Archive for the The Bridge of San Luis Rey Category

Bridge of San Luis Rey: Final Chat

Posted in Louis Bromfield, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder on May 5, 2010 by Diablevert

Dreadful Penny: I think Wilder is able to like — I think it is possible to write a book that is not about sex. And I think Wilder does that pretty well, with this book. He does that pretty well with Our Town, too. And the criticism of it, that it just doesn’t include the whole of human experience, is perhaps a little unfair. Because what work does contain the whole of human experience? Works which are pre-occupied with sex can often ignore many other things. I think this book does talk about faith in a pretty meaningful way. I don’t think that Wilder really skirts away from the issue of sex in this book, I think it’s just beside the point. In that a lot happens offstage, or….

Diablevert: It’s not that — I don’t demand that there be boot-knocking before I give it my A++…

Dreadful Penny: “Sex or else! There must be bodices ripped on the cover!”

Diablevert: But even though it’s not a book about sex it is a book about love. Do you know what I mean? All these characters are in love one way or another. And some of it’s more familial, the love of a brother, the love of a mother and a daughter, but Uncle Pio loves the actress, even though he knows from the beginning they’re never going to get together. And granted she’s very young at the beginning of the relationship, it’s quite clear that he loves her when she’s an adult and yet that sexual issue…

Dreadful Penny: It’s never going to happen.

Diablevert: Exactly. And it’s the same with the dead twin and the actress, he’s like, this is never going to get to happen. And even if it were able to happen, even though I do have this deep love, I would give it up in order to stay tight with my brother. Do you know what I mean? It’s all about love being thwarted….it’s interesting, what do you make of the end when Pietra, the servant girl is writing the letter.

She’s writing the letter to the nun, and the letter is all about her confusion and her sense of hopelessness, like, “I’m trying to do what you want me to so here, and I’m not even sure I know what that is, and I just wish you would give me some advice, give me some sense, of how to serve you, because even if I knew—just if I knew that, then I’d be able to go on.” And that’s the turning point for the Marquesa…

Dreadful Penny: Essentially to me that letter is like a prayer. That’s the way people pray in desperation. That you pray not even for an act to happen, but you pray just for this idea of being given some kind of guidance. “If I were set an impossible task, I would do it, just give me a sense of what this task is.” Not that I’m a great pray-er, — prayer-er? Pray-er-er? — not that I’m very prayerful, but I think that that is such a good metaphor of allusion for the act of loving, the act of offering prayer. The nun is able to give what she can give but doesn’t know how to do it. The Marquesa would do anything she could do for her daughter, if her daughter would only tell her what it is. And that essential, batting your head against a wall, not knowing what thing is proper to do and running yourself ragged.

Diablevert: But what does it mean that the Marquesa, on seeing this letter and reading this letter, what she takes from that for her own like is she looks at that and says, “My daughter is never going to love me.”

Dreadful Penny: Yeah

Diablevert: And decides, like, “Okay. Fine. That’s never gonna happen.” Do you know what I mean? Like,

Dreadful Penny: Maybe she sees Pepita as a kindred spirit? Or is inspired that the girl is able to love with such passion? The girl clearly has a great maternal love, for the Abbess. And the idea that maybe the Marquesa has forgotten that children could potentially even love their parents. The idea that she’s just internalized that all kids are difficult and ungrateful, all teenagers are awful, and this idea that she’s so moved by the fact that any—that this love is possible, and gives her the idea that she could possibly redirect her energies into some font of actual, potential, not even reciprocity, but just acceptance. She’s so stonewalled, the whole time. Her daughter’s a bitch, by the way.

Diablevert: Yeah, her daughter is kind of a bitch.

Dreadful Penny: My mom sometimes makes a scene in a mall, but I’m still nice to her.

Diablevert: No, totally. Though you can make a pretty good case for her mom being a little nuts.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, she’s totally nuts.

Diablevert: But yeah, her daughter is totally a bitch.

Dreadful Penny: The letters take like two months to arrive! Is it really that aggressive?

