Haunted: the Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris: The Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris

By Jackson J. Benson

He skipped his senior year at college to go to Europe, where he was befriended by a Countess, was kept a prisoner in a castle by a mad Count, and almost met Mussoliniclose enough to land him in an Italian jail. Wright Morris returned to the States and went on to become probably the most experimental American novelist of the last century. He ended up with almost every award and prize that a novelist can earn, and his work was praised over and over again by many of our most prestigious critics. In addition to publishing thirty-four books, he was also an eminent photographer. He not only had his work shown in numerous museums and galleries around the country, but his photographs were also displayed throughout five photo-text booksa form that he pioneered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781469185507

Jackson J. Benson

Jackson J. Benson is an emeritus professor of American Literature at San Diego State University and the author of ten books. Among them are five biographies of Western writers including The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, which won the PEN USA award for nonfiction, and another, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work, which won the Evans Biography Award. He and his wife live part of the year in La Mesa, California and part in a cabin in the Sierras.

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Haunted

The Strange And Profound

Art Of Wright Morris

A Biography and a Photo Gallery

Jackson J. Benson

Copyright © 2013 by Jackson J. Benson.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2012904976

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4691-8549-1

                Softcover        978-1-4691-8548-4

                Ebook            978-1-4691-8550-7

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CONTENTS

A Prefatory Note

Prologue Quotations

Chapter I:   The Adventures Of The Half Orphan Begin: A Life Shaped By Fiction

Chapter II:   From Nebraska To Chicago, To California, And Then To A Farm In Texas

Chapter III:   Onto Europe And Meeting The Countess; Later, Imprisoned By A Mad Count

Chapter IV:   Meeting Mussolini (Sort Of) And Going To Prison; Back To His Girl In California And Embracing Photography

Chapter V:   His First Photo Safari: He Wanted To "End Up With Something Other Than What Was There." His First Novel, My Uncle Dudley

Chapter VI:   The Man Who Was There (By Being Missing—Which Also Describes The Photographs In His Photo-Text, The Inhabitants)

Chapter VII:   The Challenge For Him Was Finding The Right Voice, That Mystifying Clue To What Was Yet Unspoken.

Chapter VIII:   The Challenge To The Reader Of The Works Of Love

Chapter IX:   The Huge Season: Playing With Hemingway And Fitzgerald; Turning To The Critical Eyes Of Granville Hicks And Malcolm Cowley

Chapter X:   He Turns To Romantic Comedy, Love Among The Cannibals; Then Receives The National Book Award For The Field Of Vision

Chapter XI:   In Life, A Love Story; In His Writing, Moving From The Bullfight In The Field Of Vision To The Circus In Ceremony In Lone Tree

Chapter XII:   Divorce And Rememberings; Moves To San Francisco State And Purchase A House In Mill Valley

Chapter XIII:   An Apology To Saul Bellow; An Explosion Of Short Stories; Teaching At Sf State And The Strike.

Chapter XIV:   In The Classroom, A Raconteur With A Poker Face; Back To The Photo-Text—Creating Fictions From Facts; Floyd Warner, The New Uncle Dudley

Chapter XV:   About Fiction, Dedicated To His Students, Readers, And Writers; Plains Song, The Ultimate Plains Novel—It Was At The Heart Of All My Fiction; Ivan Doig Portrait Of Morris.

Chapter XVI:   A Sad End—Not Being Able To Write A Publishable Manuscript; A Last Hurrah—Photo Show At Sf Moma; If I Failed To Function As A Writer… I Would Just Wither Away Like A Plant.

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes And Documentation

Haunted

The Photo Gallery

Books by Jackson J. Benson

Hemingway: The Writer’s Art of Self-Defense. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969.

The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: The Viking Press, 1984.

[PEN WEST Award for nonfiction]

Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989.

Wallace Stegner: The Man and His Work. New York: The Viking Press, 1996.

[The Evans Biography Award]

Wallace Stegner: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1997.

Down by the Lemonade Springs: Essays on Wallace Stegner. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2001.

The Ox-Bow Man: A Biography of Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2004.

