BOOKS BY WRIGHT MORRIS IN BISON BOOK EDITIONS
The Home Place (BB 386)
The World in the Attic (BB 528)
The Works of Love (BB 558)
Man and Boy (BB 575)
The Field of Vision (BB 577)
Ceremony in Lone Tree (BB 560)
(In preparation)
My Uncle Dudley (BB 589)
The Deep Sleep (BB 586)
The Man Who Was There (BB 598)
Copyright 1954 by Wright Morris
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 54—10858
International Standard Book Number 0-8032-5805-4
International Standard Book Number 978-1-4962-0258-1 mobi.
The Bison Book edition is reproduced from the first (1954) edition, published by the Viking Press, by arrangement with the author.
FOR
HENRY ALLEN MOE
RAINMAKER
TO MANY HUGE SEASONS
Those who lay naked in the huge season arise all
together and cry
that this world is mad!
For us who were there, we forced on the frontiers exceptional accidents, and pushing ourselves in our actions to the end of our strength, our joy amongst you was a very great joy….
—St. John Perse: Anabasis
THE CAPTIVITY: I
They tell me that my father, a Latin teacher, would place his silver watch, with the Phi Beta key dangling, on the right-hand corner of the desk in his Vergil class. When he was not lecturing, the students would hear the loud tick. The watch had been given to him by his father when he became a Cum Laude Latin scholar, and the inscription Incipit Vita Nova had been engraved on the back. A very punctual man, my father wound the watch when he heard the first bell ring in the morning, then he would place it, with the fob dangling, on the corner of his desk. Time, for my father, seemed to be contained in the watch. It did not skip a beat, fly away, or merely vanish, as it does for me. So long as he remembered to wind the watch Time would not run out. There was no indication that he found his subject a dead or dying language, or the times, for a man of his temperament, out of joint. He died the winter of the flu epidemic during the First World War.
I never heard my father lecture, but I have his silver watch here in my pocket, still keeping very good time. It is his watch, but my own Phi Beta key now dangles from it. I have the habit of looking at the watch without seeing the time. I teach, among other things, my father’s subject, but it seems to me the times are out of joint, and that the language is not merely dying, but dead. It was still alive—or I was more alive—when my father, for cultural reasons, spoke it at the table more than thirty years ago. The dining room was always dark, even in the morning, and the Latin my father passed to me with the toast seemed as good a language to start the day with as anything else. Our house was on Byron Street, in Chicago, just a five-minute walk, as my father timed it, from his room on the third floor of the Lakewood High School. That part of Chicago, even today, might be in Terre Haute, Des Moines, or Ann Arbor, or any other town with a fairly large residential area. It is why I feel at home, as we say, in any town where the houses have lawns and front porches, and something of a stranger where the living has moved around to the back.
We had a brown frame house, more or less like the neighbors’, with the gable at the front and the back, the front porch open, but the porch at the rear closed in with screens. A piece of sagging wire went around the small patch of grass at the front. In the spring my father would put in a little grass, then tie strips of rag, like ribbons, to the wire, so the neighbors’ kids would not trip on it in the dark. A broad flight of steps led up to the porch, where my mother, between supper and the dishes, would sit in the swing behind the wire baskets of fern. She would sit there because her kitchen apron was still on. My father would sit on the fourth step from the bottom, sprinkling the grass. The best stand of grass was there near the steps, where the water dripped from the leaky nozzle, and the third step from the bottom had warped so badly it had worked loose. It was one of the things my father always intended to fix. My mother had warned him that some member of the family was sure to break his neck. But my father died in bed of the flu, and my mother, for reasons of her own, preferred to go up and down the rickety stairs at the back of the house. I lived in it long enough to go off to college, and some years later the house was sold. The loose step was still there when I walked past the house eight or nine years ago.
