The Classic Collection of Thornton Wilder. Pulitzer Prize 1928 : The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey , livre ebook

Andrii Ponomarenko - Thornton Wilder

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116 pages

English

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Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes — for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.
Contents:
The Cabala
The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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Classics

Fiction

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Publié par	Andrii Ponomarenko
Date de parution	30 mars 2023
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9786178289300
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0050€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

The Classic Collection of Thornton Wilder. Pulitzer Prize 1928
The Cabala, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Illustrated
Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes — for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day.

The Cabala
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE CABALA
BOOK ONE: FIRST ENCOUNTERS
BOOK TWO: MARCANTONIO
BOOK THREE: ALIX
BOOK FOUR: ASTRÉE-LUCE AND THE CARDINAL
BOOK FIVE: THE DUSK OF THE GODS
THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY
PART ONE: PERHAPS AN ACCIDENT
PART TWO: THE MARQUESA DE MONTEMAYOR
PART THREE: ESTEBAN
PART FOUR: UNCLE PIO
PART FIVE: PERHAPS AN INTENTION
Publisher: Andrii Ponomarenko © Ukraine - Kyiv 2023
ISBN: 978-617-8289-30-0
THE CABALA
To my friends at the American Academy in Rome, 1920-1921
BOOK ONE: FIRST ENCOUNTERS
The train that first carried me into Rome was late, overcrowded and cold. There had been several unexplained waits in an open field, and midnight found us still moving slowly across the Campagna toward the faintly-colored clouds that hung above Rome. At intervals we stopped at platforms where flaring lamps lit up for a moment some splendid weather-moulded head. Darkness surrounded these platforms, save for glimpses of a road and the dim outlines of a mountain ridge. It was Virgil's country and there was a wind that seemed to rise from the fields and descend upon us in a long Virgilian sigh, for the land that has inspired sentiment in the poet ultimately receives its sentiment from him.
The train was overcrowded, because some tourists had discovered on the previous day that the beggars of Naples smelt of carbolic acid. They concluded at once that the authorities had struck a case or two of Indian cholera and were disinfecting the underworld by a system of enforced baths. The air of Naples generates legend. In the sudden exodus tickets for Rome became all but unprocurable, and First Class tourists rode Third, and interesting people rode First.
In the carriage it was cold. We sat in our overcoats meditating, our eyes glazed by resignation or the glare. In one compartment a party drawn from that race that travels most and derives least pleasure from it, talked tirelessly of bad hotels, the ladies sitting with their skirts whipped about their ankles to discourage the ascent of fleas. Opposite them sprawled three American Italians returning to their homes in some Apennine village after twenty years of trade in fruit and jewelry on upper Broadway. They had invested their savings in the diamonds on their fingers, and their eyes were not less bright with anticipation of a family reunion. One foresaw their parents staring at them, unable to understand the change whereby their sons had lost the charm the Italian soil bestows upon the humblest of its children, noting only that they have come back with bulbous features, employing barbarous idioms and bereft forever of the witty psychological intuition of their race. Ahead of them lay some sleepless bewildered nights above their mothers' soil floors and muttering poultry.
In another compartment an adventuress in silver sables leaned one cheek against the shuddering windowpane. Opposite her a glittering-eyed matron stared with challenging persistency, ready to intercept any glance the girl might cast upon her dozing husband. In the corridor two young army officers lolled and preened and angled for her glance, like those insects in certain beautiful pages of Fabre, who go through the ritual of flirtation under futile conditions, before a stone, merely because some associative motors have been touched.
There was a Jesuit with his pupils, filling the time with Latin conversation; a Japanese diplomat reverently brooding over a postage-stamp collection; a Russian sculptor sombrely reading the bony structure of our heads; some Oxford students carefully dressed for tramping, but riding over the richest tramping country in Italy; the usual old woman with a hen and the usual young American, staring. Such a company as Rome receives ten times a day, and remains Rome.