[The Sheperdson Award for best press book of the year]

Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A.B. Guthrie, Jr.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

A PREFATORY NOTE

W RIGHT MORRIS WAS probably the most experimental American novelist of his time and must be given credit for writing as he was moved to write without regard for popularity. Yet he would have loved to have had the label, best-selling author, but he would only accept that, the fame and the money, on his own terms. He admired James Joyce and aspired to have Joyce’s courage and persistence. He, too, wanted to make a permanent mark on the course of literature. He ended up with almost every award and prize that a novelist can earn, and his work was praised over and over again by many of our most prestigious critics. But here he is today, a decade and a half after his death, almost unknown among the general reading public. He has been labeled a writer’s writer,—but is that a compliment or an indictment? The same question might be asked when he is spoken of as difficult. However, unlike Joyce or Faulkner, he was not difficult in language (he is very readable), but in conception—so foreign to our expectations, even to our needs as readers.

Take for example just one of his novels, not the one, The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award, or the one, Plains Song for Female Voices, that won the American Book Award. No, I point your attention to a very strange and haunting work called, The Works of Love. It traces the life of a man who all during that life gives love—over and over again, freely and effusively, in an effort to find it returned by others. It is not, and for that reason only, the novel may be seen as difficult. But after all is said and done, the novel provides a beautiful and moving experience in following the character’s vision and persistence. It defines love in a powerfully basic human way, void of sentimentality.

Or to take another strange and experimental work, Ceremony in Lone Tree, which really defines—in sadness, farce, humor, and tragedy—the Western myth and the hold it has over us. All of us, not just Westerners. And the ceremony he speaks of is a drama that acts out what could be, at least in fiction, the possible burial of the myth. Is there any place in this land where you can’t hear country-western music on the radio? Is there any place in this country where politicians don’t praise rugged individualism or where the National Rifle Association is not a political force to be reckoned with?

To sum this all up, I might quote from the eminent critic John Aldridge, who wrote in the New York Times:

It would in fact be hard to call to mind another novelist of Mr. Morris’s generation who has been able to sustain through such a large body of work so clear a vision of the essence of the American experience, and to project it over and over again without tricks, without cheating and without once being tempted to afford his readers the kind of easy comfort that pays off in popular reputation.

Morris’s friend Saul Bellow, on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, mentioned that there were several other authors just as deserving as he for the award, and in particular, he named Ralph Ellison and Wright Morris.

We also must note Morris’s role as a photographer, whose work has become more and more appreciated, so that he now might well be considered to be among the giants of the twentieth century—along with such photographers as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Ansel Adams. Morris found his own niche, one that came out of his early life in the Platte Valley, as well as out of a lack of mother and a missing father. In his photography, Morris sought to establish the context of his life and his identity. The people are missing, but the artifacts and environments tell the tough, unsentimental story of who he is and who his people were.

Among the many unique aspects of Morris’s work was his combination of writing and photography in his several text-photo books. He had some difficulty getting them published, and they did not get the circulation they deserved. People just didn’t know what to make of them. Of particular note are the first two photo-texts, The Inhabitants and The Home Place. Part of what later would be the book, The Inhabitants, was published in a section of New Directions 1940, along with an excerpt from the now-famous photo-text by Walker Evans and James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

PROLOGUE QUOTATIONS

I write out of a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of living. It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be sleepier than his peers, a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and dream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise.

Barry Hannah, Why I Write, a speech reprinted in Harper’s, June 2010, p. 13.

In everything by Morris, even his autobiographies and essays, there is a sense of something missing that motivates him… . What is missing is what is really there… . [And] the missing thing behind everything is his mother.

David Madden in a speech to the Wright Morris Centennial Conference in Central City, October 9, 2010.

In biography the fiction is compounded, since the author presumes to know the unknown, the unknowable: what the subject felt, what he actually thought, what he really said. If all of this impresses the reader as true, he is reading the work of a good writer of fiction. Anything might be his subject. His problem is to give it the semblance of life.

Wright Morris, What Is Fiction? About Fiction, pp. 3-4

CHAPTER I

The Adventures of the Half Orphan Begin: A Life Shaped by Fiction

T HE LITTLE GIRL, Cynthia, was all alone in a big house, not a mansion, but a very big house. So she would go next door and hang around. Next door was a garage, and over the garage were the servants’ quarters. And since WWII and shortly thereafter, there were no servants to hire, the little girl’s mother had rented the apartment out to a young couple, a couple that she knew badly needed a place to stay in upscale Bryn Mawr. The woman, Mary Ellen, taught in a private prep school for girls most of the day, and her husband, Wright Morris, busied himself by doing up the dishes in a laundry tub (there was no sink or stove in the apartment), doing the wash and hanging it out, or preparing dinner in an electric broiler oven. He was supposed to be writing. A handsome young man, he was tall with a fine head of curly light-brown hair and nicely trimmed mustache. (Later, in the territory ahead, with a mop of gray hair at the back, a bristly mustache, and piercing dark eyes under bushy eyebrows, he looked something like Mark Twain.)

