Wright Morris (1910–1998)

While I grew up in the southern US, I have spent much of my life in the western states. I have met and grown to know well many people who grew up in this part of the country. Perhaps as a result, I have developed a real affection for stories of the West, everything from Steinbeck to Stegner to McMurtry and Haruf. Wright Morris has always been on my list, but this is the first I have read by him. I will say that there is nothing romanticized about Morris' take on pioneering of the West. Cora, the heroine, seems to be made from or made for the time and place, tough and she expects to work from pre-dawn to dark, but she also is always looking to improve life for herself and her family. Plains Song rings true for me in its depiction of Cora and of time and place.… (mer)

I picked this up recently at Too Many Books, in Roanoke, VA, a wonderful used book shop that also has some very pricey special volumes. This one wasn't expensive, but it was packaged in a plastic sleeve, suggesting there was something special about it, and that certainly proved to be the case.

It is an inspired combination of text and photographs (black & white) telling the story of a family's visit to the father's "home place", a farm where he spent summers as a child, and where his aged relatives, who he hasn't seen in nearly 30 years, still live. It takes place shortly after WWII, and for reasons that are not explained the visiting family is homeless, having left New York City with "no place to go". They contemplate moving into an empty house across the road from the home place. It is wrenching in its reality, its celebration of the stark beauty of ordinary, worn and tired objects and people; and it is full of dark humor, as when the two young children, totally out of their element, encounter fly paper for the first time, and become so totally entangled and stuck up that they must have their hair completely cut off, and their poor bald heads covered with straw hats before their mother sees them. This is fiction, but it feels like documentary, with each page of text faced with a photo. On the other hand, at times the poetry of this work took my breath away, largely because there is a "home place" in my life that in my youth was still about a half century behind the times, and some of my most vivid memories are rooted there. This quote from novel speaks very loudly to me: "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 supposed to cover what I feel about a cane-seated chair, and the faded bib...of an old man's overalls. 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, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I mean. That's too bad. For this character is beautiful...there's something about these man-tired things, something added, that is more than character."

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