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.
POST-DOUGLAS: THE VIEW FROM CHILMARK
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:
(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 ‘family,’ (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 forms—one 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 theatre—an audience of one at a play would be impossible.”
CONSTRUCTING HIS STORY
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 McCarthy—ma mère l’öie hates symbols in novels—oh 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 names—Beata Ashley and Eustacia Lansing? When she goes on the concert stage Lily (for very special reasons) chooses her middle name—descended to her from a Quebec great grandmother and becomes the famous singer Scholastia Ashley! Whistle, boy, to keep up your courage.”
—to 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.”
—to 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 life—yet so much of it is expansion and enrichment of what is already written.”
—to 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 1902–1905 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.”
—to Amos Niven Wilder, Apr
il 21, 1964, Nice
5.“I still don’t know how it ‘ends,’—how the plot-lines converge and express the ideas that govern the book. Gertrude Stein used to say that you should always leave a portion ‘open’—don’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 others—merely the longest I ever ventured upon.”
—to 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.”
—to 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 suffering—they’re learning and struggling and hoping.”
—to 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.”
—to IW, April 5, 1965, Curaçao
TWO LETTERS
These two Wilder letters about The Eighth Day, both written early in its published history, address two dramatically different audiences.
“DEAR CASS”
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 time—that 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 Chardin—to whom I am much indebted. . . . ?
“It has given me pleasure to be both commended and reproved for writing an ‘old-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 ‘essays’ 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 ‘Our Town’ and ‘The 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 enjoyment—or even noticed—the allusions, ‘symbols,’ 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.”
—to Cass Canfield, Friday, March 1, 1968,
Hotel Colombia Excelsior, Genoa, Italy
TO AN UNKNOWN READER
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 evolution—Man evolving and individuals evolving (and back sliding!) Much of that is indebted to Teilhard de Chardin.
“People are upset by the religious implications, too. (‘Why 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 city—or city-state—could be.
“Notice: the women pass through (or are arrested in one or another of) the successive phases: Artemis—Aphrodite—Hera—to Athene, (if they’re lucky).
“That is the design in the Tapestry. Sez I.
“These suggestions I hope may interest you.”
“CARO MAESTRO”—ANNOTATION AS ENTERTAINMENT
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 ‘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 male—until the Eighth Day clears the air. From page 53.”
[p. 121]. . . ? sapot,* and aphrodisiac drugs
“What’s that? I don’t know. Sounds enticing.”
[Wilder gleefully invented the names of many tools and other objects in his novel.]
[p. 124] Faith is an ever-widening pool of clarity, fed from springs beyond the margin of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.*
“To me, an important passage. An obscure respect for superstition is from Gertrude Stein. A relation between faith and gambling is, I think, my own. (Not Pascal’s pari.)”
[p. [136] “Red. Red.”*
“I now regret the facile play on a color symbolism—of red and blue.”
“The oak tree is in the acorn.” She went on. “If Simon Bolívar had fathered a child at sixteen and died next day, the child would still be the son of the Liberator.”** “A central theme: the doctrine of the transmission of endowments of which the donor is unaware, (p. 250 and passim.)
[p. 178] She said that it’s a lucky woman who graduates from Artemis to Aphrodite, to Hera and ends up as Athene.*
It’s sad when they get stuck in one image.—“A theme of the book: men can only advance or recede in their type; women can change their role (or fail to.)”
[p. 213] Contact with the suffering of others does not in itself enlarge understanding. Luck must play a part.*
“Goethe’s poem (see p. 3): Tyche, chance”
[Wilder planned but then abandoned a scheme for constructing his novel around elements in Goethe’s poem, “Tyche,” or Greek for chance.]
[p. 212] John Ashley had begun the day singing loudly before his shaving mirror. He raised a joyful storm in the house
. “Bathroom’s free, little doggies! Last one to breakfast is a buffalo!”*
“A few aspects of John Ashley came from my father (Dr. Amos Parker Wilder, newspaper editor; later American Consul-General in Hong Kong and Shanghai) who was, however, patriarchal, severe, and moralizing. This is one of his ‘phrases’ in the family (p. 414) p. 31.”
[p. 232] His characteristic movements were swift; he crossed and recrossed the city as though he had wings on his heels.*
“Hermes,—but I now regret these more obvious devices. It makes me uncomfortable when readers say that I use a lot of ‘symbols.’ (It makes them uneasy.) Big symbols, yes; but not little ones.”
[p. 233] T.G. was a Nihilist.*
“An Apollo en décadence.”
[P. 407] “Mr. Frazier, in every lively healthy family there is one who must pay.”*
“I have a sister who has been under care for many years in a sanitorium for the mentally disturbed. One summer—about 1933—I was staying at the Schloss Coblenz near Prof. Freud’s villa in Grinzing. Through friends, he invited me to call. One day, I told him of my several brilliant brothers and sisters—and of this invalid sister. He replied in these words.” See also p. 265.
[Charlotte E. Wilder (1898–1980), a poet, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1941. With the exception of a few months in 1958, she remained institutionalized the rest of her life.]
[p.289] “John, sometimes I think that you’re just plain ignorant—or rather that something was left out of you. You haven’t any imagination! You haven’t any!”*
“Epigraph to my Heaven’s My Destination: ‘Of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.’”
The Eighth Day Page 47
