SOURCE: “Dualism and Doubling in Wright Morris's War Games,” in The Centennial Review, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 415-28.

[Colonel Foss] slept, … and he dreamt that he carried a small black bag which contained the leg, the arm, and the tongue of a person who was following him.

War Games (74)

Where the double is, the orphan is never far away, with secrecy and terror over all.

Karl Miller, Doubles (39)

I

At the heart of The Field of Vision (1956), perhaps Wright Morris's most representative novel (and winner of the National Book Award), there is a character who refuses to speak and whose thoughts we are never given, yet whose presence in the novel is essential. This character, Paula Kahler, is presented by Morris as having undergone a mysterious transformation which has changed her psychologically from a man into a woman. Morris presents her as a negative and dysfunctional example of imaginative potential. The genesis of this character and her shadowy associates is of considerable interest to Morris's life and work through nineteen novels and assorted photo-text volumes since 1940.

The existence of characters such as Paula Kahler is evidence of Wright Morris's predilection for dualisms, especially in those works in which he is seen coming to grips with his past, such as The Man Who Was There (1945), The Home Place (1948), and The Works of Love (1951). That Morris's thought is dualistic is by now a commonplace,¹ but little has yet been written about Morris's frequent doubling of characters—of which Paula Kahler is such an extreme example. In this doubling, readers find themselves in the company of those mysterious doopelgänger figures which appear from time to time in fiction, often apparently with psychological motives all their own—as in Dostoyevsky's The Double, Edgar Allan Poe's “William Wilson,” and Henry James's “The Jolly Corner.”

As the presence of the double in a work of fiction often raises questions of character psychology, it is reasonable to examine the relationship between character and author. In attempting to comprehend this connection with regards to Wright Morris, it will help to keep three things in mind. First, much of what Morris writes is autobiographical—even to the extent that in The Home Place he has his protagonist encounter Morris's own Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara. Second, despite (or perhaps because of) the autobiographical origins of his work, Morris often places a curtain of ambiguity between character and reader—just as he sometimes views his subjects through physical curtains in The Home Place photographs. The third thing to remember is that Morris is repetitive, often re-using scenes and characters from earlier works, many of which emphasize his childhood and adolescent experiences, including his identity as “half an orphan” (Will's Boy 35). Morris has said that “the role of recurrence” was “part of my nature before it was part of my reading” (Cloak of Light 137).

This apparent need to repeat himself amounts to an obsession: it is as if, because his childhood is so packed with elusive meaning, Morris has to return to it again and again. In this obsessiveness, Morris is very much like his character Hyman Kopfman, who shares his author's need to repeat. Hyman Kopfman is described as “[going] over the same material the way a wine press went over the pulp of grapes. But there was always something that refused to squeeze out” (War Games 8). Not for nothing does Morris name Hyman Kopfman as one of “the ‘possessed’ characters … toward which I am powerfully drawn” (“Writing Organic Fiction” 95), or admit that “The likes of Hyman Kopfman … haunt me today as they did at the time of writing” (War Games vi). In Freudian terms, this character appears to be an example of overdetermination: a fictional character first of all, Hyman Kopfman also has significance outside of the works in which he figures.

Hyman Kopfman made his first appearance in a short novel entitled War Games, without doubt Morris's most astonishing work, unguarded and defiant of rationality. Nothing remotely like the crepuscular atmosphere—or the New York setting—of War Games is found elsewhere in Morris. The novel was written in 1951-52, but perhaps because it was “a premature example of what would soon be known as black humor,” Morris's editor advised him not to publish it “until my status as a writer had clarified” (Cloak of Light 163). As a result, War Games was not published until twenty years later, in 1972, then reprinted with an explanatory preface in 1978. There Morris described the novel as “darkly somber, a book of interiors, dimly lighted streets, hallways and lobbies, with glimpses of objects and colors that emerge in subdued lighting” (vii)—in short, a perfect near-gothic setting suited to lurking doubles.

