Reading Other People's Mail

reading other people’s mail Julia Smith Interviews Evan S. Connell Biographer Steve Paul

plus two brief essays about Evan S. Connell featured writer | spring 2022

reading other people’s mail New Letters Intern Julia Smith talks with biographer Steve Paul about the writing of Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan E. Connell

Steve Paul has been a writer and editor based in Kansas City for more than four decades. His long newspaper career ran a gamut from local news and politics, to long-form features on culture, crime and food, to extended stints as book review editor, architecture writer, and editorial page editor. He retired in 2016 in order to focus on books, other writing projects, photography and more. He’s the editor of Kansas City Noir, an anthology of contemporary short fiction (Akashic Books); co-editor of War + Ink: New Perspectives on Ernest Hemingway’s Early Life and Writings (Kent State University Press); the biography Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend (Chicago Review Press); and the biography Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell (University of Missouri Press).

Julia Smith is a M.F.A. candidate in English, creative writing, at the Univeristy of Missouri-Kansas City. Her creative nonfiction has been published in New Letters and Number One Magazine and poetry in Kawsmouth.

Steve Paul photo by Roger Gordy Front cover photo by Gemma Evans

New Letters: In Literary Alchemist you piece together a portrait of the most independent and private of writers, Evan S. Connell.

As you point out in your preface, Connell fluctuated between writing books like Mrs. Bridge, a fragmentary and minimalist portrait of an upper-class Midwestern matron, to epic travel stories fueled by the “long desire,” the instincts that propel travelers to discoveries as conceived by Anatole France. To reconcile the wide spectrum of Connell’s career, you become a bit of a literary sleuth, scouring library archives, most notably his scant literary collection at Stanford University’s Green Library, as well as leads from correspondence in other people’s collections: the Max Steele collection at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Wilson Special Collections Library, as well as various writers, editors, and publishers at the University of Texas, Austin’s Ransom Center. Once you had your subject, the correspondence, both personal and business-related, became your method.

You orchestrated the voices from these letters to form your own mosaic of Connell. What can letters from a sister, a lover, an editor, a publisher, and other writers tell a biographer?

What were your most surprising discoveries and biggest roadblocks?

Steve Paul: My Hemingway book (Hemingway At Eighteen) came out in the fall of 2017. But earlier that year I was sort of fishing around for another project and Connell’s name popped into my head. When the pandemic lockdown began in March 2020, I’d previously gathered much of the available archival material in library visits over the last three years. And online archives such as newspapers.com, The New York Times, and others continued to be readily available. Some planned research trips fell by the wayside but I finished a draft, and then more drafts and revisions, and submitted a manuscript to my publisher a little ahead of schedule.

Everybody who does this kind of research knows there are a million ways you can do it. You come across manuscripts, things that weren’t published, and his correspondence. As the first biography of Connell, I didn’t think I needed to do textual analysis like I did for Hemingway.

Textual analysis is when you look at multiple drafts and try to figure out how something was written and the editing decisions that were made. I knew I wanted to look at correspondence, see who Connell’s friends were, and who was writing back to him.

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I’m involved in the Hemingway world and there’s great demand for a project to publish all 6,000 or more of his letters, from which we learn a lot that we didn’t know. We’ve got a sense of his voice in his letters, which is often different from his published fictional voice.

It’s a kind of standard that now I can use when I go into a library and start looking at other people’s correspondence.

With Connell, nobody is demanding to read Connell’s correspondence. In the letters I found from Connell to his friend Max Steele in the library at North Carolina, largely spanning the 1950s, his personal voice was more casual at times than what you might find in his published fiction. There was humor, some elegant descriptions of place— the fog in San Francisco, for example—travel encounters, and bits of personal experience that I was able to cherry pick and massage into my account of his life. That’s the stuff I really wanted to focus on. I am fascinated by reading other people’s mail. When you’re trying to figure out a person’s life, it’s their voice on the page that comes as close as you’re going to get to their person.