Diablevert: Yeah. But that’s a whole nother thread we could take up….I dunno, I’m still stuck on this, I’m not sure what the meaning of it was, with all those people. It seems so sad to me, this whole idea. That upon reading [the letter], upon seeing that this exists in the world and realizing that that’s what she doesn’t have, and is never going to have, she comes to some kind of acceptance that she is never going to happen with her daughter, and that’s what’s so sad. A lot of the other people — in a way, the story of the twins is a much more hopeful story. The idea that this guy was going to go on and move on and have a different life, even though he’s so sad that his brother was no longer there, that he was going to be able to keep going—-

Dreadful Penny: I don’t know. When he has that conversation with the captain about the captain’s daughter, the captain has this line, like, “All this is is just marking time. The rest of your life, just marking time. Find something to occupy your time and don’t worry, it won’t take that long.” I thought that was really sad, and really tragic. When he leaves the inn, where the boy is, and the apparition of the girl, he sees her and she follows him everywhere. That’s pretty fucking tragic.

Diablevert: No, you’re right, I think I had forgotten a little bit of that. That is a more hollow future. But still, he dies before any of it even fucking happened, in the bridge accident. And the other one, Uncle Pio and the little kid — first of all, poor little kid. He didn’t do dick, and he died.

[Skipping another brief sidebar on sick kids and Bromfield.]

Diablevert: But for this—I mean, we ought not to overlook the simple explanation, which was that medicine was not so advanced back in the day, and a lot of people got sick and it was a much more common experience back then —

Dreadful Penny: In rural Peru.

Diablevert: Yeah, exactly, so it was pretty commonplace and perhaps didn’t seem like such a strained device, but at the same time….it’s so handy.

Dreadful Penny: It’s convenient to have a sick child?

Diablevert: Well, yeah. Because it’s so dramatic. It’s like any other life and death situation. That’s why trials continue to be described. To be sick, is to be on the precipice between life and death, and people love their kids more than anything, and so the sickness of a child is the most traumatic event ever, and that’s why it comes up again and again.

Dreadful Penny: Maybe the artistic tension in this book is, I think essentially it has a hopeful tone, but it is a pretty pessimistic take on the futility of love. And the futility of desire, and change. The tension is what keeps it going, maybe. Maybe that’s its gift, is that it’s able to be sort of beautiful and hopeful and be very complimentary of love, but also fundamentally in plot be very negative.

Diablevert: See, I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that there can be no real answer to this question. And that that’s part of the gnomic puzzle of the book. And maybe it just comes down to your temperament, how you approach the story, whether you see it as something that’s essentially life-affirming or deeply pessimistic. But it does seem to line up with this idea of having your deepest impulses to love someone else not be able to be fulfilled, and somehow coming to accept that.

Dreadful Penny: I think that’s kind of a biographical reading of the book. But.

Diablevert: Yeah…Yes. One hesitates to be too glib with that sort of thing, but it just sort of lines up very neatly.

Dreadful Penny: Maybe that’s what gives it that sort of fable, poignant quality. It quality as a fable is that it’s able to be both those things at once.

Diablevert: Well, I think oftentimes a book is the author’s argument with himself.

Dreadful Penny: I think this is a book where the author’s arguing with himself much more than in other books. The project of a Tarkington, or a Bromfeild, or a Sinclair Lewis, is very much straight ahead. Pushing the message on. Whereas I feel like this is a book where Thornton Wilder is asking himself a question that he doesn’t quite know the answer to. The book is an exploration of that.

Diablevert: Yeah, I know, totally. And one of the reasons it’s a much better book than most of the other ones that we’ve read is that it’s so much subtler. He’s a better reader of people, and he understands people a lot better, than some of the other authors we’ve dealt with. And is just much more subtle about the kinds of things he can bring in, and the kinds of nuances that he can attribute to the character’s emotions. Like with the Marquesa, he’s able to show you that she is batshit crazy and that if you actually knew her you would probably find her irritating, but yet she’s also a very sympathetic and poignant figure, and so the daughter is a total bitch, but the daughter is not wrong to be annoyed, and you can find her [ridiculous], and yet she’s very witty…

Dreadful Penny: Well, he’s also able to do that thing as a narrator that Bromfield can’t do, where Bromfield just tells you the internal thoughts of a character, whereas Wilder is more able to let events or past anecdotes, or things — it’s not that book is so much more dialogue-heavy, I don’t think it is, it’s that he’s able to use a lot of different techniques to get you inside a character’s head, and I think they’re much more mysterious, or enjoyable, and less, “I’m just reading what the narrator thinks that person is thinking,” for 100 pages.

