mrs bridge

Sparking a Minor Industry in Connell Criticism

The overlapping worlds of biography and literary criticism frequently result in distant dialogues. You write a biography, or any book really, a critic uses the opportunity to explore his or her own impulses and ideas. My year began with a generous review of Literary Alchemist in Harper’s, which was also in large part a personal essay of the writer Gemma Sieff’s experience in Connell’s world and in his head late in his life. Now comes Max Norman—whom I don’t know—writing in The New Yorker. It’s quite a nice essay about Connell, and he clearly gives credit to my book in overt and subtle ways. But it also made me realize that my biography of Connell has served as a vessel for some writers who seem to have been itching to write about him and his long overlooked work. C’est la vie.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-man-who-mastered-minor-writing

Race is never far from the surface in Connell’s two Bridge novels

This essay, which I wrote before the publication of Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell, appears as part of a package about me and Connell in an online feature of New Letters magazine: https://www.newletters.org/digital_features/steve-paul-spring-2022/

By STEVE PAUL

Evan S. Connell, the writer largely known for his portrayals of domestic uneasiness in mid-20th century America, never shied from the realities of whiteness and race.

            His two novels about a prosperous Kansas City family in the 1930s and ‘40s, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, contain numerous incidents that peel back the scab of genteel indifference and overt scorn that white Americans brought to race relations.

             Connell wrote Mrs. Bridge in the 1950s, in the era when the civil rights movement and conflicts over the grip of Jim Crow segregation were both growing. Mr. Bridge followed 10 years later, in 1969, following the legislative successes of the 1960s as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John Kennedy and his brother Robert, and Malcolm X.

            But both novels looked back to an earlier period, one at least partly reflecting Connell’s own boyhood in Kansas City. He was born there in 1924, left for college and the Naval Air Corps in the early 1940s, and essentially left for good, via the G.I. Bill and a wandering spirit, a few years after the end of World War II.  

            While some readers might be aware of Kansas City’s status as a “wide-open” playground, a sin city that was fertile ground for the blossoming of the sound of jazz, the realities of systemic segregation and cultural racism were no less in force than anywhere else.

            In Connell’s novels, a reader’s sense of the state of race relations in Kansas City in that period often comes through the Bridge family’s interactions with their Black housemaid and cook, Harriet. (Emblematic of Harriet’s diminished stature is the fact that it’s not until late in the second novel, do we learn her last name, Rodgers.)  She had served them well for nine years and even loyally rebuffed another matron’s offer of $10 more to leave the Bridges and work for her.

            Another foil in Mrs. Bridge is Alice Jones, daughter of a neighbor’s “colored gardener,” whose developing friendship with one of the Bridge daughters is essentially snuffed out.

            We are meant to consider how India Bridge, the novel’s timid matriarch, welcomed daughter Carolyn’s attitude toward the Black girl, how she thought that Carolyn saw no difference between them.  

            Yet, Connell leaves the reader with the truer insight: "Soon, she knew, the girls would drift apart. Time would take care of the situation."

            In fact, “the situation” lingers in numerous ways throughout both books.

            Mrs. Bridge once had to instruct Carolyn not to refer to the maid as a “cleaning lady”: “You should say the cleaning ‘woman.’ A lady is someone like Mrs. Arlen or Mrs. Montgomery.” [22]

            And she was full of subtle discouragements and slights, intentional as well as unconscious, regarding Alice. The end came when Mrs. Bridge counseled her daughter against accepting an invitation to a party at Alice’s house. Alice lived at Thirteenth and Prospect, “a mixed neighborhood.” “Can I go?” Carolyn asked. “I wouldn’t if I were you.” [41] Connell gives the episode another look in Mr. Bridge. Later in the day, India Bridge mentions the party invitation to her husband and wonders whether she should say it would be OK to go. “I don’t want Carolyn to get in the habit of visiting that end of town,” Walter replies. “Carolyn doesn’t belong at Thirteenth and Prospect any more than you or I do. Those people resent us.” [MrB 78] It never occurs to either India or Walter Bridge where that resentment might come from.

            Late in the first novel, the Bridges hire a chauffeur, an “affable colored man” originally from New Orleans. The arrangement fizzled after a few weeks, when phone calls from the man’s creditors proved to be overly annoying. Subsequent experiences with two Asians and another Black man soured Mrs. Bridge and her husband on the idea of having a driver after all.

