Thornton Wilder (91 page)

Like Wilder's earlier novels and his plays,
The Eighth Day
is suffused with questions, yet as he wrote in his desert solitude, he seemed to come closer to some answers. He would be seventy when he finished the novel, and it would prove to be the mature artist's summation of a life's work, and of life itself.

36

“TAPESTRY”

History is one tapestry. No eye can venture to compass a hand's-breadth of it.

—THORNTON WILDER,

The Eighth Day

 

North America and Europe (1963–1970)

I
n November 1963, after twenty months in Douglas, Arizona, Wilder packed his bags, his briefcase, and his books and left his desert hermitage reluctantly. He had been happy in Douglas: He worked all day, and when the sun set, he “circulated,” he wrote Amy Wertheimer. His acquaintances were “just us bums and bar workers and bar frequenters. It was very good for me.”
¹
He had gone into the desert intending to finish the one-act-play cycles that he had originally conceived as the summation of his literary life—his examination of the seven deadly sins and the seven ages of man. Despite his determination, however, this vision proved too vast and complex to be contained in the modest framework of the one-act play. Furthermore, in December in the desert, to Wilder's great surprise, the plays had been swept aside by his absorbing idea for a novel.

He had always been a gifted storyteller, and had always done his best work in fiction or in drama when he was completely caught up in the story and the characters.
The Eighth Day
was driven by the powerful central story of a death and its far-reaching repercussions. Wilder gave himself up to the saga of two men and their families and dozens of satellite life stories. Once again he depicted the particular in the general, the general in the particular, the life of the village against the life of the stars. His themes and the novel's structure grew organically out of a complicated story as it unfolded within him. Steeped in the work of such nineteenth-century novelists as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville, Hawthorne, and Austen, Wilder infused the deceptively familiar form of the nineteenth-century novel with twentieth-century characters who wrestled, sometimes to the death, with questions and themes that transcend time, geography, and circumstance. He transmuted the form of the conventional, old-fashioned novel into something surprisingly new and modern, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century resonance.

He carried a sheaf of handwritten pages in his briefcase that November day when he drove out of Douglas for the last time. “From Arizona I drove 2,500 miles without bumping into anything,” he wrote gratefully in a letter to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. “Little Douglas was very good for me (I didn't let it be good
to
me) but I'm not ready to return to urban civilization yet. I'm going to find a Douglas-in-North Italy for a year. I still don't know where.”
²
His immediate destination was Washington, D.C., where he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Johnson on December 6. The award for meritorious service to the nation in a variety of fields, including the arts, had been announced by President Kennedy a few months before his assassination. Medals were presented that December day to thirty-one people, among them Edmund Wilson, Marian Anderson, Pablo Casals, Ralph Bunche, E. B. White, Edward Steichen, and Wilder. There were posthumous honors for Pope John XXIII and President Kennedy.

From Washington Wilder went to Hamden, where he prepared for a January journey to Europe, hoping to find his “Douglas-in-North Italy” so that he could finish writing
The Eighth Day.
³
Before his departure he spent Christmas with his family and attended a dinner honoring Amos's retirement from the Harvard Divinity School.
⁴
By the time
Hello, Dolly!
opened on Broadway on January 16, 1964, Thornton and Isabel were on their way to Europe. The ocean voyage was always their favorite mode of travel, if time permitted. Otherwise, they opted for the speed of air travel. Isabel flew home in March, but Thornton stayed, anticipating that for the next few months or even for the entire year, he would live and work as he had so often done “on boats and in hotels.”
⁵

