The Eighth Day

 

For Isabel Wilder

DEDICATION

FOREWORD BY JOHN UPDIKE

PROLOGUE

I “THE ELMS” 1885–1905

II
ILLINOIS TO CHILE
1902–1905

III
CHICAGO
1902–1905

IV
HOBOKEN
,
NEW JERSEY
1883

V “ST. KITTS” 1880–1905

VI
COALTOWN
,
ILLINOIS
,
CHRISTMAS
, 1905

AFTERWORD BY TAPPAN WILDER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BACK ADS

ALSO BY THORNTON WILDER

CREDITS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

The Eighth Day
was published in late March of 1967, three weeks before Thornton Wilder's seventieth birthday. Reviews were mixed, from Edmund Wilson's calling it “the best thing he ever wrote” to Edith Oliver's judgment, in
The New Yorker
, that “None of the characters, major or minor, is essentially credible to the reader” and Stanley Kaufmann's, in
The New Republic
, that “we have—from a man who has always meant well—a book that means nothing.” Nevertheless, Wilder's first novel in nearly twenty years had Book-of-the-Month endorsement, spent twenty-five weeks on the bestseller list, and won the 1968 National Book Award. I was one of the judges, much the youngest; the other two were Granville Hicks and Josephine Herbst. Hicks and I wanted the award to go to Wilder; Herbst gracefully acceded, and my two senior colleagues asked me to write the citation. On the spot I scratched it off:

Having just reread, thirty-five years later,
The Eighth Day
, I am only slightly disposed to quarrel with this rash summary. The “coming to birth” and “chase of Providence” seemed muted the second time around, with a louder emphasis on the misery and muddle of the human condition. “Clean gay” are not the words with which I would now characterize the prose, though there is considerable gaiety in the narration's swift onward flow, its sudden pools of rumination and opinionizing, its pleasure in its own inventions, the impish leaps in time that telegraph crucial plot developments so quickly we can scarcely believe our eyes, and the globe-spanning nimbleness and cosmic lift-off of it all.

Wilder was the product of a pious (though progressive and cultured) Protestant household and Christian educational institutions; he kept religion's bias—its basic gaiety—while leaving the dogmas behind. His comedies skate on the skin of the void. If not a theist like Teilhard de Chardin and Kierkegaard, whom he admired and drew upon, he declined to write off the universe as a bad job. His Caesar in
The Ides of March
(1948) writes a friend that he is not certain “that in no corner of my being there lingers the recognition that there is a possibility of a mind in and behind the universe which influences our minds and shapes our actions”; in a later letter he confesses, “Yet even in my last bitterness I cannot disavow the memory of bliss. Life, life has this mystery that we dare not say the last word about it, that it is good or bad, that it is senseless, or that it is ordered.” In Wilder's personal journal, on August 14, 1955, he chastised himself for his unexpungeable religiosity:

As late as 1968, he had not made up his mind; he wrote to an inquirer who had asked what his philosophy was, “I'm optimist and pessimist and religious and non-religious. I try 'em out for size. I'm tossed from pole to pole. I'm an awful wobbler.” Wobbling may be the way most people get through life, but it doesn't win intellectual friends; literary critics who could accept Roman Catholicism and high Anglicanism and Communism as counters in a desperate game of twentieth-century commitment had little patience for Wilder's God-tinged half-optimism. He was dismissed as sentimental when he was being realistic, in the skeptical yet hopeful American style.

The Eighth Day
revisits and extends the small-town world of
Our Town
(1938), the stark and dreamy drama which turns out to be one of the most enduring and beloved of American plays. The play and the novel share provincial location (southern New Hampshire, southern Illinois), two households with romantically entwined offspring, an intervening village explainer (the Stage Manager, the nameless narrator), and a brooding sense of cosmic import within ordinary human events. The Stage Manager states:

Both works are located in turn-of-the-century, pre-automobile America, when Wilder was a very small child; the young people of these dramas are almost a generation older than he. Nor did he experience a settled small-town upbringing. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, where his father, Amos Wilder, ran a financially challenged newspaper, he was moved before his ninth birthday to Hong Kong; his father had managed, through his Yale friend William Howard Taft, to secure President Theodore Roosevelt's appointment as consul general there. Before the year was out, Isabella Wilder took her four children back to the United States—to Berkeley, California, where they lived until late 1910, when they again sailed across the Pacific to rejoin the head of the household, who had been promoted to the consulship in Shanghai. Thornton was placed in the China Inland Mission Boys and Girls School four hundred fifty miles to the north. There Thornton learned Latin and loneliness and the look of human misery; China was in the throes of Sun Yat-sen's revolution. More dispersals followed: Mrs. Wilder, now the mother of five, took the two youngest children, both daughters, to join her sister in Florence, and at the age of fifteen Thornton joined his older brother, Amos, at the Thacher School in California's Ojai Valley. In its sporty, outdoor atmosphere he first tasted the joys of participating in organized theatrics, though his father forbade him from taking the female role of Lady Bracknell in
The Importance of Being Earnest.
But then his mother returned from Italy and Thornton was enrolled in Berkeley High School, from which he graduated in 1915, going on to two years at Oberlin and then to Yale, from which, after eight wartime months in the Coast Guard Artillery Corps, he graduated in 1920. He proceeded to a year at the American Academy in Rome, studying Latin and archeology and gathering the impressions for his first novel,
The Cabala
(1926). So scattered an upbringing provided the model, we can conjecture, not only for the diaspora of
The Eighth Day's
Ashley family, with its absentee father and withdrawn mother, but for the peripatetic life that the adult Wilder, once he was affluent and widely acquainted, pursued, lugging his manuscripts and fitful inspirations from one hotel room to another.

