The Limits of “Write What You Know”: Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey

I recently listened to the wonderful audiobook of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a novella that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1928. The book takes place in Peru in the early 1700s. Now, why would an author like Thornton Wilder, who spent his early years in Madison, Wisconsin, be writing about life in Lima two hundred years before his time? 

Thornton Wilder (1897–1975)

New writers are often admonished to “write what you know.” Basically this means that authors are supposed to work best when personally familiar with the type of setting and characters they’re depicting. Not only that, but today critics and other writers often accuse authors of appropriation if they write about cultures, characters, and/or histories other than the ones from their own backgrounds and ancestry.

One difficulty with “write what you know” is that writing is always an act of the imagination. Even an autobiography involves huge leaps of the mind to recreate scenes and dialogue from the past. Why limit our compassion and insight to only ourselves? Isn’t literature all about extending our empathy beyond our own little circle?

Yes, there is a grave danger of misusing, exploiting, or distorting the stories and experiences of people from other cultures. That type of writing can be deeply hurtful to members of the appropriated group. But I do believe that danger can be swerved around in the right hands. If writer are sufficiently empathetic and aware, and if they have something important and vital to say, writing about another culture or history can be extremely effective.

In the case of Thornton Wilder, there were kinds of human interactions that he could portray better in 18th century Lima than he could in Madison, Wisconsin, in the 1920s. This was possibly because the culture and society he grew up in was not a place that nourished certain personality traits that moved him, such as the character of a great actress who dazzled an audience that knew the classics of Spanish theater.

In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder not only creates a world of dimensional and sympathetic characters in 18th century South America, he does it with extraordinary perceptiveness. How is it possible, I asked myself as I listened to one incredible revelation after another in this book, that Wilder knows so much about the little kindnesses and jealousies that individuals show one another in this world? Had he spent a great deal of time in Peru? He was just over 30 when the novel was published.

When I investigated the background of the novel, I discovered to my astonishment that Wilder had never visited Peru or anywhere else in South America when he wrote The Bridge of San Luis Rey. And yet he could describe in excruciating detail the experience of attending the theater in Lima in the early 1700s:

“She [the Marquesa de Montemayor] decided to go to the Comedia where the Perichole was playing Doña Leonor in Moreto’s Trampa Adelante.…The Marquesa sat in her box gazing with flagging attention at the brilliant stage. Between the acts it was the Perichole’s custom to lay aside the courtly role and appear before the curtain to sing a few topical songs. The malicious actress had seen the Marquesa arrive and presently began improvising couplets alluding to her appearance, her avarice, her drunkenness, and even to her daughter’s flight from her…”

Whether it is historically accurate that actors did this on stage in Lima in 1714 is not the point here. What’s important is that this scene is highly emotional. We, the readers, know that the Marquesa is a deep soul and a great writer, who is being wrung out in public by a superficial but sparkling person. In a dramatic turn of events, that actress later begs the Marquesa's forgiveness when she comes to know the generosity of the other woman’s heart.

Without the distance of writing about 18^th century Peru, I doubt that Thornton Wilder could have created the moments of indelible pathos and insight in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Here are two of my favorites.

Writing about the artist’s constant striving for perfection, even after the audience thinks the work is good enough: “The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.”

“The whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.”

Yes, write about what you know, but never forget that knowledge can be an electric vehicle, charged by the imagination.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Be an American Writer, Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

There is another mode of American literary populism that is not so much about making the ordinary person larger than life, as in Walt Whitman’s poetry. This other strain of American populist is concerned with finding the pathos in small, everyday moments. Maybe my favorite U.S. populist in this vein is Thornton Wilder, author of the play Our Town, and the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, among other works. Wilder wrote many different kinds of books and plays, but here I’m just going to address his more naturalistic writing.

Thornton Wilder

In addition to Our Town, which beautifully celebrates meaningful moments in small-town American life, Wilder wrote a wonderful one-act play called The Happy Journey from Trenton to Camden. How much more mundane can you get than a family road trip from one city in New Jersey to another? The family members are traveling to visit the eldest daughter, who lives with her husband in Camden. En route, the family talks about the most banal topics—billboards they see with ads for spaghetti and cigarettes. They debate whether to make a pit stop at a gas station, whether the son is old enough to take a paper route. The mother is the loudest, most uneducated, obnoxious character. When the family finally gets to the home of the fully grown daughter, it’s the usual small talk—how much the kids have grown, how nice her house looks. Can life get any more boring?

Then suddenly, Wilder has the mother send the other family members off on various errands. The mom is now alone with her grown, married daughter.

You can see a video of part of a production of the play here. The scene I’m going to discuss starts right after the 2:40 second mark and goes till about 4:07.

