The American Century: Literature since 1945 575Significantly, these books on old Western themes came after McMurtry himself
called for writers in his home state of Texas “to turn from the antique myths of the
rural past and to seek plots and characters and literary inspiration in modern
Texas’s urban, industrial present.” Which suggests how equivocal writers of the
West can be about the myths enshrined in its past – or, more positively, with what
care and self-consciousness they tend to maneuver their way between Western myth
and Western reality.
A novelist who negotiated his way with particular subtlety between past and
present, the legends and facts, in this case of the Midwest, is Wright Morris
(1910–1998). Born in Nebraska, his acutely crafted fiction observes characters often
in oblique fashion as they try to come to terms with others, with the past of their
family and community and with the history and pastoral legends informing the
places where they live. Morris said that his aim in many of his books was “to salvage
what I considered threatened, and to hold fast what was vanishing.” He pursued this
aim in novels that, typically, concentrate on one situation diversely affecting the
people involved in it (My Uncle Dudley (1942), The Field of Vision (1956), Ceremony
in Lone Tree (1960)), or shows characters searching for a meaningful life (The Ways
of Love (1952)) or loving relationships (The Huge Season (1960)). He also did so in
books like The Home Place (1948) that combine sharp but sensitive verbal and visual
description. In The Home Place, for instance, a tender account of conflict between
generations, and the vanishing of a more considered and authorized way of life, is
contained not only in the story of a writer and his family returning to their home
town in Nebraska. It is there also in the photographs of landscape, people, and
objects that have acquired dignity from the people who have used them – all of
which, taken by Morris himself, intersperse the text and suggest how close the story
is to the autobiographical bone. Typically, Morris avoids prolonged dialogue and
moments of intense action in his novels. His characters are marked by their refusal
to speak at length: “Cora ... welcomed silence,” we are told of one leading figure at
the beginning of Plain Song (1980). Moments of conventional crisis are less cru-
cial to them than moments of gradual illumination, quiet, or even mute
understanding – which are usually the gifts of maturity. “Already,” we learn of a
character in Fire Sermon (1971), “he was old enough to gaze in wonder at life.” What
they achieve, if they are lucky, is immersion in the land, and the habits and rituals it
instills. So, for one of the protagonists in Plain Song, “voices, bird calls, a movement
of the leaves, the first hint of coolness of the air” become “not separately observed
sensations but commingled parts of her own nature.” “Her soul,” the reader is told,
“experienced a sense of liberation in its loss of self.” The older characters in Morris’s
work, those of an earlier generation, are likelier to be luckier in this way. For the
younger, the later generations – when, say, they return to the “home folks” – there is
the feeling, simply, of being “withdrawn from the scene,” as if they were looking at it
“through a window, or within the frame of a painting.” “Abstinence, frugality, and
independence – the home-grown, made-on-the-farm trinity,” reflects the writer,
the protagonist in The Home Place. “Not the land of plenty, the old age pension, or
the full dinner pail. Independence, not abundance, is the heart of ... America” – orGGray_c05.indd 575ray_c 05 .indd 575 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM