Mrs. Bridge

After reading “Mr. Bridge” I turned immediately to MRS. BRIDGE, both written by Evan S. Connell (1924-2013). “Mr. Bridge” was the story of a lawyer, meandering through his life of industriousness, indifference, and conservatism. His interaction with family and friends was well presented with wit and introspective insight. MRS. BRIDGE is the wife’s view of the same life, as represented by her own feelings, thoughts and relationships.

Both books explore the world of the 1920s to the 1940s of a conventional couple trying to live with both social expectations and the handling of three difficult children but seemingly incapable of handling either. The dysfunction leads to wide gaps in the emotional relationship between them and their children and with each other.

Once again I appreciate Connell’s story and his writing skills. India Bridge suffers with many demons. She is insecure, bored, missing earlier romantic moments with her husband, and feeling estranged from her children. I find her to be extremely interesting; someone yearning for understanding and affection, and putting out desperate feelers for friendship. She is awkward and forward in her search and the results are both painful and humorous. Not surprisingly, her attempt to tell Mr. Bridge that she needs therapy for her unease results in rather abrupt dismissal, typical of their relationship..

At first glance it would seem that she has everything needed for a satisfied existence. She enjoys wealth, a live-in housekeeper, a laundress, a magnificent home, friends, and leisure time for special pursuits. Her husband is not attentive and her children treat her unkindly for her attempts at motherhood. Her friends are mostly superficial and pursue incompatible interests. She has no regular activities that keep her involved and focused: As a result, time drags, leading to boredom and excessive introspection.

Connell is a magnificent writer. He is not judgmental, nor does he expect his readers to follow any predisposed opinions. He lays out the story and leaves the reader to make of it as they see fit, making any resemblance to one’s own existence to be in the beholder’s eye. It is intriguing, however, to recognize how he has discerned the ordinary human condition.

I strongly recommend both MR. BRIDGE and MRS. BRIDGE as great literary adventures. While not runaway best sellers, both books have sold steadily and in good numbers. I find them very enjoyable.

Schuyler T Wallace
Author of TIN LIZARD TALES

Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell is a collection of discrete vignettes that chronical the life of India Bridge, the wife of a prosperous Kansas City attorney and mother of his three children in the 1930s. Mrs. Bridge is a novel that is delicately laced with symbolism and nuance but has no central plot or arc, instead it relies on exquisite refracted observations that are presented in 117 short vignettes each of them one to three pages long. The title, Mrs. Bridge, (an example of the subtle symbolism) references India Bridge’s transition to her life as the married appendage of her husband, a signifier that her roles as wife and mother supersede her individuality – she is ever the good girl/the good wife/ the good mother, and tries mightily to embrace the prescribed social persona and roles given to women of her time and status. She sees and defines herself so much through the lens of other people’s expectations of her that she hardly knows what she likes or wants or believes. For me, the most poignant moments in the book depict instances when she experiences an awareness of those personal vacancies and gets glimmerings that she’s missed out on something profound. As her children grow and leave home, and her husband works long hours to give her material security and then dies, she finds that living solely for others has impoverished both her own life and what she had to give to her relationships. She’s left alone with a vast and aimless emptiness at the end of her life.

I have a Ph.D. in English and in all my years of study I never came across this author. Perhaps it was the movie "Mr. Bridges" that brought a forgotten author to light, but however it happened, I'm very glad it did. This is writing on par with Hemingway. It is short, simple, sometimes beautiful, sometimes brutal. It could easily be "the" classic novel about life & expectations in the United States in & around the 1950s, describing the parents of the Baby Boom generation. It's also an example of how the nuclear family, living in isolation in the suburbs is not the best social model for creating engaged human beings and emotional growth . . . but now I'm going beyond the scope of a review . . . .

Mrs. Bridge is perhaps the most vacuous and nondescript central character in any novel that I have encountered. She is the mother of three and the wife of a lawyer sufficiently successful for her to have a full-time colored maid/cook and a once-a-week laundress, freeing her for the PTA, meetings of the ladies' Auxiliary, country club engagements, and art classes. The qualities that she values above all others and seeks to instill in her children are nice manners, pleasant dispositions, and cleanliness. In any and every conversation, she can be counted on to supply vapid filler. And she will go to great lengths to gloss over the earthier things of life, especially with her children. For example, she took them to the wedding of a distant relative, where the bride walked down the aisle obviously pregnant - a circumstance that Mrs. Bridge could not bring herself to remark upon; three months later they received an announcement of the birth of a child, and Mrs. Bridge exclaimed, "Isn't that nice!", and then added for the benefit of her children (ages 14, 16, and 18), "First babies are so often premature." The great achievement of Evan S. Connell in MRS. BRIDGE is to limn such a pathetic existence in such a readable, engaging novel.

