Thornton Wilder (93 page)

 

HE WAS
seventy on April 17, 1967. (“You know how it is: you're twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decision; then whissh! You're seventy,” the Stage Manager says in
Our Town.
) Thornton, Isabel, and Janet celebrated what they planned to be a quiet, private birthday in Hamden. He had tried not to draw attention to his upcoming birthday milestone, but the word got out in Germany, and “the telegraph boys of New Haven kept arriving in relays—cables from everybody, from the President of the Republic—through the university presidents, the directors of theatres—down to . . . the former bar maid at the Mimosa Bar in Baden-Baden.” He wrote that she was the

 

only bar maid I ever knew who was undergoing a psychoanalysis. She got it free, I think, because she was so beautiful. She came, as my guest to the opening of the opera Die Alkestiade in Frankfurt am Main, and attended all the official junkets that surround such an occasion—much to the consternation of Louise Talma, Isabel Wilder, Inge Borkh, the Mayor and the Operdirektor. I don't intend to cause pain in life,—but things just happen to come out that way.
⁴⁷

 

Wilder drove to Edgartown the day after his birthday in a rare April snow- and hailstorm, leaving Isabel to cope with the “bedlam” at home on Deepwood Drive—“the phone-calls, visitors, strangers, the enormous mail resulting from the combined novel-publication and birthday (interviewers, photographers, TV proposals, cakes baked by high school students, Vietnam petitions,—bedlam).”
⁴⁸

Bestseller, National Book Award winner, Book-of-the-Month Club selection—
The Eighth Day
was a magnet for attention, and a lightning rod for critics, some stridently negative, others effusively positive. The reviews in the United States and England were largely favorable, but Brooks Atkinson at the
New York Times
was disappointed in Wilder and his novel, as were Stanley Kauffmann at the
New Republic
; Benjamin DeMott, also at the
Times
; Edward Weeks at the
Atlantic
; and David J. Gordon at the
Yale Review.
Granville Hicks at the
Saturday Review
praised the book, as did David Galloway at the
Spectator
in London, Warren French at the
Kansas City Star,
Malcolm Cowley in his nationally syndicated Book Week column, Fanny Butcher in the
Chicago Tribune,
and many others in the United States and abroad. Needless to say, Clifton Fadiman, a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club editorial board, reviewed
The Eighth Day
very favorably for the
Book-of-the-Month Club
News,
and one of the enthusiastic judges who voted for the novel for the National Book Award was the young novelist John Updike.

 

OVER THE
years Wilder gave astute writing advice to many younger novelists and playwrights—advice that could apply to life as well as art. After he encouraged the young would-be novelist John Knowles, also a Yale graduate, to write about vivid memories and experience, Knowles wrote
A Separate Peace
(1960) and dedicated it to Wilder. In 1970 Wilder wrote a letter of literary advice to novelist, actor, and playwright James Leo Herlihy, who had already published two novels, first the commercially and critically successful
All Fall Down
(1960) and then
Midnight Cowboy
(1965), which would be far more successful as a movie (1969) than as a book. Herlihy was looking for a new fiction project, and Wilder wrote, “James-the-Lion, see to it [that] in every novel you write (NOVEL: a window on Life—and on all life) you touch all bases: death and despair and also the ever-renewing life-force, sex, courage, food, the family. I think you've always done that anyway, but
know that you're doing it
. Touch all bases to make a home run.”
⁴⁹
That was a glimpse of the compass guiding Wilder as he wrote
The Eighth Day,
and it would guide him in his final novel as well.

 

CHARACTERISTICALLY WILDER
did not look back for long at the literary work he had completed, for a new book was already stirring in his imagination and in experimental drafts as early as 1967. He wrote to Amy about it in the spring of 1968: “The work I've begun is a story using the background of my boyhood in China. I'm not sure yet if it'll take shape as I would want it to. It may follow a number of other projects into the wastepaper basket.”
⁵⁰

Wilder had earlier written that “our true life is in the imagination and in the memory.”
⁵¹
In 1967 he began merging memory and imagination in a manuscript he first viewed as a novel, and then alternately called a novel and an autobiography with a “ ‘controlled' fictional element.” He was every bit as innovative and unorthodox a novelist as he was a dramatist, and by 1968 he was once more experimenting energetically with a new form—this time an intentional hybrid of fiction and autobiography. His concept was to begin and end each separate episode with autobiography, but to insert fiction in the center, fusing memory and imagination. He explained his idea to Ruth Gordon in a letter on August 15, 1968. “I fancy that I'm writing everything!” he said.