            Some years later, after Carolyn is married and living in a Kansas suburb, she visits her mother and mentions she and her husband were talking about buying a house, one with a decent yard and a dry basement. Carolyn now was very much conscious of “the situation.” She tells her mother of a concern about a neighborhood they’d looked at: “The niggers are moving in.” [235] Mrs. Bridge did not know how to respond. She reflected that “she herself would not care to live next door to a houseful of Negroes; on the other hand, there was no reason not to. She had always liked the colored people she had known.” Well, of course she had.

            Mrs. Bridge does tell Carolyn that surprisingly she had run into Alice one day in a downtown elevator.  It had been years. Alice now worked as a hotel maid, and Mrs. Bridge noticed how she looked darker—“so black”—than when the two girls played together. “It’s such a shame.”[236]

            In four simple words, Connell thus exposes not only the shame but the tragedy of white privilege and the enduring pain of the “all-American skin game,” as the late Stanley Crouch once put it, albeit in a somewhat different context. Carolyn suggests there’d be no reason for her to visit Alice. She wouldn’t know what to say.

            As Connell returned to the family portrait a decade later in Mr. Bridge, the subject of race becomes even sharper. American cities, including Kansas City, had been burning, and the toxic atmosphere couldn’t help but inform Connell’s vision as he reflected on a societal landscape of two or three decades earlier.

            It’s likely that Connell was also stirred by an increased understanding of the disturbing racial picture emanating from his old home town.

            By the early 1960s, Connell, while living in San Francisco, had attached himself to a literary magazine, Contact, published across the bay in Sausalito. Connell became a co-editor and some of his work had appeared in the journal in recent years, including segments from Mrs. Bridge several months before its arrival as a novel.

            In 1963, Connell produced an editorial comment—it was unsigned, but I’m certain of his authorship—about a Kansas City, Kansas, family who were snared in a web of injustice and tried to do something about it. The Shanks family refused to send their children to a segregated school, were not allowed to send them to a white school, and were fined when they chose to teach them at home. This was a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which called for the end of school segregation. That federal case, of course, had arisen from Topeka, just an hour west. The editorial not only lamented the situation and lauded the Shankses quiet heroism, but took the local media to task for their hypocrisy and, in the case of the Kansas City Star, shameful silence.

            As the portrait of Walter Bridge emerged from his consciousness, Connell was unsparing about the family patriarch’s hardly suppressed racist attitudes.

            One of the most quietly searing moments in Mr. Bridge occurs after India Bridge sees a photograph from a lynching in a news magazine. As we know from many such photos, the dangling Black victim was surrounded by a crowd of grinning, leering white men and boys. “What on earth makes people behave that way?” she wants to know. Her husband takes in the scene, feels the violence and the setting in a sensory, knowing way, and exclaims that most disappointing of equivocations: “There are many fine people in the South.” Then he blames the victim, figuring he must have been doing something “that he shouldn’t have been doing.” Hell, Walter Bridge says, he’d spent a few days in Atlanta once, “and I never met more courteous people.” [78-79]

            Scenes with Harriet Rodgers again present opportunities to reveal Mr. Bridge’s character. When some coins go missing from his dresser, he can’t help but wonder if she, rather any of the children, stole them, because there was no proof otherwise. When Carolyn and Harriet have a little spat, however, he blames his daughter and warns her to treat the maid with dignity and to remember Lincoln’s words: “It is no pleasure to me to triumph over anyone.” [102]

            When Harriet informs Mr. Bridge that her nephew in Cleveland had received a four-year college scholarship and wanted to go to Harvard, he takes it in skeptically. Later, to his wife, he fumes: “No good will come of it.”[178] When a boyfriend gets Harriet in trouble with the police, Walter drives downtown to pick her up and warns her that there’ll be no more of that.

            After the oldest Bridge daughter, Ruth, moves to New York, her father pays a visit on a business trip. He meets a Black friend of hers as they wander through the Metropolitan Museum. He wonders how often Ruth and the friend get together, and Connell channels his insecurity, which, of course, remains the insecurity of much of white America: “Perhaps this intermingling of the races was inevitable. In centuries to come it might be all right. But not now.” In my reckoning, the line can’t fail to prompt a response, coined by an ancient rabbi: “If not now, when?”

            Connell well knew that he was pulling back the curtain on uncomfortable matters. As Mr. Bridge was undergoing proofing and revisions, he added a couple of vignettes to heighten the racial undertones. In one, he wonders about a series of attacks on neighbors’ dogs in the form of ground beef laced with bits of glass. He suspects the perpetrator must be one of the Black laborers in the neighborhood.

            Connell’s own father, a noted eye surgeon in Kansas City, was known for his stern, businesslike, and distant demeanor. Connell conceded that his father at least in part inspired Walter Bridge and his attitudes—about Jews as well as Blacks.

            Depictions of everyday racism arise only sparingly elsewhere in Connell’s body of work. The scope of his vision, however, in nearly 20 distinct books spanned the clash of civilizations and the vast human record of folly, intolerance, suffering, and violence.  Rather than period pieces of a quaint and quiet America, his two Bridge novels retain, for better and worse, some timeless and contemporary power.

A Connell Timeline: Tracing Key Moments in Life and Work

Connell Timeline

Brief milestones in the life and work of a writer. For the details see my book, Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell (University of Missouri Press, December 2021)

Aug. 17, 1924: Evan Shelby Connell Jr. is born to Dr. Evan Shelby Connell and (Ruth) Elton Williamson Connell in Kansas City, Missouri. The family lives at 210 W. 66th Street in a Brookside district neighborhood developed by J.C. Nichols.

May 1937: Graduates from Border Star Elementary School, which promoted an intensive reading program.

1939: The Connell family moves to 1515 Drury Lane (later renumbered 2215 Drury, after incorporation of Mission Hills, Kansas).

1941: Graduates from Southwest High School and leaves Kansas City for Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Transcripts reveal him as no more than an average student.

Summer 1942: After flunking chemistry at Dartmouth, takes makeup chemistry courses at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, north of Kansas City.

December 1942: Registers for the military draft: 6-foot-2, 155 pounds.

ESC with his sister, Barbara Connell Zimmermann, 1945.

ESC with his sister, Barbara Connell Zimmermann, 1945.

September 1, 1943: Inducted into the U.S. Naval Air Corps in Mt. Vernon, Iowa.

1943-1945: Naval flight training in Albuquerque, Memphis, Pensacola, Florida, and elsewhere, followed by instructor training in New Orleans. Promoted to Ensign in May 1945. Concludes service August 20, 1945 to November 24, 1945, as flight instructor at the Naval Air Station in Glenview, Illinois.

February 1946: Enrolls for spring semester at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he studies English, writing, and art and cements his decision not to follow in his father’s medical footsteps. Among his professors is Ray B. West, editor of the Western Review literary journal.

1946-1947: Serves as art director, writer and illustrator for The Bitter Bird, a campus humor magazine.

April 1947: Connell’s first published short story, “A Cross to Bear,” appears in Foreign Service, a veterans magazine published by the VFW in Kansas City. Receives $35.

October 1947: Receives bachelor’s degree in English from Kansas.

1947-1948: Encouraged by Ray West, ESC successfully applies to a new creative writing workshop led by Wallace Stegner at Stanford University in California.

1949: ESC’s short story “I’ll Take You to Tennessee” appears in Tomorrow magazine and the O. Henry Prize annual collection.

1949-1950: Spends a year in Columbia University graduate school in New York, emphasizing creative writing and art.

1950: Settles in Los Angeles for a while trying to write for movies. 

1951: Moves to Santa Cruz, California, continues to write stories and takes a job reading gas meters. Wins another O. Henry award for his story “I Came from Yonder Mountain.”

February 1952: Travels to Europe, where he spends nearly two years wandering and “loitering” (his phrase) for longer spells in Barcelona and Paris.

Fall 1952: In Paris, ESC meets Max Steele, another American writer, beginning a long friendship. Of Connell, Steele notes in a letter to his mother: “He’s a strange, silent, extremely lonesome person who can write like no one else.”

Spring 1953: A group of American writers in Paris, including George Plimpton, William Styron, and Peter Matthiessen launch a literary journal, The Paris Review.

September 1953: Plimpton takes a Connell story for the third issue of The Paris Review—“Cocoa Party,” a standalone section of a failed novel.

January 1954: After leaving Europe and spending time in New York and Kansas City, settles in San Francisco. Works on a novel about a timid matron named India Bridge and takes a temporary job as a shipyard clerk.

This Paris Review issue contained “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge”

This Paris Review issue contained “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge”

1954: ESC’s agent Elizabeth McKee reports several rejections of the India Bridge novel.

Spring-summer 1955: Travels to Kansas City, around the West and spends summer in Denver. In a letter to Max Steele: “Spent all afternoon at the Custer battlefield going over the maps and routes and almost felt my two drops of Indian blood. What a pageant that must have been that day.”

