The Bridge of San Luis Rey (12 page)

Camila lurked about the convent church and fell humbly in love with the homely old face, though it frightened her a little. At last she called upon her.

“Mother,” she said, “I . . . I . . .”

“Do I know you, my daughter?”

“I was the actress, I was the Perichole.”

“Oh, yes. Oh, I have wished to know you for a long while, but they told me you did not wish to be seen. You too, I know, lost in the fall of the bridge of San. . . .”

Camila rose and swayed. There! again that access of pain, the hands of the dead she could not reach. Her lips were white. Her head brushed the Abbess's knee: “Mother, what shall I do? I am all alone. I have nothing in the world. I love them. What shall I do?”

The Abbess looked at her closely. “My daughter, it is warm here. Let us go into the garden. You can rest there.” She made a sign to a girl in the cloister to bring some water. She continued talking mechanically to Camila. “I have wished to know you for a long while, señora. Even before the accident I had wished much to know you. They told me that in the
autos sacrementales
you were a very great and beautiful actress, in
Belshazzar's Feast
.”

“Oh, Mother, you must not say that. I am a sinner. You must not say that.”

“Here, drink this, my child. We have a beautiful garden, do you not think so? You will come and see us often and some day you will meet Sister Juana who is our gardener-in-chief. Before she entered religion she had almost never seen a garden, for she worked in the mines high up in the mountains. Now everything grows under her hand.—A year has gone by, señora, since our accident. I lost two who had been children in my orphanage, but you lost a real child of your own?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And a great friend?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Tell me. . . .”

And then the whole tide of Camila's long despair, her lonely obstinate despair since her girlhood, found its rest on that dusty friendly lap among Sister Juana's fountains and roses.

 

But where are sufficient books to contain the events that would not have been the same without the fall of the bridge? From such a number I choose one more.

“The Condesa d'Abuirre wishes to see you,” said a lay-sister at the door of the Abbess's office.

“Well,” said the Abbess, laying down her pen, “who is she?”

“She has just come from Spain. I don't know.”

“Oh, it is some money, Inez, some money for my house for the blind. Quick, bid her come in.”

The tall, rather languorous beauty entered the room. Doña Clara, who was generally so adequate, seemed constrained for once. “Are you busy, dear Mother, may I talk to you for a while?”

“I am quite free, my daughter. You will excuse an old woman's memory; have I known you before?”

“My mother was the Marquesa de Montemayor. . . .” Doña Clara suspected that the Abbess had not admired her mother and would not let the older woman speak until she herself had made a long passionate defense of Doña María. The languor fell away in her self-reproach. At last the Abbess told her of Pepita and Esteban, and of Camila's visit. “All, all of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love—I scarcely dare say it—but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?”

The Condesa showed the Abbess Doña María's last letter. Madre María dared not say aloud how great her astonishment was that such words (words that since then the whole world has murmured over with joy) could spring in the heart of Pepita's mistress. “Now learn,” she commanded herself, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.” And she was filled with happiness like a girl at this new proof that the traits she lived for were everywhere, that the world was ready. “Will you do me a kindness, my daughter? Will you let me show you my work?”

The sun had gone down, but the Abbess led the way with a lantern down corridor after corridor. Doña Clara saw the old and the young, the sick and the blind, but most of all she saw the tired, bright old woman who was leading her. The Abbess would stop in a passageway and say suddenly: “I can't help thinking that something could be done for the deaf-and-dumb. It seems to me that some patient person could, . . . could study out a language for them. You know there are hundreds and hundreds in Peru. Do you remember whether anyone in Spain has found a way for them? Well, some day they will.” Or a little later: “Do you know, I keep thinking that something can be done for the insane. I am old, you know, and I cannot go where these things are talked about, but I watch them sometimes and it seems to me . . . In Spain, now, they are gentle with them? It seems to me that there is a secret about it, just hidden from us, just around the corner. Some day back in Spain, if you hear of anything that would help us, you will write me a letter . . . if you are not too busy?”

