Wright Morris has published ten books, all of them critical successes. Many would agree with Mark Schorer that he is “probably the most original young novelist writing in the United States.” Yet nothing seems to happen, nothing, that is, of the kind that ought to happen. His books have never been taken up by “the wider public”—assuming that there is still such a thing for serious literature—and critics have left his praise almost entirely to isolated, and frequently misleading, reviews.¹

There is perhaps little point in fussing about the popular neglect; though he provides no murders, rapes, or bedroom scenes, his great gift for evoking the recent American past and for playing upon the humor and poignancy of life as felt by Americans since the turn of the century will ensure that his book, in the long run, will make their way. But we ought to take a first step toward critical justice now by recognizing the richness of the vision which operates beneath the engaging surface of his “realistic” novels and stories.

I

One need not attempt to go beneath that surface to discover his preoccupation with the problem of what is real and what is “phony.” “Just what the hell isn't bullshit?” the young Foley asks in The Huge Season, and he spends the rest of his life trying to outgrow the effect on his imagination of Lawrence's answer: a foolhardy act of unmistakable physical courage. In the latest novel, The Field of Vision, the lesson is somewhat different, but the problem is the same. “It's deader,” the middle-aged failure, Boyd, says to his friend's grandson, “than that coonskin hat.”

The boy wiped it from his head to look at it. Had he thought it was alive?

“It's a real one,” he said. “It's not a phony.”

“Is that so?” said Boyd. “How do you know?”

The boy stroked the tail on it, and said, “It cost more. It cost four dollars.”

“That's how you can tell?” said Boyd.

He then grabs the hat, gets the matador to put it on his head, and returns it to the boy. “It's a real hat now,” went on Boyd, “because it's been on the head of a hero. That makes it real.”

But even Boyd knows that that is not enough. Still trying to give to the boy the touch of reality which, for Boyd, only his own lost sense of the heroic can give, he throws the cap into the bull ring and sends the boy after it. And it works. A few moments later the boy is walking with his grandfather, and they pass a man selling black paper bulls.

“‘You can have a bull,’ said McKee [the grandfather] to the boy. ‘You want a bull?’ ‘It's not a bull if you buy it,’ said the boy.” And McKee, annoyed and baffled by his own sense that nothing he touches is any longer real, says, “Okay—since you're so smart I'll just buy a little bull for myself. And while I'm at it I think I'll buy myself a pair of these real horns.” But he seems to know that they won't be real if he buys them.

As a final example, toward the conclusion of The Huge Season, more than twenty years after Foley learned from Lawrence to recognize what was real, he overhears the following conversation between two characters who, like himself, have been unable to free themselves of the “strange captivity” of the twenties.

“Mesdames et Messieurs,” Dickie said, raising his hand for attention. He stepped forward and bowed to Lou Baker, took her hand in his own, kissed it. “Doll, it's been real.”

“Oh, Christ!” said Lou Baker.

“That's the way they're doing it now,” said Dickie.

“I can't believe it,” said Lou Baker. “I won't believe it.”

“You think we're different, eh?” Dickie said.

“I think we were different,” Lou Baker replied. Under her gaze Dickie lowered his eyes, flicked the levers on his watch. “They say it's been real, but we were real,” Lou Baker said.

Such passages may look deceptively matter-of-fact, even naive, out of context. But they are a manifestation of a highly sophisticated dialectic that flows throughout Morris's works. The real world, gruesome as it is, is not as real as it looks. To endure it, indeed to live at all, a man must, as Brady discovers in The Works of Love, find a more genuine reality by getting “out of this world.” The novels indicate at least three main ways of doing so.

HEROISM: THE MOMENT OF REAL ACTION

The three passages already quoted all indicate, at least indirectly, the same way to reality—the way of heroic intensity. Whatever else may be phony, the man who can do the big thing, with transcendent vitality or courage or even foolhardiness, is not. In a world in which things tend to fall apart at the seams, in which most people are dead on their feet and hardly know who or where they are, the hero is at least really there. The dead hero of Morris's second book, The Man Who was There, was much more real than any of the living characters whose lives were affected by his having been there. Similarly the “rainmakers” in The Huge Season are able to “make rain” to water the wasteland of the twenties mainly because they see themselves in the large, they cannot be contented with anything less than some sort of greatness. Lawrence, the tennis player, is satisfied only with championship, and he drives toward that championship with a style that in more ways than one never allows the ball to hit the court; forced to stop playing tennis by an accident, he takes up bullfighting, is badly gored and shoots himself. Proctor, wanting more than anything else to be a great runner, shoots himself through the foot in order to prove to Lawrence that a Jew can do the great thing, can not only take it but “can give it up.” Foley finds that he cannot free himself from the impact that such total living, now gone from his world, has made. He writes a book about his obsession with those times when heroism in the midst of despair still meant something.

“Young men are a corn dance, a rite of spring, and every generation must write its own music, and if these notes have a sequence the age has a style.”

Who said that?

Peter Nielson Foley.

Where could it be found?

Near top of last, or next to last, page of manuscript now lying in grate of his fireplace, unpublished, unfinished, and tentatively titled “The Strange Captivity.”

Above statement led up to the following:

“The great style, the habit of perfection, united George Herman Ruth and Charles A. Lindbergh, Albie Booth and Jack Dempsey, Juan Belmonte and Jay Gatsby, and every man, anywhere, who stood alone with his own symbolic bull. He had his gesture, his moment of truth, or his early death in the afternoon.”

Foley does not find the world of the fifties obsessed with the habit of perfection; in losing the sense of the heroic, the world has lost a great deal. Morris makes it clear that the heroic dreams of the bullfighters and the tennis players and the great Gatsbys pursuing the green light were never enough in themselves. Foley's whole effort is, in fact, to find an escape from the limitations of the heroic ideal without losing the imaginative transformations it could effect. On the one hand, they really did make rain in that huge season, and the wasteland was not a complete wasteland because they were there. Yet much as Foley has lost, it is clear that he must lose even more, if he is to free himself of the strange captivity. The danger of the heroic is that it can freeze the imagination as well as liberate it.

Boyd, in The Field of Vision, has learned all this the hard way. All his life he has been obsessed with a romantic desire to be the ultimate hero. As a young man he drove toward the great success, even at one point nearly drowning himself by trying to walk on the water: if one is going to be a real hero, certainly only Christ is ultimately satisfactory as a model. When it becomes clear to him that he will never succeed in becoming a positive hero, he takes the next logical step of trying to become a heroic failure.

In a prologue to a play that was never produced, Boyd advised his public that he hoped to fail, since there was no longer anything of interest to be gained in success. He went on to speak of culture as a series of acceptable clichés. A photographer's salon where ready-made frames, hung on the walls of rustically historical gardens, lacked only the faces of succeeding generations in the ready-made holes. This hand-me-down world defined the realm of the possible. The impossible—become a cliché itself—had been ruled out. This left the artist—Boyd himself, that is—with only one suitable subject, and life itself with only one ironic result. This was Failure. Such as Boyd, from the beginning, had practiced himself.

Now in his fifties he still carries about with him an old pocket he had torn, as a boy, from the pants of his hero, Ty Cobb. That pocket had once worked a transformation, had raised his sights, had given him the habit of perfection, and was so far so good. But somehow Boyd, a man of “promise,” got stuck with an inadequate dream. The problem, he says to himself as he watches the heroic transformations of the bullfight, was “how not.”

How not to be embalmed in a flannel pocket, how not to be frozen in a coonskin hat. How to live in spite of, not because of, something called character. To keep it open, to keep the puzzle puzzling, the pattern changing and alive.

To make a flannel pocket into “Gordon Boyd's piece of the Cross” is to lose oneself in the past, rather than using that past imaginatively. There is no question but that even this is better than the almost total imaginative failure of McKee, the grandfather. But it is not enough.

IMAGINATION: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

The heroic can never be an end in itself; it is only a means to the imaginative transformations it can effect, the moments of truth it can yield. The insight itself is what is important, and it is therefore not surprising that although all the novels can be said to move toward or through moments of revelation, the heroic is far from being necessary to those moments. Anything that can capture and hold the imagination will do. In the earlier novels the precipitant is often a single physical object with no heroic associations, an object that can show, if looked at closely, what life really is for those who made the object and have used it. Though the objects shift from book to book, from milieu to milieu, ranging from old croquet balls, kitchen stoves, and Swiss watches to new Davy Crockett hats and sombreros, there is always a tremendous sense of the human meaning of the things as conveyed by their visual reality.

The man who can really see an object used by human beings can in the process see something about them that even the closest look at their faces could not yield. It is thus no accident that two of his first books were “illustrated,” though that is hardly the word, with his own photographs. In The Inhabitants and The Home Place, the texture of the overalls, the feel of the broken plow handle, the heat and weight of the kitchen stove are made to belong to us more really, in a sense, than they did even to the people who actually used them: they have been made into art by the imagination of the author and photographer.

It is also no accident that Morris chose as the epigraph to The Home Place Henry James's vivid statement of his own feeling for the object:

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.

[The American Scene]

In that book, the narrator, having returned to the home place, surveys the ugly, worn objects in the weatherbeaten house, and wonders why they have the effect on him that he would expect only from beautiful objects. “Everything in its place, its own place, with a frame of space around it. Nothing arranged. No minority groups, that is. No refined caste systems for the furniture.” And he concludes that their singular power lies in their ability to carry him, as genuine art works do, out of himself: they evoke, they suggest, they carry their own weight in a way that will not allow the sensitive viewer to go his own way without taking them into account. Clyde Muncy's moment of truth comes when, in the abandoned house, he goes through the old relics and suddenly feels their essential “holiness.”

