The Works of Love by Wright Morris

First published: 1952

Type of plot: Regional romance

Time of work: From the 1880’s to the 1930’s

Locale: Nebraska, California, and Chicago

Principal Characters:

• Will Jennings Brady, the protagonist, a chicken farmer and egg entrepreneur
• Ethel Czerny Bassett, his first wife
• Will Brady, Jr., his adopted son
• Gertrude Long, his second wife
• T. P. Luckett, a booster who inspires Will to make something of himself

The Novel

Set for the most part in the desolate plains and dusty small towns of eastern Nebraska, The Works of Love traces the history of a naive man and his difficulties in feeling at home with his fellow-man.

Orphaned at an early age, Will Brady has no option but to take the world as he finds it. His lack of culture and education indicate that he has no means of understanding the world. He has, however, no inclination to understand it. He gets to know his limitations and frustrations as an intermittent series of pangs occasioned by nocturnal glimpses of the lights on railroad semaphores and by a desire for female companionship. His formative experiences of life and love are obtained in his sojourn in Calloway, Nebraska, where he works at the Merchant’s Hotel and on his nights off visits Opal Mason, a lonesome whore.

As a result of one of these visits, Will’s life becomes more complicated. Feeling that he should be married and having Opal reject him, he finds himself associated with one of her young colleagues, Mickey Ahearne. Nothing comes immediately of this association. Mickey is pregnant and already engaged; the second time Will sees her, she is leaving town with her fiance. The complication arises when Will receives, by rail, a picnic basket containing an infant and a note saying, “My name is Willy Brady.” Yet, strange as this event is, neither Will nor anyone else in Calloway thinks very much about it.

This episode establishes the manner in which all further incidents in the novel are perceived by the characters. Will is impressed by the way T. P. Luckett, a frequent guest at the Merchant’s Hotel, extols the virtues of Nebraska as a land of opportunity. He also falls for Luckett’s groundless and inflated estimation of Will’s acumen. As a result, Will enters the egg business, supplying the products of his chicken farm to railroad companies. The business succeeds magnificently and without discernible effort. Not even a devastating outbreak of chicken disease seriously impedes its progress. Yet, despite its large profits, the only satisfaction it contains for Will is the release in him of a sympathetic, intuitive feeling for the shape, weight, and color of eggs.

Similarly, when the owner of the hotel dies, Will, without exactly knowing why, finds himself marrying the widow Ethel Bassett. The marriage is a disaster, socially and sexually, and ends with Ethel leaving him. This initiates Will into a hitherto unknown degree of loneliness. Yet this unfortunate turn of events does not stir Will to take decisive action. Rather, finding himself obliged to be in Omaha frequently on business, he drifts into a relationship with a cigar-counter clerk named Gertrude Long in a city hotel.

Thanks to his business success, Will is able to provide his new bride, Gertrude, with a lavish lifestyle. The culminating expression of his wealth is a mansion on the prairie. The house, however, is never properly habitable because of Will’s ignorance in such matters. Gertrude becomes an unhappy recluse in it, pining for the nickelodeons and busy streets of Omaha. Her longings are shared by Will, Jr., so that the domestic arrangement seems to consist of father and two children.

Eventually, Gertrude runs away. On her return, Will attempts to rehabilitate their relationship by means of a trip to California. In the course of the vacation, however, Will discovers that Gertrude is an alcoholic. The relationship ends, but Will is given help in enduring his loss by means of a quasi-religious experience. An anonymous, bearded old man tells him: “There’s no need for great lovers in heaven. Pity is the great lover, and the great lovers are all on earth.”

The novel’s concluding section seems to reveal the force of the old man’s statement. Here Will is shown living within the confines of his own pathos. By this time, he is in Chicago. He spends his days sampling his neighborhood’s social mix. In this “wasteland,” experience is given its ultimate enactment as a blend of worldly inconsequentiality and ineffable desire. As at the end of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, human voices awaken Will Brady and he drowns—in a sewage canal, dressed as Santa Claus.

The Characters

In effect, there is only one character in The Works of Love, the protagonist. Although Gertrude’s fate is of concern to him, and the future of Will, Jr., a source of worry, neither these two nor any other character establishes a fully developed reality independent of Will Brady’s within the confines of the novel. The minor characters with whom Will is intimately connected obviously have an impact on his circumstances and on the various directions of his life. Still, they do not succeed in altering his nature or in influencing the manner in which he perceives life. On the contrary, they seem to dull his vision of the world.

