Thornton Wilder (41 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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FROM THE
outset
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
was a commercial and critical success on two continents.
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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.”
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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.”
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For the English novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, it was a work of “genuine beauty and originality.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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).”
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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.”
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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”:

 

You and I and Isabel and Janet or everybody are taking a house near London (Oxford or the Thames-side) all Summer. And we, all or some or more, are staying there until March. Then I am coming back to lecture for two months under Lee Keedick (the best: Margot Asquith and G. K. Chesterton and Hugh Walpole). You stay on if you like.
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Wilder wanted his mother to go over to England early in the spring to “find a house with a garden, please. . . . And a big house.”
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It needed to be spacious, not only for the family but for houseguests. He told her that he would be traveling abroad in July with three Lawrenceville boys “vaguely” under his care, that the boys would “drop in and out during the Summer,” and that Gene Tunney would visit in the fall.
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Not to worry about the expense; they could afford it: He had just received six thousand dollars from the Boni firm, he told his mother. Etching the words in deeper, darker ink, he promised her that there was “
More monthly
” to come.
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Wilder's sudden success, prosperity, and fame inundated him with opportunities, challenges, and frequent headaches. He was unhappy with his publishers, who had been, in the case of
The Cabala,
careless and even inattentive in the production of the book. The Bonis were often slow to promote his books, late with royalty payments, and not as supportive as Wilder wished of his ideas for future projects. He decided early in 1928 to take matters into his own hands. For one thing, he was being wooed by Harper & Brothers publishing executive Cass Canfield, just Wilder's age, a Harvard graduate, World War I veteran, reporter, and advertising man, and three years away from becoming president of Harper.

On January 16, 1928, Wilder wrote to Cass Canfield to say that he wished to commit himself to Harper on the condition that “the House of Harpers will consent to subsidize me to the extent of five thousand a year for three years beginning June 1929” even though that period would include some of the time when he would be completing the books he was obligated to give Albert and Charles Boni. In return Wilder would consider all future books to belong to Harper, except for the book of his short plays which was set to be published by Coward-McCann, since the Bonis were not interested in bringing it out. The fifteen thousand dollars from Harper would constitute an advance on royalties for “at least two novels of 50,000 words [each] or more.” If it turned out that Wilder would not need the advance sum, he wrote, he would be “willing to enter into a contract along the ordinary lines” on terms satisfactory to the author and the publisher.
⁴⁶
In what was a highly unusual arrangement, Wilder signed a secret agreement promising to move to Harper once his contractual obligations to the Boni firm were fulfilled.

“I've been going thru Hades; breaking with the Bonis,” he wrote to the Townsons in mid-February. “I went about it all wrong and now there are scenes, and gore, and screams. Heaven help me, but [it] had to be. But gee I could have done it more nicely and I'm sunk in self-reproach.”
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By late June he was a “wore out schoolteacher just comin' back to life,” and he was afraid he was going to have to resort to litigation over some of his snarled contracts.
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At his father's encouragement, he turned to the New Haven lawyer J. Dwight Dana for legal advice. “A week ago I took unto myself a lawyer so that he could keep my poor contracts and papers and he found out that I had been vague and amiable and that my affairs were in a bad way.”
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From that time on Wilder relied on Dana and then his firm, Wiggin & Dana, founded in 1934.

In February, Wilder had faced another professional decision. He found in his stack of mail a letter from renowned lecture agent Lee Keedick, who represented and sometimes managed public figures including polar explorers such as Sir Ernest Shackleton and Capt. Roald Amundsen, and the controversial Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Keedick usually had a waiting list of eager prospective clients, and it was significant that he solicited Wilder. “If you ever plan to do any lecturing I shall be glad to meet you at your convenience and discuss the matter in its many phases,” Keedick wrote on February 4, 1928. “I feel confident that the public would welcome an opportunity to hear you on the lecture platform.”
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Wilder replied in a brief note February 9, putting Keedick off.
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But the impresario was a fast worker. On February 15 he met with Wilder in Lawrenceville, and departed with a signed contract in hand.
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On February 21 he sent Wilder a copy of an advertising circular for his approval. “Of course, you may not approve of some of the statements,” Keedick wrote, “but please remember that the committees realize this is our appraisal of you, and not your own opinion of yourself.”
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Wilder fired back his objections on February 23. “I have never been in South America. And in the next sentence I could hardly have ‘evolved the . . . Perichole' because she was a historic woman. . . . The heading:
‘Greatest novel of the age'
is liable to antagonize really cultivated people rather than win them. Tolstoi and Hardy and Conrad haven't been dead so awfully long.” Wilder also objected to the statement that he was unsurpassed “ ‘
by any foreign writer.'
Sure, I'm [un]surpassed by a good many foreign authors, but, my god, by all?? I suppose you meant
scarcely surpassed
. And even that's a bit thick.”
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He then added what had to be an unusual request: “Don't put me down as terribly expensive, Mr. Keedick. Or make it plain that there is a sliding scale for serious educational institutions. I couldn't face an audience if I thought they were astonished that such a ‘humanitarian' author was after big cold prices.”
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