For thirty years I've had a clear idea what the home place lacked, and why the old man pained me, but I've never really known what they had. I know now. But I haven't the word for it. The word beauty is not a Protestant thing. It doesn't describe what there is about an old man's shoes. The Protestant word for that is character. Character is the word, but it doesn't cover the ground. It doesn't cover what there is moving about it, that is. I say these things are beautiful … this character is beautiful. I'm not going to labor the point, but there's something about these man-tired things, something added, that is more than character. … Perhaps all I'm saying is that character can be a form of passion, and that some things, these things, have that kind of character. That kind of Passion has made them holy things. That kind of holiness, I'd say, is abstinence, frugality, and independence—the home-grown, made-on-the-farm trinity.

Useful as objects can be, however, in stimulating the imagination to its task of creating the real world, they have their limitations. They tend, for one thing, to lead the author into relatively private evocations, and thus to an almost plaintive rhetorical appeal to the reader to share what the author feels as he contemplates them (e.g., “I say these things are beautiful, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I mean. That's too bad.” [The Home Place]). Morris has shown steady growth in the “size” of the objects receiving his attention, and he has shown increasing ability to pack them with the meaning he intends by surrounding them with the characters, actions, and events necessary to make the evocation public. In some of the earlier works one is occasionally left wondering why in the world he thinks these things are so charismatic; I should think that for readers who have never shared the small-town experience they would be even more frequently unintelligible than they are for me. But more and more he has developed the technique of centering on heroes and saints who are heroic and saintly just because they have the “holy” ability to create reality out of what is not yet real. “The man” who “was there” re-created everything and everyone he touched when alive by the intense vitality of his imaginative life. In The World in the Attic, those who live in the mundane world have their only real life in the “attic,” the house where the romanticized Caddy Hibbard acts upon their imaginations like a magnet working on iron filings, “supplying the town with energy and direction, like a dynamo.” In Man and Boy, Ormsby struggles, almost without knowing it, for some kind of imaginative clarity that will make it possible for him to cope with his domineering wife and the empty, dry life she has forced, as he thinks, on himself and his dead son. Thinking of that dead son, and of the charge that his son's life was worthless, that he “went phooey,” Ormsby says to himself:

“The Boy and the Ormsby” [the ship named for the heroic son] he continued, which certainly meant nothing whatsoever, or considerably more than anything he had ever said. “There goes the Ormsby,” men would say, just as he had always looked and said to himself: “There goes the Boy.” The Boy and the Ormsby—it was a very strange thing that they both had the definite article. There was something impersonal and permanent about both of them. … There goes the Ormsby, men would say, without ever knowing, as he knew, how absolutely right it was. Without ever knowing that this was proof that his plans went right.

Other men had lost boys—but until he met a man who had found one, he could hardly talk about this thing. … And then it would depend on whether the man thought of his son as the Boy, or as something that belonged to him.

Will Brady in The Works of Love, dim as his vision is about most matters, sees and feels one thing clearly: the hopeless, helpless need for love in “this world” which does all it can to stifle love; in taking on the role of Santa Claus he re-creates, re-imagines the ideal of disinterested love.

In The Deep Sleep Webb, son-in-law to the dead judge, struggles throughout for what he calls “the picture,” the picture of the judge, sane, kindly, wise in his public life, harried, driven to secrecy and loneliness by his wife. Throughout most of the book Webb feels nothing but hatred for the domineering female; it is hardly surprising that some readers have accused Morris of hating women. In his half-drunken apocalyptical vision, Webb shouts at his wife:

“The first and last Commandment of the House reads—Thou shalt not give a particle of gratification. Thou shalt drive from the Temple the man who smokes, and he shall live in a tent behind the two-car garage, and thou shalt drive from the bed the man who lusts, and he shall live in tourist camps with interstate whores, and thou shalt drive from the bathroom the man who farts, and he shall sit in a dark cubby-hole in the basement, and thou shalt drive from the parlour the man who feels, and he shall make himself an island in the midst of the waters, for the man who feels undermines the Law of the House!”

It is true enough that Mrs. Porter sins by drying up the sources which water the creative imagination. But she is herself the victim of a world which forces the female into an unimaginative role as the defender of the House. The deep sleep that falls on the male in the presence of Eve can also be read as the sleep that makes Eve what she is. Thus the epigraph of this work, “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam …” should be read with that of Man and Boy, from Donne: “If man had beene left alone in this world, at first, shall I thinke that he would not have fallen? If there had beene no Woman, would not man have served, to have beene his own Tempter?” Webb's discovery of forgiveness at the end of the book, as shown by his coming to the point of restoring the Judge's watch to Mrs. Porter, even though the Judge had hid it from her, is almost unintelligible if we try to explain it by ordinary standards of character motivation. Only if we see that the mere act of “getting the picture” is for Morris a holy thing does his reversal make sense. And Katherine, his wife, after years of hatred for her mother, is able to forgive when she finally understands: “Her mother, God knows, understood nothing, neither her husband, her son, nor her daughter, but perhaps it was not beyond reason to understand her. Perhaps that was just what her husband [the Judge] had done. Perhaps that explained what could not be explained about him.”