In contrast, Will frequently encounters characters in the course of supposedly predictable social transactions who illuminate or reinforce the nature of his own experience. The anonymous man in California who speaks to Will of love and pity is a case in point. Similarly, there is Mr. Lockwood, a former college track star and current sporting-goods salesman, who carries clippings of his former triumphs in his wallet. He is an illustration in passing of a man who, like Will, is condemned to the narrowness of his own nature. “Some writer of books might even say that these clippings poisoned him”—just as the author of The Works of Love implies that Will Brady, having spent so much time at sea, metaphorically speaking, drowns at last in his own confusion.

The author’s decision to concentrate on Will exclusively is stated baldly at the novel’s outset. “Will Jennings Brady is there by himself. That might be his story. The man who was more or less by himself.” Will combines a sense of the singular and of the bereft: “a man who neither smoked, drank, gambled, nor swore. A man who headed no cause, fought in no wars, and passed his life unaware of the great public issues.” He is a man whose life consists solely of his own history.

The question certainly does arise, as the author says: “Why trouble with such a man at all?” The answer appears to be precisely because of his singularity. Will appears to be socialized. He marries, engages in business and mixes successfully with most levels of society. Yet his evident normality deepens his strangeness, a strangeness of which Will is aware but about which he can do nothing.

The novel’s most sustained treatment of Will’s sense of his strangeness arises out of an attempt that he makes to understand his adopted son. In order to do so, he reads some boys’ books, including Jules Verne’s Journey to the Moon. Having completed the book, Will muses

that he did even stranger things than the men in books. It was one thing to go to the moon, like this foreigner, a writer of books, but did this man know the man or woman across the street? . . . Could he explain why there were grass stains on the man’s pants? That might be stranger, that might be harder to see, than the dark side of the moon.

The Works of Love is dedicated to two writers, Loren Eisley and, in memoriam, Sherwood Anderson. Mention of the second of these names is especially illuminating. It suggests that Will Brady may be seen as one of Anderson’s “grotesques,” a term Anderson uses to describe the emotionally deformed provincials in that outstanding classic of American regional fiction, Winesburg, Ohio.

Critical Context

Wright Morris is a highly respected author, the recipient of numerous prestigious awards as well as significant critical attention, yet his work seems not to have earned for him a large public. Despite its many virtues, most notably its emphasis on spirit and vision, his work is often seen as nebulous and lacking in drama. Perhaps his stature may always be overshadowed by the generation immediately preceding his own, the generation of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The Works of Love is one of the author’s more admired works. Even here, however, the protagonist’s passivity and simpleness tend to make him a case history whose experiences confirm both the author’s view of the individual’s invincible loneliness and his belief that a redemptive ethic arises out of the negotiation of that loneliness. Not the least dubious aspect of this belief is its vagueness. The fact that the ethic cannot be socially mediated, as The Works of Love demonstrates, somewhat limits its credibility. In addition, since Will Brady is the ethic’s exemplar, he must also be a victim of loneliness.

Nevertheless, the author’s commitment to such concerns makes him at least as worthy of serious attention as some of the better-known but more callow members of his generation. This novel is also an excellent introduction to Wright Morris’s Nebraska, further accounts of which can be found in The Home Place (1948) and The Field of Vision (1956). As the author himself has remarked: “The Works of Love is . . . the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains.” In his fidelity to spirit, and also to place, be it ever so humble, Wright Morris has added to one of the most distinguished genres of American imaginative prose.

Bibliography

Crump, Gail B. The Novels of Wright Morris. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Crump explores Morris’s novels and provides an overview and analysis.

Knoll, Robert. Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. A collection of essays and interviews with Morris.

Madden, David. Wright Morris. New York: Twayne, 1965. Madden provides a critical and interpretive study of Morris with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references. Useful for Morris’s work through the early 1960s. An expanded version in the Twayne Authors series by Joseph J. Wydeven was published in 1998.

Morris, Wright. “Wright Morris and the American Century.” Interview by James Hamilton. Poets and Writers Magazine 25 (November-December, 1997): 23-31. Morris comments on his career and his writing and photography over a period of fifty years. He discusses creative imagination and the influence of the American nation on his writing.

Morris, Wright. “Wright Morris: The Art of Fiction CXXV.” Paris Review 33 (Fall, 1991): 52-94. Interview by Olga Carlisle and Jodie Ireland. A lengthy interview with Morris on various aspects of his life and career.

Morris, Wright. Writing My Life: An Autobiography. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1993. Morris reflects on his life and career as a photographer, essayist, novelist, and critic.

Wydeven, Joseph J. Wright Morris Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. The first complete examination of the work of Wright Morris as a novelist and a photographer. Wydeven includes a portfolio of photographs by Morris along with a detailed analysis of the novels, criticism, and memoir that Morris produced. Wydeven focuses on Morris’s principal theme of the American Dream and the promise of the American West.