The Eighth Day

by Thornton Wilder

  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:

  Mr. Wilder believes that the novel is declining as an artistic medium, and that the drama will become predominant as the new vehicle to succeed the narrative form. He wants to write plays and has been writing them all his life, then tearing them up. “Drama is pure action without editorial comment and is closest to life, since life itself is action,” he declared.

  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.

  The work’s critical success was a partial surprise. The country was becoming unglued over urban race riots and the Vietnam War in 1967, and books exploring often savage emotions—Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, for instance—were much of the moment. Clifton Fadiman observed in the Book-of-the-Month Club News that readers schooled in the work of Norman Mailer, James Jones, and John Barth might find Wilder’s characters “so un-neurotic” that they might have “a little trouble” adjusting. Fadiman added pointedly, “I suppose many critics and readers, naturally influenced by the bleakness and blackness of our time, will object to The Eighth Day on the ground that it presupposes faith in the future of the human race.” (The B.O.M.C. publication also contained a photograph of Wilder with Carol Channing in full “Dolly” regalia.)

  For two reasons, however, The Eighth Day’s critical record has long been categorized as “mixed.” First, the book did in fact receive more mixed notices than any other Wilder novel. But more important, this saga of two families from Coaltown caught damning notices, several at influential addresses, among them The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Time magazine, and the New York Times (Sunday edition).

  In general, negative critics attacked the novel’s story, style, and sermons or philosophy. Words such as “dull,” “shallow,” “verbose,” “contrived,” “preachy,” and “pedantic” catch the spirit of what critics disliked about the book. Lines from two pieces suggest the range of critical unhappiness: “Wilder’s didacticism is, in its way, as innocent and as uninteresting as the ignorance of the characters he has created.” [New York Daily News Record] “Wherever the narrative demands confrontation, the author turns remote, reverts to brief explorations of life’s enduring verities; and the reader’s deprived of vital particulars.” [Time] Finally there was Stanley Kauffmann’s famously ugly dismissal of The Eighth Day in The New Republic as “sophomoric,” “shockingly and unredeemingly bad,” and “a book that means nothing.”

  But the negative views in the country and throughout the English-speaking world were greatly in the minority. Perhaps no one put the pleasure of the moment as dramatically as the critic of the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald: “It is rather as though a monument—one of those august figures in bronze, staring at some far place—were to climb down from its pedestal and begin to speak.” Newspapers and magazines were full of happy notices praising the story as a “rattling good yarn,” as one reviewer put it. Words that capture the views on this side of the critical fence include “beautiful,” “glowing,” “classic,” “luminous,” “moving,” “absorbing,” and “full of wisdom”—a term typically tied to a special appreciation for Wilder’s exploration of good and evil, faith and love.

  Much was made of Wilder’s deployment of aphorisms and irony, often with reference to Dr. Gillies’s oration on the first day of the new century, and many a piece quoted the author’s suggestion that “It is the duty of old men to lie to the young.” “[The novel] ranges over a vast and varied tableau with a self-confident ease that makes The Eighth Day a work of great distinction,” noted the critic at The Spectator of London. The reviewer at The Christian Science Monitor called Wilder’s novel “a major work of the imagination” in which “he has raised the ultimate questions and sent them whirling their deep spirals with a wit and intelligence no other American novelist of the moment can match.”

  That Wilder had offered a summing up in the novel (what he had failed to do earlier with his Sins and Ages, of course), was also clear to many critics, and, depending on space and knowledge, some sought to place his book in the larger context of his work in drama as well as fiction. Seasoned critics such as Malcolm Cowley and Granville Hicks, who knew the record well, did so with finesse in prominent publications. Now and then a voice would pick up on recurrent themes in Wilder’s work: The question in The Bridge of San Luis Rey of whether there is a “plan” to human life; in Heaven’s My Destination, Wilder’s experience and his fascination with America as “catalyst of a new life rising from old cultures.” The critic in the Flint, Michigan Journal found a parallel to a theme in The Woman of Andros: “The most exhausting of all our adventures is that journey down the long corridors of the mind to the last halls where belief is enthroned.” But more often than not, commentators did not venture much beyond the way Harper & Row publicists positioned the book in ads and in the dust jacket copy, namely tying the story to Wilder’s two familiar Pulitzer Prize—winning dramas:

  As Our Town—each individual so singular, so actual—stands for all towns, and The Skin of Our Teeth encompasses with miraculous ease the whole life-span of the species, The Eighth Day moves back and forth through time and space, easing the brilliant figures of Ashleys and Lansings into the vast tapestry that is human history.

