Thornton Wilder (40 page)

 

When Wilder entered the French classroom on the first day of the fall term, Andrews remembered, he wrote on the blackboard “in a neat, precise hand, MY NAME IS THORNTON WILDER. I AM YOUR TEACHER. THIS IS A COURSE IN CONVERSATIONAL FRENCH. AFTER TODAY, NO ENGLISH SPOKEN HERE.”
⁵⁸

According to Andrews, Wilder made Conversational French “the most popular class at Lawrenceville.” He was popular out of class as well, inviting students on weekend afternoons for tea and conversation (perhaps in the mode of the Elizabethan Club), sessions his students referred to as meetings of the Thornton Wilder Literary Society. Wilder usually concluded these gatherings with the dramatic recitation of a poem on the order of Robert Service's “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” declaiming every word by heart. (He had been required to learn that particular poem as a boy, he said, as “a punishment.”)
⁵⁹

 

THAT FALL,
Thornton began to suffer intense pain that led him to fear—correctly, as it turned out—that he was showing symptoms of appendicitis. His father's physician, Dr. William Francis Verdi, performed an appendectomy in New Haven in October. “The appendix was lifted out three weeks ago tomorrow,” Thornton wrote to Marie Townson from New Haven on November 9. His surgery and recuperation kept him away from his school duties for three and a half weeks.
⁶⁰

He was back at Lawrenceville, still healing from his operation, when he began to realize that his harried life of the schoolmaster was about to change. On October 27, 1927, he had signed a contract with Longmans, Green & Company, Ltd., for the British publication of his second novel. The North American edition of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
was published on November 3. To offset the brevity of the book, Albert and Charles Boni had chosen 235 pages of thick stock set with a generous-sized font and wide margins, accompanied in the first edition by the ten pen-and-ink drawings by Amy Drevenstedt. They added a map of Peru and Ecuador on brown endpapers. (A 1929 edition of the novel would be illustrated by wood engravings by the artist Clare Leighton; a special limited edition published in 1929 contained three-color lithographs by Rockwell Kent.) To the amazement of the author and the publishers, those advance proofs must have worked, for there were immediate enthusiastic reviews in the United States and in England, and
The Bridge
was successfully promoted for the Christmas trade. By the end of December the novel was in its seventh printing in the United States, and by January 6, 1928, Baer wrote to Thornton, the publishers would be “wildly busy getting ready the eighth edition of the Bridge.”
⁶¹

 

WHEN THE
Lawrenceville School closed for the Christmas holidays, Thornton traveled to Florida and to Cuba to rest and continue his recuperation—but most of all, to recover from the excitement and stress of the year. From the Columbus Hotel in Miami, he wrote to Marie Townson that his novel was “selling like catnip . . . I'm almost getting RICH. But mind you I refuse to buy a car. A swimming pool, all right, a gold tooth, all right, but no CAR.”
⁶²
He didn't like Cuba, he told his mother, but in Miami he spent quiet, restful days in the sun. “Already I'm turkey-red,” he wrote, “and I sleep nights for a change. And I have a friend in Town, oh what a friend! as the hymn says. And that's Gene Tunney.” Thornton explained to his mother how they met:

 

I wrote him a note asking for an hour's talk and telling him I had messages from Ernest Hemingway. He phoned back at once that he was delighted, would I please come to dinner Friday night, that right there on his table was The Cabala which had been highly recommended to him and which he was going to read as soon as he finished Death Comes to the Archbishop. I warned Father last October that I would get to know the champion and he made a disgusted face. Explain to him that now-days there are prizefighters and prizefighters.
⁶³

 

Thornton spent a fascinating evening with the movie-star-handsome world heavyweight champion, and wrote to Marie Townson about their meeting:

 

I don't know what to say. . . . Most of the times, he's wonderful, as likable and naïf as the best Lawrenceville boy—and (don't quote me) exactly mental-age of 17. Then in the distance you hear a faint sound of brass. Perhaps I imagined it. Heaven forgive me. Anyway I'm sure of this: his famous aspiration after culture is perfectly sincere, only he doesn't get 3 consecutive minutes to do anything with it. I wish someone would engage me as his tutor. Anyway, I shall see more of him.
⁶⁴

 

