[In the following letter, originally published in 1957, Morris talks of his own work, and of other writers.]

David Madden was in 1957 a graduate student at San Francisco State College contemplating a master's thesis on the novels of Wright Morris. In December of that year he sent Morris a list of questions relating to the novels. This letter is Morris's reply to most of those questions. It has been edited slightly by Morris and Mr. Madden, whose questions and comments are noted within brackets.

Wayne, Pennsylvania

December 7, 1957

Dear David Madden:

On the assumption, gratefully assumed, that you have made your way both in and out of Darkest Morris, I greet you at the edge of the clearing with a bottle of cherry phosphate and some fatherly advice. I take it you have a copy of your map in hand, so let's begin at the beginning:

[What is your estimation of Wayne C. Booth's essay (“Two Worlds in the Fiction of Wright Morris,” Sewanee Review, Summer 1957, 375-399) on your novels?]

Booth's report strikes me as sound, in the essentials, and it had much of interest to say to the author. The theme of audacity, as I would describe it, in one or several disguises, and many variations, emerges from all of the books. We begin with it in Uncle Dudley, and we last confront it in The Cannibals, where both Horter and the Greek improvise on the “act of bolting.” The Cannibals seems to have thrown you off stride, as it did many of my readers, who were happily nested in the groves of Nostalgia. It is the purpose of that book to shake the sentimental leaves from all those mythic limbs. You will not find this achievement of much interest until you have processed your own past, and come to terms with your inheritance of raw material. Having written ten books on this subject, I can appreciate your engagement. But there can, and in my opinion, should, be an end. In “The Territory Ahead,” [incorporated into a book with the same title published by Harcourt Brace in 1958] an essay in The Living Novel, just published by MacMillan, you will find a summarizing statement on American writing and writers, on technique and raw material, that will answer many of the questions you have about Morris—and raise others. Insofar as my books and opinions interest you, I cannot urge it on you too strongly. It should serve as a statement, to which these notes may be appended.

[Are your novels in the “realistic” genre?]

Realistic etc.—all of my books testify to the function of verisimilitude: the life-like look that conveys the sense of life. No theories here: this is how the mind works, or how it doesn't. What I want is a sense of life so real it evokes a little more than life.

[You use some of the same character names, and indeed some of the same characters, throughout the novels; different characters have some of the same very particular memories, sometimes almost verbatim. How intentional is this common memory store?]

In putting my puzzle together—a fairly literal description—I began with no conception that a pattern might emerge, or that this emergence was a latent, groping form of conception. (See “Territory.”) The pieces of the jig-saw that keep turning up (figures like Tom Scanlon; the unemployed heroes, Charles Lawrence, Boyd, etc.; men who feed birds, open cans with forks; bowls that contain the past, like an urn; paper weights where it is forever snowing, and clearing, and snowing)—these are the keys to the house of fiction. A writer shapes them to open doors with them. The room and the view will be different, but the key is the same. In The Field of Vision you see me arranging familiar pieces in a new pattern. A beginning. Much still to be done. It could not be done at all, however, while I was trapped in my own material. In those self-dug graves lie the bearded giants—face down.

On this subject we might prattle happily forever. It is both denser and more complex (the life of these fragments) than is evident in the published books. The Works of Love, a key book in this matter, in an early, wonderfully incoherent draft, contained the gist of all these potsherds in a flow reminiscent of Bridie Murphy. By the way—and a very large by—the University of California at Berkeley has a quantity of Morris manuscripts in their library, just waiting for the likes of Madden. … In the many drafts of the key books you will find some questions answered, others raised. But there, my boy, is the site of Morris-Troy. Bring up your wooden horse!

[One of your finest qualities is the subtlety of your underwriting, by which some large feelings and ideas are generated; but sometimes one gets lost. For instance, Dudley's audacious behavior is often enigmatic.]