“Am enjoying my late sixties plus my
existence en marge
,” Wilder wrote to his brother and sister-in-law from Nice in April 1964.
⁶
His “life on the edge” was beset with distractions, but somehow they did not vex him as they had done in earlier years. He suffered his customary January-February “head cold virus” that left him, as usual, intermittently deaf. He searched for his Italian Douglas to no avail, but “Nothing makes much difference to me except the hours at my desk,” he wrote, and for once in his life he seemed able to write anywhere.
⁷
The Eighth Day
was flourishing, growing even longer than he had foreseen. Just as he had written
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
without seeing Peru, he had never been to southern Illinois, one of the settings for the novel. He thought he ought to go to “look at the locale and read their 1902–1905 newspapers,” but in the meantime he had “great fun inventing how a coal mine is run, how a murder trial is staged.” His sojourn in Douglas had given him some firsthand knowledge of copper mines and copper smelting; consequently, he was “no slouch either at describing copper mining at 13,000 feet in Chile” for one of the episodes of his ambitious novel.
⁸

He was homeward bound in May aboard a slow-moving ship out of Genoa, headed to the Netherlands Antilles. He had taken this leisurely two- to three-week-long voyage before because it allowed him to circumvent a landing in New York, but best of all he found the prolonged time at sea ideal for writing. He could unpack, set up a writing space in his cabin, settle in, and concentrate on his work. He planned to fly from Curaçao to Miami, rent a “drive-yourself” car, and “fool around Florida.” He would also pay a visit to his aunt Charlotte, now retired in Florida and having health problems, but in transit by sea or by land, he managed to devote regular “daily working hours” to
The Eighth Day.
⁹

By late June he was back in Hamden, catching up with mail and business affairs, and visiting his doctor, who discovered a cancerous mole near Wilder's left eye. He underwent surgery in late June followed by radiation treatments that extended into late October. It was a time of family illness and convalescence: Charlotte Niven was hospitalized in St. Petersburg, Florida, for lung and bronchial problems. Charlotte Wilder, now severely overweight, was suffering in Amityville with arthritis, kidney disease—and respiratory problems aggravated by her chain-smoking. Thornton was undergoing a long series of radium treatments in New Haven and recuperating at the Hotel Taft, with occasional visits from his nephew, Tappan, who was working in New Haven that summer. They paid such frequent visits to the Anchor Bar and Grill, one of Wilder's favorite hangouts in New Haven, that the proprietors thought Wilder had actually written the entire
Eighth Day
right there on the premises. Isabel, who had been on Martha's Vineyard, came home to Hamden so that her brother could finish his convalescence in the house on Deepwood Drive, where he worked on the novel for hours each day.
¹⁰

He made short trips in New England in August, traveled to Quebec in September, and headed back to Florida in his T-Bird in December, writing wherever he landed. He needed to find another “hermitage,” he wrote to Aunt Charlotte, but he still didn't know where. In January 1965, his radiation treatments completed, Wilder was back in Curaçao to board the
Rossini,
another slow boat to Europe. This time he bypassed winter in Italy for the warmth of Cannes and Nice, where he stayed in his hotel room all day, working on the novel. Room service delivered his standing daily order for two sandwiches and two bottles of beer for lunch. (The menu might vary, but Wilder liked to have lunch delivered to the door when he was working, whether he was at the MacDowell Colony or on shipboard or in a hotel.) At the end of the day, his writing quota accomplished, Wilder would “sally out at sunset, healthily hungry and ready for some chance conversations in bars and restaurants.” Those conversations fed his imagination and his evolving book. “The Riviera is a magnet to drifters,” he wrote to his aunt, who, along with Ruth Gordon and his New Haven friend Catherine Coffin, had succeeded his deceased mother and his deceased friend Sybil Colefax as the recipients of letters about his work in progress. “I don't frequent milieux that are sordid,” he wrote to Charlotte Niven,

 

but these people like to tell their life-story (editing it to their own advantage)—stories of lost direction, broken homes, disappointment. Places celebrated for their beauty attract these broken-winged = Capri, Santa Fe, Tahiti, Taormina (aren't there many in Florence?). All this is perfect LOOT for a novelist and many a trait or anecdote entered my work. I wasted a good deal of time but it wasn't all wasted.
¹¹