Diablevert: Oh, I think he’s the better writer. But the fact that he’s using this more fabulous tone helps him, because he’s able to make these sort of more broad, profound statements, and it doesn’t seem — it fits in with the tone of the entire book and so it seems okay. But the other thing is that he…there is a lot of third-person omniscient stuff in here, as in Bromfield, but the other thing in Bromfield is that a lot of the interior thoughts that the characters are having is him just underlining dialogue. Do you know what I mean? Just tons of stuff you could just rip out wholesale, and have the dialogue in there, and [the reader] could pick up, like, 95 percent, of everything he’s just spent fifteen pages writing out.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

Diablevert: It’s imperative in the dialogue and you should be able to see it. One of the things, when they always talk about show-not-tell, to my mind, is that the way that works is that in real life you have to observe how people act and infer. And if you’re writing the characters and you have them set up so that people know something about them, they can infer so much for speech. That was the whole problem with Bromfield. He didn’t trust you; he thought you were a dumbass, and he had to tell you exactly what the characters were thinking.

Dreadful Penny: Which is not fair. Bromfield, history will find you to be a fucktard.

Diablevert: Yeah. Whereas Wilder — the scene with the two brothers, where the one brother is really sick and the other brother is trying to take care of him —

Dreadful Penny: He gets stabbed in the knee and dies, P.S. It didn’t seem like a very big injury to kill you.

Diablevert: Oh, no, I disagree, actually. Rural Peru back in the day? People died of that shit all the time! There was no tetanus.

Dreadful Penny: I guess so.

Diablevert: One my distant cousins died of appendicitis, and that was in the 50s. If I’d have been born like twenty years ahead, I’d have died on my ninth birthday —- no, really. My appendix ruptured.

Dreadful Penny: And they wouldn’t have been able to do anything. I’ve often thought that if I had lived in the 18th century, my asthma and chronic pneumonia as a child would have killed me. There was no amoxicillin back then.

Diablevert: Maybe. Or you could have been one of those people like in Heidi, where you were a convalescent or whatever.

Dreadful Penny: That’s true.

Diablevert: Maybe you would have died, though, because I don’t know, maybe your family wouldn’t have been wealthy enough to —

Dreadful Penny: They probably would not have been wealthy enough for a mountain retreat.

Diablevert: Yeah. More of a Secret Garden deal. You needed a Dickon.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, exactly. Who doesn’t? Who doesn’t.

Diablevert: Where were we? Wilder, Bromfield…. I lost my train of thought. That’s what happens when you bring up certain strapping Yorkshire lads.

Dreadful Penny: And now you go home now to write Secret Garden fan fic.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Yet more.

Posted in Early Autumn, Louis Bromfield, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder on May 1, 2010 by Diablevert

(ed. note: I, too, can hardly believe it, but there is yet more of our chat on Bridge. DP has voted for completism, so here’s part 4, with *gulp* more to come once I get done transcribing it.)

Diablevert: But what did you think about this idea of it being all about love being thwarted? It seemed so sad to me, that none of these people ever came close to achieving that fulfillment. And that seemed to be part of the point somehow.

Dreadful Penny: It is, it’s a very sad book. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’s tragic, because it might be too slender to be tragic, but it is. Even the characters who are left behind — the actress who enters the convent, or the daughter, who ends up sort of sad and remorseful for her scorn — there are a lot of characters in this book who end up sort of sad. But it’s not a hopeless book. It feels like a book that’s very full of hope.

Diablevert: I dunno, I think a lot of it was about all the characters accepting that they’re never going to get what they want. You know what I mean? That kind of happens to everybody. It’s like the actress’s idea…her face is ruined and she’s never going to attain that fame, and her art doesn’t mean anything to her anymore, and so she throws herself into good works, but that’s kind a limited, and a very different thing from what she had hoped to achieve. And even the nun, who had hoped to see her work carried on, is like, okay, her protégé is dead, and that’s never going to happen for her, [and she comes to accept], I’m not going to change this society permanently, but I can do this little thing that I can do, I do that the best I can and that’s it.

Dreadful Penny: And Uncle Pio has this great love for the actress, and he’s killed, and the twin, nobody gets any in this book, or you’re right, it’s all offscreen. I mean, it’s not so scared of sex as, say, the Bromfield, where people literally went batshit insane of, you know…

Diablevert: Sidebar on Bromfield: Did you ever see Cold Comfort Farm?

Dreadful Penny: Yes, I did see that movie, yes.