I learned that Connell’s papers were at Stanford, where he received a fellowship to study creative writing with Wallace Stegner in 1947. In these papers, he made carbons or copies of his own correspondence

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and incoming letters from his agents and publishers. I spent a week at Stanford paging through as much stuff as I could, and it was an odd archive experience. Some archives are more strict than others. This one would only let you have two boxes at a time, and you had to ask for them a day ahead. By Wednesday, I had gotten through the requisite two boxes but I was hitting these roadblocks. It was mid-week and I had been told there was a large box of correspondence from his sister that had been added by one of the Connell family members. I kept asking for that, and they kept not finding it. On Thursday, a similar thing happened. Friday comes around and I’m emailing my editor and Connell’s niece. I go into the library and say, “Where is this box that you’re supposed to have? I can’t wait any longer.” And because I was going to leave the next day, a manager went to the warehouse and found the box and brought it over. Lo and behold, it’s a box filled with envelopes. This was 11:00 AM on Friday, my last day at the library, and I had four or five hours left in the day to scan this stuff.

What I do in libraries is scan and read later when I get home. If I were an old-school biographer with all the time and money in the world and a huge contract, I’d be at the library and I’d look at everything and I’d make notes and I’d turn the page. But when

you’re on your own dime and you only have limited time—this is what we have to do.

So I’m going through all these letters to his sister, 150 to 200 of them. It’s great to have this sort of feedback that she’s giving him, and you get a sense of his voice. He tells her what’s on his mind, from daily stuff to political disagreements between them. At some point, I realized there was no way I was going to get through the rest of them. I said to the library, “You guys, you screwed me over by giving me these so late. Would you please finish scanning the rest of this box and send them to me later?” And they did. I was grateful. They scanned another 60 letters or so and emailed them to me. What they didn’t do was scan the envelopes. Connell wrote hundreds and hundreds of letters. I’ve got 600-800 of his letters. He always typed them and I almost never saw a handwritten note

and he always left out the year. The library didn’t send me the envelopes for those 60 letters so I spent a lot of time figuring out from the internal evidence when he wrote them.

NL: From extensive research at several libraries, you piece together time frames and geographies that match up with letters and published works of Connell. Through this process, you discovered the importance of place to him. And it’s clear that one place he doesn’t want to be is Kansas City.

This telling excerpt from Mrs. Bridge shows Mr. and Mrs. Bridge on vacation in Paris and their stultifying mid-western gaze on a young artist, Morgan Hager. I can’t help thinking that Hager embodies an artistic freedom that Connell finds in Paris:

From Mrs. Bridge The guidebook spoke of a cafe called Le Dome as having been the haunt of famous intellectuals at the beginning of the century, so there they went to spend an hour or two.

“Picasso used to linger here,” Mrs. Bridge read from the book, and she went on to read the names of other celebrated individuals who had taken their leisure on this very terrace.

“Here comes Picasso now,” said Mr. Bridge.

“Oh, I don’t believe it,” she said, looking up nevertheless. In a moment she saw to whom he was referring; it was Morgan Hager, whom they had not seen for several days. Hager was carrying a portfolio under his arm and he was wearing a beret that for some reason made him resemble a fox. He looked startled when he saw them in the cafe, and for an instant seemed ready to flee, but then he smiled and nodded and came over to join them, placing his portfolio in a corner. Mrs. Bridge thought about asking to see his drawings, and after some hesitation she did so. He said the drawings were not much good and she did not press the matter.

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NL: Connell studied art at KU along with writing, and continued to practice life drawing his whole life. Paris gave Connell an artistic freedom he was seeking. Why else was Paris important to Connell?

Paul: Paris is where Connell was accepted as an artist and a writer and where he got his big break with the Paris Review. In my first research trip to Stanford, I discovered his friendship with the writer and advisory editor to Paris Review from South Carolina, Max Steele, that was formed in the 1950s in Paris.

Also, I accidentally found that there was a guy named Eugene Walter, a minor literary figure, who happened to be in Paris when Connell was there, and was reading manuscripts for the Paris Review. All of a sudden, I see that his papers are at the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. The most

amazing discovery I found was the 1954 letter in which Connell submitted those early paragraphs for Mrs. Bridge to Eugene Walter asking if Paris Review would be interested. I saw the actual onion skin letter of the earliest extant manuscript pages of Mrs. Bridge.