Thornton would indeed see more of Tunney—but before then, he would come to know firsthand what it was like not to have three consecutive minutes to do what he needed or wanted to do. The retreat to Florida proved to be the calm in the eye of a hurricane of totally unexpected literary success and acclaim, unrelenting public visibility, and incessant demands on his time and energy—as well as a barrage of mail. More and more people, Thornton wrote to Yale professor Chauncey Tinker, were wondering why he didn't “leave the little chicken-feed duties of the housemaster and teacher and go to Bermuda, for example, and write books as a cow gives milk.” He didn't know how to answer, except to say that he felt “(though with intervals of misgiving) that this life is valuable to me and, I dare presume, my very pleasure in my routine can make me useful to others. Anyway no one, except you and I, seems to believe any longer in the dignity of teaching.”
⁶⁵

Thornton shared with Tinker some revealing details about himself and his work: “As for your questions, oh, isn't there a lot of New England in me; all that ignoble passion to be didactic that I have to fight with. All that bewilderment as to where Moral Attitude begins and where it shades off into mere Puritan Bossiness. My father is still pure Maine—1880 and I carry all that load of notions to examine and discard or assimilate.”
⁶⁶
Had Thornton been to Peru? Tinker wondered. What were his sources for the novel?

“No, I have never been to Peru,” Thornton replied. “Why I chose to graft my thoughts about Luke 13–4 upon a delightful one-act play by Merimée,
Le Carosse du Saint-Sacrement
[
sic
]
,
I do not know. The Marquesa is my beloved Mme de Sévigné in a distorting mirror. The bridge is invented, the name borrowed from one of Junipero Serra's missions in California.”
⁶⁷

Tinker told Thornton that certain pages of
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
had made him weep. “It is right and fitting that you cried for a page of mine,” Thornton replied, with gratitude. “How many a time I have cried with love or awe or pity while you have talked of the Doctor [Samuel Johnson], or Cowper, or Goldsmith. . . . Between the lines then you will find here all my thanks and joy at your letter.”
⁶⁸

19

“THE FINEST BRIDGE IN ALL PERU”

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

—THORNTON WILDER,

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

 

New Jersey and Europe (1928)

T
hornton Wilder's second novel made its bow to the world without the mechanical errors that had marred pages of
The Cabala.
His novel may have been short, but thousands of readers got their money's worth in story and substance. Like
The Cabala
before it,
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
pulls the reader into an intriguing narrative composed of interlacing stories and characters—and, in the process, confronts the reader with universal questions. In his second novel, however, Wilder was far more at home in his craft, more skilled in characterization, more assured in style and voice.

His journal and his surviving manuscript drafts and letters reveal the evolution of the novel and the emerging habits of the writer. For part of his inspiration Wilder gave credit to
Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement
(
The Coach of the Holy Sacrament),
a comedy by the French dramatist Prosper Mérimée (1803–70), whose novella
Carmen
was the source of the popular opera.
Le Carrosse du Saint-Sacrement
was based on a supposed incident in the life of Micaela Villegas (1748–1819)—the Perichole—a great Peruvian actress and courtesan. For a time she was the mistress of the Viceroy of Lima, Andrés de Ribera, and she bore him three children.
¹
Wilder was fascinated with the legendary Perichole, but except for a few details, the complex character who emerges in the novel is Wilder's fictional creation—and a tragic figure rather than Mérimée's comic, even farcical one. Wilder transforms the Countess Montemayor, a minor figure in Mérimée's play, into the Marquesa de Montemayor, one of the three most important women he creates in his novel.

For two years he had filled the pages of his journal and notebooks with drafts, revisions, questions, and ideas, discarding many of them along the way. En route to his final manuscript, Wilder played with structures, sequences, and characters. One early plan, for instance, was to have a mysterious stranger perish in the collapse of the bridge, and then to dramatize the efforts to establish his identity, but Wilder abandoned that idea. The novel, dedicated to his mother, is at once more profound and more subtle than
The Cabala.
The tone is often conversational as the narrator speaks familiarly and directly to the reader. The style is pared back, clean, and taut, with a restrained beauty of expression. Stung by what he perceived to be the critics' overemphasis on his literary style in
The Cabala,
Wilder, as noted, wove into
The Bridge
a rebuke and a defense: When the marquesa's son-in-law failed to see past the style to the substance of her letters to her daughter, Wilder wrote that he missed “the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart.”
²

