The Bridge of San Luis Rey: in Conversation with Joseph Cermatori

Last month, my friend Joseph Cermatori and I read Thornton Wilder's 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey together (just for context, Wilder was thirty (!) when he wrote the novel and he wrote Our Town in 1938). I want to post my conversation with Joe about Wilder's novel – mostly this is because I got to talking with a friend who had also recently read The Bridge of San Luis Rey and because Joe is so smart with his questions that I thought this might be a fun read for folks who know the novel. Both Joe and I were deeply moved by the book, and our conversation goes in all sorts of directions. If you haven't read the book, this conversation might not mean much to you, but, then, if you haven't read the book, get started. It's incredibly good.

Aaron
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I think what's sort of nuts about this is that when I started reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey I was like: This is this Pulitzer Prize winner? Like, for what? I am (obviously) skeptical of the Pulitzer anyway, but as we began I was sort of mildly surprised that this won.

Oh I should also say that I saw – maybe about 2 or 2 months ago – the 1944 film version of The Bridge of San Luis Rey with Akim Tamiroff (the 1929 one is hard to come by, apparently). Tamiroff played Uncle Pio and was the only redeemable part of the movie, which was essentially a love triangle between the Perichole, Manuel, and the Viceroy – which is clearly a complete rewriting of the novel, in which Michaela and Manuel didn't fall when the bridge fell and sort of escape off into loving one another and move to Spain or some shit. In any case, I expected the novel would be completely different, but I was surprised at just how different.

Joe, there's just so much good stuff to talk about. I think, though, the first thing to say is that the Esteban–Manuel relationship is so queer and beautiful, and (maybe I've been reading too much Bersani, but) this is clearly a way for Wilder himself to deal with his homosexuality, to imagine a relationship between men in which a woman intrudes but where the relationship between the men is something else, something deeper, greater, more important. I was heartbroken during this sequence. Especially the end in which Esteban attempts suicide and fails: "Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. 'I am alone, alone, alone' he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said 'We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes." I mean, it is just so much. For Wilder to say that the banal is life-saving, the banal is what allows us to continue. A cliché, maybe, can be a reason to live, and we must choose that.

It's interesting that Michaela is the character that the 1944 film focuses in on: she is not the character who interests me most, and she is certainly not the figure to whom Wilder most attends. The chapter is called Uncle Pio, and it seems to me that Wilder is dealing with the kind of relationships he would often have with younger people in his life. (He doesn't write Stein about any of these relationships, and perhaps I do not know enough about this, but I am thinking of Montgomery Clift, specifically). Or maybe I am thinking of myself as a teacher/parent. I am nothing like Uncle Pio in my treatment of my boys, I don't think, but what Wilder is exploring here is a very different kind of love, the kind of paternal affection that is selfless in so many ways because one knows that one cannot be repaid, that the beloved cannot return your love in a way that fulfills the lover, because she must grow up and be her own person and that can be a very deep bond, but it will never be a kind of love that is like partnership or that fulfills the romantic needs of someone like Uncle Pio (or me).

But I haven't yet spoken of the Marquesa, and yet I think it is so important that Wilder begins with the Marquesa (and that Pepita becomes such an important figure by the end of the novel). Because the Marquesa is messy. She loves so inappropriately. She is so selfish and jealous with her love, and also such a liar. She refuses to be honest about the realities of the world, about how her daughter treats her. She is so unhappy, drunk, etc. And yet... the book is so merciful to her. The book wishes, actively, for her happiness, and I think believes fundamentally that this woman can be happy if she can love her daughter without denying her daughter's bullshit. I adore the scene in which the Marquesa is kind to the Perichole, not knowing that Michaela has insulted her. She is simple and human with her, treating her like her daughter, and like a great actress. It's a humorous sequence, but also so masterfully designed, since we know nothing of Michaela yet – only know her humiliation as it sits next to the Marquesa's own humiliation.

