Penelope Niven

by Thornton Wilder

  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.

  This novel, like much of Wilder’s work, is notable for the presence of strong, complex female characters who empower the story—three in this instance: the marquesa, the Perichole, and the great abbess Madre María del Pilar. All three are inspired by real-life figures—the Marquesa by Mme de Sévigné; the Perichole by the great Peruvian actress Micaela Villegas, known as “La Perricholi”; and the abbess by Wilder’s maternal aunt, Charlotte Niven, noted for her humanitarian work for the international YWCA. In the depiction of their lives and the conclusions they reach, the novel makes its strongest statement about the nature of love. In all three cases the prospect of peace and redemption comes only through selfless love. The marquesa realizes her own selfishness, her “tyrannical” love.24 The Perichole despairs that she has always equated love with passion, that she has no heart, that she feels nothing. After Pio and her son die, she endures a “terrible incommunicable pain”—“the pain that could not speak once to Uncle Pio and tell him of her love and just once offer her courage to Jaime in his sufferings.” She has failed everyone, she realizes too late. “They love me and I fail them.”25 The abbess, too, has wrestled with her own doubts, especially her fears that her work will not go on after her death. By the end of the novel she has “accepted the fact that it was of no importance whether her work went on or not; it was enough to work.” She concludes that it “seemed to be sufficient for Heaven that for a while in Peru a disinterested love had flowered and faded.”26 The abbess, who hates men but loves mankind, has “allowed her life to be gnawed away” because she has “fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization. She hurled herself against the obstinacy of her time in her desire to attach a little dignity to women.”27 Ultimately she practices a selfless love of her work, and of the sick and the blind and the lost whom she serves and comforts.

  The abbess has the last word on love. She acknowledges the reality that every person who has ever lived will die and will ultimately be forgotten. “But,” she adds, in lines that are among the most quoted in literature,

  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.28

  FROM THE outset The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a commercial and critical success on two continents.29 For the critic and editor Clifton Fadiman, the novel was “a very beautiful book,” and its author was one of the “few young Americans writing today whose development will be watched by the discerning critic with greater hope and confidence.”30 The British novelist and critic Arnold Bennett wrote from England that he was “dazzled” by the book, praising the writing as “simple, straight, juste, and powerful” and “unsurpassed in the present epoch.”31 For the English novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, it was a work of “genuine beauty and originality.”32 The positive reviews poured in, along with the occasional negative: Edwin Muir, novelist and poet, wrote in the London Nation and Athenaeum, “The book is hardly a good one, therefore; it is in many ways and at many points a bad one; but it is interesting, and the work of an unusual talent when he is genuine, and of considerable accomplishment when he is meretricious.”33

  The reviews abounded throughout 1928. The writer and critic Edmund Wilson, just two years older than Wilder, was impressed that “so young a man should display such unmistakable originality of style, of form and of point of view,” although he wished Wilder would now “study the United States, and give us their national portraits.”34 The American poet and editor Louis Untermeyer called Wilder’s success in England “unprecedented,” and noted that major as well as minor critics had “responded to Wilder’s sensibility, to his finesse of phrase, and what is most unusual—to his spiritual power.”35 Skepticism came from a seemingly disgruntled Hugh Walpole, the popular and prolific English novelist, whose own novel Wintersmoon (1927) had been superseded on the 1928 bestseller list by The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He wrote that he fancied that Wilder’s book was “in danger of overpraise.”36

  According to Publishers Weekly, The Bridge was the number one best-selling novel in the United States for 1928. It was serialized in Hearst newspapers that summer, accompanied by garish headlines and illustrations. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for novels published in 1927, a stellar group that included William Faulkner’s Mosquitos, Willa Cather’s Death Comes to the Archbishop, Glenway Wescott’s The Grandmothers, Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women, Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, and Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (The Pulitzer Prize for poetry that year went to Wilder’s MacDowell Colony friend Edwin Arlington Robinson for Tristram.)

  “LETTERS AND telegrams from everywhere. What to do?” Wilder wrote to his mother from the Lawrenceville School in January 1928. “I could write you all day, honey, but I’m angry and distracted at the fact I can no longer even live between the claims of these duties real and imitation. I get some of the damndest letters and telegrams you ever saw.” All he could think to do was to try to get away again.
He confided in his mother that he was “probably going to travel through Germany, Austria, Venice and Greek islands with Gene Tunney and write a lovely travel book about it and us. 100,000 copies—all the boy scouts and their mamas.”37 Meanwhile there were the daily duties at Lawrenceville, compounded by the demands from his publishers: On February 4 they were hosting a party in his honor at Lewis Baer’s Manhattan apartment, inviting, Wilder said, “all the critics and the New Yorker type of glib gossiphound.”38 When one reporter asked Wilder what he hoped to write next, he said he’d like to do a picaresque novel, and that the boyhood of Uncle Pio in The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a “hasty sketch” for the protagonist—“a purely parasitic, conscienceless gifted boy who carves out through endless trials and errors his own odd, but convincing, rules of right and wrong”—a harbinger of George Brush and Heaven’s My Destination, the novel he would write in the thirties.39

  He could not keep up with the burgeoning correspondence generated by the astounding success of his novel. He wrote his mother on February 23 that books sales were “going to go well above 100,000 copies.” The Bonis told him that on one day alone he “had earned over 600 dollars (5,000 copies by telegraphic order).”40 If he wound up making the kind of money the Bonis implied he would, Wilder wrote to Amos that “the first thing to do is give Mama a few more rooms and a Finnish maid.” But he was not “splashing around in worldliness,” he told his brother; he was just overwhelmed. He asked Amos to be patient with him when he didn’t answer letters, and to love him “thru thick and thin.”41 For the present he could only do his best to manage the new responsibilities without neglecting the old ones—and he made one decision that would affect his entire family. He wrote right away to tell his mother about it, in a letter headed “Dearest of mamas”: