Thornton Wilder--The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

This was my first time reading this still popular and well-regarded little book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for its 30 year old author and seems to have marked the peak of his career as a novelist, at least. My comments on it as I was reading it ran thus: 

It is a nice smooth read. Too much exposition though, not enough dialogue/characterization. Does feel somehow small, critic (Clifton Fadiman, quoted in an "about the author" segment in the back of the book) said it lacks ambition. It has some ambition, but does not teem with life in the sense of some of these other books. It is at the same time good, though, in its way. It is a book by a smart person who is still looking in at the world of art, culture, learning, from outside, and this is the closest he can approach to being somehow part of it (though he went to Yale and studied archaeology in Rome for a year as well, his writing does not seem to me to assume its own authority, but to still be making a pitch for acceptance from others who already have it). 

I seem to remember someone at St. John's writing his senior essay on this, and they obviously let him do it, though I am kind of surprised by that. Again, it is not that the book is not clever and well done, and an interesting exercise, necessarily artificial (it is set in Peru in 1714, and while the characters are well drawn as familiar types of the old Spanish literary world, they do not quite emerge as individuals with a life that transcends their functions in the story). I think most people who like literature would enjoy it if they are in the mood for something shorter and lighter than what you get if you generally stick to a solid diet of classics (you can easily read the whole book in a couple of hours). It just strikes me as something the faculty there would find pretty superficial and not great grist for thoughtful writing or discussion. 

The IWE introduction: "Thornton Wilder made his first great success with The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It is very short, not 35,000 words--hardly a novel at all by most standards--but it ranks with such magnificent miniatures as A Christmas Carol and Of Mice and Men. It won a Pulitzer Prize."

The IWE people liked Wilder, who was still living at the time this list was made (he died in 1975). While contemporary luminaries who are more celebrated today like Waugh and Orwell and Wodehouse could only get one book into their Hall of Fame, Wilder appears three times. We'll be seeing him again.

There have been three major film versions, a 1929 MGM silent movie, a 1944 United Artists release, and a 2004 film featuring many recognizable actors, F. Murray Abraham, Kathy Bates, Harvey Keitel, Robert DeNiro, Geraldine Chaplin, and more. None of them appear to have been spectacularly successful. 

p.16 "...the scientist Azuarius whose treatise on the laws of hydraulics was suppressed by the Inquisition as being too exciting."

p. 17 "...he thought that when he had enjoyed the style he had extracted all their richness and intention, missing (as most readers do), the whole purport of literature, which is the notation of the heart."

p. 50 "Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, 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."

p. 86 "Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theaters in some Heaven whither Calderon had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth."

p. 92 "Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their house, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely-read could be said to know that they were unhappy."

Even these quotations that struck me at the time as worthy of noting are rather lackluster. I am being unduly hard on it though. I enjoyed it. I liked the vignettes. I was hoping that the priest would find somewhat more of a unifying theme with regard to the lives at the end, or at least a more interesting summation of the project. His character was not fleshed out/did not have a clear, strong purpose in the story. 

My book, which I will try to include a picture of, was a circa 1998 paperback Harper Perennial Classics edition that I picked up from my local public library's discard pile a couple of years ago, knowing that this was on the list. With most of these books I try to get a hardback copy from 1920-1960 or so for the reading, but given how short this was, and having the paperback already on hand, I didn't bother to do that with this one. There is a sticker on the front of my book indicating that The Bridge of San Luis Rey was the 2002 selection for the communal Concord Reads program where, I presume, the community reads the book at the same time and they have groups where they talk about it. Of course I wouldn't participate in that. While I would like to find people to talk about books with, they have to be the right people (clever, preferably witty, some attractive women would be nice as well) in the right setting (while drinking). But I haven't anyone met anyone like this who will hang out with me in years, so I drink and talk to myself and occasionally write a blog post. 