The novel spans about 25 years of India Bridge's life, from the time she gets married at age 26 (narrowly escaping, one senses, spinsterhood) to the time her youngest child is going off to war. It is set in an affluent section of Kansas City during the Twenties and Thirties. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge are thoroughly imbued with Midwestern Republican values, as are most of the secondary characters, their friends and neighbors. There are a few genuine eccentrics, but no one is particularly notable, much less admirable or heroic.

The story is told in a pointillistic, anecdotal fashion. The writing is spare and straightforward. I am finding it difficult to make the novel sound interesting. Yet it is . . . which is a tribute to the craftsmanship underlying this starkly realistic portrayal of a certain unlamented time and place of American life. Four-and-a-half stars.

P.S.: Evan S. Connell, now 86, is one of the more under-appreciated men of American letters. MRS. BRIDGE was the first of (by my count) seven novels. He also has written short stories, poetry, essays, and book-length works of non-fiction, including the nonpareil "Son of the Morning Star", an extended meditation on Custer at the Little Big Horn and the plowing under of Native Americans.

Addendum (18 January 2013): Evan S. Connell died last week, alone, here in Santa Fe. I wish I had had the opportunity to meet him.

The fact that women in the 1930's were already facing issues of what to do with their leisure time as well as feeling lost, useless, and lonely once their children were grown was both surprising and, yet, also reassuring in terms of the universality of our life experiences. What was even more surprising was the fact that a male author could pinpoint the feelings that a wife has with regard to her husband's inability to express his feelings of love for her. This story deserves to be read and cherished by a wider audience. Not only did I laugh out loud numerous times when reading the anecdotes of Mrs. Bridge trying to teach her adolescent son household rules and manners, but I gained insight into why males view such lessons as pointless. This book would make an excellent selection for book clubs.

This entry contains two reviews, one of 'Mrs. Bridge' and the second of 'Mr. Bridge':

The unexamined life of a conformist

I am convinced that if we want to understand what an affluent housewife’s life was like during the first half of the 20th century we need look no further than Evan Connell’s ‘Mrs. Bridge’, published in 1959. Its companion novel, ‘Mr. Bridge’, was published ten years later, covering many of the same events from the husband’s point of view.

Walter and India Bridge are an upper class couple in Kansas City, Missouri, raising their family in the years between the world wars, which means that many of the ensuing years include the Great Depression. This national economic disaster is never mentioned in ‘Mrs. Bridge,’ which gives a good indication of the impact that it had on a certain segment of the population. Walter is a workaholic lawyer, leaving India and her cohort wives to occupy their days with Auxiliary Clubs, shopping and lunches. The Bridge’s have a faithful black housekeeper, Harriet, whose loyalty to the family precludes her acceptance of a higher offer from a friend of the family’s. The Bridge’s have two daughters, Ruth and Carolyn, nicknamed “Corky”, and a son, Douglas.

India Bridge’s first name is the only exotic thing about her. She wondered if her parents somehow hoped she would become a person more suited for that name. Her neglect in asking that question was perhaps the first of many examples of the incurious attitude she adopts about most things for the rest of her life.
“She was not certain what she wanted from life or what to expect from it, for she had seen so little of it, but she was sure that in some way—because she willed it to be so—her wants and her expectations were the same.”

Once she marries Walter and their children are born she slips into a groove of behavior and expectation that determines the pattern of her life. Opportunities to question the status quo arise and pass throughout her life but she never takes advantage of any of them. However, one of her friends, Grace Barron, does. Grace is somewhat eccentric, often dressing in jeans, a dirty sweatshirt, tennis shoes and a baseball cap. Grace says to her friend, “India, I’ve never been anywhere or done anything or seen anything. I don’t know how other people live, or think, even how they believe. Are we right? Do we believe the right things?” Grace calls up doubts in India’s mind and, while those doubts nibble at the edges of her consciousness, India never does allow them to take up permanent residency. They obviously take up more space in Grace’s, though, because she eventually succumbs after taking fifty sleeping pills. Of course, India seizes on the possibility that she may have eaten some spoiled tuna salad and that that was what killed her. That is what she tells her children.

