By Stuart Mitchner

Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (HarperCollins 2004) was the year’s number one fiction best-seller when it was published in 1927; it also received the 1928 Pulitzer Prize and is still in print, reportedly selling seven thousand copies worldwide every year. So how is it that in my long life as a reader I ignored it until April 17 of last week, Wilder’s 127th birthday? There may be a clue in the wording of the New York Times December 8, 1975 obituary: “Aloof from the 20th century’s preoccupation with politics, psychology and sex,” Wilder “concentrated in his novels and plays on what he construed as the universal verities in human nature. He seemed to be examining mankind from an Olympian platform.”

In his foreword to the 2004 edition, novelist Russell Banks, who died in January 2023, says that Wilder’s novel is “as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature.” The book “feels, in its exquisite universality and ease of timeless application, ancient, classical, almost biblical.” Probably aware of the “aloofness” issue, Banks admits that while “in certain ways, the prose seems antique,” it’s “not in the least antiquated,” the “sentences are elegant, but never self-admiring, exquisitely balanced, yet not overformal, and complex without being elaborate.” Banks’s way of bringing the novel into contemporary America, circa 2004, is to suggest an analogy between the fictional fall of the bridge that “precipitated five travelers into the gulf below” on July 20, 1714 and the terrorist attack that killed thousands when it brought down the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Referring to Brother Juniper, the “metaphysically anxious” Franciscan missionary who witnesses the collapse of the bridge and asks himself why this happened to those five,” Banks recalls how “on that day in September …, we all, thanks to the miracle of modern video technology, became witnesses to an event that defies our moral understanding and tempts us to try puzzling out the mind of God, hoping thereby to justify the ways of God to man.” Having highlighted the spiritual dilemma that Brother Juniper was obsessed with, Banks concludes with reference to the “necessary admonition” in the speech by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, delivered at a memorial service in New York for British victims of the attack — a speech Blair dressed in the reflected glory of the novel’s closing sentences: “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.”

Wilder Attacked

Writing in the October 22, 1930 New Republic three years after the publication of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Michael Gold called Wilder “the Emily Post of culture,” “the preacher of tea parlor Christianity,” the author of “little lavender tragedies,” and “a fugitive from the American scene” who is “at home in Paris and Rome,” likes “museums and culture,” and has no room in his fiction for “coal miners” or other working-class, blue collar issues. According to Malcolm Cowley’s classic Exiles Return (1951), Gold’s article was the occasion for “hundreds of letters to the editor, some carefully reasoned, some violently hysterical,” letters that at first defended Wilder and attacked Gold but that in time were “half-agreeing” with Gold, even though he had “ridiculously overstated his case.”

One of the pro-Wilder letters quoted by Cowley says, “I heartily resent, as do many of my liberal friends, this attack on a man who we consider has done lovely things and who we believe is endowed with a very lovely nature.” As Cowley points out, one thing Gold had correctly diagnosed during the onset of the Great Depression was “the weakness of Wilder’s readers … as the situation of the country became more desperate. Literature for the next few years would be asked to deal in one way or another with the problems of the day.”

Eight years after Gold’s article, Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning play, Our Town, written during the Depression, made its debut at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre. Wilder called his play “an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our life.” Declaring Our Town to be his favorite among all his works, he insisted that it “should be performed without sentimentality or ponderousness — simply, dryly, and sincerely.” In other words, no “Emily Post,” no “tea parlor Christianity,” no “little lavender tragedies.”

A Bridge in Princeton

If the back story of The Bridge of San Luis Rey interests me more than the book itself, it’s because of an afterword by the author’s nephew Tappan Wilder, explaining that the idea for the novel came to Wilder when he was “studying for an M.A. in French at the Princeton Graduate School.” His sister Isabel recalled the time he showed her “the exact spot on the campus” where the idea “came to be full blown.” It was “as he crossed a small bridge over a narrow flow of water” that emptied into Lake Carnegie.