At last after Doña Clara had seen even the kitchens, the Abbess said: “Now will you excuse me, for I must go into the room of the very sick and say a few words for them to think about when they cannot sleep. I will not ask you to come with me there, for you are not accustomed to such . . . such sounds and things. And besides I only talk to them as one talks to children.” She looked up at her with her modest rueful smile. Suddenly she disappeared a moment to return with one of her helpers, one who had likewise been involved in the affair of the bridge and who had formerly been an actress. “She is leaving me,” said the Abbess, “for some work across the city and when I have spoken here I must leave you both, for the flour-broker will not wait for me any longer, and our argument will take a long time.”

But Doña Clara stood in the door as the Abbess talked to them, the lamp placed on the floor beside her. Madre María stood with her back against a post; the sick lay in rows gazing at the ceiling and trying to hold their breaths. She talked that night of all those out in the dark (she was thinking of Esteban alone, she was thinking of Pepita alone) who had no one to turn to, for whom the world perhaps was more than difficult, without meaning. And those who lay in their beds there felt that they were within a wall that the Abbess had built for them; within all was light and warmth, and without was the darkness they would not exchange even for a relief from pain and from dying. But even while she was talking, other thoughts were passing in the back of her mind. “Even now,” she thought, “almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Afterword

Overview

Thornton Wilder wrote
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
over the period of a year, from the summer of 1926 to that of 1927, turning over the final pages to his publisher, Albert & Charles Boni, in July of 1927. The completed manuscript ran about 34,000 words, by any definition a short novel. Its brevity, in fact, caused some concern to the Boni firm, as Wilder explained in a letter
to his sister: “My publisher is REVOLTED that it isn't long enough to keep up the fraud of a $2.50 book. He wants six to eight illustrations, and the Canadian and Eskimo rights.”

No party to the birth of Thornton Wilder's second novel need have worried.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
was published on November 3, 1927, in a press run estimated at the time to be 4,500 copies, priced at $2.50 each. The book was an ungainly object, designed with hideously thick paper stock, its 235 pages set with grotesquely wide margins and containing no fewer than eleven illustrations. Nevertheless, it sold out almost immediately. A little more than a month later, by December 31, 1927, 17,500 copies had been snapped up, and by June 1928—a month after the book received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction—sales had risen to 158,000 copies. According to a yellowing royalty statement in Wilder's legal files, “The Year of the Bridge” ended with 223,170 copies sold in a total of seventeen printings. The launch of
The Bridge
is even more remarkable when it is remembered that nearly 50,000 copies were sold in Great Britain over the same period.

These numbers will evoke no gasps from modern readers used to print runs reported in the millions for a popular best-seller. But in 1928 the commercial success of
The Bridge
was a sensational story, an adjective used to describe the event at the time. The
New York American
, the William Randolph Hearst New York City outlet, initiated the serialization of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
in other Hearst papers beginning July 8, 1928, with unusual headlines for a novel by a highbrow author:

THE GREATEST LITERARY TREAT EVER OFFERED METROPOLITAN READERS BY A DAILY PAPER

DID THE FIVE PERUVIANS WHO WERE HURLED TO DEATH DIE BEFORE THEIR TIME?

It is an understatement to say that
The Bridge
was well received by critics on both sides of the Atlantic. The words that recur and reverberate through the notices of the day include “masterful,” “masterpiece,” and “triumph.” When strung together, the praise was deafening, especially as fashioned into sentences by literary superstars writing in influential journals: The novel was a “star of the first magnitude” (William Lyon Phelps in
Scribner's
magazine); a “book of such aloof and untruckling beauty” (Alexander Woollcott in
The World
). English novelist and critic Arnold Bennett wrote the words in the
London Evening Standard
that are often cited by scholars as being among the first to ignite the explosion of praise for Wilder's novel and his style. Said Bennett, “The writing has not been surpassed in the present epoch.”

Language from less famous quarters also sold books: the novel was “Altogether unique,” according to a review in the
Asheville
Times
(North Carolina). A critic writing in the
Birkenhead
News
(United Kingdom) spoke of the “bridge over which the author has passed in triumph to his rightful place among the masters.” Inevitably, there were some voices of dissent, notably in the Catholic press. The
Standard
in Dublin pronounced Wilder's treatment of the Church “stupid” and the work of a man motivated by “Presbyterian malice.” According to a review in
Isis
in Oxford, England, the book was disappointing in its “unexpected dullness.”