The fullest expression of the role of the creative consciousness is given, however, in the last two works. We have already seen how Foley, in The Huge Season, is trapped in a strange captivity of the imagination. He escapes from that captivity only by capturing in his imagination the meaning of the past. In his consciousness, that past is

Suspended in time, like the ball that forever awaited the blow from the racket, or the upraised foot that would never reach the curb. A permanent scene, made up of frail impermanent things. A lover like Lou Baker, a saint like Lawrence, a martyr like Proctor, and a witness like Foley … in the burning they gave off something less perishable. How explain that Lawrence, in whom the sun rose, and Proctor, in whom it set, were now alive in Foley, a man scarcely alive himself. Peter Foley, with no powers to speak of, had picked up the charge that such powers gave off—living on the field of the magnet, he had been magnetized. Impermanent himself, he had picked up this permanent thing … the bones of Peter Foley would go on chirping in a time that had stopped. No man had given a name to this magnet, nor explained the imperishable lines of force, but they were there, captive in Peter Foley—once a captive himself. … He took out his watch, started to wind it, and saw that the time—the captive time—had stopped. At two o'clock in the morning, the first day of his escape from captivity.

Similarly the whole structure of The Field of Vision can be described as that of the concurrent search, by a small group of American tourists in Mexico, for some kind of vision that will lead them out of their unreality. Only Boyd and Lehmann, through their capacity to think and feel, come close to the condition of being real human beings, and even they are seriously maimed. Everyone else suffers more or less unconsciously, gropes more or less blindly, lives if at all only in the life provided by some other more vital consciousness. Old Scanlon, the great grandfather, lives in the events of his father's past (not, as at least one reviewer has said, his own past) having retreated from his drab and meaningless existence in Lone Tree to a more heroic, and hence more visitable, age. McKee, the aimless grandfather, hardly lives at all, but there are signs that he once almost lived, like his son and grandson, in the light reflected from Boyd's vivid imagination. Mrs. McKee, like Mrs. Porter frozen into the half-life of the American middle-class matron, unloving and unloved, seeing and feeling nothing but what her own conventions impose on the life around her, still remembers the one moment when she was really kissed by a man who was, at least at the time, there, in the kiss: by Boyd, of course. Paul Kahler, now Paula, frustrated in his attempts to find a meaningfully creative life as a male, “lives” through having imagined himself, transformed himself, into a totally harmless—though totally ineffectual—woman.

Boyd and Lehmann both see, in different ways, the nature of the imaginative act that alone can give redemption from these uncreated worlds. For Boyd, the problem is to find a picture of himself that is not so thoroughly padded with clichés that it is not a picture at all.

Neither going to pot, throwing in the sponge, or even working at it had brought him failure. How achieve it? It had to be imagined, like everything else. It had to undergo a sea change, a transformation, that would indicate that failure had happened … to the man behind the front. The armor of clichés [all of the trappings of failure, unconsciously accepted as the real thing] kept him from touching bottom, or from being touched.

Thinking about what must happen to his young namesake, the grandson, before he will find himself, Boyd describes the process more clearly than he can when dealing with himself.

… he would not know its meaning until the pattern itself appeared. And that he would not find. No, not anywhere, since it did not exist. The pattern—what pattern it had—he would have to create. Make it out of something that looked for all the world like something else … a tireless shifting of the pieces … until the pattern—the imagined thing—began to emerge.

Lehmann, finally, the half-fraudulent and half-inspired “psychoanalyst,” sees much more clearly than anyone else what is required, what the imaginative act must be. Why, he asks, are things so seldom what they seem?

They were not meant to be. They were meant to seem different—each according to the nature that was capable of seeing, behind the spectacle of lights, the constellation in his own roof brain. The universe in the process of being made. … Emerging and dissolving patterns of meaning, seeding the world's body with cosmic rays that each according to his nature would absorb, resist, or lightly dust off. Each according to his lights, such as they were, if and when they came on. …

“Mehr licht,” Lehmann said, softly. …

LOVE: THE MOMENT OF COMPASSION

If the world of our imaginings is the universe in the process of being made, it might be inferred that what is given reality in that world would be a matter of indifference. If the activity of the creative consciousness is itself of supreme value, one might suppose that distinctions between good and bad, beauty and ugliness, and even truth and falsehood, would disappear into a relativistic, but “realized,” universe. Some writers for whom the sensitive vision is the greatest value have indeed aimed for neutrality toward all other values: most notably Joyce. And there are times when Morris seems to imply, momentarily, that for him there is no objective order of values which in any sense controls the worth of particular imaginings. But whatever he might say, his novels reveal a world full of distinctions of value, full of love and hate, of Good and Evil, of Heaven and Hell.

