Thornton Wilder (90 page)

This was either destiny or as good a place as any—and far more private than Patagonia. He stayed for twenty months. “No phone,” he wrote. “Made my own breakfast and lunch. Closed the local bar (midnight in that State),” meaning, he said, that he stayed in the bar till it closed and “had to be cajoled out.”
⁸³
Census records of the time counted 11,925 citizens in Douglas in 1960, although Wilder wrote that there were five thousand people in that Arizona border town in 1962—three-quarters of them Mexicans who crossed the border from Agua Prieta and other villages to put their children in Arizona schools.
⁸⁴
A few ranchers lived in town, as did engineers and other workers at the Phelps Dodge Company's gigantic Copper Queen smelter two miles outside the town limits. Most Douglas citizens had no idea who Wilder was, and didn't care. They started calling him Professor—or, in some cases, “Perfesser”—and treated him as they treated everybody else.

Wilder went to the desert to finish his plays and work on some other projects, staying first in the fading grandeur of the historic Gadsden Hotel. In late summer he rented a three-room apartment on the second floor of an apartment building at 757 12th Street, and settled into one of the happiest, most productive periods of his life. He felt completely free from the push and pull of the life he had left behind. His days were his own—no appointments; no telephone calls, unless he called Isabel from a public telephone; no demands. He walked the wide streets in town to buy a newspaper, pick up his mail, shop for food. At the risk of life, limb, and eyesight, he cooked simple meals in his small kitchen, afraid all the while he'd make the oven explode. “Several times I've almost lost an eye from far-spitting fat,” he wrote to Isabel, “and that lifting hot water from one place to another.”
⁸⁵
He washed and dried drinking glasses obsessively because, he said, he had inherited from both the Wilder and the Niven sides of the family “a compulsive perfectionism. I can never
believe
that the glass is clean and dry.”
⁸⁶

For variety, meals in good restaurants, provisions, nightlife, and bars, he drove to nearby Arizona towns—Nogales, Bisbee, Tombstone, or Phoenix—and often to Tucson, 118 miles to the northeast, where he could stay at the Arizona Inn and do research in the University of Arizona library. Almost every day he took the T-Bird out for sunset drives in the “glorious desert.”
⁸⁷
He admired the “frontier” qualities of his fellow citizens—“Ready courtesy and much reserve. A real deference for women, immediately recognizable as different from big city politeness. As frontier, very church-going.”
⁸⁸
(There were, in fact, thirty-six churches in Douglas and the immediate area.) He spent his first months in his desert hermitage resting; clearing his mind; walking; driving; listening to people talk in restaurants, shops, and bars; but most of all enjoying the solitude. Sometimes he felt a “pang for friends and conversation and music,” but that abated when he took his late-afternoon drives into the desert, where the silhouettes of the Chiricahua Mountains and the fanciful shapes of cactus came to life in the drama of the sunset.
⁸⁹
Once, when he found himself longing for the sea, he drove all day to Guaymas, Mexico, on the gulf the Mexicans called El Mar de Cortés, and spent two weeks watching the waves come in to the shore.
⁹⁰

It took him three months “to blow the cobwebs of self-conscious genteeldom out of my head,” he wrote to a friend, but, finally refreshed, he eased gradually into a writing schedule. He focused on
The Seven Ages of Man
and
The Seven Deadly Sins
, the plays he had told a journalist he envisioned as a reflection of “the tendency of the mature artist in all ages to forge a definitive statement of his crystallized philosophy.”
⁹¹
In addition to the one-act-play cycles, Wilder, as usual, kept a list of ideas and works in progress in his journal. Letters to and from Isabel and their occasional telephone talks kept Wilder as connected as he wanted to be to the outside world. His “Plays for Bleecker Street” were a “sensational success” in Milan.
⁹²
Plans for a “musical
Matchmaker
”—the work in progress that would become
Hello, Dolly!
—were “coming along great.”
⁹³

