Thornton Wilder (92 page)

 

BY APRIL 1966
Wilder was exhausted, and ready for the long journey of writing the novel to be over. He turned sixty-nine that April, and wrote to the director Cheryl Crawford, “I've put my foot into my 70th year and intend to enjoy it.”
²¹
He indulged in two pleasures: traveling abroad and spending time on Martha's Vineyard, a retreat he and Isabel had enjoyed so much over the years that in 1966 they bought a house there on Katama Point in Edgartown. On September 13, 1966, Wilder wrote that he was sitting at a “table-desk” in their new house, looking at the Atlantic. Because it was after Labor Day, he said, “all those trashy worldlings have left the Island except us.”
²²

Soon he was headed for Europe again, writing to his aunt Charlotte from Innsbruck, Austria, on November 24 that he had finished reading the proofs of
The Eighth Day
and had sent them off to New York.
²³
Although he had spent forty hours reading them himself, he paid Louise Talma a thousand dollars to go over the galleys with her keen eye for detail.
²⁴
The book was scheduled for publication on March 29, 1967, and Wilder had to forgo his slow voyage home to fly back to New York and sign “a bushel” of books for his publisher. After that, he said again, he was determined to find that other “hideaway—like Douglas, Arizona—though I think that this one will be in the ‘piney woods' of North Carolina.” This was a matter of urgency, he wrote, because “I've begun on another novel which may take me some time.”
²⁵

 

WHEN ROBERT PENN WARREN
wrote Wilder a “generous warming letter” about
The Eighth Day,
Wilder responded with a revealing analysis of his novel's structure and sources:

 

Book One: “Little Women” and how they made a boarding house.

Book Two: The exiled wanderer in search of his soul. And after Kierkegaard's study of “the man of faith.”

Book Three: Horatio Alger, combined with the Bildungsroman (Merton's Magic Mountain [
sic
] after Goethe.)

All mixed up with the family under an evil star—The doomed children rehabilitated.

And Teilhard de Chardin.

And Jung's theory (though I'm no Jungian) that The Greek and Roman pantheons are projections of ourselves. The women are passing through the phases Artemis to Aphrodite to Hera to Athene (or getting stuck en route like poor Beata.)

The overriding notion (no more than a notion) is that men make (secrete, project) gods and then the gods they have created in turn make civilization (for good and ill.) So it's not finally very important whether the gods are outside us or inside us.
²⁶

 

At 435 pages, this was Wilder's longest work of fiction, and his first novel in nineteen years. He dedicated the book to Isabel. The central idea was simple, Wilder wrote to a reader: The novel is about “evolution—Man evolving and individuals evolving (and backsliding!).”
²⁷
The novel was an immediate bestseller and the winner of the National Book Award in 1968. When the news of that honor reached Wilder in Genoa, he sent a statement of acceptance to Cass Canfield, his editor and publisher at Harper & Row (as Harper & Brothers had become in 1962). Wilder shed more light on the novel's theme: “The principal idea that is expressed in the novel (and in its title) has been present in Western thought for some time—that Man is not a final and arrested creation, but is evolving toward higher mental and spiritual faculties.”
²⁸

Wilder was indebted to Teilhard, the French Jesuit priest who also held a doctorate in geology and was an experienced paleontologist.
²⁹
Science, religion, and metaphysics converged in Teilhard's landmark book,
The Phenomenon of Man
, published in French in 1955 and in English in 1959. According to Teilhard, there were four steps of evolution: the evolution of the galaxy; the evolution of the earth; the evolution of life; and the ongoing evolution of consciousness. He also embraced Nietzsche's idea of the unfinished, still-evolving human being. Wilder's novel featured a cast of unfinished human beings and their still-evolving, unfolding lives. Some of his characters firmly believe that they are living lives that are preordained. Others believe that they possess powers of free will and choice. Others have no opinion at all because they are so absorbed in or overwhelmed by the lives they are living—or the lives that are living
them
, as Dr. Gillies, the Coaltown physician, often observed. (According to Dr. Gillies, “We keep saying that we ‘live our lives.' Shucks! Life lives us.”)
³⁰

In the novel's prologue Wilder introduces his readers to a tantalizing murder mystery in the fictional small town in Illinois where the tragedy happened in the summer of 1902, and then to the questions the residents of the town confront as they speculate on the mystery of the shooting death—and by extension the mysteries of life itself. Time is not simply chronological in
The Eighth Day,
but fluid and malleable. The setting frequently shifts from Illinois to Chile, Russia, and various destinations in the United States, with Coaltown, Illinois, the hub.

The novel is a saga of two families, as well as a virtual turn-of-the-twentieth-century travelogue and social history. It is also an exploration of Wilder's belief that “nothing is more interesting than the inquiry as to how creativity operates in anyone, in everyone,” as the novel overflows with illustrations of creativity expressed, nurtured, fulfilled—or thwarted, denied, distorted. But foremost
The Eighth Day
is Wilder's summation of the recurring universal questions that infuse his work—many of his early playlets; his major plays; his later experimental plays; every novel from
The Cabala
onward; the profusion of literary and personal reflections in his journals.
The Eighth Day
is also Wilder's culminating treatment of the challenges of family life; the often perilous variations of love, especially married love and familial love; the positive as well as negative manifestations of creativity; the dynamics of memory and imagination; the endless quest to understand the self and the inner life; and the significance of the multiplicity of souls—“the disturbing discovery of the human multitude,” as Roger Ashley, the son of the murder suspect, expresses it.
³¹