Diablevert: Do you know Stephen Fry’s character in the movie*?

Dreadful Penny: Yes. Yes, I do.

Diablevert: I think Bromfield might be a bit like that.

Dreadful Penny: Oh no! <She dissolves into giggles.>

Diablevert: Do you know what I mean? Because Stephen Fry’s character is very much — it’s a very good book, also, Stella Gibbons — but his character is like, “It’s not that you don’t like me, it’s that you have these tremendous hang-ups about sex, and if only I, this virile gentleman, could just get you to get over this….”

Dreadful Penny: Which is so funny because Stephen Fry, I mean, that character…

Diablevert: Oh, I know, exactly….but the whole idea of this pig-headed, blind, “God, these sheltered, hopeless, foolish, blocked people! If only they would just Embrace the Life Force!” Bromfield just struck that note for me, and I mean…the [Courant] review had a good headline, ‘Pummelling the Puritans’—

Dreadful Penny: “Pummells the Puritians….with his weiner.”

Diablevert laughs.

Dreadful Penny: Good job, Bromfield.

Diablevert: Yeeeah….

*Note: He show up 2:39 into the clip.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Chat the Third, on lyricism, meaning, and Pulitzer beatdowns

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , , , , , on April 7, 2010 by Diablevert

Dreadful Penny: I think that the Franciscan friar’s opinion only really enters into the beginning and the end of the book, and the sections that are told about the individual characters that they focus on are not really at all colored by the perceptions of the Franciscan friar. Because they’re not particularly occupied with divinity at all. To me, those bits are really sort of essentially about the unknowability of the human heart. How you can feel you know a person’s desires but they’re essentially inscrutable and you can’t really predict a person’s actions based on that.

Diablevert: That’s interesting, I’m not sure that that’s what I took from it.

Dreadful Penny: I really think that this is about that idea that there is a mystery that lives in every person, and that mystery…while you can describe the actions of their life, you can’t essentially know their motivations. And you can’t, essentially, know how they would react in a situation. You wouldn’t expect such a doting mother to give up at the last moment and turn her affections towards a servant girl.

Diablevert: Yeah.

Dreadful Penny: So on and so forth. And that all of that is cut out before they actually have a chance to change. At the moment of change in their lives they’re cut short of that. So she’s going to change and not love her daughter and instead transfer her love to the servant girl but they’re both killed in a bridge accident. You know, the son is going to move out with – what is his name?

Diablevert: Uncle Pio.

Dreadful Penny: Uncle Pio. But in that moment of change, they die. All of this is like — the twin is going to finally have a separate life from his brother. But at that moment they’re cut out from it. You can’t essentially predict the actions of the human heart, because there are all these unforeseen circumstances, and nexuses of intersection between different people — one of the things I really like about the book is how intertwined it is. I find it very pleasing when plots are neatly tied up. And I find it that way in my own writing, that I like it when things line up, and are circular, and recursive, and I like that about the book a lot. Every character is involved in each person’s life. It’s like a Where’s Waldo book.

Diablevert: Mmmm. Yeah, that’s interesting. Now I’m just sitting here thinking about that, because I’m not sure if that’s what I thought about it. I can definitely see that side to the argument, but I’m not sure if that’s what I took from the book overall.

Dreadful Penny: I guess it doesn’t have to have an over-driving theme, a message.

Diablevert: No, it doesn’t have to. But it’s interesting thing to talk about, because we both think it’s an interesting book and it has some interesting stuff in it, so it’s interesting to think about what he might be driving at or what you can take from it.

If that’s the case though, if the whole point is that people are unknowable and it’s surprising that they would make an abrupt change in this way, what does it mean they they’re killed?

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

Diablevert: Because I mean, he does bring in that whole element of discussion…that there’s a moral to their lives. That’s the whole thing that the Fransciscan friar is searching for, that there’s a reason that these people died, at this time and in this place, and it was to provide some kind of example.

Dreadful Penny: Was to be demonstrative of something.

Diablevert: Yes. And so if the idea is, you can make an abrupt change in all that you feel and react and act in response to the world, and then all the people who are trying to do that are killed, what does that say?

Dreadful Penny: It makes it sound like it’s advocating stasis. That people should essentially stay the same. Because change will kill you.

Diablevert: Yeah, kind of. I don’t know.

