge, some sought to place his book in the larger context of his work in drama as well as fiction. Seasoned critics such as Malcolm Cowley and Granville Hicks, who knew the record well, did so with finesse in prominent publications. Now and then a voice would pick up on recurrent themes in Wilder's work: The question in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
of whether there is a “plan” to human life; in
Heaven's My Destination
, Wilder's experience and his fascination with America as “catalyst of a new life rising from old cultures.” The critic in the Flint, Michigan
Journal
found a parallel to a theme in
The Woman of Andros:
“The most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.” But more often than not, commentators did not venture much beyond the way Harper & Row publicists positioned the book in ads and in the dust jacket copy, namely tying the story to Wilder's two familiar Pulitzer Prize—winning dramas:

Finally, even this brief glimpse of the critical record must include examples of other large claims made for the book at the time: “A work that Dickens or Dostoevsky would have been proud to have written.” (
Denver Rocky Mountain News
) “It ends with the most amazing final paragraph of modern literature.” (
Asheville Citizen Times
) “He has taken a calculated risk with few parallels in literary history and he has won.” (
Chicago Tribune
) “No resemblance to any other novel in the past 100 years.” (
Washington Post
) “A well told story is not of an age—but for all times.” (
Dallas Times Herald
)

Will
The Eighth Day
someday join
Our Town
and
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
as a classic, “a story for all times?” Worthy of note is that over the years students in this country and abroad, in a symposium here and an essay there, have kept the light on for a novel they celebrate as a work of epic proportions. In fact, Wilder poured everything he knew about human nature and himself and his society into his American epic.

What
The Eighth Day
meant for Thornton Wilder, author, is no secret. He went to Douglas, Arizona as a playwright and came home as a novelist. He tried his hand at drama once again, but returned quickly to fiction, the form that now satisfied his drive to tell stories. And to show that the lesson he learned about himself in Douglas was well and truly learned, Wilder needed only twelve months to write
Theophilus North
, his second largest novel at 133,000 words, and a bestseller for twenty-one weeks. It was published in 1973 when he was only seventy-six years old.

At Wilder's death two years later, a new novel was in the works. From its surviving fragments we know that, like
The Eighth Day
and
Theophilus North
, it would have been full of erudition, wit, and irony. And it would have addressed questions about the nature of life in a lively
and
lengthy way.

—T
APPAN
W
ILDER

Chevy Chase, Maryland

O
N TO
P
ATAGONIA:
D
ETAILS FROM
W
EST
G
ERMANY

Wilder was only too glad to tell the world his plans. In addition to the March 3 AP wire story from Frankfurt cited above,
New York Times
reporter Flora Lewis caught up with the quotable Wilder in April in the bar of the Park Hotel in Bad Homburg. The Lewis interview, from which this excerpt is taken, appeared in the
New York Times Magazine
on April 15, 1962.

To save time, Wilder has a plan for what he calls a “loafer's life” in the small Arizona town of Patagonia. The name of the place conveys the dream he has of it. “I will live in one of those ugly old frame houses,” he said, “with a rocking chair on the porch—a life without neckties, or shoelaces, or telephones.”

He needs about two and a half years of idleness, he feels, to recharge the batteries whose energy is drawn upon by a lifetime of accumulation of friends and obligations. And yet, when he speaks of Patagonia, it begins to sound as though a quiet town near the Mexican border were about to discover a volcanic activity in its midst.

“Of course,” Wilder says, “I'll go down to the Post Office, the A & P, and so on, so I can become a part of the place and not be pointed out as an eccentric. And I'll drive up to Tucson to arrange for books from the university library because I have a lifetime habit of compulsive reading. . . . ?

Some time later, Wilder adds that he hopes the house he finds is near the desert scrub. He plans to put out a saucer of milk every day to attract rattlesnakes and especially their young. Everything that can be studied about animals as groups is virtually achieved, he said. . . . ?

Then, further on in the conversation, he mentions that he wants to get on with his two cycles of short plays,
The Seven Ages of Man
and
The Seven Deadly Sins.
The first three of these plays are currently a success off-Broadway under the title
Plays for Bleecker Street.
A constant reviser, an enthusiast of the wastebasket as the writer's best friend, Wilder considers he has years of full-time work ahead on these projects alone.

His journal contains a completed three-act play, bushels of notes and fragments and ideas that he also feels deserve some time. “And I'd like to learn another language, maybe Russian. But, of course, a couple of times a week I'll drive into Tucson after dark and see what the night life is there. If you are ever in the neighborhood, do come.”

It will not be so close to all the friends and acquaintances and favor-seekers as the home his sister Isabel has made for him in Hamden, Conn. But it is obvious that even in Patagonia, Wilder will be much nearer the center than the edge of the world. He has too many enthusiasms for a metamorphosis to hermitry.

Nor, though he speaks of his “last lecture,” his “last class,” his “last gambling casino,” is there slightest hint of a man who has had enough and wants to coast the rest of the way downhill. After all, he points out, he plans to hibernate for two and a half years and after that everything will be the first time again.

P
OST
-D
OUGLAS:
T
HE
V
IEW
F
ROM
C
HILMARK

As a tribute to the community where he recovered his artistic footing, Wilder would often describe himself as “the hermit of Douglas,” or, as in this interview as simply “hermit.” Hermits, of course, avoid interviews, but not easily on an island like Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, where Peter McGhee of the
Vineyard Gazette
found an author at work on a long novel in September 1965.

“I have become a hermit,” he says, but as he explains it the word connotes retirement from rather than repudiation of society, the priority of work over the distracting claims of people and institutions.

He took up his hermitage almost four years ago, not in one place but in nomadic wandering from one to another—in a dusty desert-edge town in Arizona, on an Italian ship running between Curaçao and Genoa, in European spas and watering holes out of season, and twice in that four-year period, in a low house on the brambled edge of a crimsoning salt-meadow in Chilmark—and in all that time, shunning the distractions that, unsought, crowd naturally upon a man of his eminence in American letters, at the work of his life, which is to write.

Specifically, he is at work on a novel, “a regular murder mystery” set in the mining area of Southern Illinois in 1902–5, a novel that he says “to my consternation has grown quite long . . . ? longer than anything I've done before. . . . ?”

Page after long yellow lined page fills with the playwright's words, fragments of them, snatches imperfectly transcribed, and as the correspondent's hand flies from one to the next, he is aware, in the turning of each page, how often in reaching for the fire he has captured only ashes: