Love, respect, decency: Mrs. Bridge, Mr. Bridge, and Mr. & Mrs. Bridge

Fran Magazine: Issue #129

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The very meaning of life

This issue of Fran Magazine features collages by Scott Howard, a New York City-based collage and multimedia artist. We began to correspond earlier in the year to work on some kind of creative collaboration for Fran Magazine, and we landed on subject of today’s topic after some wonderful back and forths about art and film and history and movie stars. More of Scott’s work can be found on his Instagram and by scrolling through this week’s issue. Thank you, Scott!

credit to Scott Howard

When I was in my early twenties, I functionally “forgot” how to read. I suspect this is not an entirely uncommon thing to happen after graduating from college. The stress it takes to get a job, to navigate the world as an independent adult — these are not situations conducive to reading for pleasure. More essentially, I suspect, though many of us — especially former English majors — spend much of college reading on assignment, little of the time is spent reading to develop taste. We discuss symbolism, themes, characters, context, but little notion for preference and why and how that might matter. In turn, I emerged from college having read little before the year 1990 and had no idea how to walk through a non-academic bookstore and find something that adhered to my taste. I turned, as many do, to bestsellers lists and Instagram, finding myself frequently and tediously disappointed.

When I made the decision — and it was a decision — to get “back into reading,” I did what I tell everyone who is looking for book recommendations to do, which is to ask people you both like and respect what they are reading. Do not just ask “people” — be serious. You are far more likely to get recommendations that feel apt and compelling from people who you are keen to impress and talk to, rather than a general populace or even a reviewing body. When I spoke to friends about books, I was pushed towards a number of valuable recommendations, one of the most potent of which was Mrs. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, first recommended to me by Kelsey McKinney.

credit to Scott Howard

Mrs. Bridge, per a frustrating LitHub blog, is “a Classic American Novel, a slice-of-life ‘family story’ about a wealthy woman living in Kansas City between the First and Second World Wars. It was the 1959 debut novel of a writer I’d never heard of otherwise, a white guy named Evan S. Connell.”¹

Mrs. Bridge is, to some extent, a family story, but to me, its grand success is that it is a political novel by way of accumulation. This is a book about conservative parents and liberal children, about the shifting tides of social order, about Midwest “civility” and what happens when you make a female friend who is always wearing jeans. The book feels a bit like reading Lydia Davis: these are short, abrupt chapters with strict adherence to rhythm and sentence structure. It is a book of economy — one that undoubtedly extends to the lack of indulgences in which these characters partake. The result is something akin to tragicomedy: I think, and I believe is Connell’s intention, that Mrs. Bridge’s discomforts and interests are meant to be funny. But when I call the book a novel of accumulation, the greater impact of the book is one of robust and bleak tragedy. These are characters who do not change, who see a certain kind of stability in traditional values.

Mrs. Bridge focuses on the titular Mrs. Bridge (“India” — it’s crazy we used to have girls named India; I think we still do too…) and her husband Walter, as well as their three children: the artsy Ruth, the conventional Carolyn (“Corky”), and frustrating Douglas. In Mr. Bridge, the novel’s sequel (kind of) that came out ten years later, we get a greater sense of Walter’s interiority: he spends most of Mrs. Bridge busy at the office. Though Mr. Bridge has more of a wandering point-of-view and languid pacing compared to Mrs. Bridge. I found Mr. Bridge far more lyrical, if not frustrating. Much of what was subtext in the first book became text in the second.

