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

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.

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”

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

Evan Connell: A Brief Introduction

The Story Center at the Mid-Continent Public Library asked me to present a program on Connell for its series marking the Missouri Bicentennial. Connell, of course, was a Missouri native, born in Kansas City. He reveals a bit of his Missouri heritage in at least one early book, though in general he left Kansas City far behind as he settled in San Francisco, Sausalito, and, finally, Santa Fe, N.M. In any case, I put together a slide show. Many of the images will appear in Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell, which is scheduled to come out by the end of 2021. And I strung together a series of brief capsules on aspects of Connell’s life and work, which I offered as a few dozen things you will learn about Connell in the book. Here is a link to the FB live program. The show is also expected to live on the Story Center’s YouTube channel.

https://www.facebook.com/mystorycenter/videos/232424875190652

Remembering Web Schott and his Connell Friendship

I was saddened to hear of the recent death of Webster Schott, who became an important source and sounding board for my Connell biography. I wrote about him for KC Studio magazine. The piece appears in the March-April 2021 print issue and online here:

http://kcstudio.org/on-the-passing-of-literary-men-and-the-making-of-biographies-evan-s-connell/

An Update, on Connell’s Birthday

FIrst posted on my FB page:

Today, Aug. 17, 2020, happens to be the birthday of the writer Evan S. Connell. He would have been 96. After more than three years of research and writing, I happen to be immersed in my manuscript about Connell (1924-2013) and his work, manipulating the scalpel through another round of revisions, corrections, insertions, and cuts.

As I read through a couple of chapters yesterday, I began compiling what will become the index. It reminded me of the extraordinary range of literati who intersected with Connell in one way or another. From Alice Adams and James Baldwin to John Updike and William Carlos Williams. I've got a fairly humorous (I hope) tale about Connell and Allen Ginsberg--Connell was no fan of the Beats. The Western writers Wallace Stegner and Walter Van Tilburg Clark play large roles in Connell's development. George Plimpton was an early champion. Connell was friends with a menagerie of San Francisco Bay Area writers, some better known than others, including Don Carpenter, Calvin Kentfield, Curt Gentry, Herbert Gold, Kenneth Lamott, and Lamott's daughter, Annie.

Baldwin and Connell appeared together in a short fiction anthology, and yesterday I came across this quote again that I'm using from Baldwin: “What the times demand, and in an unprecedented fashion, is that one be—not seem—outrageous, independent, anarchical.” So, decades later, it all seems so up-to-date. As anyone who has read "Mrs. Bridge" and "Mr. Bridge" knows, Connell was quite astute when it came to the subject of race, especially in the social strata of his hometown, Kansas City. So there's that, too.

I'm currently in a kind of limbo, awaiting feedback from my editor who is taking an early look at my manuscript. If she's not appalled, there's a chance I can wrap this thing up in the not too distant future and perhaps be on track for a book late next year. We shall see.

Of the photos here: Connell grew up in this Colonial house on 66th Street in Brookside, less than a mile from where I'm writing this now. We got to know this house well, because our late friend, Joann Riordan, lived there for many years and hosted many a gathering of local literati. Below that, it's not well known, even here in Kansas City, that Connell was a Jayhawk, a graduate of the University of Kansas over in Lawrence. He started college at Dartmouth, spent a few years training in the Navy Air Corps, and got a B.A. after three semesters at Kansas, where his flight jacket and suave mustache may have impressed the ladies. I've got juicy stuff to share about that period. Please stay tuned.

On the Way to a Biography: Downtime Progress and Productivity

A version of this first appeared in the May 2020 TBC, the newsletter of Biographers International Organization.

By Steve Paul

(c) 2020

The hunkering down, the trip cancellations, and then the lockdown of the last two months has meant that I've been able to devote quality time and focus to my book about the writer Evan Connell ("Mrs. Bridge," "Mr. Bridge," "Son of the Morning Star," etc.). I've finished drafting seven or eight more chapters since the first of the year and am currently into the last chapter of the manuscript. After revisions and permissions, I'm expecting to deliver a manuscript (to the University of Missouri Press) ahead of schedule by, I hope, several months.

Given the question I saw on BIO’s FB page about the ability of conducting archival research during the pandemic shutdowns, I was lucky in that I'd previously gathered much of the available archival material in library visits over the last three years. And online archives such as newspapers.com, the New York Times and others continue to be readily available.

As recently as early March, though, I was able to retrieve a really helpful batch of new special-collections material via long distance from the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. (I assume the library has closed since then.) Maybe the fact that I'd researched there in person a year and a half ago helped to expedite, but in any case, the new stuff allowed me to enrich and expand one section of a chapter I'd already mostly written. I'm currently making a run at another archive (Stanford) to revisit one folder of material I looked at three years ago and obtain one or two other new things. It's unclear, however, when the library will reopen with on-site staff able to get to my request, but at least I'm in line. (Pro tip: It doesn't hurt to get in touch to see what is possible even as libraries are physically closed.) But if we get anywhere near back to normal in coming months, I just might take a road trip to California to revisit the library and spend more time with sources I've already spoken with in person or at least on the phone or via email.  

And one more thing, sort of in the category of Robert Caro's "turn every page." When I set out on this project, I tried to locate someone who I thought would be a good source, if still alive, because I knew he and Connell had become friends and that he'd written about Connell and his work over decades. He was an editor by trade and a freelance book critic for many years. I failed to track down him or his archives and I set him aside. Then, early this year, I happened to arrive at a point where this fellow entered into the picture again, and that set me off to try again to find him. This was in February, just before the pandemic craziness set in. Lo and behold, there he was, alive and well, at 92, and living about 30 minutes away from me. We had two long conversations at his house. He shared a batch of Connell's letters and clippings and other material he had saved. He got me in touch via phone with another mutual friend in Santa Fe, though, sadly, she died just a couple weeks after I spoke with her. And now that we're both in lockdown, we speak on the phone.

I sent him the first chapter of my manuscript and waited a bit anxiously for his response. When I finally heard from him, he'd read it closely more than once, and he thanked me for giving him a new understanding of his friend. He'd known Connell for more than sixty years, and he knew how difficult it was to fully understand Connell's life of self-imposed loneliness and near anonymity.

I can't tell you how moved I was to hear him pronounce my project "terrific," even as he shared a few eagle-eyed questions, corrections and thoughts about a confusing line here or there. He said I should proceed with confidence.

Of course, I sent him four subsequent chapters—again, they were well received—and then five more.  

Now let's hope my publisher survives the economic assault on university budgets, etc. Who knows what we're in for from here on out.