A great literary success can vanish like a comet, or encounter short or long periods of neglect. But
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
has never been out of print, and over the years, in addition to its place in many anthologies, the book has appeared in numerous regular and special editions. As a paperback, for example, it was selected in 1929 to be the first book issued in Boni's pathbreaking Paper Book Series. In 1939, it was chosen as one of the first ten titles in the Pocket Book series that revolutionized publishing in this country. And from the beginning, starting with Norwegian, Hungarian, and German translations arranged in 1928,
The Bridge
has proven to be a significant perennial international presence in more than thirty languages, including Burmese and Thai.

Given its stature and popularity, an outsider might assume that
The Bridge
's subsidiary record (as the source of works in other arts forms derived from it) would be long and even notable. But this is not true, due in considerable measure to Wilder himself. He did not believe that the nuances of the novel's language could be captured in a live dramatized form, and, therefore, denied requests for rights from many artists and writers eager to adapt
The Bridge
as a play, musical, or opera. He was not opposed to radio, and there have been several recorded versions in this country and abroad, including a Voice of America radio broadcast to captive nations during the Cold War, and an historic recording in Germany. Nor did Wilder's ban extend to television, and he was guardedly pleased by the success—a 47-percent share of the audience—of a 1958 Du Pont “Show of the Month” production written by Ludi Clair, produced by David Susskind, and featuring a dazzling cast, including Eva Le Gallienne, Judith Anderson, Viveca Lindfors, Hume Cronyn, and Theodore Bikel in major roles. Other than a 50 percent share of the fee from the sale of rights (for which he received $15,000), the provisions of his publishing contract gave Wilder no rights
in the film version sold by the Boni firm to MGM in 1928. He therefore had no direct involvement with the two films that were made from
The Bridge
—the part-sound 1929 production from MGM and a 1944 remake by an independent producer. The latter, less than memorable, is available on DVD.

What can be said in broad strokes about the sources for
The Bridge
? On the matter of tone and style, as Wilder himself explained at the time and later, no source was more important than his extensive reading in the field of classical French literature in the Princeton University Library during hours stolen from his busy schedule as French teacher and dormitory master at the Lawrenceville School in nearby Lawrenceville, New Jersey. In 1955, he explained this stratum of influence to Professor Franz H. Link, a leading student of American literature in Germany:

One comment I will make—since you have asked for it!—on the “style” of
The Bridge
—on the relatively superficial aspect of the style. During the years preceding the writing of my first two novels I had been reading intensively in the literature of the French
grand siècle
. The Marquesa de Montemayor is “after” the Marquise de Sévigné—the colors heightened in the Spanish Colonial atmosphere. Those formal portraits with which I introduce the principal characters are in the manner of Saint Simon and the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, La Rochefoucauld, and even the portrait-making of Saint Simon and the sermons of Bossuet and Bourdaloue. Hence the “removed” tone, the classical, the faintly ironic distance from the impassioned actions is the expression—even a borrowing—from the latin thought world. Thence comes also the occasional resort to aphorism.

Other sources that Wilder himself commonly identified include a short comedic play by Prosper Mérimée,
Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement
, which he had seen while a Yale undergraduate. This play celebrates the notorious affair between Don Andrés de Ribiera, Viceroy of Peru, and Micaela Villegas, the great actress known as La Perichole, an actual relationship that remains a centerpiece of Peruvian history and lore to this day. Wilder borrowed the name of his bridge from one of the missions founded by the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra (1713–1784). The bridge itself was no doubt inspired by the legendary Peruvian span over the Apurímac River on the celebrated “royal road” to Cuzco. (In popular books about Peru, the tie with
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
is typically cited.) Wilder also drew on a key biblical passage, Luke 13:4, which reads, “Or those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?”

Permeating the novel's atmosphere was the author's reading in standard sources in the history of the Spanish overseas empire and the Inquisition. Then there was Wilder's own birth history as a surviving twin brother. And in the elegant compression of the language and the book's scenic character can be seen the hand of an author with a passionate interest in drama as well as fiction.

