Evenings With the Bridge Family
Nolte, William H.
once humanitarian and structural. Genuine democracy depends on economic liberty. A people entirely wards of the state simply lacks means to resist the state. Some of the Polish intellectuals in...
...With a hoarse scream it passed just above the raft...
...I don't mind waiting...
...Democratic socialists stress the corruptions and faults of relatively free economies...
...The same press has issued his selected stories in both hard- and soft-cover under the title of Saint Augustine's Pigeon...
...His primary concern is to make enough money in his law practice to ensure his family against physical want, and in that he is a success--the only way, I suppose, in which he might be considered successful although I hesitate to call him a failure just because of his narrow interests...
...Just why they provide me with such delight is hard to say, but there it is: I read them from front to back every two or three years, always with the same interest and wonder...
...The truth is that the American woman has become a superb jogger, an amazing receptacle of vitamin pills, and the most formidable female 7'aki is The American Spectator's new European editor...
...13-15...
...All morning the Catalina passes back and forth over the empty raft as if it were performing some ritual whose meaning has long since been forgotten...
...At least two of Willa Cather's novels--My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop--move me in much the same way...
...In place of Crane's _9 See William H. Nohe, "Evan Connetl the Ironist," The American Spectator, November 1978, pp...
...but that's all right...
...The second paragraph then begins: At dawn, from the south, came a Catalina flying boat, a plump and graceless creation known as the PBY--phlegmatic in the air, more at home resting its deep snowy breast in the water...
...In its brevity (three-and-a-half pages) it reads like an updated condensation of Stephen C r a n e ' s "The Open Boat"mminus the overt "lesson" concerning man's lonely place in an indifferent universe that Crane insists on our hearing...
...Go right ahead," she remarked when she saw him glance at his beer, which was foaming pleasantly near the rim of the glass...
...He was a cross to be borne when necessary and avoided whenever possible...
...Both novels were widely noticed and highly praised...
...Like the best art of whatever kindmliterature, music, sculpture, painting--the Bridge novels appeal to both the imagination and the memory...
...In short, one ideal of equality leads in practice to hope, while of the other one must write over the portal, in Dante's words, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here...
...As I have noted in these pages before," his life is barren of joy...
...Foster was gone f o r a n o t h e r y e a r . " Although Connell usually avoids any judgmental comment about the c h a r a c t e r s , in this instance he describes the ordeal from Mr...
...Hence I was pleased to learn that those volumes, which have been in and out of print for years, are now available in a new edition (in paperback with dust jackets, $7.50 each), beautifully turned out by the North Point Press of San Francisco...
...Bridge periodically endures Dr...
...You've never understood...
...Bridge I have read the rest of the dozen books Connell has thus far written...
...Stop acting ridiculous...
...Since the rise of the sexual revolution it has become all but impossible to keep her off our bar stools and out of our bedrooms...
...There is, in fact, an essentially nihilistic quality in all of Connell's fiction--never so stridently expressed as it is in Dreiser or in the early stories and novels of Hemingway (or, for that m a t t e r , in the best work of Faulkner, written between 1929 and 1940 - - t h a t is, between The Sound and the Fury and The Hamlet...
...But he had no prejudice, or if he did he had buried it beneath a haystack of piety...
...In the seven or eight pages required to present the n e c e s s a r y details (and it is of course the telling of the tale rather than the tale itself that is so funny...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 15...
...Every European male who has done any field research in the area is aware of the appalling condition: the more lib.erated the Yankee female, the lousier the lover...
...After all, the problem is not confined to America...
...Bridge is more sympathetically drawn than her husband, she is not therefore the more fascinating...
...Some of the Polish intellectuals in Rome said wryly that they were, in a sense, reinventing the wheel...
...Bridge and Douglas and all the others live in a little world I very much enjoy revisiting...
...For Mr...
...Mrs...
...Their trivial details seem to take on an importance that before had gone unnoticed...
...Cheerfulness, yes, and joviality, and the brief gratification of sex...
...Bridge, for example, there is Wilhelm Van Metre, who enlivens the chapter "Agreeable Conversation" (the chapter headings are almost invariably ironic) with one of the most hilariously boring tales I have ever read...
...Nothing in Sinclair Lewis or Evelyn Waugh surpasses it...
...The answer has to be a resounding no...
...Total control is awesome...
...And, predictably, he made a great point of talking to the children...