Mrs. Bridge and her semi-absent (overworked) husband are presented with a number of, if not constant, opportunities to confront a changing world: they meet academics, they meet artists, they mean Jewish people and Black people, nearly all of which they have some level of surface level politesse but no functional respect for. As Max Norman wrote in The New Yorker: “The Bridge novels get their enduring power not so much from telling a certain story as from resisting it.”

credit to Scott Howard

There is a Merchant Ivory film adaptation of both Bridge novels from 1990 starring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as the titular Bridges² with Ruth Prawer Jhabvala writing the screenplay. Like Jhabvala’s similar faithfulness to, say, the Forster adaptations that Merchant Ivory did, Mr. & Mrs. Bridge is a “faithful” film, which is to say: the events of both books feature prominently with dialogue often taken directly from the source. Jhabvala changes the ending to something a little less altogether bleak, adding on a pretty corny “where are they now” segment before the credits roll.

It’s one of the odder Merchant Ivory films I’ve watched: Jhabvala tries, kind of, to parrot the structure of the novel, lending the film a choppy, disjointed sensibility. This works much better in fiction in which we’re allowed to sit in the ambiguities and empty spaces in between Connell’s chapters.

Newman takes to the film beautifully; in the final decade of his career, he leans into the elder statesman with a profound grace. It’s easy to believe that this is a man for whom wanting and desire are relatively distant — is this Newman’s least flirty role? Woodward… it took me a while to warm up to her performance, but not unlike the way Mrs. outweighs Mr. in Connell’s twosome, it’s her performance that bears the weight of the story. Upon first impression, I felt as though Woodward was trying too hard. She’s too glamorous, she’s too stately — India Bridge is nervous and fidgety and self-conscious. Whereas her husband moves through the world with little thought to those around him until they’re an inconvenience, she is thinking about everything all the time, her brain and intellect bursting at the seams of what society allows. She is too cowardly to act on her desires and curiosity. That fear, I came to realize, takes a lot of work: it is difficult and challenging to remain so otherwise neutral. There is a fantastic scene — ripped from the book — when Carolyn comes home having been arguing with her husband yet again. It’s clear that Mrs. Bridge loves her daughter, but she’s inclined to take the husband’s side. She cannot figure out how to communicate, and Woodward works to make it clear that Mrs. Bridge does not have the capacity to understand or sympathize with her daughter. The gap between them is too great — no amount of labor can fix it.

Whether the Bridges are likable to you is a matter of taste and preference; what little glimpses we get at their interiority, their love — for each other and those around them — and their myriad stimuli always move me. I want to root for the Bridges, but they don’t make it easy. They are bigoted and awful. They reap what they sew. But every member of the family has the capacity to be quite tender³, despite their failings over and over again. This is not a liberal family. They are not open-minded. And in their rigidity, they push all of those close to them away. It is a fiercely political book about people who would not otherwise call themselves political. That kind of feigned ignorance and stoic indifference is the one of the most damaging ideologies one can have.

What does Connell make of these people? Where he seems to be pouring his heart is not necessarily in the Bridges, but in Mrs. Bridge’s good friend Grace Barron, the wife of a banker who grows intensely confused and political over the course of the book. The Barrons — their last name, lol — are much wealthier than the Bridges and hold a much more stable position in society, but Grace has had the misfortune — or benefit — of seeing through the veil of all they maintain. She has a drunken outburst at a party, first about the war and then about the patterns of American violence, arguing on behalf of indigenous populations. Mrs. Bridge admires her friend, but knows that the other woman has done wrong to do this. When the social ramifications and isolation set in for Grace, Mrs. Bridge has little recourse in upper-middle class Kansas City society. Grace is played by tremendous Blythe Danner in the Merchant Ivory film, and this performance is tragic and energetic and lucid. We know, as viewers, that Grace Barron is not crazy. She’s seen something she cannot unsee — the knowledge of which causes the world around her to crumble. Her eyes glow, big and open, eager to absorb all the world might want to show her, everyone else turning away.

credit to Scott Howard

1. God forbid a white guy write a book.

2. The film also features a miscast Kyra Sedgwick as eldest daughter Ruth and well-cast Robert Sean Leonard as the adult version of Douglas.

3. Douglas is harsh as a child — one of Mrs. Bridge’s most curious components. I’m sort of left, like, “are all little boys like this or what’s going on here”