My room was at the front of the house, under the gable, where the ceiling sloped down over my bed and the window at the foot of the bed opened out on the roof of the porch. The street light came through that window, and in the spring and summer the sounds of the street. A block to the west, then a block north, the Ashland Avenue cars reached the end of their run, and when the trolley was switched there would be a white flash, like lightning, on the sky. Both summer and winter this white flash would light up my room. Where the ceiling sloped down over my head I once wrote out the declensions of my Latin verbs, and on the warm summer nights I would lie there on my back, memorizing them. I would wait for the flash of the trolley wire to check on what I had learned. Later I began to pin up certain pictures—Bebe Daniels was there at one time, beside Sappho—and, for all I know, a picture of Charles Lindbergh may still be there. It showed him in the cockpit of the Spirit of St. Louis, about to take off. It was a picture you have probably seen, but I doubt if you ever saw, or heard of, Charles Lawrence, the tennis player. I took his picture down when we moved, and I still have it somewhere.
Lawrence was quite a tennis player at one time and the picture I have, although it is faded, gives you some idea of his tennis form. His back is to the camera, and he is about to serve the ball. You can see the ball at the top left corner, you can even read the label stamped on it. All the other details in the picture tend to be a little blurred: the wire screen at the back, the row of white bleacher faces with deep eye shadows so that they look like pansies, and the racket itself a blurred current of air approaching the ball. It is not, by modern standards, a good photograph. They do that sort of thing much better these days. They don’t play better tennis, however, and the one thing that comes out clear in the print, blurred though it is, is the way the player goes after the ball. You can see that he takes the game seriously. I do not mean that he takes it professionally. A stranger to the game might feel that this was not the picture of a game at all, or that the blurred figure was preparing to strike nothing more than a ball. That kind of seriousness—I almost said deadly seriousness—has gone out of it. On the other hand, the stranger might not notice it at all. It might strike him as not much more than a poor photograph. If you think that great champions are made by eating Wheaties, that great songs can be written on commission, you will be inclined to feel that I am reading something into this photograph. In that sense you will be right, as I am reading into it most of my life.
My mother believed that true breeding, like crime, would sooner or later appear on the surface, but she was thinking of the Nielsons, the Vikings whose course she had charted for nine generations, across continents and oceans, to a grand anticlimax in me. Of my father’s country breeding she did not speak. A self-made scholar, born in South Dakota long before true breeding or my mother got there, my father could give me little, she believed, beyond parenthood. His Greek translations rather than his Irish background appealed to her. At Oberlin, happily, he met my mother, which assured me the breeding I might have lacked, and an eye on the future as well as the past. From Oberlin my father went to Colton in California, where he was known as something of a classics scholar, but my mother didn’t think there was much of a future for the classics in the West. They came back to Chicago, and While they waited for an opening that would open int
o the future, the war came along, and near the end of the war, the flu.
I was not quite nine years old when my father died. As I had been when he lived, I was sent to bed early, where I studied the verbs I had written on the ceiling, with the understanding that one day I would take my father’s place. Lying there on the bed, summer and winter, I relied on my ears more than my eyes, and put great store in all the neighborhood noises. On summer afternoons I could hear the crowd roar over at Wrigley Field. Later I would read that Hack Wilson had hit a home run. In the winter I could hear the boom and the crack of the ice on the lake. Many years later, in France, where I should have been homesick, I felt more or less at home because the grass below my window was cut with a mower that had been made in South Bend. I knew the sound, even though it was cutting French grass.
Our house was like a tunnel in some respects, the daylight glowing at the front and back, but the blinds drawn at the dark windows on both sides. Our neighbors, in my mother’s opinion, were too neighborly. In the summer, when these windows were open, we could smell what the Millers were cooking, and hear how well they liked it when they sat down to eat. After the meal the Miller boy would run the player rolls through the piano backwards, or the Miller girl, Arlene, would turn up the radio so she could hear Guy Lombardo while she sat out in front of the house with her date. He was, as I remember, almost a young man, with cuts on his face to indicate he was shaving, and a Scripps-Booth roadster with Northwestern pennants on the windshield. I saw only his face, for he never got out of the car. I remember the ah-oooga of his horn, and the glow, after it was dark, of the red and green gems in the nickel-plated dashboard light. Later he took her to dances when Wayne King was over at the Aragon. Arlene was nearsighted without her glasses and thought she was dancing under the stars—the boy didn’t tell her that the clouds were on the ceiling rather than the sky. But that is not so unusual. He might not have noticed it himself.