Wilder insisted that
The Bridge
was a novel of unanswered questions—some of them questions he would explore all his life. “The book is not supposed to solve,” Wilder wrote to a former student. “The book is supposed to be as puzzling and distressing as the news that five of your friends died in an automobile accident. . . . Chekhov said: ‘The business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly.' ”
³

The questions proliferate as the novel moves forward: Why did this happen to
those
five people? Can the cause and the meaning of their fate be found in their secret, innermost lives? Is the event part of a divine plan? Do we live by accident and die by accident—or do we live by plan and die by plan? How do we cope with catastrophe? What is the significance of the religion of faith and fact, or the religion of mysticism and magic? These are the most obvious questions in the novel, and the questions that have garnered most attention, but there are other inquiries that merit close scrutiny: Wilder asks, How does one love, and why? What is the nature and purpose of art, and the function of the artist? How does one truly live and bear the burdens of life? And what does it all mean?

The plot of the novel is deceptively simple: A bridge collapses. Five people who happen to be crossing the bridge at this fateful moment fall into the chasm and die. Brother Juniper happens to witness the tragedy, and he resolves to investigate the lives of the victims in hopes of proving his belief that the accident is a “sheer act of God.” He does not doubt that it is God's will that these five people should die in this catastrophe on this day, but he sets out to “prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts,—poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good.”
⁴

To prove his case he will examine the lives and characters of the five victims—the Marquesa de Montemayor, a wealthy, bitterly lonely widow who is estranged from her only child, a married daughter living four thousand miles away to escape her mother's domination; Pepita, the marquesa's stoic servant and companion, an orphan girl who was raised by the noble abbess Madre María del Pilar; Esteban, like Wilder a twinless twin, but one who tries to kill himself after his brother, Manuel, dies; Uncle Pio, an adventurer, singing master, acting teacher, mentor, and dilettante, who has devoted his life to the Perichole, the finest actress in Peru; and Jaime, the Perichole's young son, whom Uncle Pio is taking to Lima so that he can nurture and educate the boy.

To resurrect and examine the lives of these five victims, Brother Juniper employs the tactics of the biographer—and in the process Wilder satirizes biographers and biographies. For six years Brother Juniper busies himself “knocking at all the doors in Lima, asking thousands of questions, filling scores of notebooks, in his effort at establishing the fact that each of the five lost lives was a perfect whole.” He writes an “enormous book” which “deals with one after another of the victims of the accident, cataloguing thousands of little facts and anecdotes and testimonies.”
⁵
Brother Juniper is afraid to omit any detail, putting everything down in “the notion perhaps that if he (or a keener head) reread the book twenty times, the countless facts would suddenly start to move, to assemble, and to betray their secret.”
⁶
Yet despite his arsenal of notes and facts, Brother Juniper does not discover the “central passion”—the “very spring within the spring” of the lives he has examined. As the omniscient narrator observes, “The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.”
⁷

Wilder was absorbed for many years in contemplation of the nature of art and the creative process, and the nature of the artist. One of the dozens of books he was reading during this period was French author and critic Paul Valéry's
Eupalinos, or the Architect,
an imaginary dialogue between Sophocles and Phaedrus, which contains a powerful parable of the artist and explores the processes of creation in art along with the philosophical and religious implications of certain works of art. The uses and abuses of art weave through
The Bridge
as a subtext. Two of the characters in Wilder's novel are immersed in the literary art of the theater and the art of acting; three others are caught up in the art or business of writing letters. The Marquesa de Montemayor, based loosely on the great letter writer Mme Marie de Sévigné, lives for and through the copious letters she writes to her estranged daughter. Unlike Mme de Sévigné, however, the marquesa becomes an eccentric, alcoholic recluse whose existence lies “in the burning center of her mind.” The doomed twins, Manuel and Esteban, support themselves as scribes and copyists. Manuel falls in love with the great Perichole while writing secret letters dictated by the semiliterate actress. Over their long relationship, her “Uncle” Pio teaches the Perichole to act and sing, but not to read and write. He has done the Perichole's reading and writing for her for many years. Uncle Pio has a passion for “Spanish literature and its masterpieces, especially in the theatre.”
⁸
He longs to be a poet, and has written songs for vaudeville that make their way into the world as folk music, but like the marquesa, he is unaware of the success of his art. The ultimate writer in the novel is, of course, Brother Juniper, obsessively researching and writing his epic religious treatise, which brings his downfall, and making a secret copy of it, which survives the destruction of the original manuscript by the clergy.