 

Not autobiography—but 10 episodes from my life into each of which I introduce one fictional person. Each of these stories begins and ends with extended accounts that really happened—then enters a catalyst who precipitates on a more significant level the essence of the time and place. (An indefensible literary trick, I know.) . . . I've begun one about Gertrude Stein—and I shall do one about the boys' school in Chefoo, China, where Harry Luce and I went. It would bore me to write an autobiography without this “controlled” fictional element.
⁵²

 

By February 1969, he was in Europe again, deep into the work, with two principal characters—Theophilus and his twin brother Todger—sharing the part-fictional, part-autobiographical adventures. (Todger was one of Thornton's nicknames when he was a boy, and Theophilus was the name given to his stillborn twin.) “The book is shaping up to some very striking material,” Wilder wrote to Isabel on February 11, 1969, from St. Moritz. “I now have two WINDOWS on Yale 1917–1920.”
⁵³
He was writing for hours each day without getting tired.
⁵⁴
“I'm astonished at myself—how plenteously I've been writing. . . . I cannot understand why I am so full of beans.” Once he was aboard ship again to return to the United States, he predicted, “the light will never go out.”
⁵⁵

“Writing's been going right smartly,” Wilder wrote to Isabel from Pension Spiess in Vienna on January 19, 1970: “Theophilus surely takes to Italy and keeps getting Todger into very hot water. Terrible!”
⁵⁶
His letters to Isabel that winter gave serial updates on the adventures of Theophilus—and his own adventures as a consequence of the writing. “Theophilus gets into danger with that man who smuggles art objects from the digs in Heraclea and now I've gone crazy in Greek vases,” he wrote from St. Moritz in February. Wilder the amateur archaeologist was so fascinated that he was buying books about Greek vase painting wherever he stopped in Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and France. He quickly developed his own “home-cooked theories about the pots.”
⁵⁷
“I'd go crazy, if I weren't pursuing some hobby—absorbing, totally occupying train of inquiry,” he wrote to a friend. “At present it's Greek Vase-painting. I've lived 72 and 10/12 years without giving it a thought. For something I'm writing I needed just a small bit of knowledge about it. . . . Just enough to make a bit of literary magic about it. . . . Every hobby is also an exploration, a constructive question-answering journey of my own.”
⁵⁸

By March 1970, in Cannes, he was absorbed in writing a chapter he called “SS
Independenza,
” about his first trip to Italy–that enthralling, life-changing, journey abroad fifty years earlier. He outlined the book's current status for Isabel: It began with a long chapter on Chefoo, which he had written in 1968 and had rewritten in a “whole new draft” in February 1969 in St. Moritz, to strengthen “the underpinnings.”
⁵⁹
(“I think I'm writing a short novel about the China I knew as a boy,” he had told Gordon and Kanin at the outset of his new endeavor. “Clergymen's children are supposed to be rascals,—well you can imagine what
missionaries'
children are!”)
⁶⁰
This chapter on Chefoo would be followed by a long chapter on Oberlin, but he was having a “terrible time” with it.
⁶¹

He had almost finished the “Rome 1920–21” chapter in January 1969, he wrote to his niece, Dixie. “Harrowing subject matter,” he said. “I'm beginning to be embarrassed by the discovery that Todger seems to be coming to the rescue of ‘Despairful' creatures in episode after episode—anyway that's not true of ‘Salzburg.' I do at least three [chapters] in which I am only an onlooker and two in which I'm a downright nuisance.”
⁶²
Chapters on Caserta and Salzburg were “well advanced,” he reported to Isabel in March 1970.
⁶³
He was bypassing almost every other activity and depriving himself of human company so he could write the wide-ranging stories, part history, part invention, pouring out of his memory and his imagination.

