The Eighth Day (62 page)

[p. [136] “Red. Red.”
^*

“I now regret the facile play on a color symbolism—of red and blue.”

“The oak tree is in the acorn.” She went on. “If Simon Bolívar had fathered a child at sixteen and died next day, the child would still be the son of the Liberator.
”
^**
“A central theme: the doctrine of the transmission of endowments of which the donor is unaware, (p. 250 and
passim
.)

[p. 178] She said that it's a lucky woman who graduates from Artemis to Aphrodite, to Hera and ends up as Athene.
*

It's sad when they get stuck in one image.
—“A theme of the book: men can only advance or recede in their type; women can change their role (or fail to.)”

[p. 213] Contact with the suffering of others does not in itself enlarge understanding. Luck must play a part.
^*

“Goethe's poem (see p. 3):
Tyche
, chance”

[Wilder planned but then abandoned a scheme for constructing his novel around elements in Goethe's poem, “Tyche,” or Greek for chance.]

[p. 212] John Ashley had begun the day singing loudly before his shaving mirror. He raised a joyful storm in the house. “Bathroom's free, little doggies! Last one to breakfast is a buffalo!”
^*

“A few aspects of John Ashley came from my father (Dr. Amos Parker Wilder, newspaper editor; later American Consul-General in Hong Kong and Shanghai) who was, however, patriarchal, severe, and moralizing. This is one of his ‘phrases' in the family (p. 414) p. 31.”

[p. 232] His characteristic movements were swift; he crossed and recrossed the city as though he had wings on his heels.
^*

“Hermes,—but I now regret these more obvious devices. It makes me uncomfortable when readers say that I use a lot of ‘symbols.' (It makes
them
uneasy.) Big symbols, yes; but not little ones.”

[p. 233] T.G. was a Nihilist.*

“An Apollo
en
décadence
.”

[P. 407] “Mr. Frazier, in every lively healthy family there is one who must pay.”
^*

“I have a sister who has been under care for many years in a sanitorium for the mentally disturbed. One summer—about 1933—I was staying at the Schloss Coblenz near Prof. Freud's villa in Grinzing. Through friends, he invited me to call. One day, I told him of my several brilliant brothers and sisters—and of this invalid sister. He replied in these words.” See also p. 265.

[Charlotte E. Wilder (1898–1980), a poet, suffered a nervous breakdown in 1941. With the exception of a few months in 1958, she remained institutionalized the rest of her life.]

[p.289] “John, sometimes I think that you're just plain ignorant
—
or rather that something was left out of you. You haven't any imagination! You haven't any!”
^*

“Epigraph to my
Heaven's My Destination
: ‘Of all the forms of genius, goodness has the longest awkward age.'”

[p. 435] There is much talk of a design in the arras. Some are certain they see it. Some see what they have been told to see. Some remember that they saw it once but have lost it. . . . ?

“These catalogues in the form of parallel sentences are often found in the works of Gertrude Stein.”

Shown here are the final handwritten and typed versions of the novel's opening lines. At the final hour, the author chooses to shrink the Ashley Case from a national to a regional story, and suggests a range of possibilities for the only possible verdict—guilty!

The back matter of this volume is constructed in large part from Thornton Wilder's words in unpublished material or publications not easy to come by. I hope readers will find that this approach brings the work and the man into view in a personal way. Those interested in further information about Thornton Wilder are referred to standard sources and to the bibliography available at www.thorntonwildersociety.org. This resource includes a special section devoted to the novel's universal themes written by students of his work in this country and abroad. Readers interested in additional background on the Wilder family are referred to Amos N. Wilder's “Thornton Wilder and His Public” (1980), an essay by the author's older brother that includes biographical information and reflection.
The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, Volume I
(1997) contains the two “Ages” and two “Sins” that Wilder permitted to be published in his lifetime, as well as two “Ages” and five “Sins” that he did not complete to his satisfaction. I have adopted the definition of a “short novel”—falling between 20,000 and 60,000 words—that Edward Weeks proposed in his influential edition of
Great Short Novels
, published in 1941 by the Literary Guild of America.