Dreadful Penny: Well, also the bridge itself is this kind of unchanging thing — I picture this rickety, sort of rope bridge, a la Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, this thing that’s so ephemeral but has lasted so long as to be past the point of even thinking it would collapse, and then it suddenly does.

Diablevert: Mmmm-hmmm.

Dreadful Penny: I like the end of the book where he says how it enters into their parlance, how they’d say, “oh, you live near the bridge,” like, the Sword of Damocles comparison. I like that book makes its own mythology in that way. But that’s beside the point.

Diablevert: That’s interesting.

Dreadful Penny: I mean, the bridge itself is an over-arching metaphor. This book is very metaphorically rich. I enjoy that. Because, Booth Tarkington? Not so much. With the metaphors. I liked that — to me, this is almost like a poet’s book. I mean, Wilder isn’t a poet, but it has that compression, that allusion, and it’s lovely to read. I finished the book and I wanted to re-read it. I finished the book and I wanted to re-read it again. I felt that it would be rewarding to re-read, that there were bits of it that I wanted to like, copy out, essentially, I liked it so much in that way. And I’m glad that the Pulitzers decided to reward something that has so much poetry in it in a sense, in its prose. Because the prose — I mean, Edith Wharton writes very good prose. But [other than her] we haven’t seen that style has been awarded any points in the Pulitzer, except for maybe some slight comic style. Satire has, I guess. You could say that parts of Arrowsmith are satrirical.

Diablevert: I think that much of the time, a lot of the novels have been more rewarded for having interesting or broad social ends. I guess you could say So Big had some style.

Dreadful Penny: No, it was. It was stylistically pleasing. But not that lyricism. We haven’t had a lyric novel. And I know they’re coming. I mean, I just recently — Toni Morrison was just awarded a Rooster, from the The Morning News Tournament of Books? And they were joking, saying, wow, the first writer to win a hat trick – a Nobel, a Pulitzer, and a Rooster. But I think Song of Solomon was her Pulitzer winning novel, and that I assume, will be a very poetic—

Diablevert: It’s Beloved.

Dreadful Penny: Is it? Dammit. I’ve already read Beloved. I never read Song of Solomon!

Diablevert: I’ve already read Song of Solomon. If you want we can trade off, and you can do Song and I can do Beloved.

Dreadful Penny laughs. But I know that Morrison is someone who writes with a lot of poetry, and Gilead is a book that is in our future that I know is very lyric, and I enjoy the lyric novel.

Diablevert: I know, I enjoy it too. You know, I think these books have kind of beaten me down.

Dreadful Penny: Oh no!

Diablevert: In the sense that I was very suspicious, and expecting that it was going to be mildly terrible, in some kind of way, and yet it wasn’t, so I still feel edgy about it. Like I’m still waiting to figure out the way in which it sucks.

Dreadful Penny laughs

Diablevert: And the rational part of my brain is like, “No, you liked it. It was good.” And I’m like, I did like it. It did seem good. Hmmmm.

Dreadful Penny: …..Or are they?

Diablevert: Yeah. I don’t know why I’m still suspicious of it. It’s kind of retarded.

Dreadful Penny: A prize should never have as its end result making people suspicious of the prize-winners.

Diablevert: True. But I guess you could say that the idea of going into this whole project was, are these books any good or not? I think a lot of them are kind of like….not.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

Diablevert: So with this I should probably just get down off my high horse and suck it up and be like, No, dammit. It was a good book. Suck it up.

Dreadful Penny: I think it’s a natural impulse to critique anything, you never just want to stand on your laurels and just say, “I enjoyed it.” You never want to give anybody total props.

Diablevert: The literary review equivalent of just flashing the devil horns and being like “It RAWKS!”

Dreadful Penny: Yeah.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Chat Part Two, or Consider the Narrator

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , , , on April 1, 2010 by Diablevert

Diablevert: I think, speaking of the ways in which this book is modernist, too — the narrator here is very weird. Because he leads off the book saying this priest is going to write a book about the accident, and then proceeds to say that that book has been burned—

Dreadful Penny: A book that we never see.

Diablevert: Exactly. And the book that we’re reading is being written by someone else, who says he knows more than the priest about these people, but we never learn who this person is, we never know who the narrator really is or how he knows the stuff he knows. He just stays in the background. And I wonder how conscious that is, do you know what I mean?

Dreadful Penny: That’s a good question.