Dudley is caught in the Morris field of vision, that magnet that buzzed in Lawrence, Boyd, [Agee] Ward, and [Earl] Horter, obliging him to be something of a damn fool in order to be himself. Blake plagiarized me here, as he does elsewhere, when he said that a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. I know that what you want to know is Why—the simple, bare-faced motives, and indeed they are bare. The old fool merely wants to show himself a man. Underwriting—which seems to be a species of underwater swimming—has its many disadvantages, and that is one. Is the pool empty? That is how it often looks. I still have, in my possession, a very early manuscript that appears to be in Hindu. It is also very long. There were giants in the earth in those good old days.

[Why do so many characters—the Boy and Lipido in Man and Boy, for instance—resemble birds? Is this motif related to the image of the wetting of the bread with spittle before feeding it to the birds?]

I seem to find birds a sympathetic and lucid form of symbolism. The old man and the spittle is an instance. Fact and imagination, dream and reality, the caged and the uncaged—flight with feathers on it.

[And eggs. The novels are well-stocked with eggs. The theme of Sherwood Anderson's “The Triumph of the Egg” seems dominant in The Works of Love, which you dedicated to Anderson.]

And Eggs. Let us, my dear Boswell, clear this matter up. That damn Anderson Egg has long haunted me. Long before either Morris or Anderson hoped the egg would triumph or break, my father had the dream—à la Brady—of a chicken farm in Nebraska. About 1916. The Works of Love is true to the atmosphere. The egg—from which all birds come (see above) entered my life the Hard way, and that is very much the way it is working out. Hard. I will Not say we have seen the last of them. It may seem hard to credit, with my affection for Anderson, but I had never read “Triumph of the Egg” until a review of The Works of Love called it to my attention! So there we have it. The small, small world, the large, Large egg. I suppose it was the dedication to Anderson that encouraged the tie-in. Well, He would love it. What egg could triumph better than that?

[What other writers have influenced you?]

On the subject of writers and influences—very tricky at the best—a clarifying point. I read madly in college (where I discovered books) but nothing at all contemporary. (To correct this oversight a dear overseeing lady gave me a copy of The Fountain by Charles Morgan!) I began to write without a model or style, without any useful notion of form and conception, which will help to explain a very long five years of apprenticeship. I wrote novels of childhood, several of them, then I began to write the dense, prose-poem sort of things … that eventually appeared in such a book as The Inhabitants, facing the photographs. It is writing that led me to photography—and you will see why if you study the prose pieces. I was trying to lay my hands on the object itself. The photograph seemed the logical way to achieve such ends. It was one way, of course, but a writer's way is another, and these artifacts, thousands of them, go on turning up in my books. That Uncle Dudley, my first published novel, resembles no other book so much as itself, is due to the background I have described. Your nostalgia, I'm afraid, kept you from sensing the close affinity, both in style and substance, that Love Among the Cannibals has for Uncle Dudley. We have come full circle—I came, that is, full circle without being aware of it—and The Cannibals marks a fresh engagement with the present, rather than the past, which has now been re-experienced. I am not, in any sense, through with it—The Field of Vision is the first act of organization—but I am finished with immersion. In the waters of my fathers I have been dipped. This may be the great American baptism, since all our writers of consequence have to go through it. In my opinion (vide “The Territory”) damn few survive. Immersion is immolation.

I admire writers as diverse as Hemingway and Camus, Mann and Joyce, Kafka and Lawrence, but I observe, increasingly, that this admiration is remote from imitation, and may have little to do, as in the case of Lawrence, with the major novels, or the public figure. One book, or a few pages, may suffice to include a man in the personal pantheon. The writer who writes more than he reads, as I do, will develop the faculty of appraising, in a short exposure, what it is that he seeks, and what it is that nourishes him. Whether the twig bends to water or not, the writer bends to the currents that feed him. All others are merely distractions. He truly learns only what he can use.

In this matter, as in many others, I refer you again to “The Territory Ahead,” where I have stated, as clearly as I know how, relevant opinions on writing and writers.