Finally, there are two additional intriguing sources, usefully thought of as early “triggers” for
The Bridge
, and traceable to the Princeton campus, where Wilder moved in the fall of 1925 on leave of absence from Lawrenceville in order to study for a master's degree in French. There he conceived the idea for the novel. Shortly after its publication, Wilder was quoted in an interview with the Princeton undergraduate paper about the influence of the distinguished scholar from whom he took two courses in the history of French literature:

I would like to say that the idea for [
The Bridge
] came to me while I was studying for an M.A. in French at the Princeton Graduate School. It was in a course conducted by that admirable man, Professor Louis Cons, that I received the suggestion for the first sketch in the book.

The second “trigger” is no less intriguing; after her brother's death, Isabel Wilder recalled how he once showed her “the exact spot on the campus where the idea for it came to be full-blown as he crossed a small bridge over a narrow flow of water that emptied into the lake”—a reference to Lake Carnegie.

All these sources underscore Wilder's own view in a 1928 essay about the sources of literature: “The art of literature springs from two curiosities, a curiosity about human beings pushed to such an extreme that it resembles love, and a love of
a few masterpieces of literature so absorbing that it has all the richest elements of curiosity.” These words, however, leave out one fundamental ingredient in the creation of literature—the author's drive to write.

The Wilder who took up residence at the Princeton Graduate School in September 1925 was only marginally interested in improving his credentials for a profession in teaching. More than anything he wanted to write, and among his possessions was the hoped-for ticket to that end—the unfinished manuscript for
The Cabala
, a novel he had been working on since 1920. In March 1925 the Boni firm, through the agency of its secretary-treasurer Lewis S. Baer, a Yale classmate and great admirer of Wilder's writing, had informed him they wanted to publish his first novel. When he heard the good news, Wilder wrote to his family, “Let's hope this is a dawn of a new day.”

By burning candles at both ends, he kept up with his graduate work, completed
The Cabala
during the fall 1925, and saw it published in April 1926, two months before he received his master's degree.
The Cabala
was a critical success and sold well for a first novel, but did not yield enough in the way of royalties to support a second year away from teaching. When the Guggenheim Foundation turned Wilder down for a grant to study theater in Germany, he faced a turning point in his life: Should he continue to teach and write around the edges and in the summers, as he was doing, or find a way to test himself more directly against his pen? He chose the latter course, in no small part because his “Peruvians,” as he called them, were now buzzing in his head.

Wilder patched together the funds to support his
Bridge
year, drawing on his savings, some royalty income, and the earnings from his positions as tutor and companion, one of which took him to Europe in the fall of 1926, following a summer stay at the MacDowell Colony where he could work uninterrupted. The completed manuscript pages bore the invisible marks of hotel rooms in London, Rome, Naples, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Juan-les-Pins (a major stop), as well as economy quarters on various ocean liners. He also spent time in Briarcliff, New York; rented a room on Wall Street on the Yale campus, near his parents' home; and finished the final pages of
The Bridge
during a two-week sojourn at the YMCA in Newport, Rhode Island, in July 1927.

The story of the making of
The Bridge
is richly documented in letters to family and friends and notations in his journal. Two examples offer some sense of the excitement with which he worked on the novel: He was in Naples when he wrote, “My new book is fermenting in me like Vesuvius. On trains, in galleries, in bed . . . I receive ideas, anecdotes, phrases about my Peruvians.” He was in Paris when he heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and “came home and wrote the death of Manuel.”

Wilder returned to Lawrenceville to teach in the fall of 1927, and was promoted to full head of one of the dormitories at the prep school. But life in the dorm soon changed dramatically. By Christmas, as Wilder wrote to Lewis Baer, the phone was ringing constantly and telegrams were arriving every twenty minutes—“Calls from producers, and don't dare use this: a report that Kipling liked it.” Wilder's teaching salary that year was $3,000; from
The Bridge
alone in 1928 he earned a net taxable income of nearly $87,000 or close to a million in current dollars. As the full force of his overnight literary success hit him, Wilder toyed briefly with staying put at Lawrenceville, a place he genuinely loved and where he felt secure. But by February 1928, when he signed a contract with a major speaker's bureau to give 144 lectures over a five-year period, he had decided to step forward into what was for him the uncharted world of an acclaimed author with a growing worldwide reputation.