PROFILE

Thoraton Wilder likes to get up early. "I'm a little late," he apologized the other morning about 7:40. "Usually like to be rolling at 6:30." There were only two small clusters of people in the Dunster dining room, and there were still oblong patches of sunlight on the tables at one end.

"Sometimes I miss breakfast here entirely because it doesn't open until 7:30 ... so I stroll up to the Square for something to eat ... have to eat something in your alimentary canal to start off the day, y' know, even if it's only a biscuit."

Biscuits and alimentary canals brought him to a discussion of sleep and conditioning. Once a Yale cross-country man, Wilder now limits his training to morning strolls, and afternoon naps. Walking is still his favorite exercise, and he has taken walking trips all over the world. Finding a companion seems to have been his chief trouble: "When I describe a trip to my friends they're all for it" ... emphasis from a waggling forefinger ... "but when it gets right down to it they say, 'Why we could make that in an hour on the train."

Wilder stoked himself with scrambled eggs and his eager listeners sat back for a moment. One of them edged forward again, fork in air, and asked, "What are you doing now, Mr. Wilder?"

"I'm working on two of my latest loves," the master said in a quick, clipped speech which became occasionally inaudible. "One is Spanish literature, specifically Lope de Vega." In part, this Spanish literature study will be background for Wilder's half of Humanities 2. He likes to spend hours in Widener developing minute studies, and keeps a journal as a record of his fluctuating scholarly interests.

Occasionally he digs up something previously untouched and writes a paper on it, as he intends to do with his "other love," musical symbolism in Palestrina. "Sometimes I think these projects are smokescreens thrown up by the subconscious ... It's as if the subconscious were working on something and didn't want you to look at it until it was through."

He tore his last piece of toast in half and began again:

"Teaching is sort of a substitute for writing." (Wilder taught at Lawrenceville and the University of Chicago). "You can get wrapped up in it, but somehow, in the long run, it isn't the same feeling."

The author-playwright's official status here is Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. But he gave his own definition as he tucked his Trib under his arm and picked up his tray.

"I guess I'm just a loafer," he smiled, "with never an idle moment."