As for Connell, Plimpton thought of him as a shadowy figure who would pop up seemingly from nowhere. He was a “wonderful looking man, looked like an Indian, with sort of a western black mustache.

Always looking at the ground it seems to me.” And as a writer he “is always a keen observer.”

NL: You read an excerpt from Literary Alchemist during your Kansas City Public Library interview about the Paris Review and George Plimpton, and I’m going to reprint part of it here:

From Literary Alchemist It is tempting and entirely reasonable to consider the notion that Evan Connell’s literary career essentially began over a lunch with George Plimpton in Paris. Up until then, Connell had served a drawn-out and free-form apprenticeship, punctuated by travel and a postwar, post-college search for identity. Along with some extracurricular schooling from brutally honest editors and agents, Connell had scored a handful of small literary and commercial successes, including the publication of his story “The Anatomy Lesson” in New World Writing. But Plimpton—here was someone in a position to wield what felt like genuine literary power. Plimpton and his coterie of writer friends had launched the Paris Review in the spring of 1953. The gangly and well-spoken easterner served to affirm Connell’s chosen place in life. Connell, who had just turned twenty-nine, had come to Paris to write. That’s what he’d put on his passport. Occupation: “Writer.”

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NL: Meeting Plimpton is a lucky break but this luck didn’t sustain itself over the course of Connell’s writing career. In Literary Alchemist, you detail the difficulty Connell encountered in getting Mrs. Bridge published because the form of the book, a series of fragments not chapters, was unconventional for the time.

How would you describe the many styles of Connell’s writing and why was that a factor in his lack of commercial success?

Paul: Mosaic. That’s how he sees the world and that’s how he’s putting the pieces together, and that’s his consciousness putting this stuff together. One thing leads to another, or it doesn’t, but who cares, it comes in anyway.

The whole fragmentary consciousness relating to Connell is really interesting.

NL: In the following excerpt, you speculate on writing influences that came from his time in Europe:

From Literary Alchemist Connell’s strategy to corral “particles of this and that” would prove to be a brilliant stroke, a technique that eventually also underpinned his approach to writing historical narratives in the years ahead. One could think of it as positively atomic. Connell told Steele that the gesture of titling the paragraphs emerged as he arranged them. Maybe it was the manifestation of a latent influence from Moby-Dick. A critic for the New York Times cited another likely model. Charles Poore thought Mrs. Bridge’s segmented style owed something to Machado de Assis, a nineteenthcentury Brazilian superstar whose influence on South American writers and others extended far beyond his own time.

Paul: Here’s how I put those pieces together.

The New York Times critic made an interesting observation that the Machado novel is built on fragments and they’re numbered and titled just like Mrs. Bridge. This book, written sometime in the 1880s, is later published in English in 1952, when Connell was in Paris and Barcelona, and he’s among these literary influences.

hard to publish in the 1950s. You write that Connell’s commercial success was impaired by his experimentation. Yet today this same experimentation is a requisite for the creative writer. Where do you see this in his works?

Paul: I bring up the notion of hybridity in relation to the two epic poems, “Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel: A Poem” and “Points for a Compass Rose.”

NL: Hybridity in form is now part of creative They contain personal history, speculation writing curriculums. As mentioned before, and poetry and I list them as five good works fragmentation in Mrs. Bridge made the novel in the Oxford Bibliographies.

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Son of the Morning Star, his narrative nonfiction book about Custer, was a big and popular book, welcomed and recognized.

Some Custer historians were stick-in-themuds and they didn’t like the nonlinearity of the book. They especially didn’t like the fact that there weren’t footnotes. As I write in the book, the western historian John Carroll credited Connell with raising “the art form of history to the art form of literature.” Connell gave voice to both sides; he gave voice to Native Americans.

Son of the Morning Star is not a biography of Custer by any means. He didn’t even like Custer as a character. There are other soldiers who are more interesting, but at least he had the balance of the various voices and the wide perspective of the Indian Wars in general and our military folly in trying to wipe out native cultures. The book meanders like a golf course. Fun if you’re attuned to it, but it took me a while to get into that book over the years.

of the most important trips I took. We had two long conversations over lunch, over two days, with four or five hours of recorded chat. She was vivacious and a little non-linear.