And then there is the abbess, Doña María. The final chapter of the book really shook me. And I, like you, just put it aside and cried and cried. The wisdom that Doña María acquires by the end of the book is simply staggering, and it strikes me as generous in the extreme but also self-reflexive and beautiful. I began crying when the Perichole comes to visit and is finally able to cry in Sister María's lap.

It is perhaps to be expected in a novel from this period, where things are expected to fit together, and I suppose I expected Doña Clara's visit to the abbey at the very end after the Perichole has visited. But I was not prepared for the abbess's wisdom: "All, all of us have failed. One wishes to be punished," she tells Doña Clara. "One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love – I scarcely say it – but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?"

"Now learn," she commanded herself, "learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace."

I just can't handle this. It is more than I feel I deserve. It is such a generous, merciful perspective on the world.

And that he, finally, ends with Doña María's perspective on the world, with the effort to continue to love Manuel and Esteban and Pio and Pepita and the Marquesa and little Jaime is just stunning. That at the end of the novel he forgives María and Clara and the Perichole, who have been so unkind or unjust or just foolish. It's almost too much to bear. There is so much generosity in the book, as Wilder imagines a world filled with people who act foolishly, perhaps, but are trying very hard to make a way in the world. He understands them and their stupid decisions, their insensitivities and petty selfishnesses. And he forgives. Rather than dwell on those, he focuses on loving them. Near the end of the book, Doña María "accepted the fact that it was of no importance whether her work went on or not; it was enough to work. She was the nurse who tends the sick who never recover; she was the priest who perpetually renews the office before an altar to which no worshippers come. [...] It seemed sufficient for Heaven that for a while in Peru a disinterested love had flowered and faded. She leaned her forehead upon her hand, following the long tender curve that the soprano lifts in the Kyrie. 'My affection should have had more of that colour, Pepita. My whole life should have had more of that quality. I have been too busy,' she added ruefully and her mind drifted into prayer."

It's an entire reimagining of what life could be: a reconception of a life lived with grace and forgiveness and love. Wilder asks us to see past the petty nonsense that annoys us or that we see as weak or pathetic or insensitive. He asks us to love in a disinterested way, if we can: to approach those in our lives by trying to see their needs for love. It's an extraordinary request.

I suppose I should stop there. This is a lot. I haven't talked enough about Esteban, probably. That section meant a great deal to me. And the writing is beautiful – that's worth saying, too.

It's the end of the book, though. He ties everything together so perfectly and with such elegance. It's a superb novel.

Joe
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I'm so glad – and not surprised – that we're on the same page with this lovely little book. The Esteban–Manuel material at the center of it really is its beautiful, beating, queer heart, just as you say. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, I think it certainly must have been a way for Wilder to deal with his repressed sexuality; but it also bears remembering that Wilder himself was originally a twin to a stillborn brother, and that this loss haunted him throughout his entire life, so there are many levels of autobiography on which this material resonates. But however you slice it, this chapter packs a serious emotional punch. When Esteban takes on Manuel's name, trying effectively to become his lost brother/love object, it became almost too much for me. I started sobbing during that section and almost didn't stop until the end.



With the Marquesa and with Uncle Pio, I think you're definitely right about Wilder's interest in selfless love that can never fully be repaid – love that defies the notion of indebtedness. It's a new economy of love. "But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them" seems about as succinct a summary of this love beyond debt as one could hope for. Any love that might have been lost is restored and redeemed, all debts forgiven. This is both a reflection on a sort of idealized parental love, to me, and a deep part of Wilder's philosophical theology... But I think it's also about a certain kind of queer love. I don't know what more to say about it than that. What queer doesn't know the special feeling of a certain kind of love – from adolescence, and infancy – that can only expend itself endlessly, without hope of being re-compensated? I feel like I'm slipping into Bataille's terminology here (it's just because it's almost midnight, probably). Do you know Sondheim's Passions, Aaron? It features a superbly Sondheim-ian (i.e. queer) form of longing in the romance between the characters Giorgio and Fosca: "Love without reason / Love without mercy / Love without pride or shame / Love unconcerned / With being returned / No wisdom, no judgment / No caution, no blame." (And Fosca is her own mess, in this musical.) Your description of the Marquesa put me in mind of those lyrics. She's a drunken wreck, particularly in that fabulous scene with the Perichole: a bit like a totally sauced version of Lady Bracknell, whom Wilder always longed to play onstage, ever since that time in his boyhood when Amos Wilder forbade him to do so at school...

