`Only Vacant Houses are Inhabited'

A friend who lived and went to school in Iowa and who recently returned to visit family entertained me with stories and rekindled memories of a part of the country few envy or even acknowledge as part of the country. The Midwest is blithely pigeonholed as the Great Blank, an absence filled with corn and pigs that one must endure on the way to somewhere else more important and interesting. She reminded me of Wright Morris, a writer and native Nebraskan whose once considerable reputation seems to have evaporated to another Great Blank, but whose work helped form and clarify my image of the Midwest and its place in the American imagination.

In the 1940s, Morris pioneered something he called “photo-texts,” books that mixed his own stark photographs, usually of houses and other buildings, seldom of human beings, with blocks of prose. The relation of image to word isn’t simple illustration, as in a children’s book or encyclopedia. Rather, Morris’ juxtapositions set off an evocative resonance rooted in memory and myth. The text is not a continuous narrative, and often blurs fiction and essay. His first work in this genre was The Inhabitants (1946), which I have in front of me, followed by The Home Place (1948), and God’s Country and My People (1968). The title of The Inhabitants is drawn from a passage in the “Economy” chapter in Walden, which Morris uses as an epigraph to the volume:

“What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder – out of some unconscious truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the appearance and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of life…it is the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are.”

The first picture in The Inhabitants is a barn photographed squarely from the front. To the left is a leafless tree, a section of fence and a wooden shed. To the right, in the middle distance, is a stone fence. The horizon is a distant tree line, a gray smudge. The barn is immaculate clapboard geometry – a rectangle topped by a triangle. In the center is a door opening on what appears to be a stall. Above is the window in the hayloft – another rectangle topped by a triangle, echoing the roof line. The text on the facing page, too, is an echo – of the epigraph from Thoreau:

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

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

A longer paragraph, in which we find these wonderful sentences, follows: “In all my life I’ve never been in anything so crowded, so full of something, as the rooms of a vacant house. Sometimes I think only vacant houses are inhabited.”

The barn resembles a church – a small, weathered country church. When I drive past such places, I always want to trespass, and I use that verb in a double sense. There’s legal trespass, violating another’s property, but there’s also violation of lives lived, of memory sanctified, knowing that generations of families lived here, inhabited this space, accreted their lives in the planks and lathing, yet entering anyway. I, the stranger, become a voyeur of the invisible. I know modern, lived-in houses that feel history-free, disinfected of memory, with walls fashioned of some synthetic substance to which nothing can bind.

The last photo in The Inhabitants is a close-up of rough-hewn, unpainted timbers, probably at the corner of a building that might be Abe Lincoln’s log cabin. The wood is notched and piled alternately so it stands without nails. The background is black but for a weed, a lattice-work of shadows and two wooden wagon wheels, ghostly in the deep shade. The text on the left is titled “What it is to be an American”:

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

These might be a preacher’s words, Father Mapple’s (Moby-Dick) or the Rev. John Ames’ (Gilead), more chanted or sung than recited. We no longer talk or write that way.