He was a gregarious man, fond of talk and drink and late hours, with a rapacious and whimsical intellectual curiosity: he devoted hundreds of hours to his exegesis of
Finnegans Wake
and his dating of the hundreds of plays by the Spaniard Lope de Vega. Of the American writers his age, a formidable group including Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos, he was much the most erudite and academically inclined, teaching French at the Lawrenceville School from 1921 to 1928 and English at the University of Chicago from 1930 to 1936. In 1950 he undertook to deliver the Norton Lectures, a series of six, at Harvard, and found himself so enmeshed in other duties, academic and social, that he broke down in March and never did complete the series, though he had flooded his journals with enough vigorous thoughts on the American classics to flesh out twenty lectures. A play called
The Emporium
similarly stalled. Another, long in the works, called
The Alcestiad
, conspicuously flopped in Edinburgh. Insomnia, honors, unrealized operatic projects, relentless travel: at the age of sixty-five, recognizing that he was in danger of frittering his talent away in busy-ness, Wilder announced a retreat to the Southwest, where, he told the
New York Times
, he would live “without neckties, without shoelaces and without cultivated conversation.” His car broke down in Douglas, Arizona, and there he stayed, first in a hotel and then in a bachelor apartment. In nine months he wrote his sister Isabel that he had ninety pages of a novel, a long family saga, an adventure story, “as though
Little Women
were being mulled over by Dostoevsky.” It was tentatively called
Anthracite
, after its fictional Illinois town, and then
Make Straight in the Desert
, after a quote from Isaiah, and finally
The Eighth Day.
He left Arizona with the novel unfinished, his labors on it were sandwiched into many trips—to Nice and Cannes, to the Netherlands Antilles, to the White House to accept the first National Medal for Literature, to Casablanca, and so on; in late 1965 he wrote his sister, “All I need is a hotel room. It looks as if I may be able to finish the book by January, but not the last finished touches.” One can suspect that it might have been a more unified book if he had stayed at his desk in Connecticut, but writing on the run had often been Wilder's way; distraction and stimulation were close kin. As a child he had been chastised for “jumpiness,” and as a well-off bachelor at ease in the major languages of Europe, he confessed to “a mania for constant change.” Composed in many locales, the novel offers a parade of persuasively carefully realized settings: aside from Coaltown there are Chicago, Hoboken, Andean Chile, the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, with quick trips to Iowa, New Orleans, Russia, and upstate New York. Wilder, who in
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
(1936) had invented a persuasive Peru from whole cloth, played upon the world's map as on the keyboard of a clavier.

His evocation of Coaltown, set forth in the Prologue with the firmness of a hand that has penned many stage directions, is memorably emblematic: a town built between two tall bluffs, so it never sees a dawn or sunset, further darkened by the dust of its coal mines, strung out along “an unhappy stream, the Kangaheela,” with the two notable homes, the Ashleys' and the Lansings', at either end. In the plot's throng of incidents and images, some stand out as especially poetic and moving—written, as it were, in warmer ink. The first chapter, “The Elms,” reminiscent of
Little Women
, in which Sophia alone and then her sisters and mother get themselves together to create a boardinghouse on the ruins of their fortune and reputation, combines, as the isolated family's tiny triumphs mount, the chirpiness and speed of stage action with a real sense of social humiliation and economic peril; Wilder must have dipped back into his childhood memories of insecurity, as his family fled debt for the strangeness of China. The heroic Sophia, a mere fourteen, and destined for her own breakdown, alone of the Ashleys seems fully human, without the rather cool imperviousness of the others. The savage dialogue, late in the book, of the ailing Breckinridge Lansing with his long-suffering wife, also bares a warm vein of intimacy both cruel and weary; we can taste the marriage. Wilder usually, even in the sketchy
Our Town
, places his venues on a geological base, the earth felt in its dwarfing antiquity and grudging usefulness; the mines of
The Eighth Day
function as magnificent images of human endeavor pitted against dark and adamant matter, exposed to view when the abandoned mines collapse after heavy rains: