Wright Morris's inspiration in the 1940s to combine words and photographs resulted in several unique works of fiction, “photo-texts,” he called them, in which image and text stand to each other in quite unexpected ways.¹ In The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), and God's Country and My People, (1968) picture and word cohabitate in a manner of mutual and complex exchange.² At a casual glance these works might seem similar to the juxtapositions of word and image in documentary texts popular at the end of the 1930s, but a more careful look and reading makes clear that in spite of some superficial resemblance in depictions of rural scenes they have little in common with works like Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White's You Have Seen Their Faces (1937) or Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor's American Exodus (1939). They belong more properly under the heading of experimental fiction, formal experiments in the telling of stories, the construction of narratives. Moreover, each of Morris's books ventures a different way of setting image in relation to word, either disposing them throughout an actual novel (as in The Home Place) or linking them with texts which stand as discrete memories, not stories as such but story-fragments, free associations more on the order of dreams than narratives. Different as they are, each of the three works addresses similar questions regarding the role of images in the making of fiction. And presiding over the three books is the question of photography itself, its work as a medium and its figurative implications for human experience.

How might pictures play a role in storytelling, how might they lend themselves to accounts of character, event, and scene, how might a visual component or dimension contribute to the verbalization of experience, to the crystallization of experience into knowledge? Questions such as these underlie these remarkable and compelling works and account for their fascinating subtexts, their continual hum of meditation and commentary upon photography and experience. For what emerges as most remarkable, most original in Morris's photo-texts is the way they make of photography something more than a collaborative method. Photography becomes a thematic center of its own, a master key to the essential matters undertaken in the fictions: place, time, memory, aura, privacy, loss, and the scruples and compunctions of consciousness in undergoing these experiences.

The thematization of the photograph, more accurately, of the photographic act itself, appears most prominently in The Home Place, the book among the three works which most resembles a conventional novel, a continuous linear narrative. Occupying every other page, the pictures might seem supplements more than complements of its action, direct illustrations of the text, though such literalness of reference is usually undercut by the reader's reflection on the multivalent relations between image and text. The story concerns the narrator's uninvited and unannounced visit from the East with wife and child to an old relative's old house in rural Nebraska ….

“That's Ed's room,” I said, and my wife stepped up to look at it. Then she backed away, as if she saw someone in the bed. There are hotel beds that give you the feeling of a negative exposed several thousand times, with the blurred image of every human being that had slept in them. Then there are beds with a single image, over-exposed. There's an etched clarity about them, like a clean daguerreotype, and you know in your heart that was how the man really looked. There's a question in your mind if any other man, any other human being, could lie in that bed and belong in it. One might as well try and wear the old man's clothes. His shoes, for instance, that had become so much a part of his feet they were like those casts of babies' shoes in department stores. Without saying a word, or snapping her knuckles, my wife turned away.

(135)

The wife's turning away precedes by a couple of pages the husband-narrator's reaction to an old album of newspaper clippings:

I put my hand up to my face, as it occurred to me, suddenly, how people look in a Daily News photograph. A smiling face at the scene of a bloody accident. A quartet of gay waitresses near the body slumped over the bar. God only knows why I thought of that, but I put up my hands, covering my face, as if I was there, on the spot, and didn't want to be seen. I didn't want to be violated, that is. The camera eye knows no privacy, the really private is its business, and in our time business is good. But what, in God's name, did that have to do with me? At that moment, I guess, I was that kind of camera.

(138)

Even where the text makes no overt mention of cameras or photographs, by use of windows, mirrors, views through openings, and photographs within the photograph, Morris will often insinuate photography as the figure in the carpet, the underlying master trope which informs an ongoing process of self-discovery. The narrator meditates upon his own behavior as a visitor with an irrepressible eye for objects, surfaces, the fall of light, and their implications. What kind of camera-eye am I? Or might I be? Does seeing photographically hold a clue to my situation here, in this “home place”? What are my obligations and duties to the sense of the past such images recover for me, and to my own place within that past, within this place? The camera here represents more than an act of seeing, but an act of seeing which arises from and mirrors back to the self an act of being, a way of standing toward others and the privacy inscribed in their ambient objects, the spaces of their houses, the chairs set against walls, the old snapshots arrayed upon mirrors.