[One of your major and unique abilities is to achieve dramatic intensity and interest without the crutch that action often becomes in American literature. Why do you eschew action and focus retrospectively upon a few memorable events?]

The notion of what is dramatic, novelistically speaking, is apt to be either fashionable or clichéd: the meaningful object, or the meaningful event, is precisely what the writer must imagine, and in this act of the imagination are such elements of drama as he finds necessary. It is the imaginative act, not the action of events, that reveals the artist of stature—the action of events can be learned by formula, and often is. My problem as a writer is to dramatize my conception of experience, and it may often exclude, as it often does, the entire apparatus of dramatic action. The impassive life of Brady is instructive in this point. His life, for me, is full of meaningful action on the level of awareness. This is also true of The Cannibals—with its pattern of surface action—as it is of The Works of Love, where the action is submerged. (See Chapter 3 of “The Territory.”) What a writer does, not what he should do, not even how well or badly he does it, is the only imaginative fact of any consequence. This is now all but forgotten. It is assumed books are written to provoke discussion. Actually, they are conceived to make discussion irrelevant.

[Even while you were a photographer, did you feel yourself becoming a writer?]

This is answered in my remarks on an earlier question. I began as a writer. In my effort to possess the ding an sich I tried the resources of photography. They are considerable but limited. Reality is not a thing but a conception, and the camera cannot conceive. I tried to overcome this limitation by a marriage of sensations in the mind of the beholder: The Home Place and The Inhabitants.

[A dirty question, but one raised emphatically by your works: how do you regard women in our society?]

Women? A very dirty question, indeed. But Woman, that is another matter. My opinions on this subject have been formulated, with my problem in mind, by Henry James. (Vide: The American Scene.) Betrayed by Man (deprived of him, that is), woman is taking her abiding revenge on him—unconscious in such figures as Mrs. Ormsby [in Man and Boy] and Mrs. Porter [in The Deep Sleep], where she inherits, by default, the world man should be running. Since only Man will deeply gratify her, the Vote and the Station Wagon leave something to be desired. One either sees this, or one doesn't. As of now both man and woman are tragically duped: the Victor has no way of digesting the spoils.

[What explains Webb's very moving act of kindness in The Deep Sleep when he lays the watch where Mrs. Porter can find it?]

Webb's act reflects his respect for the forces that both salvage human life and destroy it: the pitiless compulsion that testifies, in its appalling way, to the spirit's devious ways of survival.

[Your novels declare that you are haunted by Nebraska, the region of your childhood. Not since Thomas Wolfe has such lucid and meaningful nostalgia pervaded a body of work.]

Not since Thomas Wolfe? My dear Boswell, Mr. Wolfe tried to do the impossible—and failed, naturally. Mr. Morris is much more ambitious. It is the possible he wants, and sometimes he gets it. …

[How have your novels been received outside the United States?]

Too early to say. German editions just now appearing. The Deep Sleep seems to be the most exportable. It did very well in England, and has been translated into German and Italian. The English critical scene has a familiar incoherence. The Field of Vision was the object of considerable irrelevant abuse. …

[In what direction are you now heading in your work? Love Among the Cannibals doesn't seem to begin a direction that you would be likely to follow very long.]

I have been dropping hints all along the way. The biggest hint you preferred to ignore, since it didn't suit your pattern. The Cannibals. A deliberate putting aside of the familiar nostalgic pattern. An effort to confront, in Lawrence's terms, the poetry of the present, where the strands are all flying, and the waters are shaking the moon. When a writer does that rare thing—stops doing what he knows how to do, and endeavors to do something more—it is instructive that those who hold an interest in his work should be the first to cry havoc. When we are less engaged with the nature of our pasts, and have unreeled our minds to come to terms with the present, we will, I suspect, find The Cannibals a much different book. If I should prove to be a writer of some interest, it will prove to be one of my most interesting books.