Home Place

by Wright Morris

  Copyright 1948 by Wright Morris

  Reprinted by arrangement with Josephine Morris.

  Introduction © 1999 by the University of Nebraska Press

  All rights reserved

  First Bison Books printing: 1999

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Wright, 1910–

  The home place / by Wright Morris; introduction to the Bison Books edition

  by John Hollander,

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8252-0 (paper: alk. paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8396-1 (electronic: e-pub)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-8032-8397-8 (electronic: mobi)

  I. Title.

  PS3525.07475H66 1999

  813’.52—dc21

  99-19703 CIP

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  FOR

  CLARENCE MILLARD FINFROCK

  CONTENTS

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Acknowledgments

  The Home Place

  Note on Photographs

  Back Cover

  INTRODUCTION

  John Hollander

  Wright Morris was a major American novelist whose concerns for the Midwest of his native Nebraska were fulfilled in a wonderful series of books, from My Uncle Dudley in 1941 through such fine novels as The Field of Vision, Ceremony in Lone Tree, The Huge Season, One Day, and others. They manifested what only a powerful imagination could achieve: making a mere geographical middle into a representational center, a point within which lay implicit the concentric circles of significance that forever open up, as Emerson perceived, for the active consciousness. Morris’s death this past spring was a major loss to our literary culture.

  My own acquaintance with Morris began in 1952 when my fellow student at Columbia, Richard Howard, read aloud to me from The Works of Love, which, with Man and Boy, he pressed upon me despite my lingering undergraduate callow skepticism. I was immediately taken with Morris and remained an avid reader thereafter, but I came very late indeed to his remarkable book called The Home Place. I would learn only decades—and many novels—later how much photography had meant to Morris from the beginning. From the mid-thirties on, he produced a considerable body of photographic work. On a long drive from California to Cape Cod in 1938, he encountered, as he said later, “the American landscape crowded with ruins I wanted to salvage. The depression created a world of objects toward which I felt affectionate and possessive.” Some of his photographs were exhibited in and purchased by the Museum of Modern Art as early as 1941, and his first publication was an early form of his remarkable and problematic “photo-text,” as some call it, The Inhabitants (published in final form in 1946). It is a volume of photographs of the exteriors of small buildings, many abandoned, all momentarily unoccupied by human presences, the “inhabitants”—in Thoreau’s words quoted as the book’s epigraph—“whose shells they are.” These are accompanied by two sorts of texts, in two different typefaces: a sans serif caption, running from a phrase to several lines in length, in a voice of personal reminiscence, and below it a fragment of fictional vignette. In neither case is there a direct, literal illustrative relation of text and picture, but the book’s ongoing trope of habitation concerns the ghosts of charactcr that mark these vacated places. As the single sans serif text facing the opening image reflects:“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 occupied.”

  In 1946 Morris got a Guggenheim Fellowship and bought a 4 × 5 view camera to replace his older 3¼ × ¼. In early May of 1947 he went back to a family farm near Norfolk, Nebraska, where his Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara lived, and took a great many photographs, as well as several of the nearby house of a recently deceased relative named Ed. These photographs would eventually form the warp of the fabric of The Home Place. At the time he was taking them, he hadn’t imagined that from them a narrative fiction might emerge. But in a funny way, a text lay behind them all. Just a few weeks before, he later wrote, he had come upon what he called “a statement that gave me, I felt, unlimited access”—not only access to the interior of his aunt’s house (this came through her permission) but, we must suppose from the statement, access of another sort entirely.1 The passage in question speaks of his being “subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved by a report of the matter” (xi).

  That “participant at once so interested and so detached” could be construed, of course, as the camera. But Morris clearly also had a novelistic matter in mind, a particularly Jamesian matter in fact. When he began to plan a narrative to embrace the images—the weft of the fabric—he wanted to deal with “the sentiments and conflicts of a late-returning native.” The passage I have just quoted from Henry James’s The American Scene ended up as the epigraph of Morris’s book. And a continued meditation on Jamesian images and narrative agendas pervades the writing of Morris’s story, which he put together only after he had assembled an ordered array of glossy prints selected from the pictures he had taken.

  Narrative through images alone was not unfamiliar in the 1930s. The radical artist and illustrator Lynd Ward, for example, had produced a number of “novels in woodcuts,” as he called them, including God’s Man (1929) and Madman’s Drum (1930). Also published in the 1930s were books composed of photographs from the files of the Farm Security Administration with expository texts by such writers as Sherwood Anderson or verse by Archibald Macleish, as well as particular collaborations (Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell, for example). It was perhaps the appearance of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that celebrated joint work of Walker Evans and James Agee, in 1941—the year before Morris’s My Uncle Dudley was published—that proved most important for The Home Place (1948).

  But The Home Place differs from both these and The Inhabitants in being an almost unique sort of novel, one with—rather than “in”—photographs, each accompanying a page of text. The design deliberately called for a small format, with the images carefully cropped and almost entirely bled. There is something immediately enigmatic about its genre and about the relation of word and image in it. The enigma is acknowledged by the very opening, which offers a direct invitation to the reader to consider the meaning of objects in pictures. As will be seen, the initial photograph, on the left-hand page, faces the story’s beginning: “‘What’s the old man doing?’ I said, and I looked down the trail, beyond the ragged box elder, where the old man stood in the door of the barn, fooling with an inner tube. In town I used to take the old man’s hand and lead him across the tracks where horses and men, little girls, and sometimes little boys were killed. Why was that? They didn’t stop, look and listen. We did” (1).

  That very first question—“What’s the old man doing?”—might be the one posed by readers themselves. The second sentence continues the narrative set up by the words “and I looked”: it makes it plain that the neutral “the old man” refers not only to that (unidentified) old man in the photograph but to a member of the narrator’s family. We might note, too, that the book’s readers in the late 1940s could all have been expected immediately to catch the allusion to what was in those days the ubiquitous railroad-crossing sign, a diagonal cross with the words STOP LOOK LISTEN prominently displayed. By way of further introduction, I should like to explore for a bit the wh
ole book’s extremely original way of presenting word and image in a mode that appears to mix ecphrasis—the representation of a visual image in language—with illustration, which is its inverse.

  The story records a day during a visit of return, by a man named Muncy with his urban “wife and snotty kids,” to a family farm in Nebraska. It is told from the point of view of a man who doesn’t see too well, visiting his aunt who has a glass eye, bringing his camera that has a glass eye. (The text itself confirms this relation: “It’s been a long time since we seen you—” Clara said. She rocked, her right eye covered, and looked at me. I did not look at her with my camera eye” [43]). So that the opening, “What’s the old man doing?” becomes, in the unfolding of the narrative, a simple bit of verismo: Muncy literally can’t quite make out what is actually happening, although the camera’s sharply focused eye, and that of the reader, immediately can.

  The whole narrative text is full of dialogue and persons, but the photographic images are, like most of Wright Morris’s pictures, of things and regions of places. The only living person seen in the photographs is his uncle—the old man in the first image—shown three times in subsequent photographs but with a face that is never visible. And the only faces acknowledged by the camera in this book are inscribed in objects—in older photographs repictured in situ. Indeed, all the images are of objects, invoked by the facing page of text in a wonderful variety of ways, from precise reference—so that the image could be construed as one sort of “illustration”—to a more general allusion.

  Most of the images are vertically aligned on the page, only sixteen out of almost ninety being horizontal, even as they mostly, but not entirely, bleed off the page. In only one instance does the format, by placing a horizontal image across two facing pages, allow text to appear underneath a picture. This may allude somehow to the sort of captioning function of the texts in The Inhabitants. But here it is a unique case, an image that consists of an old family photograph of thirteen people posed outside a house, nailed by Morris to the exterior, shingled wall of a house and rephotographed there, even though, in the story, the photograph is discussed, and its subjects identified, indoors, and the photograph is framed. The caption, moreover, glances characteristically at visual contingency and at how problematic memorializing is:

  “Lord—It’s fadin’!” the old man said.

  “You wearin’ your glasses?” Clara said, and covered her eye to look at him.(154)

  To consider the relation of text and photograph throughout the book, one might start with the image of the horseshoes. It faces a page of dialogue—a few old men talking (80). There is no reference to horseshoes in the text, but (a) this is the sort of conversation that might accompany this innocent and by now pastoralized leisure activity, and (b) the minute particulars of this image—the horseshoes themselves—are synecdoches of their throwers. The men were of about equal skill and had presumably played a good bit together; the horseshoes are all touching (even as the image is touching or moving for the viewer) and as if in casual but assured conversation. But it will be seen that this is in no simple way a narrative illustration: nobody has thrown a horseshoe, nor mentioned one, in the story. Whether the image is read as “illustration,” or the text as ecphrastic of the image, the mode of adducing and glossing is profoundly oblique.

  Another striking image is that of the plow, again literally mentioned in text, although in passing, in a momentary simile. Remembering how the old man, albeit with great courtesy, refused the gift of a brier pipe and an expensive tin of tobacco, the narrator remarks: “No, you couldn’t tell them, show them, or give them anything. They were like the single plow below my window—when the old man had a piece of plowing to do he hitched up his team of mares, and that was what he used. A foot deep and a yard wide, stopping at the end of the furrow to sit on the crossbar and spit on the white grubs at his feet” (25). But this particular photograph shows the long-cast shadow indicating the end of the day and thus that the plow—and the horse that pulls it and the man that follows and guides it—are all at rest. This is a matter and a time of day not literally invoked in the text at all. But the few lines of text immediately following on the mention of the plow suggest a figurative connection with the photographic image of the plow and what is almost its monumental or commemorative quality:

  “It’s men like him,” Ivy had said, “who made this goddam dust bowl.”