Connell chose friends with large personalities who would take up all the oxygen in the room, and Connell was content to be there.

He surrounded himself with these big personalities, which meant he didn’t have to perform himself.

NL: As a biographer, how much do you infer about the behavior of your subject and what is the role of psychoanalysis?

Paul: I am secretary of the Biographers International Organization and I facilitate a discussion every two weeks on Zoom with about a dozen other biographers. There are people writing about poets and other authors. Someone in the group watched my Kansas City Public Library interview about Literary Alchemist where I mentioned that I didn’t want to psychoanalyze. There is, among biographers, this sort of, not a dilemma but a question, how much do you psychoanalyze? How much biography should be psychology, and how much do you dare to do that? Because I’m not a psychoanalyst.

NL: Just to establish a timeline here, Connell lives in San Francisco from the early-1950s through the 1980s. In 1965 he meets Gail Garnett, an actress and his longtime lover. He becomes a contributor and then an editor of the Sausalito-based literary magazine, Contact.

What perspective does Garnett provide to NL: You describe Connell as “a writer’s understanding Connell’s impenetrable inner writer.” Days in San Francisco were spent world? writing and nights playing chess in the No Name Bar in Sausalito. This is where he meets Paul: Gail was very important because she Gail Garnett in 1965. This is also the time of knew Connell well and she had stories. Stories the San Francisco literary renaissance, and you she didn’t always want to tell and some were include this amazing description of a photo of incomplete. Visiting her in Toronto was one Connell and Allen Ginsberg on a boat: 8

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From Literary Alchemist The photograph, to me, is a modern equivalent of Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party,” the Impressionist masterpiece filled with social codes and deep content. What mostly draws my eye to the tableau is the space occupied by two adjacent figures. One is Connell. The other is Allen Ginsberg. A couple of years younger than Connell, Ginsberg at the time was the leading poet of the Beat brigade. With full black beard and flowing locks, Ginsberg is shoeless and dangles a leg over the side of the boat. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and looking toward the camera rather jauntily in the sun. Connell, seated just behind Ginsberg’s right shoulder, appears somewhat bemused, and there’s no hint of a smile beneath the thick arc of his mustache. Maybe he is wondering how he landed on this crazy craft among a bevy of Bohemians while he was decked out in a proper suit and tie. It figures.

Paul: I just thought those collisions between those two guys were really interesting.

I’m really disappointed that I couldn’t use this photo from an article in Cosmopolitan Magazine. Not only were there resolution issues but I tried to get permission from the first publishing and they couldn’t find the photo.

There are a lot of dead ends. I could go on and on about dead ends relating to photographs I wish I was able to use. One of the more interesting things I found was the

review that Connell wrote for the Kansas City Times in 1962 about the two books written about LSD. NL: An interesting intersection with Allen Ginsberg is that his cousin, Dr. Oscar Janiger, a psychotherapist conducting experiments with LSD, facilitated Connell’s experimentation with the hallucinogenic that led to the review you mention above.

You write:

From Literary Alchemist Connell went public with his experience a couple of years later: “I can clearly recall clutching the edge of a table with both hands in a desperate and futile attempt to hold on to reality, or what we assume to be real.” His platform was a book review, written for a Kansas City newspaper. Under consideration were two new books, one by a Hollywood actress using a pseudonym, the other by Alan Watts, the philosopher and popularizer of Zen Buddhism in the West.

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NL: We can see that Connell was not a square but also not a Beat. In the 1960s, he became a contributor and later an editor of Contact.

You write that “Contact’s values are decidedly more restrained than the freewheeling Beats, who were redefining the city’s cultural renaissance.” What type of content was Contact publishing during such a creative and volatile time in American society?

Paul: I’m a pack rat and I was incredibly happy when I realized how easy it was to acquire all twenty-one issues of Contact, the complete set. Contact was a funny thing and I thought that there would be an opportunity to go into more detail and to do an analytical history. It happened during the great San Francisco Literary Renaissance. But it had the stigma put on it in one way by Ferlinghetti, yet it was sort of the polar opposite of the Beats.