...Trying to make incomes roughly equal, it can hardly avoid insisting that opinions be roughly equal...
...Douglas will have none of that, of course...
...There is about him a stolid quality coupled with a vague d i s c o n t e n t . Although a fully r e a l i z e d c h a r a c t e r , Muhlbach is too slow (I can think of no better word to describe him) to be very i n t e r e s t i n g ; in fact, I find him something of a bore--as does, I daresay, his creator...
...Bridge, living is a serious business, and one had best go about it buttoned up and with one's affairs strictly in order...
...Since first re'ading Mr...
...Such novels are more preoccupied with the significance of life than they are with its phenomena...
...Certainly "The Yellow Raft," more an exercise in the art of description than a short story, sticks in the memory...
...Once a year Dr...
...It was, she said, a reaction to having been "aroused to a high pitch of indignation by hearing American men constantly maligned...
...Whatever the reason for continuing the absurd vigil, it was no more senseless than the final act of the PBY (its pilot is never mentioned, which gives an added chill to this most chilling of stories...
...Then THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 13 the Catalina began to climb...
...The last lines of the novel underline the fact: "He remembered enthusiasm, hol~e, and a kind of jubilation or exultation...
...This is particularly true in the case of Mr...
...Half the time you don't know if I'm dead or alive...
...the yellow raft fell back, torn into fragments of cork and deflated rubber that stained the ocean with an irid6scent dye as green as a rainbow...
...It has taken on global proportions...
...One said they were like the early Americans, using Madison as a sort of how-to-do-it book to create a new democracy...
...Now I have given Miss Lawrenson's historic essay, "Latins Make Lousy Lovers," some further thought...
...While reading Connell's two masterworks, I constantly feel that "inexplicable presence...
...I don't expect you to understand...
...They have no business in that far country where boys dig caves, climb trees, dream dreams, and decorate the landscape with once-in-a-lifetime creations...
...Drinking beer...
...To Mr...
...Bridge, whom I cannot help liking (rather more, I suspect, than Connell does) even though I know his prejudices differ markedly from my own...
...There were ominous heavy maneuvers to the west in East Germany, to the south in Czechoslovakia, and to the east on the Soviet frontier in Lithuania...
...This is by no means to imply that bores have no place in literature or that they may not be interesting (unlike those we encounter in our daily lives), but the i n t e r e s t we have in the fictional bore is generally derisory and in keeping with the author's satiric intent...
...Only an Iranian freely consenting to the clsador could be much worse...
...Where Conrad depicted his characters as being little more than puppets in the hands of some inscrutable and infinitely ironic Force, and Jeffers (in the narrative poems) depicted his as being, more often than not, blind atoms driven by an atavistic need to destroy themselves and be damned, so Connell peoples his stories and novels with men and women who e i t h e r muddle through the p r e s e n t , wistfully hoping tomorrow will bring a new flavor or light to their dreary lives, or else delay living in the present in order to ensure a future that, by the very n a t u r e of things, must always come too l a t e . Recall Karl Muhlbach, whom Connell borrowed in p a r t from Thomas Mann's P r o f e s s o r Cornelius in "Disorder and Early Sorrow...
...Only a productive, inventive, growing economy provides the means not only of progressive social legislation but also of popular hope, mobility, and serendipity...
...She constantly reminds me of Madame Bovary although she could no more conceive of committing adultery than she could consider biting off the noses of her children...
...Gladness, too, fullness of heart, appreciation, and many other emotiofis...
...A couple more accusations and denials and the vignette concludes: "She never explained what he had done wrong, and after thinking quite a lot about this incomprehensible fit of hysteria he decided the best procedure was to ignore i t . " And it is never mentioned again...
...Bridge, life is a complex of obstacles to be overcome or, b e t t e r , to be avoided...
...Bridge is Dr...
...For Mr...
...The ensuing ordeals have become a plague worse than herpes simplex number 2. I am an unabashed admirer of the fair sex...
...Slowly the constellations reappeared...
...But surely one can like a person without 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 being like him...
...Keats touched on the same theme when he noted that unheard melodies are sweeter than those heard...
...Or rather she refuses to believe what her mind and senses tell her since to believe the t r u t h would set her a p a r t from the other parishioners...
...The only thing to be grateful for was that he had enough decency to refrain from mentioning religion...
...For one thing, I was struck by the fact that once they had passed through the tadpole stage and into the harrowing period of pubescence they seemed to understand their parents better than their parents understood them...
