Theophilus North – 4/5 Stars
This last novel of Wilder’ was written in the 1970s, when he was also in his 70s and would die a few years after. The vantage point of the novel is from about the 1970s, but involves a young man who went to Yale (Wilder went to Yale when he was a young) who gets a leave of absence from his job as a Latin and French tutor at a private boys school and moves to Newport, Rhode Island to his time. While he’s there, he thinks about his understandings and theories about the world while meeting people and having little adventures.
He begins the novel by detailing his life’s “Nine Ambitions”, the abstract desires he had for life at various points in time as he tried to make sense of who he was and where he was in the world. You can see from the list that never once was he interested in settling down with a family, running or owning a business, working a trade, or making money. Instead, he has the sense that life need to be about something and partly that is built through your orientation to the world itself. The ambitions: “I resolved to be a saint” and he means this in both the classic Catholic and classic literature sense of that; “to be an anthropologist” – a secular saint, as he sees it; “The Third, the archaeologist”; “The Fourth, the detective”; “The Fifth, the actor, an amazing actor”; “The Sixth, the magician” or some kind of magicker more like an areligious shaman; “The Seventh, the lover”, but more courting, than courtly; “The Eighth, the rascal…el picaro”‘; “The Ninth, to be a free man”, and this is where we find him. When he arrives in Newport, he finds that if his inward turn is that of seeing his life as being a series of roles similar to the “Commedia dell’arte”, then the city of Newport is like an ancient Rome of seven cities, or even the different layers of Dante’s purgatory, from which Wilder gives us an epigraph. The nine cities of Newport: “The First City exhibits the vestiges of the earliest settlers”; “The Second city is the eighteenth-century town”; “The Third City contains the remains of one of New England’s most prosperous seaports”; “The Fourth City belongs to the Army and the Navy”; “The Fifth City was inhabited…by a small number of highly intellectual families” – a kind of city of the mind in balance to the city of opulence; “The Sixth City…the very rich”; “The Seventh City…the servants”; “The Eighth City…the camp-followers and parasites”; and “the Ninth City, the American middle-class town”. From here the rest of the novel circulates both around the different ambitions and the different cities of Theophilus’s journey through the city in a meaningful year.
The novel is part a kind of retelling of purgatory and partly a picaresque tale of a pseudo-trickster figure. Teddy (Theophilus) puts into practice all sorts of ideas for chaos and change in different people’s lives. He’s always a little devilish, but never the devil, and his machinations are always outward. Interestingly, he’s also a character and a teacher with great boundaries. It’s also very difficult not to see Teddy as a queer figure, in both the sense that he reads as perhaps gay (Wilder was gay) but also in the sense that he disrupts the otherwise establish heteronormative assumptions of the town.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey 5/5 – I have read this book a dozen times and so a few things stood out to me this time. Having recently read a lot of other Wilder, and seeing how funny, weird, and playful he is in every single other piece of writing, it’s not longer easy for me to come at this book in a straightforward way. It reads as sentimental, but now I am not sure anymore. Regardless, what really comes to mind for me, especially thinking about the stage manager in Our Town, is to take the question at the center of the novel, is there a power that put these people on this bridge at the time of its collapse? I think the answer squarely is yes (and this seems always to have been the answer), but the answer is not god, but the author. So in rereading this book, I requestion all the moments of divine intervention that seemingly connect the three main stories and just replace them with authorial intrusion. It seems quite possible to me that Wilder knew he was playing (he’s too well-read for this to be an impossibility) and even deciding on Spanish colonial culture in Peru as opposed to somewhere in the US allowed to play with the immanent understanding of God in 18th century Spanish Catholics.