It was not uncommon for Contact to publish provocative material. There was this piece by

Dick Gregory about following the Harlem riot of 1964 related to the police shooting of a kid on the Upper East Side. Really interesting essay and timely given the Black Lives Matter movement. And even more timely because I just finished reading Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle, which essentially concludes with this same incident.

I did an article on race and the Bridge novels expanding issues that I mentioned in the book. Connell was very aware of the of the racial divide of Kansas City and what was happening in the sixties with Civil Rights and race.

NL: Politics help us understand the world Connell left behind in the prosperous and conservative Mission Hills suburb of Kansas City. Much speculation has been made about whether in real life the Connell’s were like the Bridges. In the preface of Literary Alchemist, you write:

From Literary Alchemist The lives of India and Walter Bridge and their three children in the two novels are contained within the walls they construct, knowingly or unknowingly, for themselves. India Bridge, especially, lives an almost helpless life of loneliness within a marriage where romantic love is long lost. Critics’ general conclusions that the Bridge family was probably not unlike Connell’s own are certainly supportable, though he invented many facts. Unlike Douglas Bridge, for example, Connell had only one sister, Barbara, not two, and she, he long maintained, was nothing like either Carolyn or Ruth Bridge in the two novels.”

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NL: You tell us in the book that Connell’s sister, Barbara, was conservative. There is a funny anecdote about her proselytizing to Paul Newman on the set of the film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge. Who do you think India Bridge would have voted for in the 2016 Presidential election?

Paul: She would’ve been a Trumper because her husband would’ve been. She might have been a little wary of the goofiness of his personality. But she would’ve gone along thinking that he is maybe better for the country than whatever socialism was represented by the other side. That sort of argument. You can see that a little bit when I write about Connell and his sister in the 1990s when Connell starts writing short stories again, “Election Eve,” “Mrs. Proctor Bemis” . . . Mrs. Proctor Bemis is the arch conservative, sounding a little bit like his sister. She is married to a guy who is a more liberal Republican. It does resonate and it is another extreme present-day Mrs. Bridge in that sense. She was a little bit more politically aware than the first Mrs. Bridge, but in the wrong way and on the wrong side.

NL: As the first biographer of Connell, you’ve realized a desire to reclaim his literary legacy and a hope to inspire future scholars to research his legacy. What’s next for you as a writer?

Paul: I would hope there’s some scholarly interest. As I was completing this book I learned of an essay by David Pickus exploring “social oblivion” in two of Connell’s novels, Mr. Bridge and The Connoisseur.

Connell’s centennial is coming up in 2024, and wouldn’t it be nice if people noticed and there was more attention?

Earlier this year I started working on my next book, a biography of poet William Stafford, who is a little forgotten-about except in some circles, but he was a major American poet in his time. He died almost 30 years ago and was poet laureate of the U.S. in 1970-71.

He came out of Kansas, settled in Oregon, was a teacher, and an influential peacemaker and pacifist. He was a conscientious objector in World War II serving in what were called the civilian public service camps that were run by peace churches. He led a principled life as a pacifist. Just to see if this was worth doing, I asked some important people like the poet Naomi Shihab Nye, because she considered him a mentor. I called her and she said, “We need this book, Steve.”

This would probably be the last of my trilogy of biographies. Dead white male Midwestern writers. With Connell, I wanted to make clear that there are reasons not to ignore him.

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How Chess Channeled the Dark Visions of Evan S. Connell

Steve Paul It wasn’t surprising to learn, early in my research about the underappreciated American author Evan S. Connell, that he harbored a habit for chess. Connell (1924-2013) was a notably introspective and private person, a writer given to long, self-directed intellectual pursuits. So focusing his attention onto a chessboard while hanging out in a bar came to him naturally.

As a denizen of the so-called No Name Bar in Sausalito, Connell often could be found at a quiet, back-corner table nursing a beer or a martini and buried in a mano-a-mano round of chess.