  True enough—but it was men like him who were still around when the dust blew away. (25)

  One particular photograph is all of texts. A scrapbook page shows a commonplace book of newspaper clippings, including the particular one referred to, commented on, and read aloud from in the story. It can be seen that among the clippings there are some newspaper verse, some dialect-humor on the lower right, and next to it some instructions for sending amorous messages encoded in the way a postage stamp is placed on an envelope. Next to that is the text called “A Parody,” an example of a vanishing genre in which rhymed, jingly verse was printed as prose in newspapers, as much for the exigencies of space-saving in a column of type as for the minor pleasure of a readerly recovery of the verse from its linear dislocation. The “parody” in question is of the widely known verses of Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832–1911), entitled “Rock Me to Sleep” and beginning,

  Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight

  Make me a child again, just for tonight

  In the text of the story, the jingle is quoted not in the restored verse format but with the line breaks identical to those in the columnar typesetting:

  Backward, turn backward, oh,

  Time, in your flight, and give us a

  maiden dressed proper and right.

  We are so weary of switches and

  rats, Billie Burke clusters and peach

  basket hats (138)

  It is hereby indicated that this is the way Muncy half-mockingly reads the newspaper clipping aloud; it also frames a subtle joke—central for the book generally—about the verbal and the visual and their various versions of each other.

  The notion of pattern in its relation to surface and depth, which will recur in the book, is introduced by the image of the chair. Facing it is a paragraph that begins: “To sit on a straight-backed chair I have to lean forward, on my knees, and look at my hands or something on the floor. On the floor was a piece of worn linoleum. The center of the pattern had been worn off, and Clara had daubed on one of her own. Brown and green dabs of the brush. Uneven rows”(41). Farther down the page the narrator continues:“I looked at the floor again and decided that the pattern was part of the floor. It was not decoration. That was why she had daubed one on again” (41). This gets picked up again in the text on the following page, following the brief observation quoted earlier, in which the narrator says, “I did not look at her with my camera eye.” It continues: “I looked at the floor and the hole she had worn in the patch of linoleum, and the hole beneath the patch, by rocking and dragging her heel. Every time she rocked forward, the right heel dragged back” (43). A temporal dimension is added here, in a modern revision of the old Renaissance conceit of Veritas filia temporis—“truth is the daughter of time”—that makes it problematic: marked by the pendulum-clock motion of the rocking chair, time effaces pattern and deconstructs surface design.

  This central issue returns with a notion adapted from an important Henry James story called “The Figure in the Carpet,” where it refers to a secret but general interpretive key to a novelist’s oeuvre. Morris refigures it throughout The Home Place, moving from an image of the pattern on linoleum (and, perhaps more deeply, “in” a carpet) to the later patterns of the traces that human activities themselves impose on, or engrave into, these established ones—moving from a question of the meaning of stories to one of the meaning of lives. This emerges in a most crucial passage in the book (almost “illustrated” by the photograph of a tattered jacket, sweater, and cap hanging in a row from hooks against a white wall).

  What is it that
strikes you about a vacant house? I suppose it has something to do with the fact that any house that’s been lived in, any room that’s been slept in, is not vacant any more. From that point on it’s forever occupied…. with the people gone, you know the place is inhabited. There’s something in the rooms, in the air, that raising the windows won’t let out, and something in the yard that you can’t rake out of the grass. The closets are full of clothes you can’t air out. There’s a pattern on the walls, where the calendar’s hung, and the tipped square of a missing picture is a lidded eye on something private, something better not seen. There’s a path worn into the carpet, between the bed and the door, the stove and the table, and where the heel drags, the carpet is gone, worn into the floor. The pattern doesn’t come with the house, nor the blueprints with the rug. The figure in the carpet is what you have when the people have lived there, died there, and when evicted, refused to leave the house. (132)

  This speaks at once to what a camera would notice in recording tokens of absence and what a novelist’s writing would “notice” in its way of mutually confronting fact and fiction, literal and metaphoric constructions of reality (the fine sentence about the wall with the calendar and the “tipped square of a missing picture” is in some sense a sort of verbal photograph).

  The book’s closing paragraphs face its very last photographic image, that of the old man—again with his face averted—walking into a barn. We can’t help but read it not so much as an entrance but as an exiting. The text meditates upon transience and decay, but with a wonderful final turn on the metaphor of the pattern that speaks of surface and depth, and of the ghostly presence of traces of what had been life, in a splendidly conclusive way:

  Nothing happens to a man overnight but sometimes what has been happening for years, every day of his life, happens suddenly. You open a door, or maybe you close it, and the thing is done. It happens. That’s the important thing. I watched the old man in his nautical hat cross the yard like one of his harrows, the parts unhinged, the joints creaking under a mat of yellow grass. He stopped near the planter to suck on his pipe, tap the bowl on the seat. On the spring handle of the gear was a white cotton glove, with the fingers spread, thrust up in the air like the gloved hand of a traffic cop. The leather palm was gone, worn away, but the crabbed fingers were spread and the reinforced stitching, the bib pattern, was still there. (176)