  Finally, even this brief glimpse of the critical record must include examples of other large claims made for the book at the time: “A work that Dickens or Dostoevsky would have been proud to have written.” (Denver Rocky Mountain News) “It ends with the most amazing final paragraph of modern literature.” (Asheville Citizen Times) “He has taken a calculated risk with few parallels in literary history and he has won.” (Chicago Tribune) “No resemblance to any other novel in the past 100 years.” (Washington Post) “A well told story is not of an age—but for all times.” (Dallas Times Herald)

  Will The Eighth Day someday join Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey as a classic, “a story for all times?” Worthy of note is that over the years students in this country and abroad, in a symposium here and an essay there, have kept the light on for a novel they celebrate as a work of epic proportions. In fact, Wilder poured everything he knew about human nature and himself and his society into his American epic.

  What The Eighth Day meant for Thornton Wilder, author, is no secret. He went to Douglas, Arizona as a playwright and came home as a novelist. He tried his hand at drama once again, but returned quickly to fiction, the form that now satisfied his drive to tell stories. And to show that the lesson he learned about himself in Douglas was well and truly learned, Wilder needed only twelve months to write Theophilus North, his second largest novel at 133,000 words, and a bestseller for twenty-one weeks. It was published in 1973 when he was only seventy-six years old.

  At Wilder’s death two years later, a new novel was in the works. From its surviving fragments we know that, like The Eighth Day and Theophilus North, it would have been full of erudition, wit, and irony. And it would have addressed questions about the nature of life in a lively and lengthy way.

  —TAPPAN WILDER

  Chevy Chase, Maryland

  READINGS

  THE LEAD ACTORS

  Wilder’s plan to retire to Arizona as soon as possible was on the public record when he and his sister Isabel departed for Europe on February 13, 1962, to attend the world premiere of the opera based on his play The Alcestiad, for which he contrib
uted the libretto. In a column entitled “Thornton Wilder, at 65, Is Full of Energy, Enthusiasm and a Thirst for Learning,” New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson wrote, “Mr. Wilder departs for Germany by ship today. That’s the wrong way to get to Arizona.” Wilder dedicated the novel conceived in Arizona to Isabel.

  ON TO PATAGONIA: DETAILS FROM WEST GERMANY

  Wilder was only too glad to tell the world his plans. In addition to the March 3 AP wire story from Frankfurt cited above, New York Times reporter Flora Lewis caught up with the quotable Wilder in April in the bar of the Park Hotel in Bad Homburg. The Lewis interview, from which this excerpt is taken, appeared in the New York Times Magazine on April 15, 1962.

  To save time, Wilder has a plan for what he calls a “loafer’s life” in the small Arizona town of Patagonia. The name of the place conveys the dream he has of it. “I will live in one of those ugly old frame houses,” he said, “with a rocking chair on the porch—a life without neckties, or shoelaces, or telephones.”

  He needs about two and a half years of idleness, he feels, to recharge the batteries whose energy is drawn upon by a lifetime of accumulation of friends and obligations. And yet, when he speaks of Patagonia, it begins to sound as though a quiet town near the Mexican border were about to discover a volcanic activity in its midst.

  “Of course,” Wilder says, “I’ll go down to the Post Office, the A & P, and so on, so I can become a part of the place and not be pointed out as an eccentric. And I’ll drive up to Tucson to arrange for books from the university library because I have a lifetime habit of compulsive reading. . . . ?

  Some time later, Wilder adds that he hopes the house he finds is near the desert scrub. He plans to put out a saucer of milk every day to attract rattlesnakes and especially their young. Everything that can be studied about animals as groups is virtually achieved, he said. . . . ?