But Connell, whose best-known titles are the minimalist novel Mrs. Bridge (1959) and the maximalist work of Indian-war history Son of the Morning Star (1984), went even further with this obsession. In one of his more challenging yet astutely composed books, Connell employs a game of chess as a recurring device.

At a time when a popular Netflix series, “The Queen’s Gambit,” has brought new attention to the brainy board game, Connell, something of an unacknowledged pacesetter of late twentieth-century literature, can offer a new and wholly unexpected point of entry.

Points for a Compass Rose (1973) was the second volume of a fragmentary, genre-bending literary project that Connell began a decade earlier in Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel. Its form is epic poetry, though it mostly reads like meditative and argumentative prose. Its content is a guided tour of deep human history. Despite Connell’s protestations that he was no poet—and reviews that said much the same—the book was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry in 1974. Annie Dillard once declared the two books to be masterpieces. “You could bend a lifetime of energy to their study,” she wrote, “and have lived well.”

In Points for a Compass Rose, Connell’s nameless narrators evoke the follies of violence, vanity, and debacle from ancient times to the waging of the Vietnam War, which was still under way at the time he wrote. And embedded periodically from beginning to end are a series of chess moves.

“The colors of a chessboard represent our two conditions,” Connell writes, “which are Life and Death.” He goes on to describe how the white and black chess pieces represent a diversity of men who “contend together and finally experience a mutual fate leveling all ranks.” There are ancient judgments we readers must contend with: “the Queen moves aslant because Woman is greedy and not to be trusted” and “the King . . . moves in all directions because he is law.”

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As he is about to launch into the action, Connell’s spokesman warns: “Play warily, my friend, your opponent is subtle. Take abundant thought of your moves, because the stake is your immortal soul.”

So, in this fractured worldview, much depends on chess, a game imbued with symbol and philosophical meaning. For example, Connell notes in this kaleidoscopic work how a chess game involving a frustrated King Ferdinand of Spain contributed to Christopher Columbus’s mission to find the New World.

Along with the chess moves, another recurring marker in Points for a Compass Rose becomes a litany of horror—the names of German death camps in World War II are followed, one by one, by the number of people who perished there. That sequence represents only a part of the book’s inventory of brutality. So, the stakes in this project are high.

P-K4.

P-K3.

These are the game’s opening moves early on in the book. White King’s pawn steps forward two spaces to the fourth rank. Black King’s pawn responds warily from the other end of the board by moving one square.

The game winds through the book with pairs of moves appearing every 10 to 20 pages or so.

Connell sets up the final move in the text like this (again, in a voice from his unidentified cast of narrators): “Look, I had two sons. One was killed in Asia, // the other’s lost his wits. I regard them as tokens // in a merciless game of incredible complexity // played for the most part by companies of footmen // snatched from the board by mounted knights, bishops // and other powerful opponents who are supervised // from far away by an immured and terrified king. // Tell me, did they have much chance?”

Connell has no mercy for political leaders and warmongers who led us to disasters such as the Vietnam War. And then this sequence by symbolic “tokens”: P-B4, PxP. After 14 previous pairs of moves and countermoves, this exchange was the first direct assault, in which a black pawn captures a white one. Drawing from my rudimentary experience with chess, I can surmise that the board is now set up to witness an outright slaughter. Yet, we reach the end of the book with the game hanging in air.

I don’t know how Connell saw it playing out. In “The Queen’s Gambit,” Beth Harmon has bedtime visions of chess challenges to come. Connell did not have the benefit of her phenobarbital habit, nor did he go in for her kind of reckless, drunken bingeing.

Connell left us no specific commentary about his use of the chess game—in his writing or his life—except what can be found in the pages of Points for a Compass Rose. There, the battle on the board serves at least two missions. As a mirror and an omen.

Race was never far from the surface in Evan Connell’s two Bridge novels

By Steve Paul Evan S. Connell, the writer largely known for his portrayals of domestic uneasiness in mid-20th century America, never shied from the realities of whiteness and race.

His two novels about a prosperous Kansas City family in the 1930s and ‘40s, Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, contain numerous incidents that peel back the scab of genteel indifference and overt scorn that white Americans brought to race relations.