The Challenge

1. Crucial Conversations: Tools For Talking When the Stakes are High.....................6,604

2. Roz Chast--Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant....................................1,662

3. Before I Fall (movie--2017).....................................................................................1,303

4. Miles Davis--Sketches of Spain (music album--1960)................................................916

5. Liaquat Ahmed--Lords of Finance..............................................................................732

6. Rosa Parks: Rosa Parks: My Story..............................................................................609

7. Goya's Ghosts (movie--2006)......................................................................................606

8. Helen Oyeyemi--Boy, Snow, Bird................................................................................574

9. Solomon, Greenberg, Pyszczynski--The Worm at the Core.........................................220

10. Anna Malaika Tubbs--The Three Mothers.................................................................179

11. Alice Kirks--The Recipe to Win an Earl's Heart..........................................................93

12. Jenni Ferrari-Adler--Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant......................................72

13. Aimee Reid--You Are My Friend.................................................................................70

14. Raleigh Ruebens--The Best Friend..............................................................................49

15. Jo McNally--It Started at Christmas...........................................................................22

16. John Medici--Pleasant Avenue....................................................................................12

16. Moliere--The Imaginary Invalid..................................................................................12

That tie for 16th place necessitates a play in game.

Play-In Game

Moliere over Medici

The Medici book is a memoir about growing up in an Italian American immigrant family in postwar East Harlem. Not an entirely unenticing book, but one that had the misfortune to come up against a heavy hitter right off the bat in the tournament.

Round of 16

#16 Moliere over #1 Crucial Conversations

Crucial Conversations has sold 4 million copies and captured the top seed here by a nearly 5,000 point margin, but it doesn't have the game to take on a real contender.

#15 McNally over #2 Chast

Roz Chast has some juice in the publishing world but McNally comes in with an upset to propel her into the quarterfinals. 

#14 Ruebens over #3 Before I Fall

#4 Davis over #13 Reid

Usually music will fall to a book of any quality, and while this children's book about the late television icon Mr. Rogers may possess quality, I think Miles Davis can handle it comfortably in a first round matchup.

#12 Ferrari-Adler over #5 Ahmed

Despite the ridiculous attention-seeking title, I am going with Ferrari-Adler in this matchup of two works that are neither completely off-putting nor possess any special attraction to me because it is quite a bit shorter. I see on further review that the Eggplant book is a collection of humorous cooking essays by around 20 different writers, and Jenni Ferrari-Adler is the editor. Having noted in her biography that she graduated from Oberlin with an MFA from Michigan in conjunction with the title of her book I began to have all kinds of wild speculations, that she was kind of a babe and one of the party girls of the MFA scene that made going to graduate school actually worthwhile (though as my then future wife replied once when I talked about graduate school and going to parties, "people in graduate school are adults"), but then I checked myself. 

#6 Parks over #11 Kirks

#10 Tubbs over #7 Goya's Ghosts

#8 Oyeyemi over #9 The Worm at the Core 

The Worm at the Core is a psychology book about the fear of death. Oyeyemi was one of the most acclaimed novels of 2014.

Super 8

#16 Moliere over #4 Davis

#6 Parks over #15 McNally

#8 Oyeyemi over #14 Ruebens

#12 Ferrari-Adler over #10 Tubbs

The only really close game in this round--Davis hung around Moliere most of the game but the Frenchman pulled away in the closing minutes--Tubbs's book is about the mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. The Eggplant book sounded more fun.

Final Four

#16 Moliere over #6 Parks

#8 Oyeyemi over #12 Ferrari-Adler

Both of these games ended up not being very close.

Championship

#8 Oyeyemi over #16 Moliere

I mulled over this one for a while. By the ordinary parameters of tournament competition, with upsets not in play, Moliere would have won here. His book is shorter, older, written in a foreign language (that counts for a slight advantage), and he is overall the more celebrated author. However, I have had several books of this type (modern, written by, to put it bluntly, an author who is not white) come up lately and advance through a couple of rounds only to get tripped up in the semi-final or final. So I decided that this time I would go in favor of the more contemporary book.  

Evelyn Waugh--Brideshead Revisited (1945)

I read this back in 2010 and wrote a number of posts about it on my original blog which can be seen here. At that time I read a newer Everyman edition that used the text of the 1959 revision, in which supposedly a good deal had been altered. While I liked a lot about the book at that time, I had always felt something about it was a little off, considering its reputation and the obvious affection which many people had for it. I determined that the revision must have had something to do with this, and when I knew it was coming up on the IWE list I made a point of getting a copy of the earlier edition, shown above. I cannot say that I noticed any of the supposed differences, but I did feel better having an edition of the book as it first appeared to the public, or at least the American public, in the 1940s. Whatever it is, I am sure that I have it now as much as I am ever going to.

While I was reading this there was a small kerfuffle on the internet for a few days about the academic discipline of Classics with its traditional association as the study of Greek and Latin being essentially a white supremacist field, that it needed not merely to be opened up and equal space and esteem given to the works and languages of other ancient civilizations, but all of the ideas and the mystique that underlay it more or less needed to be blown to smithereens. I made a note in my that "If people the Classics are too white, I hope they don't find out about this. (JOKE)" Then I added, "I know it is the discipline in its current incarnation, not the books themselves, that is being objected to", but I have no idea what I was getting at here, it probably is the books themselves too. Still, the world of Brideshead Revisited represents something of an epitome of what that system of education produces, in the English speaking countries at least. Perhaps Waugh and his characters can (for some people) be described simply as "white supremacists" and left at that, though that designation, applied as it is so universally and on so many occasions, doesn't really begin to do justice to the sense of physical, cultural and intellectual superiority the characters at the inner core of this novel project towards pretty much the entirety of the rest of humanity. And this was so deep that even though their houses and wealth and much of their social position erode and are lost during the course of the book this sense of themselves can never really be crushed out of them--the drive to do which by the way is very strong in the current crusades against white supremacy, which I take to account for much of the anger directed against even fairly nondescript and inoffensive white people by those who in comparative terms would seem to be indisputably more accomplished and successful and recognized as such. It's the internalized feelings of worth people retain that can in any way be attributed to "whiteness"--and these are as prevalent among the educated and enlightened, if not more so, than among the humbler classes--that seemingly cannot be eradicated in the face of all argument and even evidence against them that seems to infuriate people so wildly.

p. 45 "'I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon'; that was enough then. Is more needed now?"

I'm really going to try to keep the quotes to a minimum--in this book there is something quoteworthy on almost every page--but this might be the last time I read this, so I want to leave a few favorites to remember it by.

p. 59 Very palpable evocation of a lost world here (Oxford on Sunday morning ca. 1923): "None but church-goers seemed abroad that morning; undergraduates and graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English church-going pace which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering; holding, bound in black lamb-skin and white celluloid, the liturgies of half a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St. Barnabas, St. Columba, St. Aloysius, St. Mary's, Pusey House, Blackfriars and heaven knows where besides; to restored Norman and revived Gothic, to travesties of Venice and Athens; all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race."

p. 225 "...the epochs of history, when a race which for centuries has lived content, unknown, behind its own frontiers, digging, eating, sleeping, begetting, doing what was requisite for survival and nothing else, will, for a generation or two, stupefy the world; commit all manner of crimes, perhaps; follow the wildest chimeras, go down in the end in agony, but leave behind a record of new heights scaled and new rewards won for all mankind; the vision fades, the soul sickens, and the routine of survival starts again." Back to the classics--this take, I think, is what many (white) men at least have traditionally had in mind as what is meant by them much of the time.

p. 227 "Hence my prosperity, far beyond my merits; my work had nothing to recommend it except my growing technical skill, enthusiasm for my subject and independence of popular notions...I did not go to Europe; her treasures were too safe, swaddled in expert care, obscured by reverence (ed--this has only gotten worse since then). Europe could wait. There would be a time for Europe, I thought; all too soon the days would come when I should need a man at my side to put up my easel and carry my paints; when I could not venture more than an hour's journey from a good hotel; when I should need soft breezes and mellow sunshine all day long; then I would take my old eyes to Germany and Italy." 

p. 271-2 "You must remember I am not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals...My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, 'Take me to Charles's unhealthy pictures.'" Lol. Anthony Blanche.

p. 299 "'To put it crudely,' said my cousin Jasper, as though he had ever in his life put anything otherwise..." 😄 

While I am very fond of this book--it strikes as very much the kind of book that many writers, perhaps especially those of the would-be variety, would most like to write--the snobbery and pointedness of the exclusivity of this sliver of literary history at least always gets to me a little in the end. It just permeates the book so much. The narrator never really likes anyone outside of his very narrow set (granted, he doesn't even seem to like his own wife and children very much either, so maybe a mere reader should not be so sensitive with regard to it). It can be amusing, but in the end why should the rest of us have to put up with it forever? I think I was overcome by a similar reaction towards the end the first time I read this as well.

p. 231 On New York: "...it was four o'clock, but neither of us was ready to sleep, for in that city there is neurosis in the air which the inhabitants mistake for energy." Mainly interesting because New York people themselves still emphasize "energy" as the defining characteristic of their city, and by extension presumably themselves, 75 years on. 