Wilder was proud to hear from friends that Edward Albee had been telling interviewers that a conversation with Wilder “long ago made him turn playwright.” Albee had sent Wilder a copy of the text of
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and Wilder thought it was “fine to have a new dramatist who speaks
in his own voice
.”
⁹⁴
Later Wilder would nominate Albee for membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters, endorsing him as a “dramatist of distinguished quality, high seriousness and notable technical accomplishment” who had “fulfilled his early promise and taken his place in the first rank of American dramatists.”
⁹⁵

By December 1962 Wilder was still not able to do any sustained work. He spent some time before Christmas reflecting on the past few months. The decision to escape to the desert was not a “light one,” he wrote to Louise Talma. Instead, it “sprang from deep sources—and I've discovered that I was more shaken than I thought.” He tried to work on his projects, only to find them “powder away” in his hands. He could not finish things. He could not make commitments, especially to any schedule that involved other people. “It is above all a date-line that inhibits me,” he wrote. He hoped that “the
turn for the better
—the recovery of the full self” would occur any minute.
⁹⁶

He was chronically torn between his need to be with people and his need to be alone. “I'm getting to be a growly-smily grouching-chuckling old humbug curmudgeon,” he had written to Charlotte in 1960. “I don't hate people. I merely hate to be in groups of over four.”
⁹⁷
He was a writer with a unique and reverent grasp of the billions and billions of souls who had inhabited the universe, and a man with a growing aversion to seeing his fellow human beings in groups. He wrote to his nephew in December 1962:

 

The sense of the multitude of human souls affects every man in a different way: It renders some cynical; it frightens many; it made Wordsworth sad: me it exhilarates. I must go back and submerge myself in it from time to time or I go spiritually sluggish. What I have fled to the desert from is not the multitude but the coterie.
⁹⁸

 

In his desert retreat the Professor was alone and lonely that Christmas of 1962 but only because he chose to be. Townsfolk had invited him for Christmas dinner, but he declined. Wilder gave himself a record player for Christmas, and three records—Bach's Magnificat, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, and a Lotte Lehmann lieder recital. The music gave him great pleasure and helped him in his work. He spent Christmas in Santa Fe and Taos, wanting to see snow—as well as to see his old friends the poet Witter Bynner and British-born artist Dorothy Brett, who had lived in Taos since 1924, painting landscapes and portraits of Native Americans. There were ghosts in Taos, and Wilder and Brett reminisced about the old days, and old friends, especially Mabel Dodge Luhan, who died in August 1962 after several years of illness and senility. Tony Luhan died a few months later.
⁹⁹

 

AS HE
stepped into the new year, Wilder realized he was not “a 100% hermit.” He wrote Thew Wright that he now had a “considerable acquaintance,” but they were the “type of persons that closes the bars.”
¹⁰⁰
Whether it was all fact or mostly fancy, Wilder wrote a whimsical newsletter of Douglas “Society Notes” for Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, mainly highlighting his own activities. With an engineer named Louie and a highway patrol officer named Pete, Wilder had allegedly crossed the border into Mexico for dinner, dancing, and “smooching” at the Copa, followed by a visit to a “house of ill-fame” from which all concerned emerged with virtue intact. The Professor took flowers to Vera, a waitress, who was in the Douglas hospital for an operation. He danced with a waitress-turned-cook at Dawson's on the Lordsburg Road, helped a traveling salesman write a letter to a lawyer and judge in hopes of reducing his alimony, and listened to the life story of a woman who was wintering at the Hotel Gadsden.
¹⁰¹

Whether the events were true or imagined, they foreshadowed details that would later emerge in his last book,
Theophilus North.
Theophilus interacted with the populace of Newport just as Thornton did with the inhabitants of Douglas, mingling with people from an intriguing variety of backgrounds, listening to their life stories, dispensing advice. By February 1963, three months short of a year since his arrival in Douglas, the Professor was surrounded by local friends. In a letter to his dear friend Catherine Coffin in New Haven, he identified them with names and significant details—Louie the engineer; Rosie the hotel elevator girl; Gladys the cook at the Palm Grove; his best friend, Harry Ames, who had been going through a “terrible time,” being ousted from his Round-Up Bar and liquor store.
¹⁰²
Wilder was fascinated with his new town and his new friends, content—even happy—in this unlikely setting.