Morris's observation that War Games “began with a scene and a character that had sprouted in the compost of The Works of Love” (v) is crucial. The metaphor suggests that the novel was an organic by-product of the long gestation and five years of intense writing which culminated in The Works of Love, a novel which ambiguously memorialized his father. As I have suggested elsewhere, in that novel Morris grappled “with conflicting emotions towards his father,” finding the means to express “sympathetic desire for his father's mutual regard” (Wydeven 111, 103). Coming out of this period, then, War Games may be understood as another attempt by Morris to deal with materials from his childhood.

Obviously Morris thinks of it as an important book: “In the absence of War Games, many clues to the fiction that followed were missing” (vii). Curiously, however, Hyman Kopfman, that character formed in “the compost of The Works of Love,” has only a brief role in War Games; by the end of the first chapter he is dead. But his importance is profound, for Hyman Kopfman is at the center of a complex of dualisms which move the actors in War Games, then reappears to haunt the themes of The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960). (Hyman Kopfman finally shows up with his “real” name, Herman Unger, in Morris's memoir Solo [1983] 26.) Readers have good reason to wonder why Morris returned to this character so frequently and so memorably.²

II

When War Games opens, Colonel Foss, the protagonist, has been struck by a pie truck and taken to a hospital, “where he hovered between life and death for several weeks” (2). There he encounters Hyman Kopfman, “a small, rabbit-faced little man who belonged in the hopeless ward, but it had been overcrowded” (7); he suffers from a terminal blood disease, resulting in amputation of an arm and a leg. Morris places these two characters in distinct opposition to each other: Hyman Kopfman, an immigrant, remains exuberant about the possibilities of American life; Colonel Foss, wearing his military glasses, sees “a battlefield” wherever he looks and thus has little desire to live. This opposition is resolved in terms typical of tales of the double: as Hyman Kopfman's case worsens, Colonel Foss, who “had been failing, now for no apparent reason … began to improve” (17), and when Kopfman dies, the Colonel is well enough to be released.

So ends the first chapter. Morris seems to have wanted this elaborate introduction in order to put forthcoming events into perspective, providing an acceptable rationale for Colonel Foss's subsequent experiences. Upon his release from the hospital, Colonel Foss takes Hyman Kopfman's meager personal belongings to a Mrs. Tabori, thought to be Kopfman's mother (described as having “luminous” eyes), and her apparent husband, Tabori, a bellhop at the Regent Arms Hotel. Then Foss goes home to his wife, in their fourth-floor apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Shortly afterwards Tabori arranges a meeting with him, and as a result, Mrs. Tabori is installed in the Foss apartment as housekeeper. A few days later the janitor in the building is found dead with a broken neck, and Foss makes the discovery that Mrs. Tabori is responsible.

Then the blackmail starts. Tabori tells Foss that he is “willing to handle it for fifty a week” (97), “no money at all considerin' what you got in the house” (99). What Foss discovers he has “in the house”—Mrs. Tabori—is a man, not a woman. The blackmail gives the Colonel a curious sense of satisfaction: “Every man felt, the Colonel was sure, the lurking furtive guilt that he had been feeling, and the need to attach this sense of punishment to some crime” (102). Furthermore, “He had got a lot of blackmail … very cheap” (109).

One day, venturing into Mrs. Tabori's room, Foss discovers a photograph linking Mrs. Tabori to a Paul Kopfman, “Soldier of Christ” at the Larrabee YMCA in Chicago. Almost immediately afterwards, for no apparent reason, the Colonel identifies himself to a stranger as “Colonel Kopfman.” Then a second death is announced: Tabori's body is found at the bottom of an open elevator shaft at the Regent Arms. Colonel Foss suspects Mrs. Tabori has murdered again.

