Remembrance of Cranks Past

By Robert Wernick

FIRE SERMON by Wright Morris. 155 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

Twenty-nine years and twenty-odd books ago, Wright Morris brought out of Nebraska a troop of crabbed characters, blown a little lopsided by those howling winds of the Great Plains. Ever since, he has been putting them through literary paces that have justifiably made him the most admired of America's little-read novelists.

All Morris' characters now seem to coalesce in the splendid single person of a wiry old coot named Floyd Warner. He is the hero of the author's latest novel, a terse, bright fable with all the Morris trademarks--the oblique wit, the offhand revelation, the unfailing eye for what Wallace Stevens called "the real that wrenches, the quick that's wry." Stubbornly out of touch with this or any other time, living in exile in a California trailer court, Floyd has got up to the age of 82 on a diet of hard-fried eggs and potatoes, not to mention sheer spite against the couple (still in their 60s and owning three cats) who are waiting for him to die so they can move into his trailer. Floyd's working life consists of standing at the corner by the school with STOP stenciled on the back of his jacket and GO on the front of his plastic helmet. At other times he walks with his 11-year-old great-nephew, an orphan he never asked for, to the post office to tell the man in charge there how things should be run.

The boy--he is named Kermit but called "boy"--has the unsparing, unsentimental eye of his age. He can see that Uncle Floyd, though he may sometimes look like a picturesque cowhand from a TV serial and sometimes (with that yellow helmet) like a bug, is really a stupid, selfish, kindly old man. When a telegram announces the death of Aunt Viola in Nebraska, old man and boy take off in the trailer, precariously hitched to an ancient Maxwell. On their way to the home place by the Platte River, they pick up two oligosyllabic polycopulative young people named Stanley and Joy, and a dubious battle sets in between the hippies and old Uncle Floyd for the soul of the boy.

Bonfire and Buddha. The Morris prose style modulates effortlessly between a deadpan Mark Twainish narrative of bizarre situations--Tom Sawyer as Easy Rider--and a grave Hawthornesque moral allegory. In the end there is a great fire, and symbols shoot all over the big Nebraska sky. Hence the title of the book, which comes from the Buddha, courtesy of T.S. Eliot. The original Fire Sermon, preached 2,500 years ago, consigned all the physical nature of man--birth and passion and death--to flames. The one that forms the central panel of The Waste Land tries to burn away the sordid sterility of casual modern sex. Wright Morris' bonfire is more modest. What goes up in flames is the treasure and junk that three or four generations of stiff-backed people have squirreled away in an empty homestead--including various machines supplied with cranks that "would all do something if cranked, but few would crank."

At first that seems to be the nub of the sermon. The old machines don't crank, the old ways are as irrelevant as dead leaves; it is time to sweep them away and leave the world clean for a new generation like the boy Kermit who "brought so little to what he saw, he saw what was there."

As Morris presents it, however, the sermon is never as clear-cut as all that. The reader, after all, has only the nice young female hippie's word for it that the fire that consumed Aunt Viola's house also released the little boy from bondage to his ancestors. One does not need to be partisan--either way--about the Generation Gap to feel that freedom, even from this creaky past, may turn out to be worse than bondage. The boy is an amiable cipher. The hippies are more or less cheerfully conventional California creeps. Any future they can put together on their own is likely to be pallid and pulpy at best. The true life of the book is in the gristly old man, immersed in his gnarled and useless, but oddly beautiful past.

Robert Wernick

Not long ago, Wright Morris totted it all up and figured he had been writing for 36 years. Seven of his score of books are still in print. If they have never quite made him a living, they have earned him much critical praise, as well as a number of grants and prizes--including the 1956 National Book Award for The Field of Vision. Morris' settings range as far afield as Acapulco and the Aegean. His cast of characters runs into the hundreds, and has included such creations as a mailman who kills cats with a bow and arrow and a seedy Venetian barber who sells watercolors.

But all his books are peculiarly American, and many of them--well before the term Generation Gap became a cliche--touch upon the odd, jagged relationship of age and youth. In some ways, in fact, Morris' latest novel closes that long circle of concern. His first, My Uncle Dudley, published in 1942, was the story of a man and a boy traveling across the country.

Ambiguous Reserve. Morris left the Great Plains in 1920, when he was ten. He spent his boyhood--middle class and Irish--first in Omaha, then in "Little Sicily," a part of Chicago's gangster-haunted North Side. His mother died when he was born. His father was a railroad man given to minor business failures. Morris recalls him as a "Sherwood Anderson tragic figure--full of the froth of American dreams but hardly any of the facts."

In those prebusing days, Morris managed to get into a good Chicago high school simply by lying about his address. Eventually he worked his way to the West Coast for college (Pomona), but he dropped out to bum around Europe. "I began to invent the Midwest out of my experience," says Morris, explaining his early writing. "Then I began to elaborate on it. The slowness of time, the quality of life, the Protestant background."

His work is most often compared with Sherwood Anderson's, a judgment that reflects only on small segments of Morris' creative and intellectual effort. Morris is not displeased with the comparison, however. "There are things in Anderson which touch me deeply. Reading him, I sometimes think I was plagiarized before I was born."

He is not bitter either about his relative lack of recognition. Partly, he believes, the trouble is that the Midwestern novelist, unlike the Southern or the urban novelist, cannot count on any factional audience. "Today," he adds, "except for those writers who have a wide response, there is no longer a predictable public for the novel. The old audience is fragmented. Even though much of the current writing is brilliant, it lacks a coherent response."

Wright Morris has been married twice but has no children. At 61, he is as spare as his prose. A gentle-looking, though apparently rough-hewn character, he wears a subdued lion's mane of silver-white hair. For years he has made some of his living at part-time jobs, especially teaching. He is currently at Princeton for a year. During the past decade he has been a creative-writing instructor at troubled San Francisco State, an excellent place to get acquainted with the kind of radical young whom he treats in Fire Sermon with ambiguous reserve.

Morris admits he does not care for what he calls "their tribalism," but he likes the young. "I'm truly amazed," he says, "at how little the American character has changed. In my teaching I find absolutely no distinction between the young students I deal with and myself at their age. They are as idealistic, naive, soft and hard, and as appealing as--I hope--I was."

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