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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 cliché—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."