Through his photographic work in the 1930s and 1940s Wright Morris seems to have discovered for himself that photographs have a way of inviting or enticing language, not for the sake of completing or specifying a “meaning” (as in photographs with a documentary purpose) but more contingently, as something camera images do, some aspect of their character as traces of a wordly act of seeing. Morris said in an interview in 1975 that photographers all share a common sensibility, a sensibility which moves among us and works simultaneously through many eyes.³ And in an essay in 1979 he refers to an actually anonymous picture which might have been made by either him or, say Walker Evans, whose 1930s pictures Morris's work often brings to mind. “I recognized with a shock,” Morris wrote, “that this anonymous photographer was seeing through my eyes, and I through his. The similarities of all photographs are greater than their real or imagined differences.”⁴

What these similarities are, what a photograph possesses in the way of an embodied act of seeing and knowing by virtue of its being a photograph, is what Morris's photo-texts attempt to say. The similarities his work shares with Walker Evans's, and the differences upon which the resemblances are founded, can lead us to certain discoveries of our own about Morris's thematic deployment of photography in his photo-texts. While Evans, a would-be writer who chose the camera instead, collaborated often with writers, most famously with James Agee, he scrupulously eschewed adding his own words to his pictures, except for laconic identifying captions. How Evans's images can be said to stand toward language might help us see what is distinctive in Morris's play of word and image in the mode of fiction.

Take this picture, which first appeared uncaptioned in the expanded portfolio of pictures in the 1960 edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and hear how the poet Donald Justice recomposes elements of the image into a text both independent and coeval with it … :

                                                            “Mule Team and Poster”
Two mules stand waiting in front of the brick wall of a warehouse,
          hitched to a shabby flatbed wagon.
Its spoked wheels resemble crude wooden flowers
          pulled recently from a deep and stubborn mud.
The rains have passed over for now,
          and the sun is back,
Invisible, but everywhere present,
          and of a special brightness, like God.
The way the poster for the traveling show
          still clings to its section of the wall
It looks as though a huge door stood open
          or a terrible flap of brain had been peeled back, revealing
Someone's idea of heaven:
          seven dancing girls, caught on the up-kick,
All in fringed dresses and bobbed hair.
          One wears a Spanish comb and has an escort …
Meanwhile the mules crunch patiently the few cornshucks
          someone has thoughtfully scattered for them.
The poster is torn in places, slightly crumpled;
          a few bricks, here and there, show through.
And a long shadow—
          the last shade perhaps in all of Alabama—
Stretches beneath the wagon, crookedly,
          like a great scythe laid down there and forgotten.

on a photograph by Walker Evans (Alabama, 1936)⁵

Compare Morris's textualization of an image in The Inhabitants … :

All the same. The streets, the stores, the faces, the people—all the same. An all-overmore something added and that was all. More people, more big, more everything, more less at home. More the less alone it seemed the more he was. More people to know than he'd ever dreamed, more people seen than he'd ever know, more left unsaid. All people in windows, not people you come to know. A girl in a window showing a ring or holding a bottle and tapping the glass, or stripped down some showing even more. Or a man with a corset to melt your pouch or if you hadn't a pouch it would widen your shoulders, lengthen your life. Nobody thought of talking to her or seeing more than the pouch on him, or wondering if whoever they were they were alive. They were just the pouch, or the ring, or the look, or whatever they did. Not somebody to know or like but something to buy. Something to have if you first just had the dough.

(np)

We can take the poem by Donald Justice as an instance of how Evans's images arouse a desire to speak or write, to reassemble the components of the image, including its interior light, into a construct of words independent of the image, addressed to (or, as it says, “on”) it rather than from it. Through the lens of the poem the separate parts of the picture cohere into the vision of a figurative place, an “Alabama,” and its interior life. The Morris text, on the other hand, does not so much reconstruct the image as lend the image a voice, an imagined utterance from within, as if the picture were the occasion of a memory rather than the fact of that memory.

