Influential Book #12: Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell

I have decided on a backward countdown for my influential book series, which may take some time to complete. For my first (i.e. 12th) most influential book, I am choosing the novel Mr. Bridge, by Evan S. Connell, published 1969 and first read by me around the age of eighteen.

Mr. Bridge is the sequel to 1959's Mrs. Bridge, which I could almost as easily have chosen. Each concerns the life of a well-to-do family in Depression-era Kansas City, though from the interestingly different perspectives of husband and wife. Connell writes in a simple but powerful episodic style, each chapter being a discrete meditation on a specific event. Many of these events are minute, but by isolating and illuminating them Connell discovers the mysterium, tremendum and fascinans of middle American existence.

Being then ensconced in a very similar middle Canadian existence, these books (I think, on reflection many years after the fact) helped me to see myself from a distance, with a perspective, and to understand my own world as something more than a dull "default" condition with no prospect of being worthy or interesting other than through literal, as opposed to imaginative, escape or transcendence. The midwestern view is a characteristically American view. In its restraint, empiricism, independence and practicality there is little to appeal to a romantic teenage intellect--there is (it seems) no "philosophy" in any of that...although of course there is. Mr. Bridge was of the same age and mien as my own paternal grandfather. These were serious, modestly successful midwestern men just a generation removed in time, and not at all distant at heart, from a far harsher agrarian life. Ever mindful of the contingency of their condition, they were a later, more fortunate, generation of the "Independent People" drawn in Halldor Laxness' masterpiece of that name--ordinary men independent, not only of each other but, for the first time, of any meaningful religion. And perhaps of a love for philosophy, but not of philosophy itself, as Mr. Bridge reveals in a startling moment of introspection:

I know only myself, but I do believe I know myself. What I am, as well as what I am not, I think I know, even if I may not know exactly what I would like to be. In any case, whatever I feel or think or see or believe is a consequence of my own sensibility, not that of some other man. I believe what I believe, and I have not yet believed a single thing only because it was believed by others, nor do I intend to. I can be grateful for this, at least: that I have kept myself. I have not once dressed up in a costume. There may be stronger consolations, but not many. Be that as it may, I cannot live differently than I do. Whatever the reasons for this, good or bad, they exist. Evidently that is enough. So, early tomorrow, I must get up again to do what I have done today. I will get up early to do this, and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and there is nothing to discuss.

Of course, this is an expression of empiricist thought, and of scepticism. It is the language of Montaigne and Hume, and perhaps it is not coincidental that coming from this same geographical and psychological space, I ended up studying and writing about Hume, whose name I'm sure will come up once or twice in other points of my "most influential" list.