In a strange, contemplative state of mind (“Was he fleeing from, or hurrying toward something?” [123]), Colonel Foss makes his way to Chicago, where he takes a room in a cheap, fly-infested hotel. The flies in his room drive him to distraction and he goes into a frenzy trying to kill them. Then, seeing himself in a mirror, he undergoes a mystifying experience: “The figure in the mirror had the Colonel's body, but not his face. No, the face was new, and the luminous eyes gazed upon the bed …” (128). Now it appears that Colonel Foss has come to identify with Mrs. Tabori, of the luminous eyes—preparing us for his discovery, next day at the Larrabee YMCA, that Mrs. Tabori is in reality the missing Paul Kopfman, Hyman Kopfman's brother.

With a Mr. Hoppe at the YMCA, Colonel Foss pieces together Paul's story: he had suffered severe psychological trauma related to the death of his uncle, then disappeared, leaving his former life behind. As for the uncle, he had frozen to death in the snow, and his body was not recovered until the spring thaw. Then, unidentified, the corpse was handed over to a medical school and dissected; one of the hands was recognized by one of the students and brought to the family, including Paul, for identification. Evidently the shock of this event and its disclosure—and the manner in which it occurred and was presented—was sufficient to cause Paul to reject the world and his own male sexuality. (One of the novel's perplexities is that Morris gives no further information to help readers understand the specific form Paul's rejection takes.) Having completed his business in Chicago—his business apparently being to establish the true identity of Mrs. Tabori and to take on a new “identity” of his own—Colonel Foss returns to New York to find that his wife has “fallen” from the balcony of their apartment. On the pad by the telephone he finds a note in his wife's handwriting: “SHOCKING DISCOVERY. COME HOME IMMEDIATELY” (160). Finally, left alone with Mrs. Tabori in the apartment, Foss feels both terror-stricken and “remarkably free,” anticipating “change for better or worse” (164).

This synopsis, of course, is quite unsatisfactory, for this odd book refuses to bend to fictional reason, relying on nuance and suggestion rather than on plot; further, there are gaping holes in the plot which Morris either failed to spot or refused to plug—where, for example, are the police in all of this? And what has led Colonel Foss to such measures? But tales such as this need not adhere to the fictional conduct of realism, for they are subject only to the unruly discipline of dreams.

War Games is most intriguing precisely because of its eeriness, and I am tempted to call it an existential gothic novel: it uses more or less gothic fictional devices to conclude with something like an existential sense of freedom: having apparently transcended guilt and found purpose, at the end of the novel Colonel Foss finds himself “remarkably free.” But no label will explain the considerable mysteries in War Games—nor does Morris's Preface, which focuses on Hyman Kopfman, but says nothing to illuminate the strange “bond” between Colonel Foss and Mrs. Tabori-Paul Kopfman.

To approach the double in literature is always an adventure, for one generally has to deal with a psychological allegory of sorts, where normal rules of social conduct are put aside, replaced by “the deliriums, impasses, and impossibilities which are encountered in these fictions” (Miller vii). Because free will is challenged by a variety of determinisms, characters are not required to make sense, and events, as C. F. Keppler writes, “can never be entirely accounted for by the facts of the case or by logical reasoning about them” (11). There is frequently confusion of subject and object, and we must decide if the double relationships are intended to be hostile (as in Poe's “William Wilson”) or helpful (as in Conrad's “The Secret Sharer”). Furthermore, the double implies or imposes patterns where none were seen to exist before: as Colonel Foss observes of one strange phenomenon, “At one time he would have thought it merely a coincidence” (121).

There is some internal evidence to suggest that War Games may be indebted to Saul Bellow's The Victim, but Morris's novel is considerably more convoluted and quirky.³ Whereas Bellow's novel consistently focuses on one double relationship—Asa Leventhal's pursuit by Kirby Allbee—Morris's War Games is shot through with dualisms and doubles—beginning with the oxymoron in the title itself. Morris even has Hyman Kopfman speak of the amputation of his arm as an operation which “balanced him up” (7). And that the toy animals entering Mrs. Tabori's ark are paired not by male and female, but by principles of natural enmity (lamb and tiger, snake and mouse, fox and rooster) may be emblematic of her dysfunction; there are clearly no human males in her collection, no Adam, not even Noah (113).

