The Eighth Day (61 page)

(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.”

C
ONSTRUCTING
H
IS
S
TORY

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.

These two Wilder letters about
The Eighth Day
, both written early in its published history, address two dramatically different audiences.

“D
EAR
C
ASS
”

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

“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.”

[p.3]. . . ? also of Coaltown.
^*

“Most of the place-names are imaginary. I have never been in Southern Illinois.”