The Eighth Day (61 page)
(On being young)
“If you haven't got a lot of protest in you when you are young, you can't hope to be a useful conservative when you are old.”
(On the Beatles)
“One of the most fascinating things I know of . . . ? the myth-making fantasies that sweep up a whole generation.”
(On newspaper columnists)
“They don't have to stand by their advice. I'd like to see them have to eat all their old columns.”
(On student protests, a phrase)
“No sense of the responsibility of criticism.”
(On Pop art)
“Not, as some people say, sneering and derisive but, on the contrary, to me it seems a joyous effort to accommodate all that is tiresome and joyless in national life . . . ? to digest it in creativity.”
(On the evolution to Pop art)
“Art had just emerged from abstraction . . . ? the United States was in the forefront of the movement to remove all representation from the canvas . . . ? Europe had acclaimed Pollock, Klein, and de Kooning as great painters . . . ? a new threshold had to be crossed, centurions of oil on canvas, of brass and marble had to be thrust aside.”
(On change)
“What stands still turns to pillars of salt . . . ? the world is full of bright people, and brightness is seeing things in a new way . . . ? the avant garde is always vulnerable, because it is the phalanx of the good and the bad.”
(On himself)
“Gertrude Stein lived for a while in a village in the South of France, a real self-respecting peasant village whose families had lived there for generations. She got to know them well, and they allowed her to read the letters in their attics, letters that had been written home by soldiers in the Napoleonic wars, the first world war, and so on . . . ? letters going back many generations. She read them, read them endlessly. What they wrote about was always the same: the weather, the crops, the family, and money. Well, I am the poet laureate of the âfamily,' (and a little about money).
Our Town
was barred from East Berlin, closed on its second night, because the Communists considered the family a bourgeois institution.
Our Town
is a hymn to the family.
The Skin of Our Teeth
is about how the family survives.
(On his writing)
“I write what I would like to read myself. From the beginning I conceived of literature as being liberated from the prevailing conditions. I'm merely one of the tide. I've written just about everything, plays, librettos, movies, everything but burlesque blackouts, which I'd love to do.”
(On the stage)
“I'm really stage struck. The stage is the greatest of all art formsâone in which society sits shoulder to shoulder and sees an imaginary story about the human condition. In paintings, you can be alone and get everything out of a picture; at a concert people listen alone, there is not nearly the pooling of judgment that there is in the theatreâan audience of one at a play would be impossible.”
C
ONSTRUCTING
H
IS
S
TORY
These eight quotations from Wilder's letters show him wrestling with his manuscript before and after leaving Douglas. All are to family with the exception of the one to his editor, Cass Canfield of Harper & Row.
1.“My book has the ship-shape writing-by-plot-line and by recurrent themes; and by symbol-images (la McCarthyâ
ma mère l'öie
hates symbols in novelsâoh Lord! What a goose!) and yet such a diversity of place and mood. Louisa May Alcott through Dostoevsky is still there; but there's also Agatha Christie through Stendahl. Don't you think my heroines have beautiful namesâBeata Ashley and Eustacia Lansing? When she goes on the concert stage Lily (for very special reasons) chooses her middle nameâdescended to her from a Quebec great grandmother and becomes the famous singer Scholastia Ashley! Whistle, boy, to keep up your courage.”
âto Isabel Wilder [IW],
July 6, 1963, Douglas, Arizona
2.“There've been big changes in the novel like a shifting of the earth's crust (which is one of the symbols in the book). An extended opening passage has been moved to about the third chapter. Several chapters have been coalesced into one. The manner of titling chapters has been altered. All that's a very good sign; but it certainly shows that I began typing too soon. . . . ? Until Wednesday I was working along toward the very close of the book and slowly these structural modifications began to impose themselves and demand attention. Fun.”
âto IW, Sunday,
mid-September 1963, Douglas, Arizona
3.“Yes, I think the novel will be called
Make Straight in the Desert.
I was shy of it before because it skirted the preachy and didactic, but two days work have enlarged the form of the story so that it can support so portentous an allusion. I work as regularly as ever I have worked in my lifeâyet so much of it is expansion and enrichment of what is already written.”
âto IW, February 17, 1964, St. Moritz
4“. . . ? Will be longer than I had foreseen. I should get down to Southern Illinois to get a look and read their 1902â1905 newspapers. But I've had a great fun inventing how a coal mine is run, how a murder trial is staged. I'm no slouch either at describing copper mining at 13,000 feet in Chile.”
âto Amos Niven Wilder, April 21, 1964, Nice
5.“I still don't know how it âends,'âhow the plot-lines converge and express the ideas that govern the book. Gertrude Stein used to say that you should always leave a portion âopen'âdon't work too close to a determined
schema
: if you've built correctly the material itself will dictate its culmination.
“I talk of it as being long, but it won't be a long book compared to many othersâmerely the longest I ever ventured upon.”
âto Cass Canfield,
December 8, 1964, Hamden, Connecticut
6. “Threw away a whole month's work (in Douglas), but it's for the best. I've also thrown out the opera-singer in Chicago, and replaced her with something that carries the burden better.”
âto IW, January 13, 1965,
aboard the
S.S. Rossini
7.”Damn, damn, damn, double-damn. The novel keeps growing interestingly. I wrote a sequence A-B-C-D-E and now discover that between C and D there must come a lot of material. . . . ? It adds force to passages fifty pages before and after it. . . . ? It's only lately come clear to me what an awful lot of suffering there is in the book. I never intended that. I hope it's not immediately apparent to the reader because most of the characters don't regard themselves as sufferingâthey're learning and struggling and hoping.”
âto IW, March 19, 1965, Cannes
8.”Gotta perform a major operation on the novel. This time I don't have to throw a lot of stuff away; I got to removing [sic] a lot of Act Four and put it right up forward in Act One. Scissors and paste pot.”
âto IW, April 5, 1965, Curaçao
WO
L
ETTERS
These two Wilder letters about
The Eighth Day
, both written early in its published history, address two dramatically different audiences.
“D
EAR
C
ASS
”
On February 28, 1968 Wilder learned by phone and cable in Genova, Italy that
The Eighth Day
had won the National Book Award. The following day he wrote to Cass Canfield, who stood in for him at the awards ceremony, using these words as part of the author's speech of acceptance.
“The principal idea that is expressed in the novel (and in its title) has been present in Western thought for some timeâthat Man is not a final and arrested creation, but is evolving toward higher mental and spiritual faculties. The latest and boldest affirmation of this idea is to be found in the work of Père Teilhard de Chardinâto whom I am much indebted. . . . ?
“It has given me pleasure to be both commended and reproved for writing an âold-fashioned novel': there is the convention of the omniscient narrator reading his character's thoughts and overhearing their most intimate conversations. I have been more reprehended than commended for introducing many short reflections or even âessays' into the story. That is old-fashioned also, stemming from Henry Fielding. I did this even in my plays: there are little disquisitions on love and death and money in âOur Town' and âThe Matchmaker.' I seem to be becoming worse with the years: the works of very young writers and very old writers tend to abound in these moralizing digressions.
“It has somewhat surprised me that few readers have found enjoymentâor even noticedâthe allusions, âsymbols,' musical [themes] that are a part of the structural organization. These cross-references are not there to tease or puzzle; they are not far-fetched or over-subtle. It is hoped that they reward and furnish both amusement and insight in a
second
reading of the book. It is a device particularly resorted to by writers in their later decades.”
âto Cass Canfield, Friday, March 1, 1968,
Hotel Colombia Excelsior, Genoa, Italy
T
O AN
U
NKNOWN
R
EADER
A fan had questions. It was probably Isabel Wilder who made a typed copy of Wilder's reply before the letter was mailed. It is titled “Note: This refers to those who write in saying they do not understand
The Eighth Day.
” Taken from a letter Thornton Wilder wrote in longhand March 16, 1968.
“Yes, many people have been non-plussed by the book.
“But the main simple idea is not hard to see: it's about evolutionâMan evolving and individuals evolving (and back sliding!) Much of that is indebted to Teilhard de Chardin.
“People are upset by the religious implications, too. (âWhy does Wilder wobble so? Why doesn't he come out either with a ringing affirmation of Christian faith or with a fine stoic affirmation of agnosticism?')
“Note the double movement: Either God made Man in His own image or Man made the gods out of some aspiring extension of his own image of himself (which is a notable Spiritual achievement in itself).
“Notice: these Man-projected gods are both or either terrifying or benign . . . ? but they also
evolve
. . . ? notice the recurrence of Pallas Athene, friend of godman, who gave civilization the image of what a noble cityâor city-stateâcould be.
“Notice: the women pass through (or are arrested in one or another of) the successive phases: ArtemisâAphroditeâHeraâto Athene, (if they're lucky).
“That is the design in the Tapestry. Sez I.
“These suggestions I hope may interest you.”
“C
ARO
M
AESTRO
ӉA
NNOTATION AS
E
NTERTAINMENT
Wilder's presentation copy of his novel in August 1967 to a man he admired deeply, Otto Klemperer, the famed conductor of the London Philharmonic, included a number of marginal notations pertaining to sources, plots, style, and themes. Selections are transcribed here, three graphically illustrated. Readers are invited to search out indicated cross references. Wilder's inscription on the title page reads: “For Caro Maestro Otto Klemperer for his amusement with deep regard & gratitude.”
[p.3]. . . ? also of Coaltown.
*
“Most of the place-names are imaginary. I have never been in Southern Illinois.”
[p.14]. . . ? LET THEM BLAZE THE TRAIL* against that day.
“While writing this book I planned to call it â
Make Straight in the Desert
: a highway for our Lord.' See pp 175, 242, 430. Road-building. Tree planting, (city-building; church building): pp 169, 193; 50, 259, 403 and passim.”
[p. 120]. . . ? She added: “Trust women. Men won't be much help to you from now on.”
*
“One of the principal themes in the book; I have not marked the many passages in which it recurs: the male rescues and sustains the female; the female, the maleâuntil the Eighth Day clears the air. From page 53.”