The Man Who Mastered Minor Writing

1959 was a good year for American fiction: Philip Roth published “Goodbye, Columbus,” Saul Bellow unleashed “Henderson the Rain King,” and Evan S. Connell, Jr., made his quiet début with “Mrs. Bridge.” You’ve probably heard of the first two writers, but chances are you don’t know the last. Connell’s slender book, split into a hundred and seventeen short sections, peers into the life of India Bridge, a white, upper-middle-class matron living with her husband, three children, and a Black maid in Kansas City between the World Wars. It is written with a clarity worthy of Flaubert, so finely noticed as to give equal ground for sympathy and satire as we watch Mrs. Bridge biding her time, and sensing, repeatedly, that there may be more to life than what she knows. The book’s delicate, spare perfection radiates from the first paragraph:

Her first name was India—she was never able to get used to it. It seemed to her that her parents must have been thinking of someone else when they named her. Or were they hoping for another sort of daughter? As a child she was often on the point of inquiring, but time passed, and she never did.

Dorothy Parker wrote, in Esquire, that Connell “never did anything that was not perfect” in the novel. “It’s all frighteningly good,” John Updike told Connell in a letter. With the book and its companion, “Mr. Bridge” (1969), which revisits the family from the perspective of Mrs. Bridge’s stern, bigoted, but not unfeeling husband, Walter, Connell gives us two of the very finest, and very saddest, twentieth-century portraits of white bourgeois American domesticity. Yet, in spite of admirers like Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith, the Bridge novels—as well as Connell’s nearly twenty other books—are not so much underrated as underread. That’s why the journalist Steve Paul, in “Literary Alchemist,” the first biography of Connell, mounts a “reclamation project” for the writer’s legacy.

Connell, who died in 2013, is in part to blame for his own obscurity. More than just camera-shy and subdued, he avoided anything that resembled a traditional career, and—writing almost always on spec, without a contract—was uninterested in developing a literary brand. His bibliography can’t be plotted in straight lines, or even in zigzags: it’s a confusing scattershot that includes a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman (“The Patriot”), book-length jumbles of aphorisms and adages (“Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel” and “Points for a Compass Rose”), a charmless Nabokovian novel about a sexual criminal (“The Diary of a Rapist”), some slim fables about a middle-aged insurance executive turned art collector, and lots of short stories. In the late seventies, Connell turned away from straight-ahead fiction and concentrated almost entirely on fact: long historical essays reminiscent of Guy Davenport, a deeply researched account of Lieutenant Colonel Custer and Little Bighorn, an erudite chronicle of the Crusades, and, finally, a typically idiosyncratic biography of Francisco Goya. Connell was engaged, Paul argues, in “a nonstop, absorbing project of literary alchemy”—only the alchemy was achieved not through illusion but by its opposite. If anything ties his work together, it’s the skeptical, even scathing clarity of vision that Connell cast on his subjects, and on the mechanisms of narrative itself.

In an era dominated by strong literary personalities, Connell was famously bland. Born in Kansas City in 1924 to a prominent eye surgeon and a judge’s daughter, Connell later said that he never knew what his mother was thinking, though he did “know that she felt threatened by allusions to sex.” His father, Dr. Connell, was “a sensible man, except when infuriated by some incomprehensible wickedness such as Roosevelt.” Dr. Connell’s indulgences included fishing, college football, mystery novels, and listening to the crooner Nelson Eddy at night (a predilection shared by Mr. Bridge). Connell himself was a bit like the Bridges’ son, Douglas—an all-American boy, a middling student, and, at times, a problem child.

Connell matriculated at Dartmouth, and seemed on track to become a respectable Midwestern doctor. He was dragging his feet, racking up gentleman’s C’s, when the Second World War gave him a way out. He trained as a naval aviator and worked as a flight instructor in bases across the South, but, to his regret, never made it into combat. Although he didn’t resemble the protagonists of the war movies he loved as a kid—though graced with leading-man looks, in life Connell tended to play a supporting role—he was at least liberated from the world of the Bridges. “If it hadn’t been for World War Two,” he said, “I would have graduated and gotten a job as a banker and got married.” Instead, after being discharged, Connell enrolled at the University of Kansas to study writing and art, was part of Wallace Stegner’s inaugural class of creative-writing fellows at Stanford, and spent a year at Columbia, on the G.I. Bill, where he took up sculpture. In 1952, he moved to Paris, where he ran with the founding circle of The Paris Review and began making the first sketches of “Mrs. Bridge.” Having broken free from a certain American story, he could tear that story to shreds.

Connell eventually left Europe, and instead of going to New York settled in San Francisco, in 1954. The motley, frontier cosmopolitanism of the Bay Area suited him, and he warily became one of its creatures. His only real literary job was as an editor at Contact, a small magazine based in Sausalito, right across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco; his closest thing to an institutional affiliation was his long relationship, from 1980 on, with a vibrant local publisher, North Point Press. Otherwise, he kept his distance from the city’s literary scene, and seemed to look down on the antics of the Beats. “I used to visit City Lights,” he recalled in a 1987 interview, “[and] would go to North Beach for dinner. Never saw Kerouac. I’ve met Ginsberg two or three times since then, have been acquainted with Ferlinghetti for some years. But I’m not a part of any group, belong to no organizations.” Connell had tried LSD in 1959, and enjoyed it, but as part of a medical study; he was vocally opposed to the Vietnam War, yet as far away from long-haired hippiedom as could be. The only thing wrong with San Francisco, he once said, was the “flock of homosexuals.”