When I read that sentence, I wanted to head for the Graduate College to follow Wilder’s footsteps, even though that “small bridge” is most likely long gone. If I’d known that Lake Carnegie had figured in the geography of Wilder’s conception, I’d have read his novel back in the fall of 1975 when we lived a short walk away from a place I’d come to think of as Einstein’s lake ever since learning that he liked to sail his dinghy there.

Wilder’s Choice

Still on the subject of the Graduate College and Lake Carnegie, Tappan Wilder takes the story of the novel to the moment when Wilder had to decide between continuing to teach French at Lawrenceville Academy or finding “a way to test himself more directly against his pen,” the course he chose because “his ‘Peruvians,’ as he called them, were buzzing in his head.” His job as a tutor and companion in Europe in the fall of 1926 explains why “the completed manuscript pages bore the invisible marks of hotel rooms in London, Rome. Naples, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Juan-les-Pins.”

When Wilder returned to Lawrenceville to teach in the fall of 1927, his salary was $3,000. In 1928, from The Bridge alone, he earned a net taxable income of $87,000 or close to a million dollars in 2004. He was entering “what was for him the uncharted world of an acclaimed author with a growing worldwide reputation.”

Banks Looks Down

The reference to “blue-collar issues” in Michael Gold’s litany of complaints about Wilder’s work reminded me of the New York Times obituary describing Russell Banks as “a novelist steeped in the working class” who wrote of his “own sometimes painful blue-collar experiences.” That sort of typecasting would seem to make him the last person in the world suited to write an eloquent, sympathetic foreword to The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Curious to find out more about Banks, who taught at Princeton, I looked into his memoir, Voyager: Travel Writings (Ecco 2016), published 12 years after the foreword to The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the closing chapter, Banks is in the Himalayas crossing a “narrow suspension bridge strung between two cliffs” when he suddenly remembers Wilder’s “scary novel” and looks down “at the milky river crashing against the rocks five hundred feet below….If the swaying bridge, as in the novel, were to inexplicably give way, I wanted to see where I’d be hurled.”

Banks was 72 when he experienced that moment on the bridge as Wilder’s book with all its “exquisite universality” and “personal philosophical inquiry” suddenly became a “scary novel.”

Deeper Into Wilder

Read deeper into Wilder’s New York Times obituary and there’s a refreshing transition from the characterization of the author as “aloof” and “Olympian” to a man with “an uninhibited appetite for life. Full of bounce and bubble, entirely without airs and immensely interested in people, he fueled himself on travel and conversation. His friendships ranged from truck drivers to waitresses,” from Sigmund Freud to Gertrude Stein to Texas Guinan, “the nightclub entertainer.”

In case the idea of Wilder teaching French at the Lawrenceville Academy sounds less than compelling, it seems that his teaching style had taken some interesting turns by the time he was lecturing on “The Classics in Translation” at the University of Chicago. According to Time’s January 12, 1953 cover story, “It was the big campus show, with Wilder the happiest and hammiest of stars. He would fling his arms about, jump from the platform and leap back again. Talking at trip-hammer speed, he was sometimes in the front of the class, sometimes in the back, sometimes at the window waving to friends. Necks craned to keep up with him; heads swung back and forth as if watching a tennis game. Wilder could play the blind Homer, a Greek chorus or the entire siege of Troy.”

“Perhaps an Accident”

Tappan Wilder’s afterword includes several facsimiles of the original manuscript of The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In the earliest draft, Wilder used his own birthday, April 17, instead of July 20, for the collapse of the bridge. In the early draft, the first part of the novel is titled, “An Act of God.” In the published version, Wilder has replaced it with “Perhaps An Accident.” The only photograph included shows Wilder, walking stick in hand, with heavyweight champion Gene Tunney on the edge of Mont Blanc in the Swiss Alps, in September 1928. A glimpse of the friendship between the fighter and the writer is offered in The New Yorker’s Town Talk for August 4, 1928: After a walking trip through Central Europe, they plan to “settle down somewhere, possibly in Henry James’s old house at Rye, in England, which they are trying to rent.”
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Note: the photo of Thornton Wilder on the front page of this week’s paper is from the Time magazine cover illustration by Boris Chaliapin.