We have already seen him using terms like “holy” and “religious” in talking about the feelings which come with the moment of truth. Such terms thicken whenever he deals with love. It was not clearly so in his earliest works; love did not figure in that holy trinity, “abstinence, frugality and independence,” in The Home Place. The value of love as compassion, however, as the charity that alone makes us capable of imagining ourselves into other people's lives, has been implicitly important from the first. And since The Works of Love (1952), his characters have wrestled constantly with the problem of how to find “connection” with their fellows; the quest for the moment of love has thus become the most frequent particular form of the general quest for the moment of truth.

The longest sustained and most explicit quest for love is that of Brady in The Works of Love. Brady is an ordinary, confused, helpless man, engaged in a blind search for love in a world that provides no love. The hell of his existence, referred to in the epigraph from Blake, is only occasionally relieved by hints of possible “connection” with one or another of his fellows (another epigraph to this book is Lawrence's, “We cannot bear connection. That is our malady”). There is, briefly and dimly, his mother. There is the whore who likes to talk with him and to whom he proposes marriage, only to be laughed out into the street. There is the other whore whose baby he adopts, and there is the baby itself, “the boy.” There is his first wife, the terrified, hopeless and lonely bride, whose fear of physical connection delays their spiritual connection until it is too late: they must return to “this world.” There is a second wife who marries him because he is hopeless, because he “knew how to give” but didn't know how to receive anything. There is a woman who reminds him of his mother, and there is an assortment of other lost souls. He loves all of them, in the only fashion he knows; he finds real connection, genuine reciprocal love, with none. His world is not geared for love; he has not been trained for it. And like the madman he meets in the California park, who is happy only when he is being poured like a teapot, and who thanks kindly anyone who will pour him, or like the many “holy men” in Morris's works who feed pigeons with bread soaked in their own spittle, he is forced to find inadequate substitutes for the real thing. Yet even these substitutes are the only thing approaching reality in his life. Shut off, because of his meagre consciousness, from any of the other paths to reality, he has only the path of love.

The meagreness of Brady's consciousness is, I suppose, the greatest hurdle to comprehending what Morris is about in this work, and may account for its having been less enthusiastically received than most of the others. But Brady's blindness is necessary—even though the technical problem of how to portray that blindness without limiting the book itself unduly might have been better solved. Where is there, in Brady's world, any source of better information about love than he has been given? Who is there to tell him what is wrong with his marriages? Where, in the towns he passes through on his gradual movement eastward, can he hope to find someone who will tell him what is wrong with the lives that touch his and with his own.

It all seemed to Will Brady, there in the moonlight, a very strange thing. A warm summer night, the windows and the doors of most of the houses were open, and the air that he breathed went in and out of all of them. In and out of the lungs, and the lives, of the people who were asleep. They inhaled it deeply, snoring perhaps; then they blew it on its way again, and he seemed to feel himself sucked into the rooms, blown out again. Without carrying things too far, he felt himself made part of the lives of these people, even part of the dreams that they were having, lying there. … Men had been there [to the moon], it was said, but where was the man who had traveled the length of his own house? Who knew the woman at the back—or the boy at the front who lay asleep? … What about the man who stood in the dark eating cornbread and milk? What about the rooms where the blinds were always drawn. … What writer, what traveler, could explain the woman who rolled herself up in the sheet, like a mummy or the man who came home every night and undressed in the dark? All one could say was that whatever it was it was there in the house, like a vapor, and it had drawn the blinds, like an invisible hand, when the lights came on. As a writer of books he would have to say that this vapor made the people yellow in color, gave them flabby bodies, and made their minds inert. As if they were poisoned, all of them, by the air they breathed. And such a writer would have to explain why this same air, so fresh and pure in the street, seemed to be poisoned by the people breathing it. … What the world needed, it seemed, was a traveler who would stay right there in the bedroom, or open the door and walk slowly about his own house. Who would sound a note, perhaps, on the piano, raise the blinds on the frontroom windows and walk with a candle into the room where the woman sleeps. A man who would recognize this woman, this stranger, as his wife.

But if books would put a man in touch with the moon, perhaps they would put him in touch with a boy. …

And still groping, he tries to discover in Penrod and Tom Sawyer—where else?—some clue to his failure with his own son.

Finally, crushed by what looks like a total failure with every human being he has ever tried to “get in touch with,” he lands in Chicago, “In The Wasteland,” kept alive by meagre memories, meagre letters from what he has forgotten is only his adopted son, meagre conversations with only half-real, half-living acquaintances in the city, meagre clichés about providing his son with “the best.” In a final uncomprehending desperate grasp at love, he takes a job as Santa Claus—“Oh how they will love you,” says one of his friends—and, blinded by a sunlamp which he uses to make his cheeks rosier for the children, he walks into the heart of the city—into the canal where earlier he has imagined, in the only really apocalyptic “imagining” he ever attains to, that all the souls of all the people who really “have faith” have gone to get “out of this world.” His all-encompassing pity, fed by the acrid human smell from the city below him, makes of the smell the “breath of life.”