...Though the adult may remember his Dionysian yooth when u n c e r t a i n t y , ignorance, and irrationality conspired to 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 give each new day the aspect of a world new-born, his Apollonian rage for order short-circuits his efforts to comprehend quixotic outbursts...
...Look at yourself...
...You've never cared for me...
...But then one tremendous pale blue wing of the PBY inclined toward a yellow dot on the ocean and in a dignified spiral the flying boat descended, keeping the raft precisely within its orbit until, just above the water, it skimmed by the raft...
...He first inquires, then he listens to the not very satisfactory answers, and then he commands...
...I realize you've written me off...
...No wonder most of us sympathize with our p a r e n t s for having had to cope with our behavior...
...Now for Heaven's sake, India," he said...
...One may read such things symbolically, of course, but I fail to see the least trace of a symbol--a human invention employed to stitch meaning into the fabric of human endeavor--in an event so bare of meaning...
...parents are policemen, and hence must be gotten around...
...Even as I laugh at the Bridges, and one laughs at them and not with them, I at times have the uneasy feeling that I am laughing at myself...
...They pay little attention to the corruption inherent in governmentally managed economies...
...Yet whenever I find myself trapped in the company of liberated women I feel as if I am in the company of those greasy Cuban chauvinists Lawrenson portrayed so accurately...
...haranguer on earth, but it is also the truth that the American woman ranks among the lousiest lovers in the world...
...In Mrs...
...Though he has no interest whatever in ghostly concerns, Mr...
...When the gunfire stopped the strange dance ended...
...At the same time, she is saying that the past we recall most poignantly is that which is most incommunicable...
...His two odd books of vatic meditations, as they are generally called--Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (1963) and Points for a Compass Rose (1973), the second of his volumes to be nominated for a National Book Award--I dip into now and then, but I believe the two companion novels remain his g r e a t e s t achievement...
...They felt they were living on a new frontier, trying to build a genuine democracy from within a system of total state control--and trying to do so bloodlessly, gradually, with the pressure of ten million members of Solidarity (and their families) behind them, but facing the awesome power of the military, the police, and the Party, over which the massive presence of 100,000 Soviet soldiers on Polish soil presided...
...And to relive or rediscover that past, one naust turn to art which not only reproduces scenes and events but incites the imagination of the auditor to take part in the creative process...
...My favorite bore in Mr...
...The genius of democratic capitalism of the American type is that it divides power into three systems: the political system, the economic system, and the moral-cultural system (the press, the universities, the churches, etc...
...Bridge (1959) first-came to my attention in the early sixties...
...The reader watches and listens as the precise, perfe~:tly balanced sentences follow each other across the page...
...The players in this little drama are viewed from a great height, as a mere speck, as an inadvertent obtrusion against the enormous backdrop of water and sky...
...By politicizing everything, they think they will achieve unprecedented liberty and equality...
...In Connell's highly skilled hands the commonplace is given weight and texture...
...Sports and politics ought to interest a man, so each time be came to dinner he tried out these topics...
...Higher and higher, never again changing course, it flew toward the infinite horizon...
...Bridge's point of view: If only the minister held some violent prejudice, no matter how preposterous, then at least he would be worth talking to...
...Foster's sermons as a favor to his wife, who can never decide what to think of the minister...
...Foster, the clergyman responsible for the spiritual health of the Bridge family (he lights up a corner or two of Mrs...
...The lessons I draw from this vivid personal experience are not contemporary lessons about Soviet socialism...
...I can't think of any...
...As a true blue friend of the USA, I regard it my duty to report these findings and to sound the alarm...
...Just look at you...
...Democratic socialists wish to collapse this three-fold system into a single system of political power...
...In practice, the politicization of all power concentrates authority and corrupts society...
...In trying to show that the most important thing created by the lkerary artist is what one feels "upon the page," Miss Cather remarked: "It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself...
...With a few exceptions, the tales fail to hold me--or anyhow do not invite more than an initial acquai n - tance...
...I might i l l u s t r a t e this distinction between the bore who simply bores, a common species, and the bore whom we cherish by returning to the Bridge novels, in which various and sundry prosers come and go, always exiting before the reader has finished laughing...
...He had no more sinew than a dish of custard...
...Except for the flashlight rolling back and forth and glittering in the sunshine the yellow raft was empty...
...Rather he resides in that gray area that contains a sizable segment of the American populace...