Wilder's themes are dramatized in the parallel lives of two families, the Ashleys and the Lansings. The murder victim, Breckenridge Lansing, has one principal goal in life—to “found that greatest of all institutions—a God-fearing American home.” He holds that a husband and a father “should be loved, feared, honored, and obeyed.” But as his life and his family disappoint him he asks, “What had gone wrong?”
³²
John Ashley, the accused murderer, realizes that “he had formed himself to be the opposite of his father and that his life had been as mistaken as his father's.”
³³
As noted, Wilder is reflecting on his own life as Ashley wonders,

 

Is that what family life is? The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one's own errors impoverish and cripple one's children? Such is the endless chain of the generations?
³⁴

 

In another examination of family dynamics
,
Wilder echoes the words Freud spoke to him about his sister Charlotte three decades earlier. In
The Eighth Day,
Freud's words are delivered by the Maestro, a singing teacher, who says that family life is

 

like that of nations: each member battles for his measure of air and light, of nourishment and territory, and particularly for that measure of admiration and attention which is called “glory.” It is like a forest; each tree must fight for its sunlight; under the ground the roots engage in a death struggle for moisture . . . in every healthy family there is one who must pay.
³⁵

 

The novel is studded with reflections on marriage and family; the shifting concept of the patriarch and the matriarch, despite social constraints; the relationships of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, permeated with Wilder's characteristic faith in the wisdom and strength of women.

The boardinghouse is a pervasive symbol in
The Eighth Day.
Young Sophia Ashley transforms the family home into a boardinghouse after her father is accused of murder and then disappears. Ashley the fugitive finds shelter in boardinghouses, particularly at the inn in Manantiales, Chile, run by Mrs. Wickersham, who is based on Anna Bates, whom Wilder met in Peru in 1941 during his South American tour. (She appears in his journal on May 23, 1941, in an entry written in Arequipa about the “famous, kind, roaring, strongwilled, childhearted mistress of the best inn on the west coast of South America.”)
³⁶
As adults, the children of
The Eighth Day
's two protagonists find shelter in boardinghouses in various strange cities.

After a lifetime of “boarding”—living in countless rented houses with his family, in school and college dormitories, in hotels around the world, and aboard ships traversing the oceans—Wilder had a firsthand acquaintance with boardinghouses, and several times chose them as symbols in his work. A boardinghouse could provide temporary shelter, transient company, anonymity. A boardinghouse could be a cheerful and comfortable resting place, or a facade for illicit pleasures, or, most often, a lodging for loneliness and alienation. George Brush, the hero of
Heaven's My Destination,
was a frequent guest in boardinghouses, particularly Queenie Craven's, his “substitute home” in Kansas City, and Ma Crofut's “very fine house” full of “daughters” in that same city.
³⁷
Mrs. Cranston's boardinghouse in Newport, Rhode Island, as will be seen, was “a temporary boardinghouse for many and a permanent residence for a few” in
Theophilus North.
³⁸
In Wilder's experience as in his imagination, an endless pilgrimage of people traveling through life lodge briefly in boardinghouses and then move on, and most of these travelers are searching for home.

Whether he was writing a novel or a play, endings were always difficult for Wilder, and he struggled with the finale of
The Eighth Day
—not only the denouement, but the precise language of the last passage. He settled on one last homage to James Joyce, who had ruminated for a while before choosing the final word in the concluding passage of
Finnegans Wake,
leaving that word suspended in the last sentence of the novel for the reader to continue or complete. There is no period—nothing at all following the article “the,” so that the final line reads, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the      ”
³⁹

In the last paragraph of
The Eighth Day,
Wilder offers the same incompletion, a word hanging in air to lead the reader off into the future, or into confusion or into his or her own reverie:

 

There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. Some are strengthened by seeing a pattern wherein the oppressed and exploited of the earth are gradually emerging from their bondage. Some find strength in the conviction that there is nothing to see. Some      
⁴⁰

 

This dangling fill-in-the-blank is in essence a question. Wilder was always reluctant to impose answers on his audience, but it is possible to discern in
The Eighth Day
and its context some of his personal conclusions in his own lifelong search for answers. He was exhilarated by the “sense of the multitude of human souls,” he wrote to his nephew.
⁴¹
He had high hopes that Teilhard de Chardin and others were right that human beings are still evolving “toward higher mental and spiritual faculties.”
⁴²
He saw the characters in his book as people living “storm-tossed lives as stages in a vast unfoldment.”
⁴³
He recognized that there was “an awful lot of suffering” in the book, although he had not intended that effect, but he hoped his readers would understand that “most of the characters don't regard themselves as suffering—they're learning and struggling and hoping.”
⁴⁴
They are, in other words, evolving.

Wilder, the grandson and the brother of clergymen, was criticized from time to time as too much of a preacher himself. He acknowledged that he was “more reprehended than commended for introducing many short reflections or even ‘essays' ” into
The Eighth Day.
He pointed out that he did this in his plays as well; that there were, for instance, “little disquisitions on love and death and money” in
Our Town
and in
The Matchmaker.
He wrote to Cass Canfield, “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.”
⁴⁵

Between the lines in Wilder's work, as in his life, there was an enduring appreciation for all that is good and beautiful in a difficult world. Wilder wrote to his friend Timothy Findley, “At my time of life—I'm that old Chinese fool-poet sitting on a verandah watching the moonlight on the pond—I'm at a distance from all emotion except awe.
⁴⁶