If Connell’s own boyhood had been shaped by the Great Depression, the evidence is hard to find. The Bridge novels have-or should have-been required reading in Kansas City for decades, alternately loved for their crisp and intimate vignettes and warily regarded for their aching truths and acid views of middle-American hypocrisy. Those books present an upper-crust slice of Kansas City’s social fabric as it existed in the 1930s and 1940s. His family life, which largely played out in the comforts of Brookside and Mission Hills, can be inferred from the pages of his best-known works of fiction, the companion novels Mrs. Kansas City was the fount of Connell’s early creativity.
He certainly would have been impressed or at least on intellectual alert that such a souvenir of the world could be transplanted to the genteel, mostly bland landscape of his youth. But he might well have been amused by that. When Connell wrote this story, “The Walls of Ávila,” in the 1950s, he, of course, would not have known that decades later he could find a replica of the towering “golden doors of Ghiberti” in his hometown art museum, the Nelson-Atkins. And he spoke familiarly of the beauty of Istanbul, and of Giotto’s tower, and the Seine, and the golden doors of Ghiberti.” On his keychain was a fragment of polished stone, drilled through the center, that he had picked up from the hillside just beyond Tunis. J.D.’s middle-American, businessmen friends are alternately engaged and put off by his slide-less travelogue: “He had tales of the Casbah in Tangiers and he had souvenirs from the ruins of Carthage. He notices the “wind wrinkles about his restless cerulean blue eyes, as though the light of strange beaches and exotic plazas had stamped him like a visa to prove he had been there.” The story’s unnamed narrator is a close observer of the wandering traveler J.D.
Connell (1924-2013) wrote early in his long literary career, a traveler has come home to a place much like Kansas City and is describing to a group of old friends the sights he saw over the previous 10 years.
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