She has guest towels in the bathroom that even the guests never use because they look too nice. When her messy son Douglas repeatedly wipes his hands on them she is disproportionately furious with him, especially after he points out the fact that they’re not being used by anybody.

She is a dabbler in several pastimes but never pursues any of them seriously. She buys a record of Spanish lessons but never gets beyond the “Como esta usted, muy bien” stage. She goes with Grace to a concert but when Grace asks if she’d like to go back with her the following week, India says they have a social engagement (obligation) at another couple’s house.

Although she thinks her husband’s habit of spending more time at the office than home with his family is temporary, she gradually sees that it is his way of life. When he is around, he usually has his nose in the stock exchange pages of the newspaper. He is never demonstrative in his love and gets offended if she asks him why he doesn’t tell her he loves her more often. Other than laying down the law with his children when they want to do something unorthodox his participation in the daily affairs of their lives is nil.

Perhaps the most extreme test of India’s unquestioning faith in her husband occurs when they are dining at the club. A tornado is approaching the restaurant very rapidly. All the other dinner guests have adjourned to the basement and the steward approaches their table and advises them to do the same. Walter Bridge refuses to budge until he finishes his steak dinner. India grows increasingly nervous and apprehensive. He ignores her when she asks if they should go. The lights go out after the power goes out and the trees are bent sideways in the extreme winds.
“It did not occur to Mrs. Bridge to leave her husband and run to the basement. She had been brought up to believe without question that when a woman married she was married for the rest of her life and was meant to remain with her husband wherever he was, and under all circumstances, unless he directed her otherwise…For nearly a quarter of a century she had done as he told her, and what he had said would happen had indeed come to pass, and what he had said would not occur had not occurred. Why, then, should she not believe him now?”
Shortly afterward the wind dies down and the lights come back on. “There!” he says. “I told you, didn’t I?”

Connell’s novel is essentially plotless in the conventional sense. It is presented in a sequence of extremely short chapters, depictions of various significant and trivial incidents through the years. I have not encountered many relatively short novels pre-Vonnegut that contain so many chapters (117 total). It is all the more impressive for being a first novel. Perhaps Connell’s major accomplishment, aside from the fact that he makes this very mundane and uneventful life fascinating, is that he never condescends to the characters. He never steps in to judge them for their inflexible attitudes or aversion to introspection. He accepts them at face value and invites us to do the same. Connell himself was born and grew up in Kansas City. His father was a physician rather than a lawyer but one imagines that the family life may have been very similar to the Bridge family’s.

Eventually, the oldest daughter moves away to New York, on her own (she had always been the most rebellious), the second daughter marries and the son joins the army after the U.S. enters World War II. And then Walter Bridge collapses in his office, presumably of a heart attack brought on by overwork. India Bridge is left alone, especially now that the children have all moved on. The final scene is a literal depiction of her isolation, sad and chilling in more ways than one. “Hello? Hello out there?” she asks, answered by no one “unless it was the falling snow.”

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The burdens of WASP privilege

At some point earlier in his life, Mr. Walter Bridge felt the necessity to build a wall. This was not a literal wall but one that protected his financial security and investments and extended to his emotional security. He loves his wife but somehow he can never tell her he loves her except in the heat of passion. He is on a track of prosperity and acquisition of material gain and any deviation from that, even including exposing any vulnerability to his wife and children, is a risk he can and will not take.

‘Mr. Bridge’, published in 1969, like its companion volume, ‘Mrs. Bridge’, published ten years earlier, is a composite of moments rendered in brief chapters, mostly uneventful and seemingly trivial, that are like family snapshots. Together, the snapshots in both novels accumulate and form a larger portrait of a family’s life in the years between the world wars. Mr. Bridge is a successful lawyer. His wife is a housewife who is sentenced to an existence in a leisure class of wives who have house servants to do all the housework and, therefore, have little to occupy their time other than shopping and meeting each other for lunches. At home and when they go out to dinner their lives intersect. Otherwise, the bulk of their lives are lived apart.