Diablevert: Because sometime you read a book and you see the author start off with some sort of conceit, and it works, but then as the book goes on you don’t really need it anymore, and it just kind of dies off and you don’t really notice. And this felt a bit like that to me. But on the other hand it isn’t that I think he’s incapable of playing around with it consciously. It reminds me a bit of Nabokov’s — I don’t know if you’ve ever read his novella Pnin?

Dreadful Penny: No, I’ve never read Pnin.

Diablevert: It’s interesting because he kind of deliberately does that. He has this narrator who starts off seeming like a typical third-person omniscient narrator, but we gradually learn is actually a character in the book, who actually knows Pnin, and in fact is his replacement, a Russian scholar who has come to take his position in the department. It’s sort of vaguely hinted at in the book, but it’s pretty clear if you’re paying attention to the signals. And as you start to realize who the narrator is it becomes very weird to see the narrator write about Pnin in this third-person way—to speak in such terms about a person he maybe could have known, or been on the edge of knowing, and try to surmise from his perspective how Pnin might feel. It puts him on the edge of omniscience in an interesting way, and Nabokov plays with that. He uses this Narrator character to play with your emotions. Because if the book was written with a traditional omniscient narrator, then when something happens to the Pnin that makes him look kind of pathetic, you’d know that that was how you as a reader were supposed to feel — that the main character was kind of pathetic. But by sticking this sort of half-knowing Narrator in between you and the characters, when something pathetic happens to the characters, and it’s being told to you by such a narrator, you feel that same pity but at the same time you are aware of your own condescension.

Dreadful Penny: That you’re being a little holier-than-thou.

Diablevert: Yes. By having that intermediary character in there, that becomes clear to you. But I’m not sure if that’s how the Narrator was meant to work in this book. Because you could read the book just as the attempt by the Franciscan friar to determine the meaning of these events—

Dreadful Penny: Well, to try to use that accident to try to prove divinity I think was a pretty interesting idea. The end of the book where he goes into the statistics derived from his earlier studies of divinity, and he’s got the axis of goodness vs. piety vs. utility? Trying to figure out whether it proves or disproves all this — it’s a little twee, I guess, but it is kind of a fascinating matrix to try to figure out.

Diablevert: Mmm-hmm.

Dreadful Penny: But there’s no conclusions made in the book.

Diablevert: But I think that’s what’s interesting, because you have this Narrator that’s in-between them. It’s not just being told to you by a Franciscan friar, who thinks this way, and comes at it with this attitude of “I can determine the truth of this.” It’s being told to you by a Narrator, who says “There is such a person, [who thinks he can determine the truth],” but who does not himself seem to believe that [truth can be found]. That gets a little fuzzy to explain, but it’s interesting, because it’s pretty clear that the Narrator’s perspective on the events is different from the Franciscan friar’s perspective.

Dreadful Penny: Totally, completely.

Diablevert: And we get it filtered through both of their perspectives.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: A Belated Chat

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , , , , on March 30, 2010 by Diablevert

(Eds. Note: We actually had this chat shortly after completing the book last year, but neither of us got around to transcribing it. Possibly because it’s super long. But as our erstwhile fellow-traveler on the Pulitzer path has now arrived at Wilder, I felt a surge of guilt and have set fingers to keyboard. Since it’s so long, I think I’ll break it up into parts — we had a lot to say about Bridge, actually.)

Diablevert: ….I thought it was weird how they just tossed that in at the end, in his biography in the back of the book, that he was this closeted homosexual. In a weird way it kind of made sense…all the various stories in the book had anything in common, it was that they all revolved around thwarted love. Thwarted in various ways, but all thwarted.

Dreadful Penny: It makes that story of him going up against Tennessee Williams and the bad blood between them, it makes Wilder seem a lot less priggish, in a way. I mean, it still could be considered priggish, I guess, but…

Diablevert: But it’s easier to see why they’d be oil and water.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, it gives me much more sympathy for him. I really like Bridge of San Luis Rey. I was happy to read it. I can see how if it’s a common book that’s assigned to people, how it could be kind of a bitch to teach and read.

Diablevert: No, I enjoyed it also. It had such a weird style, it was written like a fable. That took some getting used to. But I would say I enjoyed it, definitely.

Dreadful Penny: It was like magical realism before magical realism. There was something truly magical about it. He does that thing that Marquez does, where you identify a character by some odd character trait, and that trait then comes to stand completely for them. Which I think is an interesting thing to do. Like in the beginning when the actress is identified just by her brashness in the theater, and that incident encapsulates her entire characterization.

