Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  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

  HE WAS seventy on April 17, 1967. (“You know how it is: you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decision; then whissh! You’re seventy,” the Stage Manager says in Our Town.) Thornton, Isabel, and Janet celebrated what they planned to be a quiet, private birthday in Hamden. He had tried not to draw attention to his upcoming birthday milestone, but the word got out in Germany, and “the telegraph boys of New Haven kept arriving in relays—cables from everybody, from the President of the Republic—through the university presidents, the directors of theatres—down to . . . the former bar maid at the Mimosa Bar in Baden-Baden.” He wrote that she was the

  only bar maid I ever knew who was undergoing a psychoanalysis. She got it free, I think, because she was so beautiful. She came, as my guest to the opening of the opera Die Alkestiade in Frankfurt am Main, and attended all the official junkets that surround such an occasion—much to the consternation of Louise Talma, Isabel Wilder, Inge Borkh, the Mayor and the Operdirektor. I don’t intend to cause pain in life,—but things just happen to come out that way.47

  Wilder drove to Edgartown the day after his birthday in a rare April snow- and hailstorm, leaving Isabel to cope with the “bedlam” at home on Deepwood Drive—“the phone-calls, visitors, strangers, the enormous mail resulting from the combined novel-publication and birthday (interviewers, photographers, TV proposals, cakes baked by high school students, Vietnam petitions,—bedlam).”48

  Bestseller, National Book Award winner, Book-of-the-Month Club selection—The Eighth Day was a magnet for attention, and a lightning rod for critics, some stridently negative, others effusively positive. The reviews in the United States and England were largely favorable, but Brooks Atkinson at the New York Times was disappointed in Wilder and his novel, as were Stanley Kauffmann at the New Republic; Benjamin DeMott, also at the Times; Edward Weeks at the Atlantic; and David J. Gordon at the Yale Review. Granville Hicks at the Saturday Review praised the book, as did David Galloway at the Spectator in London, Warren French at the Kansas City Star, Malcolm Cowley in his nationally syndicated Book Week column, Fanny Butcher in the Chicago Tribune, and many others in the United States and abroad. Needless to say, Clifton Fadiman, a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club editorial board, reviewed The Eighth Day very favorably for the Book-of-the-Month Club News, and one of the enthusiastic judges who voted for the novel for the National Book Award was the young novelist John Updike.

  OVER THE years Wilder gave astute writing advice to many younger novelists and playwrights—advice that could apply to life as well as art. After he encouraged the young would-be novelist John Knowles, also a Yale graduate, to write about vivid memories and experience, Knowles wrote A Separate Peace (1960) and dedicated it to Wilder. In 1970 Wilder wrote a letter of literary advice to novelist, actor, and playwright James Leo Herlihy, who had already published two novels, first the commercially and critically successful All Fall Down (1960) and then Midnight Cowboy (1965), which would be far more successful as a movie (1969) than as a book. Herlihy was looking for a new fiction project, and Wilder wrote, “James-the-Lion, see to it [that] in every novel you write (NOVEL: a window on Life—and on all life) you touch all bases: death and despair and also the ever-renewing life-force, sex, courage, food, the family. I think you’ve always done that anyway, but know that you’re doing it. Touch all bases to make a home run.”49 That was a glimpse of the compass guiding Wilder as he wrote The Eighth Day, and it would guide him in his final novel as well.

  CHARACTERISTICALLY WILDER did not look back for long at the literary work he had completed, for a new book was already stirring in his imagination and in experimental drafts as early as 1967. He wrote to Amy about it in the spring of 1968: “The work I’ve begun is a story using the background of my boyhood in China. I’m not sure yet if it’ll take shape as I would want it to. It may follow a number of other projects into the wastepaper basket.”50

  Wilder had earlier written that “our true life is in the imagination and in the memory.”51 In 1967 he began merging memory and imagination in a manuscript he first viewed as a novel, and then alternately called a novel and an autobiography with a “ ‘controlled’ fictional element.” He was every bit as innovative and unorthodox a novelist as he was a dramatist, and by 1968 he was once more experimenting energetically with a new form—this time an intentional hybrid of fiction and autobiography. His concept was to begin and end each separate episode with autobiography, but to insert fiction in the center, fusing memory and imagination. He explained his idea to Ruth Gordon in a letter on August 15, 1968. “I fancy that I’m writing everything!” he said.