I didn’t have the time for girls, but I took in a movie on Saturday night. They were featuring some pretty good bands, at the time, on the stage. The band leader acted as a sort of master of ceremonies. I usually went early, if the show was in the Loop; it gave me time to maneuver from a seat at the back to one nearer the front. During the intermission the organ played, rising out of the pit like a car for a grease job, and we all sang the songs the projector flashed on the screen. There often was a glowworm hopping from word to word. I didn’t sing, not having much of a voice, but after the show I would walk along the river, where the Wrigley Tower was reflected in the water, and hum to myself the tunes I particularly liked. “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight” was one of my favorites. I first heard “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” at the State, where they had a fiddle player no bigger than his bass fiddle, and he could hardly be seen until he started thumping it.
My mother was usually out on the porch when I got home. We had a radio of our own, but the dry-cell batteries were usually dead, so my mother would listen to whatever was on the Miller set. The Millers usually watered their lawn in the evening, when the water pressure was up, and Mr. Miller liked to water the lower limbs of the trees. Long after he had stopped, the leaves dripped water on the walk. The night would be quiet, with the groan gone from the hydrant, except when the motorman, over on Ashland, walked through his car, turning over the seats for the trip back. We could hear the Miller dog skid on the kitchen linoleum. Mr. Miller usually commented that now he had sprinkled it would probably rain, and Mrs. Miller would ask him to bring in the chair cushions from the porch. When it was finally quiet my mother would offer me a penny for my thoughts.
At the end of the war, to make a little money, my mother decided to take in a roomer, a Mrs. Josephare who taught History of Art, Spanish, and French. We spoke nothing but Spanish and French at our meals. One summer Mrs. Josephare went to Seville, but as she was going just for the summer she left her books and box of wide-brimmed hats in my father’s room. She never came back, and we never heard from her. My mother kept the box of hats in the attic; Mrs. Josephare, who was very frugal, had often complained, in both Spanish and French, about the things Americans threw away.
I was brought up with the understanding that I would go to Oberlin, like my parents, and I had my father’s Oberlin pennants on the walls of my room. I spent a weekend on the campus to pick up impressions, and I was impressed. But my mother, in order to avoid putting all my educational eggs in one basket, also applied for a scholarship in California, where my father had taught. Thanks to his reputation, I received a four-year scholarship. That was two years better than the Oberlin offer, and my mother reasoned that the thing for me to do was start at Colton and finish at Oberlin. That way my education would be accounted for. The turning point in my life, if it had one, lay in the decision to go to Colton first, for it was there I met Charles Lawrence, the tennis player. He was there because one member of his family had endowed the school. The endowment would help fill certain unusual gaps in his scholarship. We were both freshmen, and we shared a suite of rooms with two other freshmen, Jesse Proctor and Ed Lundgren, so that Lawrence had his captive public right from the start. I remember thinking, at the time, that we were like the iron filings in the field of a magnet that Lundgren liked to play with at his desk. But that was not it. Or rather, it was more than that. All that does is give a name to the magnet—it doesn’t explain the lines of force, or why it was that Lawrence, who was the magnet, became a captive himself. So there we were, the four of us, in a strange captivity.