The doubling of characters in War Games centers on Colonel Foss, the “first self” to whom second selves will somehow adhere. At the outset, as already detailed, Colonel Foss is paired with Hyman Kopfman—a relationship I will turn to shortly. In addition, however, Morris develops double relationships between Colonel Foss and three other characters: Milton Ashley, Tabori, and Mrs. Tabori-Paul Kopfman.

Milton Ashley is introduced to show—the extent of Colonel Foss's failure in life—indeed, Ashley is the reason why Foss is a failure, and Foss despises him because of the guilt he makes him feel:

The Colonel had been born on the same day [as Milton Ashley] (but forty minutes later, as his luck would have it) in the same town, the same year, and just across the tracks from the fine house where Milton Ashley saw the light of day. … Very early, the name of Milton Ashley was coupled with that of the Little Lord Jesus, and produced as a rule the same effect on Roger Foss's mind: a sense of having been born with much too little, much too late.

(42-43)

Ashley is the curse of Foss's life, for his mother holds him up as the pinnacle of success. Just as Foss is constantly in Ashley's shadow, Milton Ashley shadows Foss's entire life. Through Ashley, too, we learn of the impossible expectations of Foss's mother: from his birth he is a victim of his mother's envy of social position. More important, her persecutions of him for not being Milton Ashley may be responsible for Foss's lack of “interest” in women (1). The mother is clearly indicted in this portrayal. No wonder Foss thinks of himself as a “nonidentified man” (124).

The second double relationship, Foss's connection to the bellhop Tabori, involves a more traditional bond between first and second self. When the Fosses offer Mrs. Tabori employment, the bellhop, previously a stranger, intimates a closer relationship, saying that Mrs. Tabori is doing the Fosses a “favor”: “she'd only do it for a friend of the family” (63-64). From the outset the Colonel unaccountably gives way to the bellhop's vaguely threatening cajoleries. Then, when Mrs. Tabori kills the janitor and Tabori begins blackmailing Foss, the Colonel feels a sense of fulfillment—he calls it his “Manifest Destiny” (101-02): the blackmail curiously alleviates the Colonel's complex sense of guilt (concepts like original sin and existential dread come to mind here). Further, when Tabori first makes clear that Mrs. Tabori is really a man, the Colonel feels an ambiguous kinship with him: “[H]e put his hand toward the bellhop, who seemed to be living in fear of something. He even felt, strange as it seemed, in league with him.” “They were both, the Colonel realized, exalted by the same dread, and at sea in the same boat” (107). The chapter concludes with the following explanation:

What the bellhop had done was sell him a share of his predicament. This blackmail was not for money at all, but for company. … It had been too much for the man to live alone with his fear. So now the colonel had it—he had at least part of it—and perhaps this night the bellhop would sleep as he had not slept in years, while the Colonel lay awake. It made the Colonel smile (he raised both hands to his face as if to hide what he was thinking) as he had been alone himself, and now for fifty a week he, too, had company.

(109-10)

The third double relationship is between Colonel Foss and Mrs. Tabori-Paul Kopfman, perhaps best expressed by their similarities as ineffectual warriors: Claudine Foss refers to the Colonel as “Mr. Army”; Paul Kopfman had been a “Soldier of Christ” at the Larrabee YMCA. It is the existence of Paul which impels the Colonel to his identity as “Colonel Kopfman,” and it is Paul Kopfman-Mrs. Tabori's “luminous eyes” that the Colonel finds in his own mirror image in his hotel near the Larrabee YMCA. Finally, the Colonel's existential future is foreshadowed when he and Mrs. Tabori are thrown together at the end of the novel.