  Not autobiography—but 10 episodes from my life into each of which I introduce one fictional person. Each of these stories begins and ends with extended accounts that really happened—then enters a catalyst who precipitates on a more significant level the essence of the time and place. (An indefensible literary trick, I know.) . . . I’ve begun one about Gertrude Stein—and I shall do one about the boys’ school in Chefoo, China, where Harry Luce and I went. It would bore me to write an autobiography without this “controlled” fictional element.52

  By February 1969, he was in Europe again, deep into the work, with two principal characters—Theophilus and his twin brother Todger—sharing the part-fictional, part-autobiographical adventures. (Todger was one of Thornton’s nicknames when he was a boy, and Theophilus was the name given to his stillborn twin.) “The book is shaping up to some very striking material,” Wilder wrote to Isabel on February 11, 1969, from St. Moritz. “I now have two WINDOWS on Yale 1917–1920.”53 He was writing for hours each day without getting tired.54 “I’m astonished at myself—how plenteously I’ve been writing. . . . I cannot understand why I am so full of beans.” Once he was aboard ship again to return to the United States, he predicted, “the light will never go out.”55

  “Writing’s been going right smartly,” Wilder wrote to Isabel from Pension Spiess in Vienna on January 19, 1970: “Theophilus surely takes to Italy and keeps getting Todger into very hot water. Terrible!”56 His letters to Isabel that winter gave serial updates on the adventures of Theophilus—and his own adventures as a consequence of the writing. “Theophilus gets into danger with that man who smuggles art objects from the digs in Heraclea and now I’ve gone crazy in Greek vases,” he wrote from St. Moritz in February. Wilder the amateur archaeologist was so fascinated that he was buying books about Greek vase painting wherever he stopped in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France. He quickly developed his own “home-cooked theories about the pots.”57 “I’d go crazy, if I weren’t pursuing some hobby—absorbing, totally occupying train of inquiry,” he wrote to a friend. “At present it’s Greek Vase-painting. I’ve lived 72 and 10/12 years without giving it a thought. For something I’m writing I needed just a small bit of knowledge about it. . . . Just enough to make a bit of literary magic about it. . . . Every hobby is also an exploration, a constructive question-answering journey of my own.”58

  By March 1970, in Cannes, he was absorbed in writing a chapter he called “SS Independen
za,” about his first trip to Italy–that enthralling, life-changing, journey abroad fifty years earlier. He outlined the book’s current status for Isabel: It began with a long chapter on Chefoo, which he had written in 1968 and had rewritten in a “whole new draft” in February 1969 in St. Moritz, to strengthen “the underpinnings.”59 (“I think I’m writing a short novel about the China I knew as a boy,” he had told Gordon and Kanin at the outset of his new endeavor. “Clergymen’s children are supposed to be rascals,—well you can imagine what missionaries’ children are!”)60 This chapter on Chefoo would be followed by a long chapter on Oberlin, but he was having a “terrible time” with it.61

  He had almost finished the “Rome 1920–21” chapter in January 1969, he wrote to his niece, Dixie. “Harrowing subject matter,” he said. “I’m beginning to be embarrassed by the discovery that Todger seems to be coming to the rescue of ‘Despairful’ creatures in episode after episode—anyway that’s not true of ‘Salzburg.’ I do at least three [chapters] in which I am only an onlooker and two in which I’m a downright nuisance.”62 Chapters on Caserta and Salzburg were “well advanced,” he reported to Isabel in March 1970.63 He was bypassing almost every other activity and depriving himself of human company so he could write the wide-ranging stories, part history, part invention, pouring out of his memory and his imagination.

  AS HE worked on the new novel, Wilder also had to tend to other business, closing some circles, moving ahead. He gave the editor/anthologist Whit Burnett permission to publish The Drunken Sisters in This Is My Best: In the Third Quarter of the Century—a 1970 collection of work by America’s eighty-five greatest living authors. Wilder was ranked sixth on the list of the fifty top vote getters for inclusion in the book. He had served for years on the MacDowell Colony board; had received the first Edward MacDowell Award in 1960; had found escape, shelter, and companionship at MacDowell; and had written there productively for years. He was invited in 1969 or 1970 to work at MacDowell in an apartment-studio apparently designed for “senior citizens,” he wrote to Isabel, but he declined. “Often summers I’ve fallen a-dreaming about the ‘sea-blue hills of Peterborough’ (Elinor Wylie), but I think I’m too old to take the table-life—the quasi-happy young composers and painters,” he wrote. “But, oh, those hours in the studio, ‘the world forgetting; by the world forgot.’ ”64