Word: wildered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Small as a gnome, now white-haired, Miró lives and looks, or tries to look, like a conventional bourgeois (even in his Paris days when his friends were Picasso and the wilder Dadaists, he was always the one in the sober suit and tie). He is in search of no publicity at all; he has more commissions than he can handle, more monographs on his work than he can count, more requests for interviews than he cares to consider...
That is where Wilder turns up this time, in the guise of his title character, 29-year-old Theophilus North. Like Wilder, the young North (who remembers his stories in extreme old age) is an escapee from a boyhood variously spent in China, California and Wisconsin, a classics scholar, a master of many languages, an ex-prep schoolteacher and Yaleman. He is also an infernal meddler in other people's business, more or less in the spirit (much diminished) of Jesus, Socrates and George Brush, Wilder's insufferably virtuous hero in Heaven 's My Destination...
...should be put off by these proceedings or troubled by their gimmickry and lack of realism. In The Eighth Day, the prizewinning novel that Wilder published in 1967, he has a character say: "It is the duty of old men to lie to the young. Let these encounter their own disillusions. We strengthen our souls, when young, on hope; the strength we acquire enables us later to endure despair as a Roman should...
...recent years Wilder, who is 76, has been in and out of hospitals, sadly ailing. Young Theophilus North, similarly, remembers that when he came to Newport after quitting a deadly teaching job, it was like release from a hospital after a long illness. "One slowly learns to walk again, and wonderingly one raises his head." At the start, he says, he had lost his sense of joy and play. He was "cynical and almost bereft of sympathy for any other human being." When the book ends, with all those preposterous tangles easily, magically, straightened out, Theophilus is restored to affection...
Newport is an island. Theophilus North is Wilder's Tempest, a mock world, a playful world, made safe and orderly by kindly meddling. It would take a Caliban or a young curmudgeon to complain that it is a tempest in a teapot...