The Eighth Day (59 page)

Where his own work was concerned, in the fall of 1962, after a breather, Wilder began working again on his plays-in-progress, on
The Seven Deadly Sins
and
The Seven Ages of Man.
This was no surprise. Building on a passionate love of theater traceable to his early boyhood years, Wilder had started his ascent in the professional world of drama in 1930. Over the next twelve years he wrote short plays, translations, and adaptations; tried screen writing and acting; and taught, lectured, and performed as a goodwill ambassador for his country. Even those last three endeavors were forms of theater for Wilder. With the spectacular success of
Our Town
(1938) and
The Skin of Our Teeth
(1942), he had reached the top of the theatrical world by 1942 when he entered military service.

Upon returning to civilian life three years later, he translated a play by Jean-Paul Sartre and wrote his first novel in thirteen years,
The Ides of March
(1948). He then put fiction aside and returned to his first love, drama, but this time encountered creative defeat. Wilder did complete two major plays after World War II,
The Matchmaker
(1954) and
The Alcestiad
(1955), but both works had their taproots in the 1930s.
The Matchmaker
was a touch-up job on his unsuccessful
The Merchant of Yonkers
(1939) and
The Alcestiad
was a recovery of a play he had also conceived and worked on in the prewar era. In contrast, he failed at writing a significant “new” piece of theater after the war.

Wilder kept plenty busy in the 1950s on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean as teacher, lecturer, cultural attaché without portfolio, librettist, author of essays, letter writer, obliging friend, and manager of his fame, to start a long list of how he occupied his time. He was
always
busy, but always frustrated that he could not bring off theater, his
own
theater. “My days fritter away in that occupying business of being obliging and agreeable,” he wrote his older brother Amos in 1958, in words that can stand as an epitaph for the period 1949–1962.

In 1956, seeking to regain his dramatic footing, Wilder began writing a series of short plays for the arena stage, or theater in the round. The project grew into the ambitious attempt to write two cycles of plays depicting the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Ages of Man that Wilder came to view as an artistic summing up, and he was so quoted in the press. “It reflects the tendency of the mature artist in all ages to forge a definitive statement of his crystallized philosophy,” he told
New York Times
reporter Arthur Gelb in a story carried on page one of that paper's edition of November 5, 1961. Three of the plays had a successful Off-Broadway run in 1962, but the rest of the story proved another theatrical defeat; during his lifetime he completed and released only six of the projected fourteen plays and withdrew two of these after a single performance.

By the late fall of 1962, in his letters to Isabel, Wilder suddenly ceased mentioning his Sins and Ages—or anything about drama. What was he doing with his time? His March 10, 1963 letter sounded a drum roll:

True to his promise, a week later he reported he had in hand perhaps ninety pages of a new novel. He described it as “
Little Women
being mulled over by Dostoevsky,” adding that a boardinghouse run by a “family, reduced and ostracized” figured in the story; that it was set in a mining town in Southern Illinois around 1902; and that it dealt with “how a great love causes havoc (the motto of the book could be ‘nothing too much'), how gifts descend in family lines making for good, making for ill, and demanding victims.” He added that “the action jumps about in time,” yielding a form that he thought was “just original enough to seem fresh; it's not really like usual novels.” Finally, he had this to say about the likelihood that he would see this project through:

The news of a new novel in the works, already ninety pages along in Wilder's small, cramped handwriting was a
big
surprise on the home front because fiction was an art form Wilder seemed to have abandoned. To understand where
The Eighth Day
fits into his life as a writer, a few words are in order about the record Wilder, the novelist, brought with him to Douglas. He first gained international fame for the three short novels published between 1926 and 1930:
The Cabala
(1926, 43,000 words),
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1927, 33,000 words), and
The Woman of Andros
(1930, 23,000 words). Not only did each of these books fall below a 60,000-word upper-limit for a short novel, but as the diminishing word counts illustrate, they reveal an author heading straight for those more economical forms of fiction, the novella and the short story. It is no surprise that Wilder spoke in this period about his growing “habit of compression” and even wondered “whether I shall ever be able to write a long novel,” as he put it in Chicago's influential Marshall Field & Company publication in 1930. (Department stores were second to bookstores as retail outlets for fiction in the 1920s.)

Wilder broke out of his word-count downward spiral in 1935 with his next novel, the 54,000-word bestseller
Heaven's My Destination
, his first work above the 50,000-word bar. But that same year he took a highly publicized pledge against writing more fiction—seemingly forever—and committed himself wholly to drama. He cited as grounds his belief that the “omniscient voice” of the novelist was increasingly alien to the modern temper, and that the novel, as a result, was losing vitality as a literary form. The case was stated this way in the
New York Sun
in October 1935:

As noted earlier, Wilder kept that pledge, and went to the top of the world as dramatist during the 1930s and early 1940s. He did, however, break his pledge in 1948 with
The Ides of March
, his sixth novel and, for Wilder, a mountain of a book at 87,000 words. But while
The Ides
certainly feels like a novel in the hand and has been sold, reviewed, and catalogued ever since as a novel, its author himself preferred to describe it with the highly dramatic term “fantasia.” Moreover, he celebrated its epistolary style, its construction entirely of documents assumed to be authentic—fragments of letters, diaries, directives—maintaining that this method permitted him to continue to dispense with the fictional narrator, that omniscient voice he still abhorred.