Wilder also borrowed a character from Valéry, as he acknowledged in his journal on December 22, 1926, a sea captain who, in Wilder's incarnation, has a keen mind that is “not buoyant but concentrated & enriched by the enforced chastity of long sea-voyages.”
⁹
In Wilder's Captain Alvarado, “blackened and cured by all weathers,” there are clear echoes of Valéry's sea captain, “bleached and blackened, gilded in turn by successive climes.”
¹⁰
Like Valéry's captain, Wilder's memorable Captain Alvarado is a traveler and adventurer. He is invited by Uncle Pio to attend the nightlong symposia hosted by Don Andrés de Ribera, the viceroy of Lima. The symposia discussions are presented in concise summary in
The Bridge
, centered less on art, religion, and philosophy, as in Valéry's work, than on an array of topics—ghosts and second sight, the second coming of Christ, wars and kings, poets and scholars, and regrets about the human race.
¹¹

But for all the written words flying back and forth, and all the allusions to the dynamics of art and the artist, the novel is grounded in questions about the claims of religion and the meaning of love. As has been noted, Wilder wrote in his journal in 1926, “Some day someone will discover that one of the principal ideas behind my work is the fear of catastrophe (especially illness and pain), and a preoccupation with the claims of a religion to meet the situation.”
¹²
In the forefront of
The Bridge
is Brother Juniper's conviction that theology should “take its place among the exact sciences.” His quest grows out of his unwavering religious faith, not out of doubt or skepticism. Brother Juniper, we are told, is already convinced that he knows the answer to the question he raises: The collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey, he believes, “was a sheer Act of God.”
¹³
He is seeking “scientific” proof of his existing belief, not answers to questions about his faith. Brother Juniper dies willing “to lay down his life for the purity of the church,” but longing “for one voice somewhere to testify for him that his intention, at least, had been for faith.”
¹⁴

It is the marquesa who poses the most profound and perplexing questions about religion. She exhorts the powers of paganism as well as of Christianity—religion as magic as well as religion as faith—to protect her daughter during her pregnancy. She maintains a belief in the “great Perhaps.”
¹⁵
The marquesa's pilgrimage finally leads her to a certain peace: “She was listening to the new tide of resignation that was rising with her. Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.” She gives herself up to a certain fatalism: “What will be, will be.”
¹⁶
The marquesa faces her own failures, and is ready to start a new life. “Let me live now,” she prays. “Let me begin again.”
¹⁷
The irony is that the marquesa's spiritual quest both saves her and kills her.

For all its examination of faith and belief, the novel is fundamentally a story of people who simply desire to love and to be loved, and who, in most cases, have failed. There is an exploration of many facets of love—romantic love; unequal love; unrequited love; platonic love; parental love; familial love; the unique love of twins; neurotic love; mistaken love; controlling love; self-love; the “disinterested” love of altruism; the love of God. Uncle Pio, whom Wilder later described as “all onlooker, all uncommitted participant” (and one of the most autobiographical figures in all his work) divides the “inhabitants of the world into two groups, those who have loved and those who have not.”
¹⁸
He believes that love is “a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.”
¹⁹

After years of suffocating parental love, when the parent seeks to control the child for her own good (echoes of Wilder's own father), the marquesa realizes that her love for her daughter “was not without a shade of tyranny” and that she has loved her daughter not for the daughter's sake, but for her own.
²⁰
Between the twins Esteban and Manuel, orphans who, like Pepita, were raised by the abbess, there is an intense and exclusive love, a love that has its own private language, a love that, according to the critic Malcolm Goldstein, “is so intense that it approaches homosexual yearning.”
²¹
When Manuel begins to love the Perichole, Esteban discovers “that secret from which one never quite recovers [echoes of Wilder's own heartbreaks], that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.”
²²
Disenchanted with Uncle Pio; with her lover, the viceroy; and most of all, with herself, the Perichole, who has known love only as passion, believes that you are loved for yourself only in plays in the theater.
²³
So goes Wilder's provocative evocation of the varieties of love.