 

AS HE
worked on the new novel, Wilder also had to tend to other business, closing some circles, moving ahead. He gave the editor/anthologist Whit Burnett permission to publish
The Drunken Sisters
in
This Is My Best: In the Third Quarter of the Century
—a 1970 collection of work by America's eighty-five greatest living authors. Wilder was ranked sixth on the list of the fifty top vote getters for inclusion in the book. He had served for years on the MacDowell Colony board; had received the first Edward MacDowell Award in 1960; had found escape, shelter, and companionship at MacDowell; and had written there productively for years. He was invited in 1969 or 1970 to work at MacDowell in an apartment-studio apparently designed for “senior citizens,” he wrote to Isabel, but he declined. “Often summers I've fallen a-dreaming about the ‘sea-blue hills of Peterborough' (Elinor Wylie), but I think I'm too old to take the table-life—the quasi-happy young composers and painters,” he wrote. “But, oh, those hours in the studio, ‘the world forgetting; by the world forgot.' ”
⁶⁴

In 1969 Wilder was trying by long distance from Baden-Baden to arrange a donation of his manuscripts to the Beinecke Library at Yale, with Donald Gallup, its curator of American Literature, in charge of them, and Isabel and Louise Talma assisting with the transfer. Gallup and Wilder's lawyers were pressing him, trying to maximize Wilder's tax advantage for the gift. “I feel terrible imagining you and Louise (and Don) marshaling all that anxious scrupulosity on the job,” Wilder wrote from Europe. “As I cabled, throw every damn MS into the hopper: next year is time enough to consider the letters.”
⁶⁵
Fortunately for posterity, the manuscripts were not destroyed.
⁶⁶

As he moved into the final years of his life Wilder was holding on to some lifelong friendships—writing weekly letters to Robert Hutchins, who was undergoing treatment for bladder cancer; and hoping to go to the Beinecke Library at Yale to an eightieth-birthday party for Wilmarth “Lefty” Lewis, who had donated to their alma mater his vast collection of eighteenth-century books, papers, art, and artifacts focusing on the life and writings of Horace Walpole. Wilder was also endeavoring to avoid scholars and biographers, trying to discourage those who wanted to write about him—such as an English professor in a Maryland community college, to whom Wilder wrote, “I am about to be 75; I have lost most of the vision in one eye—I can only give only a few hours to reading and writing in order to spare the other eye. . . . It must be damned hard to find a thesis subject about me because I change all the time.” He had no philosophy, Wilder went on—“just some contradictory notions,” and he changed his religion “every ten years.” He had no unified technique as a novelist or as a playwright, because every novel was different from all the others, and the same was true for his plays. Besides, there was always a “veil of irony” over what he wrote, and, consequently, it was difficult to tell when he was “talking seriously” or putting words into the mouths of his characters. “Give it up,” he urged the professor, or “wait till I'm dead.” Better yet, “Work on another author.”
⁶⁷

Wilder was particularly unhappy about a biography being written by the English professor Richard H. Goldstone, scheduled to be published by Harper. Instead of writing the critical biography he had originally proposed, Goldstone began to solicit copies of Wilder's letters and to seek interviews with his friends and associates for the book ultimately published in 1975 by E. P. Dutton as
Thornton Wilder: An Intimate Portrait
. Despite the fact that the two men had known each other during World War II, Goldstone did not understand him, Wilder wrote to him in 1968:

 

I'm not tearful, I'm not self-pitying. I don't view myself tragically, I don't spend any time complaining or even looking backward. . . . Struggles? Disappointments? Just out of college I got a good job at Lawrenceville and enjoyed it. I made a resounding success with my second book. The years at Chicago were among the happiest in my life. I got a Pulitzer Prize with my first play. What friendships—Bob Hutchins, Sibyl Colefax (400 letters), Gertrude Stein, Ruth Gordon (hundreds of joyous letters, right up to this week). . . . Of course my work is foreign to you. You can't see or feel the play of irony. You have no faculty for digesting serious matters when treated with that wide range that humor confers. . . . Go pick on Dreiser or Faulkner. Leave me alone. Write about Arthur Miller.
⁶⁸