Connell wrote Mrs. Bridge in the 1950s, in the era when the civil rights movement and conflicts over the grip of Jim Crow segregation were both growing. Mr. Bridge followed 10 years later, in 1969, following the legislative successes of the 1960s as well as the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., John Kennedy and his brother Robert, and Malcolm X. But both novels looked back to an earlier period, one at least partly reflecting Connell’s own boyhood in Kansas City. He was born there in 1924, left for college and the Naval Air Corps in the early 1940s, and essentially left for good, via the G.I. Bill and a wandering spirit, a few years after the end of World War II. While some readers might be aware of Kansas City’s status as a “wide-open” playground, a sin city that was fertile ground for the blossoming of the sound of jazz, the realities of systemic segregation and cultural racism were no less in force than anywhere else.

In Connell’s novels, a reader’s sense of the state of race relations in Kansas City in that period often comes through the Bridge family’s interactions with their Black housemaid and cook, Harriet. (Emblematic of Harriet’s diminished stature is the fact that not until late in the second novel do we learn her last name, Rodgers.) She had served them well for nine years and even loyally rebuffed another matron’s offer of $10 more to leave the Bridges and work for her.

Another foil in Mrs. Bridge is Alice Jones, daughter of a neighbor’s “colored gardener,” whose developing friendship with one of the Bridge daughters is essentially snuffed out.

We are meant to consider how India Bridge, the novel’s timid matriarch, welcomed daughter Carolyn’s attitude toward the Black girl, how she thought that Carolyn saw no difference between them.

Yet, Connell leaves the reader with the truer insight: “Soon, she knew, the girls would drift apart. Time would take care of the situation.”

In fact, “the situation” lingers in numerous ways throughout both books.

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Mrs. Bridge once had to instruct Carolyn not to refer to the maid as a “cleaning lady”: “You should say the cleaning ‘woman.’ A lady is someone like Mrs. Arlen or Mrs. Montgomery.”

And she was full of subtle discouragements and slights, intentional as well as unconscious, regarding Alice. The end came when Mrs. Bridge counseled her daughter against accepting an invitation to a party at Alice’s house. Alice lived at Thirteenth and Prospect, “a mixed neighborhood.” “Can I go?” Carolyn asked. “I wouldn’t if I were you.” Connell gives the episode another look in Mr. Bridge. Later in the day, India Bridge mentions the party invitation to her husband and wonders whether she should say it would be OK to go. “I don’t want Carolyn to get in the habit of visiting that end of town,” Walter replies. “Carolyn doesn’t belong at Thirteenth and Prospect any more than you or I do. Those people resent us.” It never occurs to either India or Walter Bridge where that resentment might come from.

Late in the first novel, the Bridges hire a chauffeur, an “affable colored man” originally from New Orleans. The arrangement fizzled after a few weeks, when phone calls from the man’s creditors proved to be overly annoying. Subsequent experiences with two Asians and another Black man soured Mrs. Bridge and her husband on the idea of having a driver after all.

Some years later, after Carolyn is married and living in a Kansas suburb, she visits her mother and mentions she and her husband were talking about buying a house, one with a decent yard and a dry basement. Carolyn now was very much conscious of “the situation.”

She tells her mother of a concern about a neighborhood they’d looked at: “The n------ are moving in.” Mrs. Bridge did not know how to respond. She reflected that “she herself would not care to live next door to a houseful of Negroes; on the other hand, there was no reason not to. She had always liked the colored people she had known.” Well, of course she had.

Mrs. Bridge does tell Carolyn that surprisingly she had run into Alice one day in a downtown elevator. It had been years. Alice now worked as a hotel maid, and Mrs. Bridge noticed how she looked darker—“so black”—than when the two girls played together. “It’s such a shame.”

In four simple words, Connell thus exposes not only the shame but the tragedy of white privilege and the enduring pain of the “all-American skin game,” as the late Stanley Crouch once put it, albeit in a somewhat different context. Carolyn suggests there’d be no reason for her to visit Alice. She wouldn’t know what to say.