Above all, Connell was silent, even boring. A 1969 Life article called him “The Roundest Square in U.S. Letters.” In a 2000 radio interview, he is said to have responded to the interviewer’s detailed opening question with a simple nod. Except for stints spent travelling, his life was monkish, mostly spent at his Olympia typewriter or, as his projects required, in libraries and archives. He was a loner, and, though he had a decades-long entanglement with the singer and actress Gale Garnett, never married. During Connell’s Paris days, the novelist Max Steele described him as “a strange, silent, extremely lonesome person who can write like no one else.” The critic Webster Schott wrote that “Connell is as stable as the Kansas wheat crop. He eats slowly. He drives carefully. He is exactly on time. His manners are perfect.” It’s hard to think of a writer who better embodies Flaubert’s dictum to “be well-ordered in your life, and as ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.”

Unlike the mid-century novels of suburban despair written by Connell’s contemporaries—Richard Yates, John Cheever, Updike—the Bridge books exist in a kind of prewar stasis. Their characters don’t struggle against the conventions that imprison them, and the plots are more about what doesn’t happen than what does. Mr. and Mrs. Bridge don’t fight, don’t sleep around—though Mr. Bridge does think about it, ever so briefly, while on vacation in Europe—and forget about divorce almost immediately after Mrs. Bridge brings it up. Darkness flickers around the edges of “Mrs. Bridge,” but it’s as if the Bridges can’t, or won’t, see it. In the novel’s saddest moment, Mrs. Bridge’s best friend, the unorthodox and independent-minded Grace Barron (she “was a puzzle and she was disturbing”), takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. “Have you ever felt like those people in the Grimm fairy tale—the ones who were all hollowed out in the back?” Mrs. Bridge remembers Grace asking her. But she eventually stops thinking about it. And, though Mrs. Bridge does feel unhappy enough to ask her husband to see an analyst, she doesn’t resist when Mr. Bridge dismisses the request, and that, too, is eventually forgotten.

Sometimes, though, a fork-tongued thought comes out of nowhere, as when Mr. Bridge feels a frisson of attraction for his eldest daughter, Ruth, when he sees her sunbathing through the window. In another unexpected turn, the usually sympathetic Mrs. Bridge makes sure that Carolyn, her middle child, breaks off a friendship with Alice Jones, the daughter of a Black gardener. It’s through these contrasts that Connell does his work, leaving room—with what Paul usefully calls a “mosaic” form—for us to sit with our ambivalence about characters we never quite like and never quite know, and who surely don’t know themselves. The Bridge novels get their enduring power not so much from telling a certain story as from resisting it.

Connell’s nonfiction works in much the same way, unraveling myths rather than weaving them. Here, though, he’s preoccupied not by those who fend off knowledge but by those who search it out. As if trying to put Kansas City and all it represented behind him, Connell wrote about those “inexplicably drawn from familiar comforts toward a nebulous goal, lured often enough to death”—what, elsewhere, borrowing a term from Anatole France, he called “a long desire.” His subjects included the expeditionists Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen, the Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley, the Swiss physician and alchemist Paracelsus, and the dreamers who searched for El Dorado. “I must say,” he quipped, “it certainly is easier to write essays than stories, mostly because one doesn’t have to think. After the research all you have to do is organize it and present it. With a story, though, you always fail; it is never as good as it should have been.” There is, Connell suggests beneath his irony, a kind of natural narrative perfection in what actually happened, which liberated him to concentrate not on invention but on the juxtapositions, the contrasts, and the unexpected approaches that characterize his best novels. Following his own long desire, Connell started to make mosaics of the details that animate, and complicate, the stories we tell about the past.

The triumph of Connell’s documentary style is his 1984 account of the Battle of Little Bighorn, “Son of the Morning Star.” The title refers to the name the Arikara tribe once gave to George Armstrong Custer, who was killed, along with much of the Seventh Cavalry, in a confrontation with a Native American force led by the Sioux warrior Crazy Horse on June 24, 1876. In American history, Custer’s name “reverberates like the clang of a sword,” Connell writes, and his book listens carefully to that report. Starting at the end, with the discovery of Custer’s defeat, the narrative is topsy-turvy, employing what the critic Stanley Crouch, an admirer of the book, called “a digressive, Melvillian technique to tell a story we thought we knew.” Rather than merely retelling the myth—“embedded in our nation’s past like a flint arrowhead in a cottonwood tree”—Connell studies its origins, mining soldiers’ diaries, contemporary reportage, and Indian Bureau documents for those details which historians might ignore, and which propagandists always do. As Connell put it in a letter, he took to heart Plutarch’s counsel that a “slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall.”

In Connell’s hands, Custer comes off as a vain dandy—he loved dressing up, brushed his teeth after every meal, insisted that a sixteen-piece brass band play his theme song during expeditions—and a reckless warrior, who at West Point, where he graduated last in his class, “unfurled less like a flower than a weed.” Touchingly, though, he doted on his beloved wife—who was so besotted with her “old fellow with the golden curls” that she once wore a wig made of his hair—and had an undeniable, rakish charisma. Connell pays similarly close attention to the stories of the Natives who have, for many Americans, become mere names: Crazy Horse, Little Hawk, Sitting Bull, and others. He does his best to show how they were misunderstood, mistranslated, and betrayed, and to reconstruct some of the complex cultural context from which Native beliefs on violence and justice emerged. And, in a way that makes the book feel like a version of Plutarch’s parallel lives, Connell brings Custer and Crazy Horse together, suggesting that Custer’s impetuousness, confidence, and luck were mirrored by his enemy: “They were hatched in the same nest, these two.” Connell doesn’t relitigate the conflict—he treats the injustice of American imperialism as a given—yet he makes us see it slant, not as established history but as something still living, still hurting. Just because it happened doesn’t mean it’s over.