...A moment later, inside the blueblack hull, a machine gun rattled and the raft started bouncing on the water...
...For all I know, this may be the case in most families everywhere, but I'm aware of few other novelists (Richard Bradford is one, as evidenced by Red Sky at Morning) who have so humorously and poignantly revealed that d i s t u r b i n g t r u t h : disturbing since it is g e n e r a l l y believed that understanding grows out of experience, though not very hard to believe if we but recall our own youth...
...Bridge for one day demanding that she be given a divorce since her husband d i d n ' t love her...
...I read Mr...
...I'm the last person on earth to spoil your pleasure...
...Back then we were moving targets, but our parents were helplessly stationary...
...it is not economically productive...
...Her recent death reminded me of that doughty defense of the American male, and I wondere.d whether an American woman today would leap to the defense of the Yankee male...
...Bland was the word for him...
...Political power has a further liability...
...he enables us to see and cherish the little markings that distinguish all of us...
...You know perfectly well I care for you...
...That simply is not true...
...Despite the plethora of instructional books published almost daily on how to manipulate their bodies and the bodies of their sex partners, American women are becoming lousier lovers with each passing discussion about pleasure, ecstasy, and their belief that sex remains the principal confrontation by which to work out new values...
...Taki AMERICAN WOMEN MAKE LOUSY LOVERS Another chapter from the ugly history of American feminism by an erudite student of the venery arts...
...Bridge, by contrast, has a knowing eye for human folly of which he is unforgiving...
...Foster dines with the Bridges, arriving at seven and departing at ten...
...No, that belonged to simpler minds...
...It seems easy to move from political democracy to "economic democracy' '--in theory...
...He could no more be despised or hated than he could be loved or respected...
...Yet serious doubts arise about the democratic socialist dream whenever it is put into practice...
...We are never surprised by anything the characters do or say, having been prepared beforehand if not to expect then at least not to doubt their actions and speech...
...I f I were asked to choose the two novels written in the last twenty or even thirty years which I most enjoy rereading, I should without hesitation name Evan S. Connell's bittersweet portraits of the Bridge family...
...The myth of Moscow as the vanguard of socialism remains strong in Italy, France, Spain, and other Western countries, but even Communist Party leaders in those lands have begun to say that the impulse of the Communist revolution of 1917 has been spent, and that Moscow no longer represents socialism but naked Russian empire, aggressive beyond its borders and hopelessly mismanaged within...
...in fact he would sometimes excuse himself before the ten o'clock reprieve and retreat to his room where he would read "until the noise of the front door closing told him that Dr...
...No resort anywhere in Europe is off limits to the American woman...
...He was a fiftyyear-old Boy Scout...
...Why, that's not true," he said...
...Bridge when it was published in 1969...
...The final sentences: The flying boat descended with ponderous dignity, like a dowager stooping to retrieve a lost glove...
...While Mrs...
...And again I wonder: What American woman would be capable of writing such a piece today...
...Only worse, much worse...
...with Mrs...
...We can discuss the divorce after you've enjoyed yourself, lean wait...
...Bridge is a more formidable foe since he can recall having done the same things Douglas is now doing and hence knows that reason is a feeble stick...
...When Helen Lawrenson wrote in Esquire some four decades ago that Latins are "lousy lovers," she made it clear that hers was not an embittered chauvinistic diatribe against those macho types from south of the border...
...He was such a bore that he was careful never to talk about himself, always about what he supposed must be interesting to other people...
...Amidst all the faultless details of the novels' landscapes one discovers that sense of the past which alone William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...
...On into the afternoon of rain and storm...
...In two long paragraphs we watch a Navy fighter plane fall into the ocean, its pilot rise to the surface, catch hold of the yellow raft, and then make the necessary p r e p a r a t i o n s for however long he must wait to be rescued...
...In speaking of "the precious, the incommunicable past," Willa Cather at least implied that the very pastness of the past causes it to be precious...
...Or almost unforgiving...
...Like others, I have not been immune to the democratic socialist dream...
...Children are antinomians, and hence must be restrained from running amuck...
...There are, then, two approaches to equality...
...On December 13, 1981, most of the intellectuals who had been in Rome (six weeks earlier) were under arrest, in detention camps, whereabouts unknown...
...The security forces had individual keys to each hotel room in which they arrested the sleeping leaders of Solidarity, gathered for a convention...