PETER FOLEY: 1
Early morning, the 5th of May, 1952. The man in the bed, a professor named Foley, lay listening to the mournful cawing of the crows. They cruised directly overhead, or hovered like vultures in the tulip trees. Cawing at the house, the cat in the house, and the man in the bed. Blackbirds hammered at the seedpods in the gutters, starlings strutted in the grass beneath his window, and on the chicken wire spread across the top of the chimney a robin built her nest. Now and then a rain of soot or a sprinkling of twigs, pipe cleaners, and string dropped down the chimney, spattering the yellow pages of a manuscript lying in the fireplace. Thrown there to be burned by the author himself, the man in the bed.
The manuscript was entitled “The Strange Captivity.” The author had worked at the book, off and on, for fifteen years. He knew everything about it, that is, but how to finish it. Now he knew that, but the knowledge had come too late. You couldn’t call a man a captive who had lost all interest in his escape.
The morning of the day before, the 4th of May, the professor had got up to let out his cat and found the Sunday paper lying on the porch. The name of Mrs. Hermann Schurz, his landlady, was scrawled across the top left corner. Foley picked the paper up, glanced at the headlines. They were not happy. He returned the paper to the porch. Then he stooped over, propped on his knees, to examine a head that looked familiar—the back of the head, for that was all that showed in the photograph. This man sat at a table, facing the microphones, and the questioner faced him and the cameras. Beneath the picture the caption read:
UNMASKS VOICE OF AMERICA
“Well, I’ll be goddamned!” Foley said aloud, as if unmasked himself. He knew the head of this man, even without the face. He knew the unmasked voice as well as he knew his own. Better, perhaps. Eyes closed, he heard this voice say, “There’s a bull in this story, Foley. But he’s a nice bull. He don’t shit in the bullring.”
There was always a bull in one of Proctor’s stories, and this one, Foley felt, would be no exception. He grinned. With good-humored admiration he wagged his head. Then he stooped over, smiling, to read the article.
The last-named witness, J. Lasky Proctor, created a stir at the proceedings with the frankness with which he collaborated with the senators. Asked if he had once been a member of the Party he replied, Well, in a sense—
What did he mean, “in a sense”?
Back at that time, he replied, he had been a very good American. A good American had to believe in something good. The Part
y had been it. It had been something in which a man could believe.
Did he mean to say he was no longer a good American?
If he was, he answered, he wouldn’t be here.
In Russia, perhaps?
No, just in jail, he had replied.
And everybody had laughed. Foley also laughed, thinking to himself how much it sounded like Proctor, and how little, in more than twenty years, he seemed to have changed. It was twelve years since Foley had spoken to him; in the city—in New York, that is—bending over one of the toothbrush bowls in the lavatory of the YMCA’s Sloane House, the grape-colored bruise still showing on the foot where he had shot himself.
“I’ll be goddamned!” Foley repeated and, still smiling, entered the house. He walked to where the percolator rocked on the stove, poured himself a cup of coffee but did not drink it. Unsmiling, he stood at the window, smoking cigarettes. The morning breeze was strong with the scent of the rotting ginko pods. He faced it, he hardly remarked it, for the mist was rising from the pond, revealing what Mrs. Hermann Schurz described as a sight for sore eyes. A small flock, a covey of water birds, unidentified. Ducks of some kind, looking like freshly painted decoys. A sight that Mrs. Schurz loved, but she never ceased fearing for their lives. They were innocent ducks, like Peter Foley, J. Lasky Proctor, and other birds of that type. Sitting ducks, seemingly unaware of the facts of life. The patriotic marksmen of the penny arcade would soon pop them off. And that book, that thing Foley was writing, what was it but the “Sitting Duck Hunter’s Manual”—a guide to the look, the diet, and the habitat of all sitting ducks? Dead ducks as of Sunday, the 4th of May, 1952.
Foley had walked down the hall to his study, scooped the pile of yellow sheets from the canned-milk carton, Crossed the room to the fireplace, and thrown them into the grate. He had stooped to scratch a match on the hearth, but in the quiet, his head in the fireplace, he could hear the birds nesting at the top of the chimney. The match had burned down, and he had gone back to bed.
The Huge Season Page 1