My companion sat reading a trodden copy of the London Times, real estate offers, military promotions and all. James Blair after six years of classical studies at Harvard had been sent to Sicily as archaeological adviser to a motion picture company bent on transferring the body of Greek mythology to the screen. The company had failed and been dispersed, and Blair thereafter had roamed the Mediterranean, finding stray employment and filling immense notebooks with his observations and theories. His mind brimmed with speculation: as to the chemical composition of Raphael's pigments; as to the lighting conditions under which the sculptors of antiquity wished their work to be viewed; as to the date of the most inaccessible mosaics in Santa Maria Maggiore. Of all these suggestions and many more he allowed me to make notes, even to the extent of copying some diagrams in colored inks. In the event of his being lost at sea with all his notebooks—a not improbable one, as he crosses the Atlantic on obscure and economical craft, not mentioned in your paper, even when they founder—it would be my confusing duty to make a gift of this material to the Librarian of Harvard University where its unintelligibility might confer upon it an incomputable value.
Presently discarding his paper, Blair decided to talk: You may have come to Rome to study, but before you settle down to the ancients you see whether there aren't some interesting moderns.
There's no PhD. in modern Romans. Our posterity does that. What moderns do you mean?
Have you ever heard of the Cabala ?
Which one?
A kind of a group living around Rome.
No.
They're very rich and influential. Everyone's afraid of them. Everybody suspects them of plots to overturn things.
Political?
No, not exactly. Sometimes.
Social swells?
Yes, of course. But more than that, too. Fierce intellectual snobs, they are. Mme. Agoropoulos is no end afraid of them. She says that every now and then they descend from Tivoli and intrigue some bill through the Senate, or some appointment in the Church, or drive some poor lady out of Rome.
Tchk!
It's because they're bored. Mme. Agoropoulos says they're frightfully bored. They've had everything so long. The chief thing about them is that they hate what's recent. They spend their time insulting new titles and new fortunes and new ideas. In lots of ways they're mediæval. Just in their appearance for one thing. And in their ideas. I fancy it's like this: you've heard of scientists off Australia coming upon regions where the animals and plants ceased to evolve ages ago? They find a pocket of archaic time in the middle of a world that has progressed beyond it. Well, it must be something like that with the Cabala. Here's a group of people losing sleep over a host of notions that the rest of the world has outgrown several centuries ago: one duchess' right to enter a door before another; the word order in a dogma of the Church; the divine right of kings, especially of Bourbons. They're still passionately in earnest about stuff that the rest of us regard as pretty antiquarian lore. What's more, these people that hug these notions aren't just hermits and ignored eccentrics, but members of a circle so powerful and exclusive that all these Romans refer to them with bated breath as The Cabala. They work with incredible subtlety, let me tell you, and have incredible resources in wealth and loyalty. I'm quoting Mme. Agoropoulos, who has a sort of hysterical fear of them, and thinks they're supernatural.
But she must know some of them personally.
Of course she does. So do I.
One isn't afraid of people one knows. Who's in it?
I'm taking you to meet one of them tomorrow, this Miss Grier. She's leader of the whole international set. I catalogued her library for her,—oh, I couldn't have got to know her any other way. I lived in her apartment in the Palazzo Barberini and used to get whiffs of the Cabala. Besides her there's a Cardinal. And the Princess d'Espoli who's mad. And Madame Bernstein of the German banking family. Each one of them has some prodigious gift, and together they're miles above the next social stratum below them. They're so wonderful that they're lonely. I quote. They sit off there in Tivoli getting what comfort they can from one another's excellence.
Do they call themselves the Cabala. Are they organized?
Not as I see it. Probably it never occurred to them that they even constituted a group. I say, you study them up. You ferret it out, the whole secret. It's not my line.
In the pause that followed, fragments of conversation from the various corners of the compartment flowed in upon our minds so recently occupied with semi-divine personages. I haven't the slightest desire to quarrel, Hilda, muttered one of the English-women. Naturally you made the arrangements for the trip as best you could. All I say is that that girl did not clean off the washstand every morning. There were rings and rings.
And from an American Italian: I says it's none of your goddam business, I says. Take your goddam shirt the hell outta here. He run, I tell you; he run so fast you don't see no dust for him he run so.
The Jesuit and his pupils had become politely interested in the postage stamps and the Japanese attaché was murmuring: Oh, most exclusively rare! The four-cent is pale violet and when held up to the light reveals a water-mark, a sea-horse. There are only seven in the world and three are in the collection of the Baron Rothschild.
Symphonically considered, one heard that there had been no sugar in it, that she had told Marietta three mornings running to put sugar in it, or bring sugar, although the Republic of Guatemala had immediately cut than, a few had leaked out to collectors, and that more musk-melons than one would have thought po