Mr. Bridge does occasionally ponder why the home and work life are so segregated:
“He sipped the drink, feeling too tired to eat, and wondered why he could not talk to the family about his work…Now they were asking. Why had he rejected this chance? He felt that he was close to an understanding; then something intervened like a shade drawn down…there is almost nothing I can say to them. My life is cut in half. The halves remain side by side in perfect equilibrium like halves of a melon.”

Mr. Bridge may be very affluent materially but he suffers from emotional poverty created by a lack of compassion or empathy for anyone outside his narrow parameters of success and socially acceptable behavior. He has no sympathy for the Negroes that create social discord by asking for admittance to white schools when there are plenty of acceptable black schools. He distrusts Jews and Italians, even the Jew that moves into his neighborhood. Although he doesn’t know the man, he dismisses him with the remark, “I don’t care for the man’s taste. Otherwise, I have nothing against him.” He has little understanding or desire to appreciate theater or poetry. His height of musical taste is listening to Nelson Eddy on the radio, whom he considers the greatest singer of all time. Franklin Roosevelt is one of this country’s most disastrous presidents and this New Deal socialism will lead to the country’s downfall.

He deals with unwelcome subconscious passions by either sublimating them or diverting them. For example, when he sees his oldest daughter Ruth sunbathing outside, wearing a halter top, he notices that “her flesh gleamed in the morning sunlight like varnished cherrywood.” When his wife enters the bedroom and sees him looking out the window he pulls her toward him and kisses her passionately, then pushes her toward the bed. Later a similar experience occurs when he walks by his other daughter Carolyn’s door, which she has left open while she poses in front of the mirror, naked. He walks on and struggles to dismiss the image from his mind.

Various challenges to his certainty from others are sprinkled throughout the novel. The only one presented to him from his wife is a weak tantrum on one occasion when she asks for a divorce. She claims that he will never change, that his top priority is his law office. A friend read her horoscope to her which told her to “express your idealistic love nature fearlessly but sensibly so that you command respect as well as love from those dear to you.” Mr. Bridge tells her to sit down beside him and he calms her down as he would a child and proceeds to forget this hysterical fit. Presumably Mrs. Bridge does as well because she never confronts him again.

His secretary Julia, one of the three indispensable women in his life, the others being his wife and his housekeeper and cook Harriett, asks if he’d like to stop somewhere for a drink after leaving the office one night. Mr. Bridge agrees. After one drink, Julia drinks another. She grows progressively weepy and sentimental and embarrasses him to the point where he just wants to see her home and be rid of her. Then she becomes hostile. She asks him if he remembers what day it is. He doesn’t. She says she should have known. He will never change. She finally tells him it is the anniversary of the day that she first went to work for him. “I’ve given you the best years of my life—the very best years. You never used them. You never wanted them.” It shocks him to realize that her association with him means more to her than it has to him.

Once, when he goes out for lunch, he decides to try a coffee shop instead of his usual choice. He runs into India’s unstable friend Grace Barron and feels it would be rude not to acknowledge her so they end up sitting at the same table. Grace seems especially combative, provoking him into stating his real feelings about Franklin Roosevelt, the New Deal and the Communists. Then she states for a fact that a Jew they both know is planning to buy a house in his neighborhood that he wasn’t even aware was for sale. The thought angers him but he struggles not to express it. Grace, however, has seen through him and is greatly disturbed.

When he takes his wife to Europe for her birthday, he indulges her wish to visit art galleries throughout Paris and Rome but he often sits out in the foyer while she spends time perusing masterpieces. He doesn’t remain silent though. He cannot understand the lifestyles of people who presumably have day jobs yet take three hour lunches and carouse throughout the night. He sees artists painting out in public day after day. It offends him that they do not work respectable jobs and relegate their painting to the weekends. His attitude toward European culture and lifestyle resembles Mark Twain’s in ‘The Innocents Abroad’ but he lacks the humor.