And arbitrarily so: Morris's habit of aligning the same image in different books with different texts confirms the point that the voice attached to the image is a fictive voice. For example, in God's Country the same image speaks like this:

With me in mind, my father picked a room with a view of the park. From the window, if the trees were bare, we could lean out and see the statue of Lincoln, green as the bent prong of the fork used to open the hole in a can of milk. In the room only one person could dress at a time, but that was no problem since the father worked nights. He was in bed in the morning when the boy got up. It was the sheets that took a beating since there was always someone between them. One day the boy came running up the stairs to find his father seated in the bed spout, where the springs sagged, with a girl in his lap. Her face was like a clown's mask bobbing on his shoulder; her thighs hugged his waist. And the boy had arrived on the scene too late; the machine would not stop. Coins dropped from the man's pockets to roll about on the floor. No, it was not a good scene. …

(np)

The voice of the image is what is imagined on this particular occasion, not the exclusive or even necessary resident of the place of the picture, only what we hear right now, on this occasion, the occasion of this fiction.

With these differences in mind we might say provisionally that Justice's poem reveals Evans's photograph as representing a moment in cultural history, while Morris's photograph represents, or is treated by the author as representing, a story of personal memory. History and story: I mean these terms here to stand for distinctive kinds or modes of narrative articulation. Where the historian gathers evidence of a past, traces of what has been lived and endured and shared by many, a recognizable public past which can be stated in narrative form, the storyteller speaks of and out of experiences of private persons, out of intimate memory. We can say, abstractly and imperfectly, that the historian constructs public memory, the storyteller constructs private memory, always someone's memory, made communally available in the telling but marked by the privacy of its origins.

In the 1975 interview Morris speaks of something hidden within objects in photographs, and the need for language to bring that inner life forward. The similarity of the subject matter of The Inhabitants to depression-era pictures, he explained, “distracts many observers from the concealed life of these objects.” “All, or most, photographs have many faces. The face desired is revealed by the caption. I do not have captions, but the facing text reveals the nature of the object that interests me: the life of the inhabitants whose shell they are.” “These objects, these artifacts,” he told the interviewer, “are structured with emotion, with implication, toward which I am peculiarly responsive. I see many of them as secular icons. They have a holy meaning they seek to give out.”⁶

A meaning they seek to give out: these words echo a passage from Henry James's The American Scene (1907) which Morris mentions frequently and had placed as epigraph to The Home Place:

To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically, minded—over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-colored picture of things—is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.

To be sure, James's account of a “mystic meaning” can be claimed as well for the method of Walker Evans. It's not just the desire to witness and preserve as an image the mysterious aura of meaning of a scene or place which points to the distinctiveness of Morris's romance with the “concealed life” of objects.

The difference between Evans and Morris doesn't lie so much in what they identify as holy or mystic but in what they see as meaningful enough to put down as image, to what innuendos of concealment they respond. Morris wrote that Evans's book, American Photographs (1938) “had profoundly confirmed my own responses. I did not see through Evans's eye, but I was captive of the same materials.”⁷ But, of course, the same becomes the different in different eyes. Evans's pictures typically fill their space with implication, one part articulated in dialogue with another, the whole giving out possibilities of meaning, nothing seemingly concealed, everything on the surface, only complexly so. Morris has an eye for objects which release association, not for literal denotations of story but for occasions for story. His pictures often leave empty spaces around objects seen intensely and particularized, spaces for speech to appear ….

The man who lives his own life, and wears it out, can dispense with the need of taking it with him. He dies his own death or he goes on living, and where the life has worn in the death will come out. Skin and bones, jacket and shoes, tools, sheds and machines wear out; even the land wears out and the seat wears off the cane-bottom chair. The palms wear off the gloves, the cuffs off the sleeves, the nickle off the doorknobs, the plate off the silver, the flowers off the plates, the shine off the stovepipe, the label off the flour sacks, the enamel off the dipper, the varnish off the checkers, and the gold off the Christmas jewelry, but every day the nap wears off the carpet the figure wears in. A pattern for living, the blueprint of it, can be seen in the white stitches of the denim, the timepiece stamped like a medallion in the bib of the overalls. Between wearing something in and wearing it out the line is as vague as the receding horizon, and as hard to account for as the missing hairs of a brush. The figure that began on the front of the carpet has moved around to the back.