The married daughter unexpectedly breaks down and starts sobbing, and the mother folds her in her arms, so we see that the daughter is still her child, even if she is fully grown and living on her own. The audience finds out the real purpose of the car trip—the mother has come to console her daughter on her recent miscarriage. The mom had missed her chance to do this when the daughter was in the hospital right after she lost the baby—a gruff doctor had sent the mother away. This moment when the mother finally gets to soothe her daughter in Wilder’s play is so surprising, so poignant. We realize that all those mundane details are just the wrapper, the outside of life, and inside are the incredibly moving moments that sustain us.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Be an American Writer, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Praise and Lament

A Tribute to Barbara Oliver (1927–2013)

This week the San Francisco Bay Area received the very sad news that the wonderful actor, director, and arts administrator Barbara Oliver passed away on May 20, 2013. Barbara cofounded the Aurora Theatre in Berkeley, California, and served as its artistic director from 1992 to 2004. This blog is dedicated to Barbara. 

                                                              Barbara Oliver

Here is a tribute to Barbara from one of her close collaborators, the writer Dorothy Bryant, author of the play Dear Master (which Barbara appeared in) and numerous novels, including the amazing The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Confessions of Madame Psyche.

“The idea for Aurora Theatre Company began in the late 1980s with a luncheon conversation with Barbara (just turned 60) about the paucity of plays featuring older leading ladies. In my ignorance I offered to write a two person ‘reading’ based on the friendship between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. (I had no idea of the work and the cost of what seemed like a modest effort to fill some time before Barbara got another role with a ‘real theater.’)

“A year of research later, plus another year of mostly unpaid public readings (followed by my rewriting) by Barbara and Ken Grantham (and other actors) transformed this ‘dialogue’ into a play, performed successfully at the Berkeley City Club, (where she [Barbara] was a trusted member), and the beginning of Aurora Theatre Company. Her achievement was monumental—a fact I learned (knowing nothing about how a play went from page to stage) as we moved along. I would never have attempted such a thing without Barbara’s staunch belief that it could work, and her willingness to do these readings, her incredible savvy about climbing all the hurdles to production, her use of contacts built by solid respect for her work at Berkeley Rep and other theaters. She was totally creative and totally practical. Whenever we hit a snag that might have made others give up, she would nod thoughtfully and then work her way toward a solution.

"Thanks to her I wrote five more plays that were performed here and in other cities. Barbara had taken what had seemed like a setback and transformed it into an opportunity to display and use all of her talents, which, with her quiet, unassuming manner, few people knew she possessed. I learned a lot from her.”

My own connection with Barbara also began through the play Dear Master. I was teaching a summer literature class for high school students at UC Berkeley in 1995, and we were reading a translation I’d done of the novel Horace by George Sand, and a novella by Flaubert. To make that period come to life for the students, I persuaded the university to host a reading of Dear Master, with Barbara recreating her role as George Sand. Barbara was so moving and wise and memorable in that part. She embodied George Sand.

After that Barbara supported my efforts at playwriting, which were very rough at the beginning. I was working on a play that consisted mostly of dramatic monologues, and Barbara gently informed me at one point, “It sometimes helps if the characters talk to one another when they’re onstage.” She was infinitely patient and read draft after draft of my plays, but she never failed to let me know when I could do better—had to do better. Barbara was a fantastic and enormously generous mentor, and she had a great respect for writers.

After retiring from the Aurora Theatre, Barbara couldn’t stop developing new plays, and she founded a reading series called Four New Ones, where each year she planned to direct staged readings of plays in progress. She only got through the first year because of commitments to act and direct for other companies.

She directed several staged readings of another play of mine, Things I Didn’t Know I Loved. I admired the way that Barbara worked with the actors, choosing people she respected highly, and letting them find their way into their roles.

I had a chance this week to speak with Barbara’s daughter, Anna Oliver, who is a costume designer. Anna shared a few of her memories of her mom.

“My mom’s dad was a missionary, a Northern Baptist preacher. When she was three years old, my mom went with my grandpa and grandma to India. She came back to the U.S. when she was seven, speaking Hindi.

“When my mom was very young she used to listen the Metropolitan Opera on the radio on Sunday afternoons. She wanted to be an opera singer. It was outside the norm for the world she grew up in to go on stage.

“There were several roles she performed that she talked a lot about. Studying drama at Carnegie Tech, she played Cordelia in King Lear. One of the roles she was most challenged by but most glad she did was in The Chairs by Ionesco, at the Aurora Theatre. She also enjoyed doing The Gin Game there opposite my dad, Bill Oliver, though it was somewhat harrowing because my dad was ill.

“In her directing, she did a lot of George Bernard Shaw, and adored it. She also directed Ibsen’s Ghosts at the Aurora—that was Babs at her best. She was very happy with the production of Wilder Times [short plays by Thornton Wilder] that she directed at the Aurora in 2012. The short Wilder play The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden—a lot of that was informed by Barbara. She knew those folks.

“My mom always said that theater is a three-legged stool—the play, the production, and the audience. It can’t stand without all three of those. What struck me about her perspective was how much the audience mattered. My mom cared so much about writers and language, but theatre for her was communication to a purpose—to connect with an audience.

“She was generous and gracious, but it wasn’t all selfless. She did it because she loved the theater. She genuinely believed in the transformative power of theater.”