Cynthia thought of him as an oddball and, as young as she was, thought of herself as an oddball, and so they got along fine. He became her friend. When she asked him what school he had gone to, he looked down on her from his work at the laundry tub, The school of hard knocks. When in 1948, he published The Home Place, a photo-text, he showed her the pictures. She was impressed by them—they were striking, but odd. There were hardly any people in them, but it was clear that in worn doorways, empty rocking chairs, and broken-down barns, there had been people. The photos were haunted.

It was this quality in his photos that first interested me in writing his biography. That, and his quirky, gently ironic sense of humor, which he displayed even to a seven-year-old girl. Then, in reading his work, I found that his stories and novels often had the same haunting quality; they were real, but not realistic. One of his favorite expressions was Real losses, imaginary gains. The people were there, but not quite there. You believed, but you were pushed to believe by the acuteness of the insights and quality of detail, not the familiarity of the characters or events. These were usually odd too, like their creator. The stories may remind you of those by John Cheever—odd people in odd situations that resolve into tragedy or end in comic irresolution. Like Cheever, Morris published many of his stories in the New Yorker, and even though it is a stretch, I can’t help saying that many of the stories have something in common with the New Yorker cartoons, black and white like his photos. Dark humor. He was a photographic genius both as a writer and photographer.

Lest I forget to mention it at the beginning, I should state that Morris was born on January 6, 1910, in Central City, Nebraska. The circumstances and place of his birth had a great influence on the course of his life and work. He was a child of the plains and wrote much, although not exclusively, about Nebraska. But the place gave him a mind-set, a view of life as windswept, worn, and tenuous that influenced all of his work, whether it had its setting in Nebraska or not. Just as important to what Wright Morris became was the fact that his mother, Grace Osborn, died six days after his birth. Have you ever noticed how many protagonists in children’s stories are orphans? Tom Sawyer, Dorothy Gale, Pollyanna, Toby Tyler, and Tarzan, just to name a few.

Of course, Wright was only a half orphan, as he called himself. But Huck Finn was a half orphan, and like Huck, Wright did not have much of a father. He was not a scoundrel like Pap, but William Morris was not around very much and did not take his fatherly duties very seriously. So in a way, Wright was a full orphan (which Huck became during the course of the novel) and seemed to see himself in the childhood protagonist mold, ready for adventure. And did he have them.

From a very young age, he—the naïf—was out to find out about the world, as well as to find himself. Several critics have noted that a basic strand or theme in Wright’s work is the search for identity. From nearly the beginning, he seems to have seen himself and his adventures in literary terms. And from an early age, he was an omnivorous reader, and so it is hard to say whether he lived his life according to what he read (there is some evidence for that) or whether he reported his life in his fiction and in his memoirs (which are partly fiction, as he admitted) following literary models. It is clear that he lived his life in large part through his writing—he was also an omnivorous writer. He would write thirty-four books.

On his mother’s death, the family got together to decide who would raise Wright. The mother’s married sister, Violet, wanted to take him, but his father would not agree, saying, He is all I have of Grace. He cared, but he had no experience or any talent for parenthood. Fortunately, in the early years, he was able to find a very capable housekeeper, Anna, and brought her up from Aurora to take care of him, his child, and the house.

Wright’s father, Will (no one ever called him Bill), was always dressed in a suit with a rolled-brim hat, which he often wore while at the dinner table or at the counter of the local diner. He was the kind of man who often chewed on a matchstick or toothpick. He was a gambler, not with cards or dice, but with the direction of his life. That was perhaps his greatest fault—he didn’t smoke, drink, or swear.

In his memoirs, Wright recalls him at work (intermittently, he was a telegraph operator for the Union Pacific) or in restaurants, or in lobbies of hotels, where he would flirt with the girl at the cigar counter. Single, tall, and good-looking, he became a ladies’ man. He was a good-natured man with wavy brown hair, his head on the pedestal of a high stiff collar. He liked to josh people. He was friendly, but too busy for friends. His sleeves were usually rolled.

Will was a busy man, a man with plans that seldom worked out. No doubt he loved his son but didn’t know how to express that love, seldom giving him any gesture of physical affection. Once, a friend of his father rested his hand on Wright’s head, mussing up his hair. Looking back, Wright commented, I liked that. It was something my father had never done.

