'A Life That Is More Real Than Life'

My nephew and I were talking about our teenage efforts to be “cool,” wearing irony like Kevlar, feigning sophistication while avoiding the shock of experience. Some of us outgrow it and become open to life’s surprises. Others carry the stance latently for life, like the Epstein-Barr virus. Others never grow up. We knew a guy like this. He could be simultaneously irritating and loveable, and we agreed we felt sorry for what he was missing. 

I suspect the name “Wright Morris” is unfamiliar to most readers. The Nebraska native was the author of more than thirty books and he won the National Book Award in 1956 for his novel The Field of Vision. When I was young and first exploring American literature, he was ranked among the leading writers of the day. He was a gifted photographer and published three books that interestingly combined photos and prose. As a writer of fiction, Morris was an experimentalist of sorts but not in the contemporary sense of being boring and nonsensical. His subject was always human beings and he never adopted the pseudo-sophistication described above.

 

Morris was interviewed in the Winter 1975 issue of The Great Lakes Review. He dismisses Susan Sontag and her haughty "sophistication" and says:  

 

“[T]he price one pays for this type of sophistication is simply that everything becomes dull. The salt loses its savor. Things are not infinitely complicated to people who instantly recognize them as dull! There are many people like this. We call it decadence in other cultures, and this is the price we all pay if we want to become ultra-sophisticated.”

 

The attitude Morris describes can be fatal for a writer. Novelists in particular use human beings as their raw material, second only to words in importance.

 

“Stand on a street in New York, in the upper fifties, sixties. Watch the people who have been shaped by sophistication, by life that is a reflection, of a reflection, of a reflection. The more sophisticated we are, the less substantial our experience. Joseph saw this when he went to Egypt: young Americans see this when they go to New York. It appealed to Joseph, and it appeals to us. Refinement of sensation, stylization of gesture, resulting in blank, highly civilized faces, and blank, lowly civilized feelings, and blank, uncivilized relationships. We're not designed for such heights. It's one of our destructive fantasies. No cycle in human culture is more tiresome than the one that begins with life, like the egg of a seabird, which we crack, probe and process into numberless omelets and rare dishes, only to find that they lose savor, as we lose our appetite.”

 

Morris was born on this date, January 6, in 1910 and died in 1998 at age eighty-eight. He is another writer I would like to see discovered by curious readers. In The Territory Ahead, his 1958 collection of essays on American writers, with a title lifted from Huck Finn, Morris writes:

 

 “Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day, whether it leads us into the past or the future, has the curious property of not seeming real enough. We have a need, however illusive, for a life that is more real than life. It lies in the imagination. Fiction would seem to be the way it is processed into reality. If this were not so we should have little excuse for art. Life, raw life, would be more than satisfactory in itself. But it seems to be the nature of man to transform—himself, if possible, and then the world around him—and the technique of this transformation is what we call art.”