Fall 1955: Returns to San Francisco. Paris Review publishes excerpts of ESC’s novel under the title, “The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge.” Another story, “Fisherman from Chihuahua,” which had appeared earlier in The Paris Review, is collected in Best American Short Stories, 1955.

1956: Submits another novel to his agent—The Patriot, based on his Naval Air Corps experience. Learns that Viking Press has agreed to publish his books.

1957: Best American Short Stories, 1957, includes “Arcturus.” ESC often noted that his story of generational tension was inspired by Thomas Mann’s novella, Disorder and Early Sorrow.

April 1957: Viking publishes ESC’s first book, a story collection, The Anatomy Lesson and Other Stories.

Summer 1957: San Francisco poet, publisher and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti on trial for obscenity in case involving Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.

1958: Contact, a San Francisco literary and culture magazine based in Sausalito, releases first issue, including excerpts from ESC’s novel, now titled Mrs. Bridge. Among Contact’s advisory editors and contributors are ESC mentors Wallace Stegner, Ray B. West, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Contact’s values are decidedly more restrained than the freewheeling Beats, who were redefining the city’s cultural renaissance.

July 1958: ESC’s mother, Elton Connell, dies in Kansas City, at age 60. She is rightly seen as a model, at least in part, for his fictional India Bridge.

January 1959: Viking publishes Mrs. Bridge to generally admiring reviews and an eventual designation as a National Book Award finalist.

Fall 1959: The Patriot undergoing extensive revisions. ESC takes LSD in a controlled experiment conducted by a Los Angeles psychiatrist.

September 1960: Though there’s much to recommend in its parts, The Patriot is published to largely disappointing reviews.

Author photo by Ruth Bernhard, 1963.

Author photo by Ruth Bernhard, 1963.

December 1962: Contact 13 devotes most of the issue (85 pages) to ESC’s unusual book-length work in verse, Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel. It’s a meditation in non-linear fragments on the decline of Western civilization. Viking reissues it as a book a few months later, then severs ties with ESC.

March 1963: In Seventeen magazine, Philip Roth, who’d won the National Book Award for fiction in 1959, recommends Mrs. Bridge and nine other notable novels for teen-age readers.

Summer 1963: After the departure of its founding publisher, ESC and two fellow editors take on responsibility of keeping Contact alive.

January 1965: Letter from singer and actress Gale Garnett confirms budding relationship with ESC.

March 1965: Simon and Schuster publishes ESC story collection, At the Crossroads.

Summer 1965: Contact suspends publication after 21 issues and soon closes.

November-December 1965: Gale Garnett spends a month performing at the hungry i in San Francisco and lives on a houseboat in Sausalito.

January 1966: ESC notably pans Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in a book review for the San Francisco Chronicle.

May 1966: ESC novel The Diary of a Rapist is published, sparked in part by a true-crime case in California and his own onetime job as a clerk in a state unemployment office.

Connell crossed paths more than once with the poet Allen Ginsberg, including at this Sausalito boat party, 1963.

Connell crossed paths more than once with the poet Allen Ginsberg, including at this Sausalito boat party, 1963.

Spring-summer 1966: Travels to Europe with Gale Garnett, including a visit in Ireland with Garnett’s friend, the film director John Huston.

Fall 1966: Continues travels alone through Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

November 29, 1966: Makes first notes for a novel centering on Walter Bridge.

March 1967: After return to San Francisco, begins first draft of Mr. Bridge.

June 1968: After recent assassinations and racial violence in the U.S., ESC submits two new chapters with racial undertones to the Mr. Bridge manuscript.

Fall 1968: New Mexico Quarterly publishes excerpts from a followup volume to Notes from a Bottle.

March 1969: Alfred A. Knopf publishes Mr. Bridge.

Summer 1969: Gale Garnett leaves San Francisco to settle in Toronto.

August 1969: Travels to South America for two months, at least in part to pursue his new interest in collecting pre-Columbian art and artifacts.

October 1969: A Life magazine profile of Connell is downgraded to limited distribution in only San Francisco and European editions ostensibly because of the underwhelming performance of Mr. Bridge.

1971: Spends four months traveling to South Pacific, India, Africa, and Europe.

August 1971: Visits Kansas City with Hollywood producer Abby Mann to scout locations for a planned, though soon abandoned, movie adaptation of Mrs. Bridge.

Spring-summer 1972: Travels to Europe.