From his early years, Wright was often left to his own devices. We don’t know how much Anna, the housekeeper, kept track of him, but we do know that his father was usually not around, and according to Wright, he frequently played hooky from school. Such freedom could have led him into a disaster of one kind or another, but despite his naivety and resulting vulnerability, it was for the most part a good thing, broadening his experience and increasing his awareness.

His father seemed to always have his eye out for what he told his son would be his new mother. When Wright was in his early teens, his father found Gertrude, young and pretty, who was rolling out dice for traveling salesmen passing their time in a hotel lobby, selling them a chance on a cigar. Will’s new wife and Wright’s new mother was not only pretty, she was closer in age to the son than the father, and the two of them formed an alliance based on similar interests—candy, popular music played on the Victrola, and movies. Here they differed in their taste—Gertrude liked love stories, the mushier the better, while Wright liked shoot-’em-up movies with William S. Hart and Tom Mix.

One of the problems with the marriage was that Will was seldom home. Wright recalled that his new mother,

accustomed to life in a big city, sat all day in a rented house with the green shades drawn against the heat and light. She had no lady friends. There were no radios. All she had was me to talk to, and to fight with over the flavors in the box of Whitman chocolates.

His father often moved toward what he considered opportunity. He moved the family first to Kearny and then to Schuyler—Gertrude hated Schuyler and insisted they drive to Columbia to eat dinner (she didn’t cook). Will wasn’t satisfied with his Union Pacific job and had an idea that stayed in his head, despite repeated failures, of going into business for himself, raising chickens and selling eggs. At first, he planned on selling them to the Union Pacific dining service and was encouraged to get into business by the manager of the service.

As part of his plan, Will moved the family to a farm that he had purchased a mile outside Central City. The house had a pump in the kitchen, mice in the walls, and a woodstove in the kitchen. A stovepipe came up through the ceiling to heat the bedroom upstairs, and Wright recalled that if he turned down the damper, it would fill the rest of the house with smoke, but if he didn’t, they would almost freeze. Out in the back of the house, Will had put up new sheds filled with incubators to hatch the leghorn chickens.

Shortly after the first batch of chickens was hatched, most of them fell ill with an unidentified disease and then died. Will dug a pit for the dead chickens and covered them with quicklime, but the smell was so bad, the family had to take shelter in the house with all the windows closed. The few chickens that survived wandered about in the snow and died. This was a spectacle that, for some reason, attracted sightseers. As they drove up in their buggies to take in the scene, Gertrude would stand in the window and thumb her nose at them. This defiance delighted Wright, who had never seen a woman do that.

The disastrous attempt to raise chickens and live in a ramshackle farmhouse led Wright’s father to consider moving yet once again. Both Wright and Gertrude were happy to abandon the farm, and when Will asked them where they should go, they both voted, emphatically, for Omaha. The two of them had talked it over beforehand, and it was in this, as in most things, us against him. Gertrude was his co-conspirator and, at times, his protector.

In Omaha, things changed. Out of the sticks and into the city, the family at first lived in a hotel until the father could find a house. While Will was at work, Wright and Gertrude sat in the lobby and enjoyed watching people coming in and out of the hotel and the action on the street. They were saddened when Will again found a house for them to live in.

As far as Will’s work was concerned, he was back to chickens and eggs. Wright recalled his father at work in a low dilapidated frame building with an office at the front:

My father could candle six eggs at a time, three in each hand, and sort them into three grades of size and freshness. He could candle two cases of eggs while I candled one. On Saturday mornings when I came along to help him, he would pay me ten cents a case for eggs I candled, and five cents for each plucked chicken.

The problem was that the father seldom had any change handy, so he would tell his son, I’ll have to owe it to you. This went on and on for so long it was embarrassing, and neither Wright nor his father wanted to bring it up. Wright’s father worked with his coat off, his Stetson hat on, his sleeves turned back on his forearms, a sliver from one of the egg cases wagging at the corner of his mouth. While he candled eggs he would whistle or hum snatches of tunes.

He had all kinds of plans to expand his business. He dreamed of making deals with all the state’s creameries to send them his eggs, of opening stores in several nearby towns, and of buying a truck rather than using the backseat of his Willys. None of his plans worked out.

Wright at first enjoyed working with his father, but after a time, with no pay and the unpleasant aspects of candling the eggs (the smell and having to bury the rotten eggs in the backyard) and killing the chickens and plucking them, he began to dread going to work. He particularly disliked going on Saturday, since baseball was played in a park nearby their house. During the week, when he was supposed to be in school, he played hooky and spent a lot of his time looking for golf balls, discovering them by walking around barefoot in the roughs of the nearby course. He would sell the balls, if in good condition, to players, and then buying pop, candy, and marbles with the proceeds.