Diablevert: There’s also the weird thing with the compression of time somehow, I don’t know how to explain…it’s like you meet this person and you see see a bit of their characterization in that one scene, and then the next time they show up, it’s like the book gaily skips through thirty years of their life until they get to another scene of that person. I feel like that’s something that happens in magical realism a lot too, especially because these books often deal with multiple generations of a family. But the actress is an good example of that. Because she first shows up in this one scene where the Countess attends a performance of hers. That feels almost near-contemporary to the time when the accident occurs, but then when you come to fully understand the story you see that that first scene must have been, like, 30 years before the main action of the story.

Dreadful Penny: Early in here career, yeah. I think that compression of time is what makes it more like a fable. Time is very fluid…..I just thought it was be very well written. It was lovely. A lovely book to read. It had beautiful bits. It was nice to see that attention to language. So nice to read a short book.

Diablevert: I definitely agree with that. It was one of the better books that we’ve read so far in this project, and so different from all the others.

Dreadful Penny: It feels very modern. It feels very fresh. Which is funny, because Wilder has a very bad reputation, from Our Town, of being very staid and stultified and given to traditional American values. And this felt totally contemporary.

Diablevert: Well, that was interesting. I don’t know, like, I don’t know that— I feel like my impression of Wilder was that he had this reputation for being very wholesome. And this book is fairly wholesome. Like, there’s some illicit sex in it but that all takes place off stage, you know, the actress has an affair with the Count, but really none of the main characters are involved in this in a direct and passionate way. There are no scenes between lovers, really. So it feels sort of neutered in that way, a little bit. And I feel like with Our Town — which I haven’t seen in it’s a production, but everyone knows its reputation — it’s all about this sort of perfect American town, and it’s this innocent, dark-Eden setting, just on the cusp of modernity.

Dreadful Penny: Well, Our Town definitely has some dark undercurrents but none of them are sexual. All the darkness in Our Town comes from the essential unknowability of another person, and the incredible fear of death and the swift passage of time. It actually is very dark, but not at all in a sexual way.

Diablevert: But I think that’s what’s interesting about it, because it has this very wholesome reputation. And because there’s very little sex in it, it’s something that can be done, and is done, by high school students and all kinds of community groups and things like that. And of course I’ve always heard that it’s also popular because it’s a production you can do almost entirely without scenery, without props, I mean you can basically do the whole thing with just the actors.

Dreadful Penny: Yeah, it’s like a ladder and some chairs and a graveyard.

Diablevert: And in a way that’s kind of avant-garde, especially because he’s writing this play in like the 20s and 30s, which is the age of the great Broadway musical, and the Zeigfield Follies, Busby Berkeley, that whole thing, these great stage sets were how you got the butts in the seats. And so to have a pure drama with just the actors is interesting.

Dreadful Penny: Well, recently in the string of drama Pulitzers, maybe in the past five or six years, somewhere in there was Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of An Author, which I think this was in line with that. That sort of modernist, breaking the fourth wall — you have the stage manager as a character in Our Town, who directly addresses the audience throughout. It is very modernist and groundbreaking in its way, just its subject matter is what makes it, gives it that wholesome reputation. There are parts of it that are certainly that sweet and saccharine reputation. Like when they address the envelope, and it’s like: ‘Grover’s Corners, Earth, The Universe, the Mind of God’…..

Diablevert: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dreadful Penny: ‘Does anyone really ever live it, every minute?’ All of that bit. But there’s also all of that sort of dark — Edward Arlington Robinson is a good comparison.

Diablevert: I have no idea who that is.

Dreadful Penny: Or like Sherwood Anderson. The attention to small-town grotesques. Kind of going back that tradition of Hawthorne, like what lurks behind these streets, these exteriors? Of American mores and means….

Diablevert: Well, that’s what’s interesting about Bridge. Our Town and all the other books have been completely concerned with that kind of thing. And this book is not. It’s pretty timeless, in a way.

Dreadful Penny: Oh, it’s completely timeless. It’s not even in America, which make it kind of interesting that it was able to win the Pulitzer. I’ll have to check the dates as to when they changed the charge. Because this doesn’t actually have anything to do with American life, except in the capacity of a fable.

Diablevert: Well, that an American wrote it. It’s like how Wilde is an Irish writer when the Irish talk about him and a British writer when the British talk about him. Maybe they grandfather you in.