But perhaps the most important doubling in War Games is that involving Colonel Foss and Hyman Kopfman. Curiously, Foss is “balanced” by Hyman Kopfman, whose decline in health is opposed to Foss's return to health: “Here you had the Colonel, who had nothing to live for, but nevertheless was getting better, while Hyman Kopfman, who hungered for life, was getting worse” (17). Again, “It became a contest of sorts, as to whether the Colonel would get back on his feet before Hyman Kopfman lost another limb, or managed to die” (19). Their relationship is one of a type C. E. Keppler calls counterbalance, “the complementary oppositeness of the two halves of the being whom they together comprise” (11-12). In War Games this balance is emphatic, for Hyman Kopfman's death is posited as a necessary condition for Colonel Foss's recovery and return to the “battlefield” of the world.

Finally, the blood disease which afflicts Hyman Kopfman is another crucial connection to the Colonel, for at the conclusion of the novel, Foss feels kinship with Kopfman's “doomed condition—as if the blood that flowed in Hyman Kopfman's veins flowed in his own” (163). This organic simile supports the view that what doomed Kopfman makes possible the Colonel's newly developed sense of human identity—that is, his move from guilt and failure to freedom and responsibility.

But there is yet another side to Hyman Kopfman's role in War Games: he is employed to emphasize a recurring phenomenon in Morris that might be called a ritual of entry—that is, a ritual which many of Morris's characters experience as a necessary step prior to transformation of self. Joseph Campbell speaks of rituals which involve “formal, and usually very severe, exercises of severance, whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life patterns of the stage [of life] being left behind” (10). In War Games Kopfman appears to be the agent of this purpose: he makes possible the Colonel's “rebirth.” When the Colonel leaves the hospital—it is significantly the first day of spring—he finds his lenses of perception changed: “Everything that he saw was unchanged, familiar … but now that he was back, within it, something struck him as strange. It was not, that is, as he had left it” (25). The change has occurred in the Colonel, not in the world he perceives.

This motif—of necessary preparation for radical change, the rendering strange of the world to the perceiver's eyes—is emphasized throughout (as well as in most of Morris's mature fiction) by what Morris elsewhere calls “the thrust from behind” which impels one to some form of effective action (Field of Vision 205). Colonel Foss is precipitated by many of these thrusts in a causal chain: struck by a truck (from behind), he enters the hospital, where he engages Hyman Kopfman; when Kopfman dies, Foss is led to Tabori, then to Mrs. Tabori—until his final release into dreadful freedom.

Most of the events leading to the Colonel's transformation are not subject to reason or the laws of normal causation. Nevertheless, Foss comes to believe that there is “logic in certain meaningless events,” perhaps most clearly expressed through the following extended metaphor:

The Colonel's temperament being what it was, it led him to conclude that all unforeseen events, if seen in perspective, were in one way or another predetermined, and to this curious circumstance men gave the name of Manifest Destiny. He observed that most men got along without it, like freight cars parked on a siding, while the course of events, the main forces of history, passed them by. He had even felt himself of this number—in a fairly long life there had been no jolts, or shocks, to speak of—until the pie truck had hit him from behind. In a matter of months his manifest destiny had caught up with him. … The moment the Colonel had set eyes on the bellhop, he had heard, as he had on the plains, the whistle of his future blowing thin and wild far down the tracks. The impulse had been given by the pie truck, and now the jolt had finally reached the caboose. This was it. This was the crossing bell he had been waiting for.

(101-02)

Later, after Foss has been led to call himself “Colonel Kopfman” and the bellhop has plunged to his death, he sees himself described in the newspapers as one of Tabori's friends “not as yet identified.” The occasion “defined his position, it cast him in a new role, and it revealed a certain order in all the disorder, as he had known for years that he was, above all, a nonidentified man. An accomplice, as yet unnamed, to crimes yet to be discovered. … [H]e was the connection, he was the link of order, between these strange events” (118-19).