His companionship with his new mother ended suddenly. Will was flirting with other women, and Gertrude saw him riding around with one. Furious and sick of being idle and isolated, she came to the house when no one was there and destroyed much of its contents. Wright came home from the park to find the kitchen floor strewn with broken dishes and glasses, the window broken where pots and pans had been thrown through it, clothes and bedsheets ripped and slashed, face powder spilled over the rugs, and even the toilet bowl stuffed with towels. Wright left, not wanting to be there when his father came home. He recalled,

To have seen the force of a woman’s rage filled me with awe and pleasurable apprehension. With my father I was learning about eggs. All by myself I was learning about life.

Soon, he and his father were back in the Maxwell Hotel.

During this brief period when his father was a bachelor, Wright felt that they were almost companionable. Yet, much of the time, Wright was a full orphan. He spent his days, instead of in school, wandering about, looking at things and learning about life. He was a people watcher and had all day to look at the trains and games in Brandeis’s toy department or ride the escalator in Burgess and Nash. His father, feeling his duty, wanted to get him into school, and finally in late October, the father moved them into an apartment two blocks from a school, and he was enrolled.

Going back to school was at first a strange experience, to sit in class and be called on, and to deal with other kids, kids that some of whom seemed threatening. Sitting at a desk near him was a boy, Joey Mulligan, who was very bright in math and good at memorizing things like the capitals of states, but odd in several ways. Wright seems to have been attracted to him because of his oddness. Joey made gestures and movements at inappropriate times and often became confused. He would bend at his knees when he should have stood erect or hop up and down when he wanted to raise his arms. And he stood out as being super neat in his appearance, not playing in the school yard at recess for fear of scuffing his shoes.

Wright, chubby, self-conscious, and a newcomer to the class—an oddball himself—found a soul mate, and the two became friends. After several weeks, Joey invited Wright home to meet his mother. Wright was flattered—he had never been invited to meet anyone’s mother. Mrs. Mulligan, attractive in a worn way, was a warm and affectionate woman married to a cold and distant man. Mr. Mulligan was a pressman who worked at night, came home in the early morning, and slept most of the day. Like Gertrude, Mrs. Mulligan was needy. She had Joey, but she was aware that he was a little screwy, and she came up with the idea that he should have a brother—a male companion that would make him happier and more secure.

Wright was Joey’s best friend, and she fixed on him because he was a half-orphan, and although in actuality he had become very independent, in her mind he needed a family. She felt very strongly that he needed a mother. When she put it to him and mentioned that he should come to live with them because he was a half-orphan, she pulled him to her and hugged him. Joey began to sob, his mother sobbed, and Wright dissolved in tears, sobbing and laying his head in Mrs. Mulligan’s lap. He found it very enjoyable. I had never before experienced the gain from such a terrible loss.

It was often several months before Wright saw or heard from his father, so he had become a full orphan adopted by another family. This was part of the pattern common to the hero of children’s books as described by Jerry Griswold in his book, Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America’s Classic Children’s Books. As I mentioned earlier, Morris’s autobiographical work, both memoir and fiction, broadly follow in their narratives of childhood a literary pattern. Did he live it that way or write about it in those terms? Here and there, he suggests both are possibilities.

In the classic children’s story, as already noted, the protagonist is almost always the story of an orphan. And in general outline, the classic story goes on to tell how the orphan who overthrows his or her parents or parent proxies to become independent—as Wright certainly did. Griswold argues that Americans are particularly drawn to this story because of our political history (our national identity began with a similar struggle for independence from old-world parents).

In his search for independence, the child-hero usually travels away from his original home—in his case, Wright travels to Omaha (which is his choice, although he is enabled by his sometime father). Such journeys mark, in Griswold’s words, a transition to a new life, and he goes on to point to Rebecca getting on a stagecoach, Toby Tyler boarding the circus wagon, Pollyanna boarding a train, Huck Finn getting on his raft, and Dorothy whirling away from Kansas in her mobile home.

Then in the new location, the child-hero is always adopted into a second family, which, of course, for Wright is the Mulligans. Griswold also notes that the child-hero, in addition to the loss of parents, also usually suffers from other hardships, such as neglect and poverty. Wright certainly suffered from the former and to some extent from the latter. The opening pages of The Wizard of Oz present a stark picture of poverty in Dorothy’s life on a drought-stricken farm in Kansas. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck is shown as victimized by both poverty and neglect. However, the child