As Connell returned to the family portrait a decade later in Mr. Bridge, the subject of race becomes even sharper. American cities, including Kansas City, had been burning, and the toxic atmosphere couldn’t help but inform Connell’s vision as he reflected on a societal landscape of two or three decades earlier.

It’s likely that Connell was also stirred by an increased understanding of the disturbing racial picture emanating from his old home town.

S T E V E PAU L

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By the early 1960s, Connell, while living in San Francisco, had attached himself to a literary magazine, Contact, published across the bay in Sausalito. Connell became a co-editor and some of his work had appeared in the journal in recent years, including segments from Mrs. Bridge several months before its arrival as a novel.

In 1963, Connell produced an editorial comment—it was unsigned, but I’m certain of his authorship—about a Kansas City, Kansas, family who were snared in a web of injustice and tried to do something about it. The Shanks family refused to send their children to a segregated school, were not allowed to send them to a white school, and were fined when they chose to teach them at home. This was a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which called for the end of school segregation. That federal case, of course, had arisen from Topeka, just an hour west. The editorial not only lamented the situation and lauded the Shankses quiet heroism, but took the local media to task for their hypocrisy and, in the case of the Kansas City Star, shameful silence.

As the portrait of Walter Bridge emerged from his consciousness, Connell was unsparing about the family patriarch’s hardly suppressed racist attitudes.

One of the most quietly searing moments in Mr. Bridge occurs after India Bridge sees a photograph from a lynching in a news magazine. As we know from many such photos, the dangling Black victim was surrounded by a crowd of grinning, leering white men and boys.

“What on earth makes people behave that way?” she wants to know. Her husband takes in the scene, feels the violence and the setting in a sensory, knowing way, and exclaims that most disappointing of equivocations: “There are many fine people in the South.” Then he blames the victim, figuring he must have been doing something “that he shouldn’t have been doing.” Hell, Walter Bridge says, he’d spent a few days in Atlanta once, “and I never met more courteous people.”

Scenes with Harriet Rodgers again present opportunities to reveal Mr. Bridge’s character.

When some coins go missing from his dresser, he can’t help but wonder if she, rather than any of the children, stole them, because there was no proof otherwise. When Carolyn and Harriet have a little spat, however, he blames his daughter and warns her to treat the maid with dignity and to remember Lincoln’s words: “It is no pleasure to me to triumph over anyone.”

When Harriet informs Mr. Bridge that her nephew in Cleveland had received a four-year college scholarship and wanted to go to Harvard, he takes it in skeptically. Later, to his wife, he fumes: “No good will come of it.” When a boyfriend gets Harriet in trouble with the police, Walter drives downtown to pick her up and warns her that there’ll be no more of that.

After the oldest Bridge daughter, Ruth, moves to New York, her father pays a visit on a business trip. He meets a Black friend of hers as they wander through the Metropolitan Museum. He wonders how often Ruth and the friend get together, and Connell channels his

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R AC E WAS NE VE R FAR FRO M TH E SURFACE I N E VAN C ON N E LL’S T WO BR I D GE N OV E LS

insecurity, which, of course, remains the insecurity of much of white America: “Perhaps this intermingling of the races was inevitable. In centuries to come it might be all right. But not now.” In my reckoning, the line can’t fail to prompt a response, coined by an ancient rabbi: “If not now, when?”

Connell well knew that he was pulling back the curtain on uncomfortable matters. As Mr. Bridge was undergoing proofing and revisions, he added a couple of vignettes to heighten the racial undertones. In one, he wonders about a series of attacks on neighbors’ dogs in the form of ground beef laced with bits of glass. He suspects the perpetrator must be one of the Black laborers in the neighborhood.

Connell’s own father, a noted eye surgeon in Kansas City, was known for his stern, businesslike, and distant demeanor. Connell conceded that his father at least in part inspired Walter Bridge and his attitudes—about Jews as well as Blacks.

Depictions of everyday racism arise only sparingly elsewhere in Connell’s body of work.

The scope of his vision, however, in nearly 20 distinct books spanned the clash of civilizations and the vast human record of folly, intolerance, suffering, and violence. Rather than period pieces of a quaint and quiet America, his two Bridge novels retain, for better and worse, some timeless and contemporary power.