Mercy must factor meaningfully into this whole concept of selfless, endlessly giving, limitless love. You write that the book is merciful to the Marquesa, and in that way the narrative is enacting its own radically inclusive love. Wilder's ending really reminded me of the ending of Shakespeare's late romances: everyone has suffered an irrevocable loss, everyone has behaved badly, everyone has taken everyone else for granted, and the survivors (e.g. Leontes) are wracked with an unforgivable guilt, and yet... they have to forgive themselves and accept forgiveness and move on.

"Now learn," she commanded herself, "learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace."

Just as you say, it is so so unbearably good. Like the scene at the end of The Winter's Tale or something, when the statue suddenly comes to life. I think it's right what you say about Wilder focusing on loving his characters: he has this compassion for them that is very familiar from Our Town. Death puts an end to everything, and yet life just keeps going on, and there is beauty in that. You write:

It's an entire reimagining of what life could be: a reconception of a life lived with grace and forgiveness and love. Wilder asks us to see past the petty nonsense that annoys us or that we see as weak or pathetic or insensitive. He asks us to love in a disinterested way, if we can: to approach those in our lives by trying to see their needs for love. It's an extraordinary request.

Yes, I love this! But, can real life ever be lived in that way? Sounds somehow so unrealistic. Is there a queer ethos here too?

More theology: the whole book seems a meditation on the question of predestination to me, or on special providence. Was the bridge's collapse pure accident, or purely intentional? Was it a random catastrophe, or was it pre-ordained, pre-intended, perhaps to teach the characters something? Is there meaning in the suffering in the world, or is it all emptiness and grief? These are such old, old philosophical questions. They are pertinent to my interests in the baroque (note the year: 1714), but I won't belabor those interests here. I think Wilder seems to be embracing a twofold possibility: yes, that everything is empty and meaningless, and yes, that everything is plentiful and meaningful, all at once. The bridge's collapse is both sheer bad luck and a kind of fate, a necessary eventuality "intelligently designed" (as it were) to be interpreted meaningfully by the survivors. And the meanings are all those that you've already spelled out, the meanings that the Abbess and Perichole and the Marquesa's daughter come to accept. I think you get a glimpse of this both/and theology in a pair of passages which I can juxtapose here, both of which have to do with the night sky:

"There was a silence. Her [Camila's] eyes were resting on the star that seemed to be leading forth the whole sky in its wonder. A great pain lay at her heart, the pain of a world that was meaningless." (at the end of Uncle Pio chapter)

But then:

"Throughout the hours of the night, through there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of those constellations." (at the end of Marquesa chapter)

In this novel, the world is shot through with a kind of divine, musical grandeur, I think, but the characters are incapable of hearing it or understanding it. The singing of the constellations binds them together each to each, just as love binds the characters to each other and to the entirety of the universe. The difficulty is that, like Emily in Our Town, the characters can't realize this love, this music, this sacred fullness while they live. They go about (as Simon Stimson says) deaf and blind to the beauty around them. That's their tragedy but also their humanity. That's what makes them in need of forgiveness, and also, so richly deserving of it.



I think the part where I burst into tears most painfully was near the end of the Esteban chapter, when the Captain imagines the ghost of his dead daughter: "He looked at a line of the Andes and at the streams of stars crowding forever across the sky. And there was that wraith hanging in midair and smiling at him, the wraith with the silvery voice that said for the thousandth time: 'Don't be gone long. But I'll be a big girl when you get back.' Then he went within and carried Esteban to his room and sat looking at him for a long time." Another nighttime scene, another scene of painful, unrecoverable loss, and another scene of love making it possible for us to endure past tragedy....