The new freedom in his personal life released him to work with new zest and energy and new material. His old projects had wilted away, he said, but he threw himself into a new one after Christmas—something entirely unexpected. He thought that his new record player helped to set things in motion—the music of Mozart and some Bach organ works. Nothing he had ever written had “advanced so fast.”
¹⁰³
This was a secret he kept entirely to himself until March 1963, when he wrote Isabel about it:

 

Well, I won't stew about any longer but come right out with it that I've written what must be 90 pages or more of a novel. I can't describe it except by suggesting it's as though
Little Women
were being mulled over by Dostoevsky. It takes place in a mining town in southern Illinois (“Anthracite”) around 1902. And there's Hoboken . . . and Tia Bates of Araquipa, Peru, transferred to Chile. . . . . and there's the opera-singer Clare Dux (Swift) . . . and Holy Rollers. . . . and how a Great Love causes havoc (the motto of the book could be “nothing too much”) and how gifts descend in family lines, making for good, making for ill, and demanding victims. You'll be astonished at how much I know about how a family, reduced and ostracized, runs a boarding house. But mostly it's about familial ties, and, oh, you'll need a handkerchief as big as a patchwork quilt. The action jumps about in time, though not as schematically as in
The Ides
. The form is just original enough to seem fresh; it's not really like usual novels.
¹⁰⁴

 

He added that between the lines there were “lots of Wilders.”
¹⁰⁵
He was liberated, rejuvenated, exhilarated. “Every new day is so exciting,” he wrote to his sister, “because I have no idea beforehand
what will come out of the fountain-pen.
”
¹⁰⁶

By mid-November 1963, still in Douglas, Wilder believed his novel was nearing its final draft. He still cooked most of his meals, still helped close the local bars, sometimes just going down for the last half hour to enjoy two highballs to help him sleep. But soon he had to head north to accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by John F. Kennedy but to be conferred after his death by Lyndon B. Johnson in December. Wilder was sorry to leave the desert. “It's done a lot for me,” he wrote to his dramatic agent, Harold Freedman. He was not yet ready to resume his life in “urban civilization,” but when he did, he told Freedman, he would “go theatre” again.
¹⁰⁷

Wilder was wrong. He would not ever “go theatre” again. He gave up his fading experiments with the one-act-play cycles for the theater-in-the-round. Although he had created Dolly Levi, he had no hand in the stunning musical transformation of
The Matchmaker
into
Hello, Dolly!—
which was a smash hit from its opening on Broadway in January 1964. Wilder was in Europe at the time, and so did not see the production for himself until May 1965. He was so pleased with it, Isabel wrote to Vivien Leigh, that one would have thought he wrote it all himself, not just the play on which the book, lyrics, music, and dances were based.
¹⁰⁸
Dolly
brought Wilder financial security to the end of his life.

Despite the playwright's best intentions and efforts, however, the novelist took over at the end of his career, and the summation of Wilder's work came not in drama but in fiction. His literary career would culminate as it had begun, with the publication of two novels. He had gone to the desert searching for himself, searching for his plays. He found something different from what he expected, something more—not only a renewal of self but an epic novel, teeming with vivid characters, intertwining plots, mystery, romance, tragedy, transcendence, pithy aphorisms, and lofty wisdom.

He called his novel
Anthracite
and
Make Straight in the Desert
before he settled on
The Eighth Day
for a title. The reference to the desert came from Isaiah 40:3: “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” This verse was “the Leit-motif in
The Eighth Day
,” Wilder told his brother.
¹⁰⁹
The title is explained in the words the town physician speaks on the eve of a new year and a new century: “Nature never sleeps. The process of life never stands still. The creation has not come to an end. . . . Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.”