For what is the Colonel being “prepared”? Into what has he gained entry? The reader has been groomed to accept Colonel Foss's welcome burden: the novel ends with Colonel Foss going forth to meet Mrs. Tabori-Paul Kopfman, the psychotic but “innocent” murderer who kills to maintain her fragile new identity. The Colonel sees as his life project the task of cherishing and protecting her—as well as saving himself from her potential violence. This means that he must avoid revealing to her that he knows her secret. The challenge, full of ambiguities and desperate risks, is to live at the cutting edge of reality where both the stakes and the rewards are high. In effect, the Colonel's new role is to shadow Mrs. Tabori, bonded to her as her caretaker-double.⁴

III

In this way the doubles in War Games achieve a curious resolution, with the narrative thrust intending the Colonel's transcendence of failure and guilt. Hyman Kopfman's function in all of this is primarily to make that transcendence possible, to effect the entry to the new experiences which open and expand into Foss's future. The means by which this is carried through is an elaborate counter-balancing of life and death, Foss and Kopfman. At the center of this strategy, however, is a paradox not to be accounted for by the internal needs of the created fiction: Colonel Foss can only live to achieve transcendence if Hyman Kopfman dies. Hyman Kopfman is given power to effect the future, but only through his death. Hyman Kopfman is a martyr.

This is an irony which we find frequently in Morris's work, and it encourages inquiry. One explanation may be sought in Morris's biography and autobiographical fictions. When writers compose from personal experience, they often shore up their own identities with fictional constructs, weaving intricate patterns which repeat as if in code the essence of their lives. One important pattern in Morris's work is that of primordial loss: in effect, he is an orphan seeking to repossess mother and father—in bafflement, anger, ritualistic repetition. Morris never knew his mother, for she died six days after his birth, making him, in his own words, “half an orphan” (Will's Boy 4, 35). Whereas the father is a shadowy figure who moves in and out of Morris's life—he writes that after one of his father's more egregious absences, “I had become more of a whole orphan than a half one” (85)—the mother in Morris is figured primarily as a perceived lack, an absence.

Although critical attention has been paid to Morris's “search for a father,” comparatively little has been done with the mother. G. B. Crump writes that “Morris's life-long search for ‘imaginary gains,’ often identified with timeless tableaux, scenes, objects, and suspended moments … expresses his need to recover the mother he never knew, and the memoirs link the loss of the mother to the loss of the past in all its manifestations” (“Author in Hiding” 5). Roy Bird asserts: “The absence of the mother helps to account for the darkness of the world view in Morris's novels, just as it helps to explain the yearning for completeness and connection” (57).

It will help to focus on the specific terms of Morris's relationship to his mother, for in several places in his work that relationship is seen as a counterbalancing one. In The Man Who Was There, for example, readers find the inscription marking the grave of the protagonist's mother:

                                                            ETHEL GRACE WARD
                                                                                1891-1910
                                        She died so that he might live

(132)

In Will's Boy, again, we read, “I am born, and a few days later Grace Osborn Morris is dead, having given her life that I might live” (5). There can be little doubt that Ethel Grace Ward is a mother surrogate carried into a fictional role. Roy Bird has remarked on the irony of the gravestone inscription: “the greatest gap in [Morris's] early experience also creates his greatest opportunity for independent expression …” (57).

In fictional terms, then, Morris very deliberately converted the death of his mother into myth, and it may be speculated that the dualistic death-life formula accounts for the strategy of counterbalance informing the relationship between Hyman Kopfman and Colonel Foss (both “doubles” for Morris himself). The view that Morris's mother must die to make Wright's life possible—as implied in the inscription—is deliberately (if unconsciously?) paralleled in the fiction. This apparent either-or fallacy (either the mother or the child must die) came to support an elaborate ritualistic pattern in Morris's fiction. This is curious, as it posits that rebirth may only occur through death—not the death of the self, however, but the death of an other—or a mother.