I didn't note it at the time and I cannot find it right now, but the line about Lady Marchmain's brothers who were killed in World War I--"these men must die to make a world for Hooper"--gets to everybody. And why should it? Because the type of the men who died had something, language, artistic sensibility, a sense of who they were, that we obviously don't. 

I forgot to look at what the IWE had to say about this. They're always good for a unique take, or sometimes a laugh, in these matters:

"Anyone who has known the younger upper classes of London after either World War can testify that Evelyn Waugh did not overpaint their wildness, their excesses, for they could hardly be overpainted. In fact, in Brideshead Revisited Waugh was quite moderate. As a novel it is great. When all the arguments about Waugh's other works are ended, Brideshead Revisited will remain to testify that the man could write. The ambivalence produced by Catholicism in Englishmen, a favorite theme of Waugh's is accented in this novel."

This is the only one of Waugh's books that was chosen for the list. He'll have to get into and win a Challenge at some point. I think he can do it.

I have not written very much about my own thoughts regarding the book. I think that for the kind of people who like novels, in particular old-fashioned ones, this gives them a great deal of the sort of things that make them happy--fashionable London in the 20s, old Oxford, exquisite dialogue, irrepressible humor, feelings of regret about the passing of time and the necessity of change, drinking, sociability among a desirable initiate. One cannot really help oneself in luxuriating in the experience and being a little wistful at its now being past.  

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge

My newly tweaked system generated so many competitors that numerous Waugh-themed books were unable to qualify for the final. But I prefer this system overall.

1. Beverly Daniel Tatum--Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?........5,539

2. Eric Metaxas--Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.......................................................3,858

3. William Zinsser--On Writing Well..........................................................................................2,440

4. Sebastian Barry--Days Without End.......................................................................................1,337

5. Linda J. McDonald--How to Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair.................................1,038

6. Jane Smiley--Perestroika in Paris..........................................................................................1,004

7. Brideshead Revisited (TV--1981)..............................................................................................909

8. Alex S. Vitale--The End of Policing..........................................................................................553

9. Brideshead Revisited (movie--2008).........................................................................................499

10. Goold Brown--The Grammar of English Grammars..............................................................482

11. Kazuo Ishiguro--The Unconsoled............................................................................................341

12. Janet Burroway--Writing Fiction.............................................................................................287

13. The Riot Club (movie--2014)...................................................................................................255

14. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor--Race for Profit.............................................................................210

15. Eleanor Herman--Mistress of the Vatican................................................................................205

16. Judith Rich Harris--The Nurture Assumption..........................................................................165

Round of 16

#16 Harris over #1 Tatum

A matchup of superficially similar books, both social science-y, both from the late 90s, similar in length, both written by women, I suppose you could add. I gave the Harris book the nod in the end dues to its having been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as (probably), being a subject of slightly more interest to me.

#2 Metaxas over #15 Herman

The popularity of the Bonhoeffer biography makes me mildly suspicious of it, but the Herman book, also a biography (by the author of Sex With Kings, among other best-sellers), brings with it somewhat similar objections from one of the opposite corners of the Catholic moral universe, which is enough to carry Bonhoeffer/Metaxas to the victory here. Interesting that the tournament opens with a pair of matchups between books that are mirrors of each other in certain senses.

#14 Taylor over #3 Zinsser

I think I have read the Zinsser book before, though not as a victor in this contest. I don't remember the occasion for my doing that. While I like occasionally reading "How-to-Write-Like-a-Professional" type books, especially the classic ones///(picking up after 10 day interruption) I was evidently really not in the mood to do so on March 2nd, I don't remember why. In any case they probably at this point in my career should not win in most instances if there is any other acceptable option.

#4 Barry over #13 Riot Club

#12 Burroway over #5 McDonald

McDonald does not present a particularly desirable alternative here.

#11 Ishiguro over #6 Smiley

Ishiguro wins a battle of big names. 

#10 Brown over #7 Brideshead Revisited TV

#8 Vitale over #9 Brideshead Revisited movie

Elite 8

#16 Harris over #2 Metaxas

Harris is quite a bit shorter. I already had misgivings about the other book just because its number of reviews seems awfully inflated for its subject matter.