He leaned there on the railing, his eyes closed, but on his face the look of a man of vision—a holy man, one might even say, as he was feeding the birds. But when the lantern dropped down … he did a strange thing. He went down the turning stairs toward the water, toward the great stench, as if he would grasp it, make it his own before it could blow away from him. Or as if he heard above the sound of the traffic, the trains in the yard, and the din of the city, the tune of that Piper—the same old Pied Piper—over the canal [the one who had led all the people of faith away, in his earlier dream]. The one that had drawn him, time and again, into the streets.

His death is thus a final attempt at an embrace, an embrace this time of the whole of pitiable humanity.

Brady's salvation through love, through his realization of a common bond with all other helpless, hopeless men, is simply the extreme form of what one finds throughout the novels: in love thus broadly conceived, one discovers reality. And it is significant that with Morris as with E. M. Forster in A Passage to India and Howards End the bond of love does not extend simply to other human beings. Proctor and Foley saving the helpless cockroach, Lehmann in The Field of Vision resuscitating the fly, the natural enemy, simply because it is helpless, are doing the works of love just as truly as is the young Ormsby when he sends off ten dollars to help save Floyd Collins trapped in a mine. There are of course instances of strong personal love in Morris—fathers and sons, husbands and wives, heroes and hero-worshippers, and just plain lovers. But he has never been willing to forget that such loves are only local manifestations, as it were, of a general problem, a general problem which is illustrated perhaps even better by impersonal compassion on the one hand and by relatively impersonal hero-worship on the other, than by grand passion or even by deep personal affection.

In The Field of Vision the love felt for the hero as strong aggressor, the male, the bull, the “goddam fool” who compels our dreaming, is contrasted with the tender love of a Paula Kahler who, in a rejection of all aggression, all brutality, has rejected her own maleness and “transformed” herself to a woman. Both kinds of love, love as admiration and love as pity, can compel the imagination many days and many hours, but in this last novel the helpless pitiable flies are perhaps even more important than the more prominent bulls. (Even the bulls are symbolic as victims as well as heroes. One of McKee's chief associations with the killing in the bullring is his childhood experience of shooting a friendly pig). One night Lehmann, the only one in the book who approaches to wisdom, the man who has, out of pity, attempted to save Paula Kahler only to find that she is in a sense saving him, goes to her room and discovers her lying with eyes wide open but apparently unconscious.

He was still in the doorway when she suddenly cried out HELP! There had been no mistaking the word, or the fact that she needed it. Gulped it out, as if choking, a last cry before going under, and he had felt that the corpse had spoken of the life beyond the grave. Needing help. So that both sides of life were the same. HELP WANTED was the big need in both of them. There was no trap door, no escape through a hole in the floor, or a door in the ceiling, on earth as it was in heaven and hell, a man needed help. This was his human condition. This was the basis of his brotherhood. … It was a need shared by all men. … To the question, Where was Paula Kahler? a simple answer. Everywhere. Everywhere that any living thing needed help. Among those who knew it, like Lehmann and Shults, among those who feared it, like Boyd and the McKees, and among those who knew as little as the fly that had dropped on Lehmann's chest. Few would need it so badly they would change their nature for it, but all of them would one day advertise for it.

The ambiguity of love as admiration and love as pity is partially resolved as Lehmann thinks further about the meaning of man's helplessness. Just as the bull, goring the matador, lifts them both to a moment of flight, a transformation into one thing, man-and-bull, a transformation that could not have occurred without both, so the mind of man is totally dependent on its links with the animal, its “connections” with the lowest, least human, life. Paula's rejection of everything but her own kindly light is, then, while a beautiful transformation in itself, not unambiguously a good thing; it is at best both good-and-evil, and at worst it is a flat denial of the truth.

There was no mind if the lines to the past were destroyed. If the mind, that is, was nothing but itself. … There had to be connections, the impulse had to ooze its way through light years of wiring. … It was why Leopold Lehmann had emerged at all. Why he was as he was, criminal by nature, altruistic and egocentric by nature, merciless and pitiful by nature, but up there at the front of the bull, forked on his horns, as well as wagging his tail. In Leopold Lehmann the inscrutable impulse was reaching for the light. … But the thrust, even in reaching for the light, must come from behind. Out of the shoulders of the bull, on the horns of this dilemma, against the current that must always determine his direction, in reaching for more light man would have to risk such light as he had. It was why he needed help. It was why he had emerged as man. It was according to his nature that he was obliged to exceed himself.

