The Wright Stuff

The work of some writers, even good ones, seems to evaporate with their death, as though body and book were one. It takes a reader to resurrect a book, and if enough readers follow his suggestion, the writer too will again walk among us. I’m thinking here of Wright Morris, who died in 1998 at the age of 88. He lived long enough to turn into a ghost long before his death, yet he published 40 books, half of them novels, the best and best known of them set in his native Nebraska. His work was not obscure or self-consciously difficult. He won the National Book Award and the American Book Award, and he worked self-consciously in a very American tradition that includes Melville, Twain, James, Hemingway and Faulkner. In fact, he wrote one of the best books about that tradition, The Territory Ahead. When I was first reading him, in the late 1960s, I was ignorant enough to think he was a very good, maybe even great writer, at least in a handful of his books, and today I think I was right.

I thought of Morris several days ago while writing for this blog. After seeing yellowed, crumbling newspaper clips in my file cabinet, I flashed on one of his photographs, “Drawer with Silverware, Home Place, 1947.” Morris was a doubly gifted man who created first-rate work in both fiction and photography. He pioneered what he called “photo-texts,” doubling as James Agee and Walker Evans, so to speak, and fashioning books out of words and pictures. “Drawer with Silverware” is a silver gelatin print that appeared in his second “photo-text,” The Home Place, in 1948. It shows forks and table knives arranged in a drawer lined with newspaper. The right side of the photo is shadowed. Some of the newsprint is legible. I think the paper is called Capper’s Weekly, and the date is from April 1939. A headline at the top seems to read “Can America Save These Children?” A one-column mugshot, obscured by knife blades except for the forehead and hair, is captioned “Hitler’s Army Chief.” In the shadow at the bottom right, another headline reads, I think, “Mother Nature is Systematic.” You could make something of these scraps of language, over-interpret them, especially in the context of post-World War II America, and especially in a book in which words and images vie for attention. But, I’m assuming they reflect what Morris found at his Uncle Harry’s farm near Norfolk, Neb., when he returned there in the spring of 1947. In the 1960s, my Aunt Stella, on a farm outside Olean, N.Y., was still lining her kitchen drawers with newspaper.

Inevitably, Morris’ photographs remind us of work by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others hired by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. All share a reverence for humble subjects, vernacular architecture and classically geometric framing. But I see no political or social subtext in Morris’ work. His Nebraska farmers and merchants, and the structures they dwell in, are not exhibits in a show titled “Agriculture in Crisis.” Morris habitually shoots people and objects in isolation, granting them a radiant centrality of attention. His pictures stir neither pity nor terror, and certainly not moral indignation. Rather, I’m touched by their mingling of stark beauty, poignancy and respect, the way I feel when I look at Shaker furniture. They often imply absence. His pictures are surpassingly artful and never artsy.

Morris’ National Book Award-winning novel is titled The Field of Vision (1956), and the photographer’s eye carries over into much of his highly visual fiction. Here’s the first paragraph of Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960):

“Come to the window. The one at the rear of the Lone Tree Hotel. The view is to the west. There is no obstruction but the sky. Although there is no one outside to look in, the yellow blind is drawn low at the window, and between it and the pane a fly is trapped. He has stopped buzzing. Only the crawling shadow can be seen. Before the whistle of the train is heard the loose pane rattles like a simmering pot, then stops, as if pressed by a hand, as the train goes past. The blind sucks inward and the dangling cord drags in the dust on the sill.”

No photographs accompany the text, but that feels as close to photography as prose can aspire. Yet the scene is not static. Who summons us to come to the window? Who’s on the train? Will it stop? Where are we? We might be in a Western movie, or one of Antonioni’s.

If we consult Photographs and Words, a collection of Morris’s pictures from the 1940s with an essay, “Photography in My Life,” we see a compulsive return to certain visual themes. A photo called “Eggs in a Pot” is shot from above, like the knives and forks, the direction from which a hand would press the lid. Windows appear in 32 of the 61 photos, not counting numerous doors and mirrors. “Straightback Chair” is simple and implies a complicated story. We see part of a door, light in color, with a white doorknob. Beside it stands a chair with a strip of veneer missing from the seat. The floor is covered with patterned, worn-looking linoleum. Diffuse light comes from the left, perhaps from a window, and the chair casts a fuzzy shadow. Whoever lives here is not wealthy and not desperately poor. The floor and wall are clean. The picture is used for the cover of Eric Ormsby’s For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems, published by Grove Press.

In the accompanying essay, Morris writes:

“…I was prepared to appreciate home-grown American ruins and to attempt to salvage what was vanishing. Nothing will compare with the photograph to register what is going, going, but not yet gone. The pathos of this moment, the reluctance of parting, we feel intensely.”

In the same essay, Morris writes of his 1948 photo-text, The Home Place, as it was originally published, including the photos mentioned above:

“The format would be…roughly the size of a novel, and the photographs would be cropped. These mutilations removed them, as a group, from the context of artworks, as `images,’ and presented them as `things’ and artifacts. The decision to do the book in this manner permitted no compromise. I wanted to know what such a book would be like, and I found out. The readers I had in mind – it was part of my euphoria – were those who would browse through the book like an album. Most of the readers I found objected to the distraction of the photographs, and those who liked the photographs largely ignored the text. The book was very well received, critically, and continues to find reader-lookers, but it was not bought at the time of publication and confused many reviewers about the author. Was he a writer, who took photographs, or a photographer who did a little writing? The public is ill at ease with the ambidextrous.”

Morris’ photos and some of his books have come to define some of what “American” means for me, along with Twain’s dialogue, Buster Keaton’s face and Louis Armstrong’s voice. The art of all these men was ambidextrous. Among the definitions of that word given in Webster’s Third are “unusually skillful, versatile” and “characterized by duplicity” – like Wright Morris and all the best American artists.