 

He returned to the United States in March aboard another slow ship, the
Verdi—
a comfortable vessel with “splendid” Italian food
.
He consumed gnocchi and lasagna and tagliatelle “like a glutton,” and when he was not eating or writing, he was reading “long books” by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
¹²
He read
War and Peace
in French on this crossing, and Murasaki Shikibu's
The Tale of Genji
in English.
¹³
Because the ship was bound for Venezuela, Peru, and Chile, most of the passengers were Spanish-speaking, including an ambassador Wilder had met at the UNESCO conference in Venice. Some of the Chileans helped him with questions regarding the section of
The Eighth Day
that was set in their country.
¹⁴
Back in Florida, his days were “centered around” his novel, he wrote Amy Wertheimer. “I think it will be the best thing I have done—but I wish that
it
did not insist on growing longer than I had first planned.”
¹⁵

He headed back to Washington in May to receive another honor—the first National Medal for Literature, to be conferred at the White House May 4. The president attended, and Lady Bird Johnson presented the medal. Wilder was pleased about that, he said, as “my novel says (I mean: implies) over and over again, Apollo makes art, but Athene fosters it.”
¹⁶

He was back in Connecticut in June for his forty-fifth class reunion at Yale. “How we senior-citizens will scan one another for signs of general delapidation!” he wrote to his niece, Dixie. “I entertained the notion of going to the Beau Brummel Beauty Parlor and taking the ‘budget treatment' ” to try to repair the permanent damage of the years, he teased.
¹⁷
Afterward he wrote to Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin:

 

Harry Luce was there for one day; Bill Whitney and Walter Millis also. Well, chums, I was a contented little sleepwalker, a narrow-chested bookworm as an undergraduate (as I told 'em at the Class Banquet Saturday night) . . . but NOW: I'm Stover at Yale in Spades. I'm rah-rah Eli—handshaking, horsing around. . . . Get it? For 20 years I've been the Texas Guinan of reunions.
¹⁸

 

He spent a few weeks of the summer with Isabel on Martha's Vineyard, and then traveled back to New Haven to do research at the Yale library, staying part of the time at the Taft Hotel near the Yale campus because he and the Deepwood Drive house did not always fare well when he lived there alone. He usually managed to make a mess of the house, especially the kitchen, if he tried to prepare his own meals. At least at the hotel he could count on someone else to cook and keep house. In October 1965 he and Isabel were back in Europe, where he hoped to immerse himself in
The Eighth Day
, vowing not to return to the United States until his manuscript was ready for the printer. By April 1966 he had finished and polished the handwritten manuscript sufficiently to give it to a typist.

Amy wrote to him that April to suggest that
Our Town
was being performed less and less, superseded by Sartre's
No Exit.
The two plays bore a “partial resemblance to one another,” Wilder replied. The last act of
Our Town
, he said, “suggests that life—viewed directly—is damned near Hell; [Sartre's] play says that the proximity of other people renders life a Hell.” Sartre had told him, Wilder wrote, “that at the time of the first production he received scores of protests—They found that line too cruel, ‘You
are
your life'—(i.e. there are no alibis.) It's a savage play.” He then contrasted Sartre's perspective to his own view as expressed in
The Eighth Day
: “In the long novel that I've almost finished I assert roundly that life is
not
an image for hell.”
¹⁹

In that volatile decade of civil rights struggles, assassinations, and antiwar protests, Wilder firmly asserted in his novel his conviction that there was hope for the future. He believed that mankind was still evolving—that “in this new century we shall be able to see that mankind is entering a new stage of development—the Man of the Eighth Day.”
²⁰
Wilder himself was living testimony to his theory—a “Man of the Eighth Day” who had spent a lifetime continuously evolving, as a person and as an artist, never static or satisfied with his writing or himself, always looking inward and outward for the next “stage of development.” The title and the symbol he chose for his sixth novel aptly summed up his own life and work.