It is this passage, I think, which explains the seeming inconsistency in calling Paula Kahler a saint, because of her absolute devotion to the teachings of Christ, and calling the tennis player Lawrence a saint, in The Huge Season. They are holy not only in the loves they inspire but also in their absolute embodiment of that part of man's nature which obliges him to exceed himself and reject the very world that made him.

II

OUT OF THIS WORLD

If the act of heroism is made important only by being transformed in the consciousness to something more fundamental than heroism itself, if the creative consciousness makes a reality which is inevitably permeated with a sense of love, we still have to account for how Morris manages to make all this seem more “real” than the drab real world which it redeems. Why should moments of awareness be so important, to art as to life? What is there about awareness even of pain, of captivity, of death in the afternoon, that is “religious”? It is in answering this question that one comes to what is thematically the most important element in Morris's work. Without announcing any specific religious dogma, his novels, more successfully than any other American novels in this century, render the mystical relation of time and the timeless. Like Proust and Mann, among others, Morris is attempting the fictional voyage of discovery into the nature of reality itself, and as one might expect, he discovers the real in whatever is permanent in a world of change. The permanent is permanent by virtue of being outside of time—and yet as human beings we discover it only in time, only in the world of impermanent things. Fiction itself, being an instrument for fixing materials which otherwise would remain impermanent, is thus a bridge between the two worlds, the world of time which always disappoints, always cheats us in the end, and the timeless world which, as for all Platonists,² is more real. The three themes traced above can be seen, therefore, as no accidental roads to the “holy”: whatever has been “really” done, imagined, or felt has been, in fact, re-created, transformed from one world into another. Ormsby's boy is permanent, because he did something that means something. Brady has found a way “to live in this world, so to speak, and yet somehow be out of it,” “to be mortal and immortal, at the same time”—by imagining and performing an act of love. Foley knows that even after the final bomb falls, “according to Foley's Law, what had been loved or created would be untouched,” that what “had been hammered out on the forge of art could be hammered to pieces, burned, bombed, or ignored, but it could not be destroyed. The outward form could be shattered, become smoke and ashes, but the inward form was radioactive, and the act of disappearance was the transformation of the dark into the light. Metamorphosis. The divine power of art.”

Foley cannot himself complete his attempt at a work of art; there is no reason to believe that he will ever finish his novel. But he can achieve what is, in fact, an equivalent: he can bring his past experience into an imaginative unity and thus remove it from the ravages of the unreal world. As the book ends, he is faced with the likelihood of being investigated by a Senate committee, and he is thus likely to become more closely involved in “this world” than for many years. At the same time, he has moved to a revelation of “a permanent scene, made up of frail impermanent things.”

The solution, if it can be called that, is an uneasy one, full of the paradoxes that plague any mystical solution in “real” life. Achieving timeless triumphs does not really deal with the world, “the world of men here below.” Attempts to deal with “this temporal kingdom, this bloody cockpit,” inevitably involve a man in evil: “all action was blended with evil, but one could be good, one could only be good, by sitting on one's hands.” Yet attempts to escape the “battleground” leave the victory to “the Prince of Darkness.” There is no escape from the paradox, except for the paradoxical fact that to understand the paradox, to see the trap for what it is, is in a sense to escape it.

But only in a sense. One cannot even understand it except by moving through experiences in time; like most writers on the timeless world, from Plato to Eliot, he sees that only the world of time can yield the necessary materials for the ascent into the world of ideas. “If you want to go to heaven, you got to go to hell first,” old Scanlon teaches his grandson. Boyd cannot succeed without utter failure, without really “touching bottom”; “the bottom was a long way down—as it was also a long way up.”

The way up and the way down are the same way—it is not surprising to find that in this poetry of the two worlds Morris should quote frequently from Eliot's poetry on the same theme. As early as The World in the Attic (1949) he used a quotation from “Burnt Norton” as an epigraph, and he has apparently gone on absorbing the whole of Four Quartets until Eliot's language now permeates his own whenever he attempts to deal with the still world.

And the matador? At this point he had turned away. As from a still life, an arrangement that would remain as he had left it, the scene transformed into a frieze of permanence. The matador a magician, holding the wand to which was attached the magic cloth, behind which the double transformation had taken place. Word into flesh, and the flesh itself into myth. … [The praise] created a vortex, a still point where he stood alone with himself. …

Boyd could see the still point where the dance was. The man rooted to it. … In controlling … the still point, he dominated the bull. Except for the still point there would be no dance. … The moment of truth was at that moment, and not at the kill.