  

#4 Barry over #14 Taylor

Barry is 100 pages shorter while his historical novels seem to be well-received by some semi-intelligent sector of the literary world.

#8 Vitale over #12 Burroway

I'm not all that into either of these books. The End of Policing is shorter, as well as topical, though that carries no great sway with me.

#10 Brown over #11 Ishiguro

Yes, Brown has an upset. 

Final Four

#4 Barry over #16 Harris

Length again, as these books are about even in attractiveness to me.

#10 Brown over #8 Vitale

Brown gets another upset, though I am not heartbroken to see Vitale eliminated.

Championship

#4 Barry over #10 Brown

I don't have time in my life right now to read an exhaustive 170 year old book on English grammar. Maybe someday. 

March 2021

I am late this month. Not because my enthusiasm for the task has waned--on the contrary my appetite for somehow insinuating my way into some corner of the discourse by any possible means has perhaps never been greater--but time, distractions. I cannot linger for five or ten minutes to find the just phrase. I have at this moment a team of electricians in my house that my wife has called in. It never begins.

A List: Kitto--Form and Meaning in Drama..............................................276/337

B List: Between books--I am 2 reports behind on this list as well, but the next book on the list is a really long one, the first really since Bleak House which we hit about a year ago, so I will have time to catch up.

C List: Stanley Gordon West--Amos............................................................66/231

Kitto has finished the Greeks and moved on to Hamlet now. He's not insufferable in the way so many modern academics are, but he is overly fond of his own erudition and thought processes, which are not that spectacular. He employs a lot of words to convey what seem to me a few fairly intuitive points that would benefit more by being expressed with a sharper and more focused clarity than given the full academic treatment. That's my impression, anyway. I don't know whether this book is read much anymore anyway.

Stanley Gordon West was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1932, and attended Macalester College, a well-regarded liberal arts school in that part of the country for those of you in the east who may not realize that, and the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1955. He moved to Montana in 1964 with his family--his obituary lists 5 daughters, though the dedication in his book, which was published in 1983, only names 4 of them and indicates that they were already grown. He seems to have lived in Montana for many years, and many of his books, including Amos, have something of a Western theme, though at the time of his death in 2015 he was back living in Minnesota again. I note these biographical details because so much in it is typical of the men of that generation, the big families, the educational attainments, the writing fetish, the comparatively non flashy, dyed in the wool Americanness. This guy only died a few years ago, and his book (this one) was published when I was in 7th or 8th grade, yet his life and career and overall outlook seem to belong to another world. This book is set in a county nursing home in Montana for people, mostly old men, who have no family or other worldly ties, a type of person which I understand is quite common in that part of the world. The staff at this home abuses the patients, manipulates them into signing over to them such monies as they receive and so on. It is supposed to have been set in the 60s, but some aspects of the world in it are recognizable to me from my childhood, especially the radio and other old media. The story has some similarities to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, another product of that generation. I don't know how well the book sold but it was made into a made for TV movie on CBS in 1985 starring Kirk Douglas, the late, great Elizabeth Montgomery, Dorothy McGuire (!), Ray Ralston and Pat Morita. Another blast from the pre-90s past there. I am reading this because it won one of my less-contested Challenges, and it is something of a respite after months of Carlyle (which I did like--otherwise I would have given it up, I can do that on the C-list). 

This month's pictures, which are not numerous. are mostly from February. March is pretty much the ugliest month of the year here, but we'll get those pictures next month. Here the fallen birch tree (which miraculously fell without harming the basketball hoop) serves as a platform for my 11 year old to practice dunking, though he would be better off practicing shooting.

These are the grounds of a former estate in Methuen, Massachusetts that has been turned into a public park. I am not sure why the house was pulled down, but only ruins remain. I went down here with 3 of my children on one of the days of my vacation. I did not go to Florida this year (or New York)

This tower is part of the estate that managed to escape destruction. We were in this neighborhood because one of my sons had a longstanding desire to go to Outback Steak House, and the nearest one to us was here. It is just over the border from New Hampshire. I could have parked in New Hampshire and walked to this place if I had wanted.

We had a spaghetti dinner at which others actually did join me.

This is just 10 days ago. The amount of snow has already diminished considerably since then.

Icicle formation outside of the best used book shop in my area.

Another view of the front of the shop.

Back to Methuen. This is all that remains of the former mansion. Apparently people have weddings here though it is really a pretty humble ruin.