Last – I read it quickly, and wasn't sure I fully understood it when I did read it, but does the Marquesa actually go into a Velazquez painting in chapter one, or was that just her drunken imagination? Can you clarify that passage for me at all?

Those are my thoughts. This one was fun and really memorable. It was an emotional week for me to be reading it: Rosh Hashanah put me in mind of my dear friend Dustin's death five years, and there were other sad things going on around these parts I won't trouble you with. But it's such a joy to have you as a close friend, and to get to read a few things with you every once in a while and exchange thoughts.

Aaron
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You ask if life can ever be lived with love that is disinterested. You say that it seems somehow unrealistic and ask me if there is a queer ethos in there somewhere. I don't know, Joe. I am trying to think about this deeply right now – as I try to let go of the man I loved this summer. He is not ready for me to love him; he feels a great amount of guilt about gay sex and homosexuality in general. As a practical matter, I am not sure I can love as the Marquesa begins to do at the end of the novel – without needing anything in return. But also I am reading Byung-Chul Han's The Agony of Eros at the moment, and he begins his book with the thesis that love is negation. Eros, he says "sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love – which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other." In other words, Han sees love the same way as Wilder, I think.

And this is not a matter for practicalities – otherwise love becomes merely "a simple pact of pleasant coexistence" (this is Badiou from the intro to Han's book). It is, rather, a challenge, a dare, a goal toward which the lover ought to strive.

I love your note about stars and the music of the spheres. I, too, was deeply struck by the line about the singing of the constellations.

As for the Marquesa entering the Velazquez painting... she says that she does. She says, too, that Velazquez himself helped her into it. And that she had a nice, long chat with the painter and the two adult subjects of the painting (apparently the "brat" in the painting was not part of the conversation). The Marquesa also says that she might spend her next evening inside of a Titian. Neither a Titian nor a Velazquez seems to me a comfortable place to spend an evening, but to each her own...

Joe
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The question you're raising seems less about disinterested love (sounds like a super Kantian formulation)... and more about a kind of love that denies the self-interest of the lover. (Take that, Adam Smith!) At least, that's the kind of love I think we're talking about seeing in the Marquesa. She's an unusual character, in this regard, because she also has such an outsize sense of self, and the lovelorn letters she writes to her daughter are also opportunities for a certain kind of self-dramatization... all of which the narrator duly notes (as do the fictional, scholarly readers of her letter archive whom the narrator occasionally mentions). But still, there is a kind of – well, should we use Bersani's term here – a certain kind of self-shattering we see with the Marquesa. She is literally going to pieces with unrequited love for her daughter or love that can only be requited once it's too late, posthumously. I think again there is a kind of queer philosophical theology here that Wilder is exploring in the most dissimulated of terms, but let me get back to your question.

By calling the Marquesa's love unrealistic, I don't mean that I find it deficient in literary realism. God no, especially given all the material about stepping in and out of a Velazquez painting. I mean only that it seems like a kind of ethical ideal Wilder is imagining, one that isn't possibly attainable every day of the week in the practice of real day-to-day life. But still, what are ideals for, if not for orienting us toward some vision of how we'd like to live, how we should be trying to live? Life is messier than fiction, of course. An ethos is still valuable even if it's unrealizable, maybe most valuable when it is unrealizable. And I think we should remember, the Marquesa's love is different from the Abbess's recognition about love at the end. The Marquesa's love is all about excessive, hopeless expenditure; where the Abbess – who comes to recognize that "all those impulses of love return to the love that made them" – puts into practice a kind of love rooted in humility, acceptance, simplicity, and the mundane... The Abbess's more workaday vision of love seems to have deep roots with her political sympathies, with her desire for a utopian future of greater human equality. I think the novel puts those two loves into tension, they are two different kinds of self-sacrificing after all – just because the Abbess and the Marquesa seem like two powerful anti-types. (More on this below.) But there may be some dialectical synthesis between the two that can be obtained, conceptually and practically.