So why is this character worth being the subject of a novel? Why is any disagreeable character worth spending time with in the pages of fiction? He is a character who steadfastly refuses to grow or change from the beginning to the end of the novel because he doesn’t want to risk making that wall he erected become unstable and unsustainable. As he did with ‘Mrs. Bridge’, Connell has depicted the mundane life of this man with impartiality and a lack of judgment or condescension. He has also succeeded in making these inconsequential moments of this distasteful man as thrilling as any overtly plot-heavy novel. We have been invited into this man’s consciousness and we understand him better than he does himself, despite his brief attempts at introspection. I would rate ‘Mr. Bridge’ slightly lower than ‘Mrs. Bridge’ mainly on the basis of the character. Mrs. Bridge is an innocent, a naïve but well-meaning woman with a largely sheltered and childlike view of the universe. She is clueless yet guileless. Mr. Bridge, on the other hand, is on a first name basis with almost every prejudice known to man. He doesn’t go through life advertising them although they lurk beneath a fairly thin veneer that even his male friends see through. There is no tragedy to ‘Mr. Bridge’ because he never fully realizes what he has missed. It is very difficult to warm up to this man or see in him someone who rarely gives more than lip service to compassion.

One of his rare excursions into introspection occurs in the novel’s closing scene. Going to the obligatory Christmas church service with his wife and singing “Joy the World” Mr. Bridge ponders the quality of joy:
“He reflected that he had occasionally heard people use this word. Evidently they had experienced joy, or believed they had experienced it. He asked himself if he had ever known it…if he had once known joy it must have been a long time ago. Satisfaction, yes, and pleasure of several sorts, and pride, and possibly a feeling which might be called “rejoicing” after some serious worry or problem had been resolved. There were many such feelings, but none of them could be called “joy.” He remembered enthusiasm, hope, and a kind of jubilation or exultation. Cheerfulness, yes, and joviality, and the brief gratification of sex. Gladness, too, fullness of heart, appreciation, and many other emotions. But not joy. No, that belonged to simpler minds.”

He should be very familiar with one of those “simpler minds”, being married to her for several decades.

Masterful. So glad I read this on the recommendation of my son. Written in the late 1950s (published in 1959), it purports to reflect America of the late 30s/early 40s, but reflects America of the 50s more than America of the earlier period. But, never mind. A powerful look into a deeply unfulfilled wife and mother dealing with highly atomized family relationships. Would make a interesting pairing with Richard Yates' "Revolutionary Road" of the same period. Poking up throughout "Mrs. Bridge" are themes that will echo down through the next half century of American life and beyond: tenuous race relations and white guilt, poverty and the American "under-class," the lack of health insurance, and an arresting mention that "there's to be a church doing (at which a Moslem will talk!")." Very easy to read, put down, and pick up again. Thus can be read beside another book that you like but not as much. Even if you don't finish this in one sitting, you'll be compelled to finish it within two or three days.

I read this book in two sittings, and I continue to think about it. There are already many thoughtful and lengthy reviews about the book, so I won't go into detail, but I found it a fascinating study of the way women (as wives and mothers) used to be expected to behave. In my opinion, Connell has not received the acclaim that he should. He says so much in his spare "vignettes"; ther writers might take pages to accomplish what he does in a relatively few words.

Mrs Bridge is an unusual book. First published in 1959 it is actually set in the period from about 1920 up to the war years. It is a short book of about 180 pages and is divided into 117 chapters, each of which describe something in the life of Mrs Bridge from the time of her marriage until her children have grown up. The chapters vary in length from 10 lines or so, up to several pages, and some are linked but each is a story within itself.

These snippets of her life gradually enable the reader to build up a picture of Mrs Bridge, and her rather sheltered and narrow life. We begin to understand her gradual emotional estrangement from her three children and her somewhat distant relationship with her husband who thinks that his role in life is to work all the hours God sends in order to more than adequately provide for his family. Occasionally funny and often poignant, overall this is really rather a sad tale. Mrs Bridge, as she is known to everyone except her friend Grace, who calls her by her christian name, India, gradually comes to realise over the years that her life is empty, but can see no way out. She is bored and yearns emotional attachment but is not equipped to achieve it so that all her relationships, both familial and social, remain rather distant.

This is a very worthwhile book which becomes increasingly compulsive reading the further you get into it. I read through Mrs Bridge very quickly and would highly recommend it to others. It is certainly very worthy of inclusion in the modern classics series.

This book is so well written and addresses the problems of most women today, that it came as a great shock to find it was written in 1959!

This is definitely one of my all time favorites and will be handed down to my grandaughter.