September 1972: Moves from San Francisco to Sausalito.

Spring 1973: Serves as a judge for National Book Award in fiction. The panel’s debates result in a rare award to two writers—John Barth for Chimera and John Williams for Augustus, which was ESC’s favorite. Afterward, travels to Europe.

May 1973: Knopf publishes Points for a Compass Rose, ESC’s second book of kaleidoscopic “Notes.”

January 1974: Annie Dillard writes a laudatory essay for Harper’s about Points for a Compass Rose and its predecessor.

May 1974: Dr. Evan S. Connell Sr. dies in Kansas City. ESC had visited him in the hospital but does not return for funeral.

September 1974: Knopf publishes The Connoisseur, a novel deriving from ESC’s new passion for collecting and revolving around a recurring character in his fiction named Karl Muhlbach.

April 1976: A second Muhlbach novel, Double Honeymoon, fails to generate enthusiasm at Knopf and is published by Putnam.

Self-portrait, c. 1976

Self-portrait, c. 1976

1977: Turns away from fiction and begins writing a series of historical essays.

June 1979: Publishes A Long Desire, first of two collections of historical essays.

August 18, 1979: One of ESC’s best friends and an editorial colleague at Contact, the writer Kenneth Lamott, dies at 54.

September 1980: North Point Press, a new literary publisher based in the Bay Area, publishes Saint Augustine’s Pigeon, a collection of ESC’s selected short stories, and plans to reprint and promote the Bridge novels and other books.

1981: Travels to Little Bighorn territory and works on expanding a planned essay into a larger project about Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the fatal battle. By late summer, reports his manuscript had grown to 500 pages.

November 1983: North Point outbids New York publishers for Son of the Morning Star.

March 1984: Travels to Honolulu, Guam and Micronesia, including Truk and Ponape.

Fall 1984: North Point publishes Son of the Morning Star, which becomes a surprise bestseller, goes through multiple printings, and earns a lasting reputation for its storytelling style and measured, human-detail-driven approach to historical tragedy.

March 1985: Contract negotiations lead to agreement to produce a television film adaptation of Son of the Morning Star.

February 1987: Talks under way for movie production based on the Bridge novels. Actress Joanne Woodward, who has been angling for years to take India Bridge to the big screen, is involved in the project.

May 1987: Receives literature award from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

May 1989: Moves to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

September-November 1989: Merchant Ivory production of “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge” under way in Kansas City with Woodward and her husband, Paul Newman, in the principal roles.

November 1990: Kansas City premiere and theatrical release of “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” 

December 1990: William Turnbull, publisher of North Point Press, announces its impending closure.

February 1991: ABC network airs two-part “Son of the Morning Star.”

May 1991: One of North Point’s last books is ESC’s The Alchymist’s Journal, a novel channeling the arcane voices of medieval philosophers and scientists.

1995: ESC’s Collected Stories includes 56 previously published works of short fiction.

August 1996: Begins research and writing toward a historical novel about the Crusades.

May 2000: Deus Lo Volt! Chronicle of the Crusades recounts religious warfare of the Middle Ages.

September 2000: Receives the Lannan Foundation’s Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement (and $100,000).

ESC TPR 2014.jpeg

September 2001: The Aztec Treasure House repackages two earlier volumes of essays reflecting ESC’s idiosyncratic, thoroughly researched and slyly humorous approaches to far-flung historical subjects.

February 2004: In Francisco Goya, ESC weaves a meditation on the life and legacy of an artist.

July 2008: Story collection Lost in Uttar Pradesh reprises some greatest hits and adds a handful of previously uncollected pieces.

March 2009: Following double knee replacements and other health complications, moves to an assisted-living facility in Santa Fe. Finds the situation not conducive to writing.

January 10, 2013: ESC dies at 88.

2014- : Connell tributes appear from time to time, often by contemporary writers still inspired by the minimalist glories of Mrs. Bridge. In 2014, The Paris Review published an interview with him conducted in 2011. In 2018-2019, an AMC series called “Lodge 49” (now streaming on Hulu) paid subtle homage to Connell.

Connell’s essay collection The White Lantern (1980) makes a cameo appearance In an episode of the streaming series “Lodge 49.” Series creator Jim Gavin credits Connell for inspiration, including a series theme related to alchemy.

Connell’s essay collection The White Lantern (1980) makes a cameo appearance In an episode of the streaming series “Lodge 49.” Series creator Jim Gavin credits Connell for inspiration, including a series theme related to alchemy.