When Life Betrays You, Only Love Remains
Reviewing Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-Winning Novel, ‘The Bridge of San Luis Rey’
Five people walk across a rope bridge spanning a deep ravine. The bridge fails and all five plummet to their deaths. What do we make of it? Our lives all contain similar tragedies, some larger, many smaller. How do we manage? Some seek comfort in faith, others in relationships. Either way, whether sacred or secular, as Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey explores, we lean on love to hold us up.
Set in eighteenth-century Peru, the novel starts with the collapse of the bridge and then works backward, exploring how each of the five found themselves suspended between sky and soil that fateful day.
Viewing the accident from the bottom of the ravine stands Brother Juniper. Convinced there must be some divine explanation for the accident, the monk determines to investigate the lives of the victims. Wilder could have relied on Brother Juniper’s investigation as the narrative device to tell the story. Instead, he offers us an unnamed narrator who treats the friar’s work as a source but reaches beyond his account, beginning with Doña María, Marquesa de Montemayor.
Lives, Intertwined
Born to wealth, the Marquesa is raised in a loveless home to a stern and demanding mother. Told—and convinced—of her ugliness, she withdraws from society until her family foists a husband upon her, a relationship that eventually leads to the solitary object of her affections, her daughter Clara. Alas, her love is unrequited.
When grown, Clara wants nothing to do with her embarrassing mother, given to drink and publicly ridiculed throughout Lima as a fool. Clara marries and moves to Spain, and the Marquesa commences writing letters that later, surprisingly, immortalize her as a literary genius. Wilder’s narrator draws from this colorful, involved, singular, and one-sided correspondence (based in some genuine history) to tell the Marquesa’s story.
Through these letters other characters come into view, some of whom converge on the bridge before it vanishes below the pilgrims’ feet. One figure? An orphan girl, Pepita, on loan from the Abbess Madre María del Pilar and her convent’s orphanage in Lima. Another? Camila Perichole, or “the Perichole” as she’s also called, Lima’s leading actress.
Early on, Uncle Pio finds Camila singing in rundown cafe. She’s just a child, but she possesses what talent scouts would call “it,” and Pio commits to turning her into a star. He succeeds but can’t control the fruit of his invention. She’s prone to getting what she wants and taking what liberties she pleases. So, for instance, she carries on a years-long affair with viceroy of Peru and, to the amusement of all but the viceroy, once publicly mocks the Marquesa in her theater.
The viceroy can’t have his leading citizens humiliated, as the offense ultimately rolls up to him. What good is authority if (a) his elites are mocked by lesser citizens and (b) he can’t defend them? So, he orders his lover to abase herself before the Marquesa and plead forgiveness. She does. And the Marquesa’s fundamental goodness shines through in the tense moment. She takes the abasement as an act of genuine kindness and it redounds to her own character.
But Camila can’t undergo that sort of reverse humiliation again. She’s borne the viceroy three children now—including Don Jaime, who suffers from seizures—and is forced to do his bidding like a slave. What’s more, her children cannot be legally or ecclesiastically recognized. She attempts to make an honest woman out of herself. To no avail.
Along the way, she alienates most everyone close to her, including Uncle Pio. Scarred by smallpox, she retreats to her remote farm and refuses to see a soul. She finally relents when Pio says he can take young Jaime with him and provide the kind of education that will secure his future. Together Pio and the luckless boy make their way across the bridge on their way to Lima to, as they falsely assume, descend to better fortunes.
While Camila loses her son and mentor in the accident, the Marquesa has traveled with Pepita to pray at the shrine of Santa María de Cluxambuqua for her daughter Clara and her infant son in Spain. They cross at the same moment as Pio and Jaime.
As mentioned, there’s a fifth on the bridge. By the time Esteban takes the plunge, his life has already descended into utter misery. His twin brother Manuel, heartbroken after doomed infatuation with the Perichole comes to nothing, succumbs to a fatal infection and leaves Esteban with no one.
Like Pepita, the two boys were orphaned and raised by the Abbess. Worried about Esteban’s declining condition, she comes to his aid now, sending for the famed Captain Alvarado to find and Esteban and take him on a voyage, to give him some renewed purpose for living. Alvarado had worked with Manuel and Esteban before and agrees. On their way to Lima, Alvarado crosses via the stream below with the provisions. Esteban takes the bridge above.
The Bridge Is Love
Published in 1927, the slender novel—just 107 pages in my copy—proved an immediate success with critics and readers. Published in November, it burned through at least seven printings by the end of the year. By the time it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, it had been through seventeen printings and had sold more than a quarter million copies. It was, according to the Atlantic, “easily the most discussed fiction of the year.”
Now almost a century old, it remains popular and has never been out of print. When Modern Library canonized the 100 best novels of the twentieth century, The Bridge of San Luis Rey ranked thirty-seven. (Interestingly, the Atlantic excluded the book from its recent list of 136 great American novels.)
The enduring appeal? Brother Juniper, who watched the bodies fall to their deaths, decides to make sense of the tragedy by offering “tabulated proof” about God’s mysterious providence. He fails—and meets his own tragic demise. But his sister in Christ, the Abbess, offers another way of understanding.
In her grief and distress, Camila visits the Abbess and finds comfort. Surprisingly, she stays on and joins the convent as a nun. She’s still there sometime later when the Marquesa’s daughter, Clara, visits from Spain. Clara’s heart has softened since her mother’s death, and she offers a defense of the Marquesa. Not that it was necessary. “Do you know, my daughter,” says the Abbess, “in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long?”
She must know because Clara shares her mother’s last letter with the Abbess. “Learn at last,” said the Marquesa, “that anywhere you may expect grace.” And here it was, a strange mercy—even in the collapse of a bridge, the loss of loved ones, and the life the survivors built in the aftermath. While Clara watches her making the rounds with the ill in her convent, the Abbess muses,
Almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son, this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
The Worst the World Can Do
Those words have served as solace to countless people since The Bridge of San Luis Rey was first published. For example, just days after the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, British Prime Minister Tony Blair read the same passage at a memorial service held in New York for British citizens killed in the attack.
I think Wilder would have approved.
“It seems to me that my books are about: what is the worst thing that the world can do to you, and what are the last resources one has to oppose it,” Wilder once wrote a friend. “In other words: when a human being is made to bear more than human beings can bear—what then? . . . The Bridge asked the question whether the intention that lies behind love was sufficient to justify the desperation of living.”
As a novelist, of course, he doesn’t answer the question. That’s for us to do. That’s because the only answer to Brother Juniper’s question is the love we offer each other, whatever disaster might befall us.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is book No. 3 in my classic novel goal for 2024. Here’s what I’ve read so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year.
January: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
February: Alice Walker, The Color Purple
March: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
April: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
May: Chuang Hua, Crossings
June: Willa Cather, My Àntonia
July: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
August: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
September: Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
October: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
November: George Eliot, Middlemarch
December: Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
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It often seems hard to determine the difference between providence and coincidence, or if these two words simply describe the same thing from different worldviews. How interesting, for example, that you would post this essential reminder about love remaining on the day the news announces the bridge of Baltimore collapsing and perhaps killing six. Fascinating.
I think of the book of Ruth that says, "she chanced upon the field of Boaz"—whom she would later marry. The book highlights this seemingly incidental event to remind us how our chances are God's choices.
Joel, another great review. I haven't read this one surprisingly. My wife is from Peru so I think this will find its way towards the top of my pile, especially since it isn't too long.