Dreadful Penny: If you’re good enough.

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Bridge of San Luis Rey: Summary

Posted in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder with tags , on May 27, 2009 by Diablevert

An overlooked classic! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, willya look at that! The Bridge of San Luis Rey is that thing I’d been partly hoping all these old Pulitzers would be: awesome books unjustly forgotten. I say partly because — if I’m honest — I was all along suspecting that some of these novels would be a bit terrible, this justifying the choice of title for this blog. But having read about ten and having most of them terrible and a few mediocre, with one outright classic (Age of Innocence), it was a real relief to find that there’d be a book I’d like before we got to, say Kavalier and Clay, 80 (god help us) books or so from now.

Of course, it might be a bit much to call Bridge overlooked; it’s been made into a movie several times, once fairly recently, and the library where I checked it out had about a dozen copies on hand; apparently it’s a poplar — that is, short — book for high school English classes. Still, though I’d heard of Wilder before thanks to Our Town, I had no real idea what the book was about. Perhaps I had a vague idea of a cross between the Treasure of the Sierra Madre and A Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Turns out it’s more like a cross between One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ship of Fools. In colonial Peru, a rope bridge over an Andean gorge collapses, killing five people. A young priest witnesses the accident and sets out to discover what led to those five people being on the bridge at that time, viewing it as a natural moral experiment, a sort of cryptogram from God. The book is the result, although there seems to be a distinction between the narrator of the book and the good friar; more than once the narrator says that he is privy to facts the priest never uncovered, and the book frequently delves into the thoughts of the characters in a way a strict third person narrator could not.

Said characters are: The Marquesa de Montemayor; her servant, Pepita; Esteban, a scribe; Uncle Pio, a man about town and manager of the famous actress Camila Perichole, and La Perichole’s young son, Don Jaime.

The Marquesa is elderly and eccentric, a well-known figure about town who is estranged from her only child, a daughter now living in Spain. The Marquesa devotes the whole of her life to writing letters to her daughter, going out into society strictly for the purpose of collecting material, seeking to win by her wit her daughter’s admiration, and soften her heart by the sheer power of eloquence.

Her servant, Pepita, is an orphan, raised in a convent, where she was the apple of the abbesses’ eye. The mother superior deliberately placed the girl in the Marquesa’s service as a kind of training exercise, hoping to get the Marquesa to donate to the convent and also grooming Pepita to move in upper class circles and gain the persuasive skills she will need to take over the running of the orphanage. Pepita, however, is not privy to the Abbess’ plans and is often overwhelmed in trying to care for the slightly cracked Marquesa.

Esteban was also an orphan, but he had a twin brother, Manuel. The two had been inseparable, until and illness (brought on, indirectly, by love) killed Manuel, leaving Esteban so bereft he contemplates suicide. A kindly Captain in the merchant marine takes pity on him and persuades the young man to take a berth on his boat.

Uncle Pio has spent the last few decades of his life making Perichole a star, after spotting her singing on the street as a young kid. So wrapped up in her does he become that it’s unclear whether he wants to be her father or her lover or what. As it turns out, he ends up neither: They suffer a falling out after the actress catches smallpox, bringing her stage career to an end. Pio, however, offers to help bring up her boy, Don Jaime, an offer La Perichole takes up.

Such scanty paragraphs suffice to describe the motives and much of the action of the book; given that the bugger leads off with the conclusion, and so there can be no mystery as to how it ends, it must be difficult to get an inkling of why I’d call the book a classic. That’s because it’s a book of mood and not motion, scene upon little scene that tries to tell you who the characters were and how they felt while leaving rather blurry what they did and when they did it: The exact period when it’s set, precisely how many years elapse between given events, the ages of the characters, all this is merely hinted at rather than nailed down. It strives for timelessness, for the qualities of a fable, and mostly achieves them, without being overwrought. This is quite a difficult trick; Jorge Luis Borges managed it time and again, but usually for ten pages, always for fewer than 30, often for just four. To pull it off at book length without getting cutesy or faux-mystical is quite an accomplishment. Instead, the tone is of restrained sadness, lyric, mournful, dry. By changing the question of the book from the more usual “What happens to these characters?” to “Whether or not the characters get what they deserve,” Wilder manages to drive the reader onward using cool-eyed ambiguity rather than the spur of revelation followed by resolution.

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