...Lois told me she had never seen a man so wrapped up in his own affairs...
...Moreover, the characters--not just the Bridges but the wide assortment of individuals with whom they come in contact--are rather ordinary in the main, solidly lodged in their social milieu, the Midwestern upper-class of the thirties...
...Bridge...
...ml I * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * . . . . . o o * o o o o o o , o o o o o o o o * o o o o o o o o o o o * o o o o , , o o o o . . . . . ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 ~ 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 1 7 6 William H. Nolte EVENINGS WITH THE BRIDGE FAMILY On rereading Evan Connell's extraordinary chronicles of ordinary life...
...When she discovers him there this exchange takes place: "I thought as much," she cried in a soft, fierce voice...
...Who would not like to see a sort of Utopia in which all human beings were equal, cooperative, brotherly, sharing...
...My iife has been spent waiting on you and the children...
...Before he can answer she rushes into the house, he follows, finds the bedroom door locked, and so goes downstairs to the kitchen and opens a bottle of beer, convinced that "after this many years of marriage she had gone berserk...
...The prot a g o n i s t of t h r e e long stories in Saint Augustine's Pigeon ("Arcturus," "Otto and the Magi," and the title story) and two novels, The Connoisseur and Double Honeymoon, Muhlbach is a perfect mix of sharp insight and slow wit...
...Go right ahead...
...Indeed I am incapable of living without it...
...Nor is Connell ever flippant after the fashion of Vonnegut and the Black Humorists, who have always struck me as intellectually lazy and self-pitying...
...On the other hand, they also knew that they lived on the front line--the world's first nonviolent attempt to create a revolution within a Socialist State...
...For example, Douglas, the youngest and most delightful of the Bridge children, constantly bewilders and dismays his mother, who makes the not uncommon parental mistake of trying to get inside his mind and thus trap the animal in his lair...
...His ingenuous neutrality was disgusting, but principally he was a bore, that was all...
...Let me explain...
...Few defenders of Soviet socialism are to be found...
...But not joy...
...and whatever he said, he qualified, chuckling and coughing into his fist...
...She is the perfect innocent, convinced that the world she inhabits is both just and stable, and perplexed when she is occa6ionally made to see that it is neither...
...Connell's nihilism comes from a far deeper well and has about it a philosophic calm, similar to that of Joseph Conrad and Robinson Jeffers, two writers whom Connell at times brings to mind...
...Connell creates one of the great set pieces of modern literature...
...Bridge as well...
...Then he tried gardening, antique collecting, silverware, church social activities, charity drives, and P.T.A...
...Several hours pass, night comes, stars emerge--and then dawn and a second day of watching and waiting...
...As studies in character the novels have no more plot than life does...
...None of you have been aware of it...
...Political power is even more prone to corruption than economic power...
...An eminently civilized man, he is ever conscious of the past and hence wary of the future, a double-concern which prohibits his being aware of the present as it slides inexorably by him...
...I must say something about the Bridge children--Ruth, Carolyn, and Douglas-who naturally play important roles in both novels...
...So total is" socialist control that the government cut all telephone and telegraph lines, closed all gasoline stations, and halted all communications internally and with the outside world...
...Bridge the three hours are barely endurable...
...Moreover, parental response is predictable, not necessarily intelligent but n o n e t h e l e s s p r e d i c t a b l e , having been shaped by habit and the tacit assumption that a u t h o r i t y begets order, r e s t r a i n t , decorum, rationality--in short, civilized behavior...
...and in which "scandalous" inequalities of wealth and power were banished...
...outrage at the cosmic indifference, Connell simply describes, avoiding comment altogether...
...Mothers may be necessary to life and perform needed services, but they must be kept in their place...
...After all, he does forgive Mrs...
...It invariably leads to lesser liberties for all and intensifies the power of political elites...
...soothes the hurt of mortality...
...It approached, high and slow, and almost flew beyond the raft...
...Anyone familiar with the vast outpouring of bilge from America's bulldyke intelligentsia knows that today's American feminist has joined Lawrenson's oily types in ceaselessly maligning the American male...
...Economic stagnation hurts the poor most of all...
...The paragraph ends: "When the storm ended it was night again...
...Indeed, he was so careful not to offend anybody that he seldom offered an opinion about anything...
...Rather, the lesson I draw concerns the practical dilemmas of socialism even of the democratic sort...
Vol. 15 • August 1982 • No. 8