If, then, Wilder broke his Fiction Pledge with
Ides
, he did so by sneaking into the House of Fiction through the stage door, to a special room where nothing stood between the novel's text and the reader but “pure action.” In any case, like
Heaven's My Destination
in the decade before,
The Ides of March
did not lead Wilder to write more fiction of his own. Instead, he practiced this art in a “subsidiary” fashion, as teacher and as student of other novelists, particularly of aspects of the American character found in the work of American classic authors, the subject of lectures he gave in Germany in 1948, and later, the lectures and journal passages he wrote as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1950–1951, and still later in speeches and talks with students in this country and abroad, especially in Germany. In fact, there would be no more of his own fiction until 1963, when Wilder wrote to Isabel about his new “baby”—and the news came as a
big
surprise.

Another big surprise lay ahead—the time it would take Wilder to complete his new novel. Previously he had needed no more than eighteen months in straight time, and sometimes less, to write a novel. (
The Ides of March
, for example, had taken only twelve months' work.) Given his track record and the speed with which he was working in Douglas, Wilder had every reason to believe he was right when he told his niece in July 1963, “I've about finished a novel,” and his dramatic agent in November, “My novel (not announced yet) is approaching its final draft.”

With his project seemingly well in hand, and now eager for greenery and the sight of water, he left Douglas forever in late November 1963. He had to return to civilization in any case to attend a White House ceremony where he would receive from President Lyndon B. Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom that President John F. Kennedy had conferred before his death. But soon, as he talked about his book-in-progress, the metaphors about birth and babies quickly gave way to more general descriptors: To close New Haven friends he wrote in July 1965, more than a year after leaving Douglas and still a year shy of completing the book, “Never did I set out on so long a venture before.”

What happened to Wilder and his novel after Douglas? In brief, he found that what he wanted to say could not be contained within the dimensions of the kind of novel he had always written. He wrote to Isabel in April 1964 from Villefranche in southern France that he had come to see that “I've been wrong in my ‘attack' on my book. I've been aiming for my accustomed compression. But I see now that all these life-stories and the ideas that play around them ask me to loosen up—So it will be quite a long book—but no pudding, no wasted words.” It was another bellwether of a new Wilder record for length in-the-works that his reading in this period featured Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Dickens, and such works as the great Japanese epic
The Tale of Genji
, books that treated “life-stories” and “ideas” without “compression.”

As the foreign address of this letter suggests, Wilder had reverted to type as far as locations for his writing were concerned. Now, as he had for nearly four decades, he sought out watering holes (hotel rooms) in Europe and the Eastern United States and ports in between served by his transatlantic steamship of choice (cabin with porthole, please). The following communities were among the way-stations in the creation of the book between 1964 and 1966. He visited most of these places at least twice in a three-year period which included four transatlantic crossings on four different Italian Line ships. In Europe he wrote in Milan, St. Moritz, Rapallo, Nice, Zurich, Genoa, and Cannes. He worked on the novel in Canada and on the offshore island, Curaçao. In the United States, Lido Beach–Sarasota and St. Petersburg, Florida; Stockbridge and Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts; and Newport, Rhode Island played key roles. Because of medical needs, he spent long weeks of two summers at his home in Hamden, although he often stayed overnight at New Haven's landmark Hotel Taft when Isabel was away, there being concern that an empty house was more than Thornton Wilder could handle safely on his own. It is appropriate, given Wilder's propensity for writing on the run, that he signed off on the book's proofs from the Hotel Europa in Innsbruck, Austria, on November 28, 1966, one month shy of four full-time years of effort on the project, or three times his usual modus operandi.

On March 29, 1967, Thornton Wilder's sixth novel came marching through the front door of the House of Fiction, flags waving, bands playing, Book-of-the-Month Club main selection, special limited boxed edition, 435 pages and 141,000 words in all, and published simultaneously in England. There is no sure thing in the world of publishing. But
The Eighth Day
, which Wilder could be caught calling his first “real novel,” was as close to predictable publishing gold as it gets. Here was the first novel in nearly two decades by the man whose
Our Town
was all but inscribed on the doors of every school in America, and whose
Bridge of San Luis Rey
had long been a staple on required reading lists. Wilder was a writer, moreover, who had received the nation's first National Medal for Literature in a White House ceremony only two years before. In the current glamour department, his fame was burnished still more by his association with a new national hero, that lovable busybody Dolly Gallagher Levi, aka Carol Channing in
Hello, Dolly!

The Eighth Day
hit the
New York Times
bestseller list in its second week of publication and stayed there for another twenty-six, twenty-two of them ranked third or higher, and picked up the 1968 National Book Award. This auspicious launch laid the foundation for a reception that carried the novel through three subsequent paperback editions and a total run of some two million copies by the time it fell out of print in the United States in 1992, as well as an appearance in seventeen foreign language editions, of which the German, Finnish, and Italian were the first and, in this new century, Estonian, Greek, and Romanian the most recent. That Hollywood has nibbled at the book five times suggests that at the very least, Wilder's Coaltown, Illinois, may someday make it to the screen, as has now happened three times to
The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Literary lightning seldom strikes the same author twice. No Wilder novel could ever surpass the staggering popular and critical success of his second book,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1927), one of the great publishing events in twentieth-century American literary history. But
The Eighth Day
, which stands second to
The Bridge
in copies sold and dollars earned, is a no less remarkable story, especially when it is remembered that the author was just shy of seventy when the novel was published.