Writing a book is, or should be, another such dance at the still point out of time, another act of permanence in a world of change. Everything Morris does shows this effort for permanence, this passion for transforming through the creative imagination the flat, lifeless, unreal materials—what he has come to call the clichés—into a living world. In style, subject matter, and structure, his books are thus running battles with cliché. I would have thought, for example, that nothing more could or should be done with the clichés about the twenties, growing out of Fitzgerald's originally fresh vision—until I read The Huge Season. I would have thought that nothing more could or should be done with the clichés about bullfighting, growing out of Hemingway's originally fresh portrayal—until I read The Field of Vision. In transforming these clichés of situation, as in twisting dead phrases into new life, he exemplifies his aesthetic theory: when you see something truly, and give it a name, it is taken out of time, where it suffered all the ills that flesh is heir to, and placed in a permanent world where time must have a stop. You cannot do this, of course, by talking about mysticism, as Huxley often attempts to do. You must render the transformation. And in the renderings effected by our creative imaginations, we can make a permanent world—according to our lights, such as they are, if and when they come on.

III

Heroism, imagination, and love, as forms of action, thought and feeling that lead “out of this world,” by no means exhaust the intellectual content of Morris's works. There are other persistent themes, and there are of course other topics under which his ideas could be treated. The original “holy trinity,” abstinence, frugality and independence, could be expanded, for example, to account for much that escapes my formulation. “Independence,” particularly, could be made to explain some elements of the free imagination which do not fit easily into the new trinity. There are times when sheer audacity or spontaneity seem almost more important than truth itself, when the ability to create, to create anything regardless of how quixotic the creation, seems more important than the ability to “get the picture” as it really is. Foley has discovered his cat and a chipmunk playing a fantastic sort of dancing game, a game incredibly inventive and “unnatural,” which they repeat again and again throughout the summer.

… the chipmunk [grew] fat and [had] to be carried by the neck, like a kitten, and after putting on her dance [lay] … with panting sides, like a fat ballerina. … To be believed it had to be shared with one of [Foley's] species. … It finally led Foley to look into Darwin … and to spend nights brooding on a creative evolution of his own. Founded on what? Well, founded on audacity. The unpredictable behavior that lit up the darkness with something new. That in some audacious moment of the lunar past, at the mouth of some cave, had resulted in man. A turning on the hinges of his own dark past, toward the light. Through some jeweled chink in Mother Nature's own armor, through some flaw in her own habit of perfection, the glint in some creature's eye shot new rays into the dark. … The Origin of a species based on charm, on audacity, on the powers of the dance, and the music that soothed whatever needed soothing in the savage breast. …

This passage, like many others, contains a good deal more than is comprehended in my systematic formulation.

What is more, to deal with Morris's ideas in this way leaves most of the major critical questions untouched. Even if his ideas are, as I believe, richer and more profound than the ideas of most contemporary novelists, they are not original by any means—at least in my account of them. And it is possible that a novelist could make use of all of them without being a great novelist.

But it is hard to see how he could fail to be an important and symptomatic one—that is, a novelist who must be given our sustained attention. Even his bare ideas, extracted brutally from their fictional context, show an honest and penetrating mind at work. And perhaps enough of the fictional embodiment of the ideas comes through in the above account to indicate that he has created a truly impressive variety of fictional worlds, made up of living characters facing real problems in a contemporary setting, surrounded by objects that tell the truth about those characters and their problems. We may want to claim that the characteristic form of Morris's novels—the more or less blind quest for permanent values in a world that, like our own real world, seems to deny those values wherever it can—is no more his own invention than are his ideas; it is a form that certainly bears strong resemblance to a long tradition that reached one kind of culmination in Remembrance of Things Past. But the above account should have made clear, what only a different sort of critical essay could do justice to: the fact that Morris gives to that tradition a new and important turn.

Such unsupported claims, however, merely illustrate the point that many of the important critical questions have not been asked here. Morris has many faults, or what look to me like faults, and a fully helpful criticism must sooner or later ask the questions that will lead to a discussion of those faults. But it should do so only after looking closely enough at his virtues to recognize what a fault would be in the distinctive context he provides. Certainly our first job is to see what it means to us to have a novelist of his gifts and his integrity coming now after fourteen years of steady, impressive growth, into what can hardly fail to be his greatest years.

Notes

1. Since the writing of this article Mr. Morris has been given the National Book Award for The Field of Vision.

2. The philosophical validity of Morris's ideas is of course not in question here, though any novelist who is as much concerned with conceptual ideas as he is must ultimately be held more directly answerable to philosophy than novelists like Jane Austen or Hemingway or even Henry James, whose “mind was never violated by an idea.” The fact that Morris's “Platonism” is closer in detail to Plotinus than to Plato does not matter at this point, since his fictional effects come from rendering the struggle to ascend from one world into the other, a struggle that is common to all forms of Platonism, including, of course, the Christian.

   Similarly, detailed comparisons of Morris's moments of truth with strikingly similar moments in other fiction, like Proust's moments of heightened memory, Joyce's epiphanies, or Virginia Woolf's moments of vision, would not be appropriate here. The whole problem of the various types of epiphany and the technical difficulties raised by trying to realize them in fiction has scarcely been touched by modern criticism, in spite of—or perhaps because of—its concern with symbolism and self-expression.