This apotheosis of mother into martyr is echoed, surely, in Colonel Foss's rebirth through Hyman Kopfman's death, but also in the Agee Ward of The Man Who Was There, who helps others live precisely through his absence; and in the character in The Works of Love who symbolically “feeds himself to the birds in a eucharistic parallel that Morris has used more than once” (Eisinger 339).

All this may be explained as part of Morris's coming to terms with his identity as an orphan, to find a means to reclaim the past—or rather, to imagine a re-creation of it in which the parts comprising the whole have never been put asunder. This mythic denial of death allows Morris to reclaim his mother by means of a magical solution, one which always restores her to life when it is called upon. If this analysis is sound, then the Hyman Kopfman-Colonel Foss relationship may be viewed as a fictional restoration of the golden past before time ruined it forever.

Notes

1. On Morris's dualism see: Wayne C. Booth, “The Two Worlds in the Fiction of Wright Morris,” Sewanee Review 65 (1957): 375-99; David Madden, “The Hero and the Witness in Wright Morris' Field of Vision,” Prairie Schooner 34 (1960), 263-78; and especially G. B. Crump, The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978.

2. Morris himself opens the door to critical inquiry when he writes, “War Games may well prove to be the seedbed of much more in my fiction than I am aware, since it was the first turning of earth more than twenty years buried” (War Games vi). No doubt War Games would benefit from a psychoanalytic critical approach that I have not attempted here. Doubles and their relation to narcissism, the potential relation between severed limbs and the castration complex, and questions of sexual orientation and identity are matters, pertinent to War Games, that one finds addressed in Freud's “The Uncanny” and Otto Rank's The Double.

3. The relationship between War Games and Bellow's The Victim may deserve critical attention, but I am operating here only at the level of hunch. Both see urban life as grim, and they emphasize release through transformation of character, including life-enhancing insights provided by pushy, obnoxious doubles—who even use the same line, “what's on your mind?” when they wish to advance their own proposals. Again, Bellow's “destiny” is echoed in Morris's “manifest destiny.” The two authors' protagonists might even have passed each other in the lobby of the St. George hotel. Surely Morris knew The Victim (1947) by the time he wrote War Games in 1951-52. Morris appears to have met Bellow in the late 1940s, in a New York bookstore. It may be no coincidence that in A Cloak of Light Morris speaks of War Games immediately after an extended discussion of his friendship with Bellow (161-63).

4. Paul Kopfman-Mrs. Tabori of War Games re-emerges five years later as Paul-Paula Kahler in The Field of Vision, where she is under the loving care of Dr. Leopold Lehmann, an eccentric psychiatrist.

Works Cited

Bellow, Saul. The Victim. New York: Vanguard, 1947.

Bird, Roy K. Wright Morris: Memory and Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1985.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces [2nd Ed. 1968.] Princeton UP, 1972.

Crump, G. B. “Wright Morris, Author in Hiding.” Western American Literature 25 (1990): 3-14.

Eisinger, Chester E. Fiction of the Forties. U of Chicago P, 1963.

Keppler, C. F. The Literature of the Second Self. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1972.

Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. [1985.] New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Morris, Wright. Ceremony in Lone Tree. [1960.] Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1973.

———. A Cloak of Light: Writing My Life. New York: Harper, 1985.

———. The Field of Vision. [1956.] Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1974.

———. The Home Place. [1948.] Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968.

———. The Man Who Was There. [1945.] Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1977.

———. Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe: 1933-34. New York: Harper, 1983.

———. War Games. [1972.] Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1978.

———. Will's Boy. New York: Harper, 1981.

———. The Works of Love. [1951.] Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1972.

Morris, Wright, and Wayne Booth. “The Writing of Organic Fiction.” Conversations with Wright Morris. Ed. Robert E. Knoll. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1977. 74-100.

Wydeven, Joseph J. “Focus and Frame in Wright Morris's The Works of Love.”