I am indebted to J. D. McClatchy, Robin Wilder, Jackson Bryer, Claudette Walsh, and the staff of Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for their support and advice in the making of this book. Penelope Niven has been of special and invaluable assistance all along the way. Olivia Gunston and Ellen Wilhite deserve thanks for helping with many a practical task. Curtis A. Foster and Scott Lehman in Douglas, James Turner in Tucson, and Newman Porter, Esq. from Phoenix helped me get a fix on the character of Douglas, Arizona, in the early 1960s. If there are errors in the Afterword, I take responsibility for them, and welcome corrections. All of us involved with this Wilder reprint series owe special thanks to John Updike for his willingness to revisit a novel he first read and judged in another century. His appreciation for Thornton Wilder and his patience with the author's nephew are now, fortunately, part of the record.

S
OURCES AND
P
ERMISSIONS

Unless otherwise noted, all excerpts quoted from unpublished sources come from Thornton Wilder's correspondence, manuscripts, and related records in the Thornton Wilder Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL) in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, or from the Wilder family's own holdings, including many of Wilder's legal and agency papers. Silent corrections in spelling and punctuation have been made when deemed appropriate. Richard Goldstone's letters are held in the Thornton Wilder Collection, Fales Manuscripts, Fales Library, New York University, and his letters to Ruth Gordon by the Garson Kanin Estate. Marvin J. Taylor's assistance at NYU and Martha J. Wilson's with the Kanin Estate are gratefully acknowledged. One previously published letter has been cited: Wilder's December 8, 1964, letter to Cass Canfield. It appears in facsimile in the latter's memoir,
Up and Down and Around: A Publisher Recollects the Time of His Life
(New York: A Harper's Magazine Press Book, 1971), 102–103.

P
UBLICATIONS

Flora Lewis's
New York Times
interview with Wilder is reprinted in Jackson R. Bryer, Ed.,
Conversations with Thornton Wilder
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 92–98. It is excerpted with the permission of Lindsey Gruson. Peter S. McGhee's interview is reprinted in this same volume, pp. 99–105. Copyright © 1965, Vineyard Gazette, Inc. Reprinted by permission. Unless otherwise noted, all rights for all published and unpublished work by Thornton Wilder are reserved by the Wilder Family LLC.

I
MAGES

Unless otherwise credited, images are taken from materials held in the Thornton Wilder Archive or by the Wilder family. The author picture by Paul Conklin, a favorite of its subject, was used in the original publication of the novel. It appears here once more with the kind permission of his widow, Ruth Merryman.

In his quiet way,
THORNTON NIVEN WILDER
was a revolutionary writer who experimented boldly with literary forms and themes, from the beginning to the end of his long career. “Every novel is different from the others,” he wrote when he was seventy-five. “The theater (ditto). . . . ? The thing I'm writing now is again totally unlike anything that preceded it.” Wilder's richly diverse settings, characters, and themes are at once specific and global. Deeply immersed in classical as well as contemporary literature, he often fused the traditional and the modern in his novels and plays, all the while exploring the cosmic in the commonplace. In a January 12, 1953, cover story,
Time
took note of Wilder's unique “interplanetary mind”—his ability to write from a vision that was at once American and universal.

A pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century letters, Wilder was a novelist and playwright whose works continue to be widely read and produced in this new century. He is the only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize for both Fiction and Drama. His second novel,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, received the Fiction award in 1928, and he won the prize twice in Drama, for
Our Town
in 1938 and
The Skin of Our Teeth
in 1943. His other novels are
The Cabala, The Woman of Andros, Heaven's My Destination, The Ides of March, The Eighth Day
, and
Theophilus North.
His other major dramas include
The Matchmaker
, which was adapted as the internationally acclaimed musical comedy
Hello, Dolly!
, and
The Alcestiad.
Among his innovative shorter plays are
The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden
and
The Long Christmas Dinner
, and two uniquely conceived series,
The Seven Ages of Man
and
The Seven Deadly Sins
, frequently performed by amateurs.