(np)

Both Evans and Morris are artists of difficulty, of opacity. Evans achieves the opaque by means of density, accumulated association; Morris, by means of bareness, a powerfully singular force of attention; he leaves spaces free of specific inscription and thus evocative of many, an endlessly generative sign of story, of memory: any story, any memory. God's Country consists largely of images from the earlier photo-texts, reprinted with new texts, reclaimed, repossessed. To reclaim, to repossess, to salvage the physical world: this act, which God's Country performs upon pictures already once possessed with story, typifies Morris's idea of photography, an act answering to what he called the need to hold on to what is passing. Thus the brilliance of his invention, the photo-text, which by its form, its mode of address of image to text to image, includes within its discourse an idea or theory of the photographic act itself.

And as with Walker Evans, the idea of photography which informs (in the sense of shaping as well as illuminating) Morris's three books seems to implicate an idea of America as well, an association which traces back to Puritan sources and to Emerson and Whitman, between a kind of seeing, at once detailed and ecstatic, and the name of the land, the country and nation. This is perhaps most explicit in The Inhabitants, a study of the voices one might hear in the presence of exteriors, voices from within. The opening image-text reads … :

Thoreau, a look is what a man gets when he tries to inhabit something—something like America.

Take your look—from your look I'd say you did pretty well. Nearly anybody would say you look like a man who grew up around here—but I think I'd say what there is around here grew up in you. What I'm saying is that you're the one that's inhabited.

I guess a look is what a man gets not so much from inhabiting something, as from something that's inhabiting him. Maybe this is what it is that inhabits a house. In all my life I've never been in anything so crowded, so full of something, as the rooms of a vacant house. Sometimes I think only vacant houses are occupied. That's something I knew as a boy but I had nobody to tell me that that's what an Inhabitant is. An Inhabitant is what you can't take away from a house. You can take away everything else—in fact, the more you take away the better you can see what this thing is. That's how you know—that's how you can tell an Inhabitant.

(np)

And the book's concluding voice … :

What it is to be an American.

There's no one thing to cover the people, no one sky. There's no one dream to sleep with the people, no one prayer. There's no one hope to rise with the people, no one way or one word for the people, no one sun or one moon for the people, and no one star. For these people are the people and this is their land. And there's no need to cover such people—they cover themselves.

(np)

There is something of a credo here, a complex anti-patriotism which asserts an artist's way of making himself a home place by means of speaking a picture, a place constituted of scrupulous acts of seeing which issue through language into acts of vision. Wright Morris's invention of a discourse of photograph and text reveals itself as an invention of Americanness as well, an instrument for recovering a lost or failing identity between an artist and his people. It's the homeless, after all, who go seeking a home place. Fusions of image and word, of fact and meaning, Wright Morris's photo-texts reveal themselves finally as experiments in the making of “home” as an imaginary place. They belong to his life-long quest for a vernacular nationality, a quality of moral and physical vision as much as of speech, an imagined America as the place of his habitation, the place which might be said to inhabit this original American artist.

Notes

1. For Morris's account of the origins of the “photo-texts” in his work as a photographer in the 1930s see his “Photography in My Life,” in James Alinder, ed., Wright Morris: Photographs & Words (Carmel, California: Friends of Photography, 1982). See also the valuable essays by John Szarkowski and Sandra Phillips in Wright Morris: Origin of a Species (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992), particularly the discussion of Morris's admiration for the documentary books of the 1930s and their possible influence on his “photo-texts.”

2. Wright Morris, The Inhabitants (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946); The Home Place (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1948); God's Country and My People (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Page references in the text are to these editions. The European setting and the use of color photographs of a fourth photo-text, Love Affair—A Venetian Journal (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), place it outside the above discussion.

3. Robert E. Knoll, ed., Conversations with Wright Morris (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 142-143.

4. Quoted in Colin L. Westerbeck, Jr.'s commendable essay, “American Graphic: The Photography and Fiction of Wright Morris,” in Daniel P. Younger, ed., Multiple Views (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 283.

5. Donald Justice, New and Selected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1995), 137.

6. Knoll, 147-148.

7. Alinder, 19.