I've been thinking much more about the notion of sacrifice recently, also as it pertains to queer love. Maybe it's because I just heard a great talk by Patrick Blanchfield about how the political theology of "sacrifice" fueled the myth of John McCain as a great American statesman, which in turn allowed him to help set the militaristic terms of who and what elsewhere should be chosen for sacrifice to the U.S. war machine. But how does it all pertain to Wilder's novel? Your quote from Han seems appropriate, but something in me (Nietzsche??) feels uncomfortable with the idea of queer love as an invitation to self-sacrificing. In a gay marriage context, that idea brings us too close to the old Victorian heteronormative cliché of the "Angel in the House." And of course, there is a certain kind of historical queer fiction (here I'm feeling my Heather Love oats) that is rooted in impossible desire, culminating in self-sacrificial violence: The Well of Loneliness, The Children's Hour and all that, in which the queers are mostly just tragic beings and they need to die tragically because of their tragic love: end of story. But I don't think that's what Wilder's exploring really, and it doesn't seem like what you're after either.

It seems important for Wilder (and for you) that the sacrificial dimension of love examined in the novel takes place at the threshold of impossible absence. The Marquesa would sacrifice anything for her daughter to love her back, but her daughter is already gone off to Spain, never to return. It's a hopeless sacrifice: the blessings it would seek to obtain are rooted in an immeasurable absence. If her daughter had stayed in Peru in the first place, we wouldn't even be talking about any of this. Even more so with the Abbess: she gains recognition into the unlimitedness of love only after the bridge collapse, when Esteban and Manuel are gone, never to return. For both women, self-sacrificing becomes a way of coping with absence, living with it, putting it to work. The Abbess seems better at sublimating it to the rhythms of life, investing her love little by little in daily action – all for the purposes of survival – where the Marquesa is just a complete, embarrassing mess. Don't we queers know both of those options all too well?

I guess also, for me, when you describe love as both self-negating and a source of strength, you seem to point to a vision of love as a kind of heroic ideal. The hero who has to sacrifice himself to gain the kingdom for others... This seems like a deeply stoic approach, maybe another arrow in your quiver of queer stoicisms? There is also a kind of messianism here, which of course in the Christian tradition is the highest ideal of love. Dying willfully to take away the guilt of the other. At the end of the book, the Abbess seems to be putting that sort of Christianity into practice: being Christ to others, the humble servant, day by day, or at least trying to be. The Marquesa seems like the opposite ideal – the would-be noblewoman. But maybe the two extremes are secretly connected, two masks of the same heroic character...? With Han and with Wilder, I'm wondering now: does love ask something heroic of us? And, especially, for queers, can loving be a heroic trial of some kind, and if so, under what circumstances?

Aaron
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Joe, I think you've hit on exactly what I'm talking about with the Marquesa. I don't think it's a realistic kind of love, but then I am not sure Wilder is interested in the practical. He is more interested in (and this is your word) the theological. But I think perhaps you are misreading what I mean about the Marquesa's affection for her daughter – or maybe your read of the book is different from my own. I see the Marquesa's love for her daughter as very selfish. She presents her daughter only with her own need. She loves her, to be sure, but she begs her daughter to look at her kindly, to give her love in return, to appreciate her love for her. But Doña Clara is only unkind to her mother, only returns her mother's affections with coldness.
But what I think that the Marquesa learns on the nights before her death is that there is a different kind of love for which she should aim – this is the disinterested love of which I spoke earlier. I think what the Marquesa learns is that she needs to love her daughter without expecting anything in return. Now, I do not really think that this is the kind of love that a lover could have for a beloved, but it is perhaps a good way to think of what parental love might look like. This is the love, after all, that Uncle Pio finally demonstrates for Michaela, a disinterested love that asks for nothing in return, nothing at all.

Your questions about queer love and heroic trials I will leave for another day.
As for queer stoicisims, I think you've got me pegged.

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You can find Joe on Twitter (@jcermato) and Instagram (@mnemonictheater).