A Cloak of Light by Wright Morris

First published:A Cloak of Light: Writing My Life, 1985

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: 1910-1960

Locale: Omaha, Chicago, Paris, Austria, and Italy

Principal Personages:

• Wright Morris, a novelist
• Will Morris, his father
• Jo Kantor, Wright’s second wife

Form and Content

The two major studies of Wright Morris’ work, David Madden’s Wright Morris (1964) and G.B. Crump’s The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation (1978), begin with similar statements of puzzlement over the reading public’s neglect of this writer. Morris’ more than thirty volumes, of which his novels represent more than half, include phototexts, essays, short stories, and memoirs. Despite having won both the National Book Award and the American Book Award, Morris had not by the beginning of the 1980’s attracted a sufficient following to warrant the reprinting by commercial presses of even his most ambitious novels. Nevertheless, the decision by the University of Nebraska Press to reprint his work, plus Morris’ continued productivity and the appearance in the 1980’s of more than half a dozen stories in The New Yorker, has resulted in a modest renaissance of interest.

Morris’ minimalist approach and understanding of human emotions raised a number of questions, fair or not, about Morris himself and about his intentions as a writer of fiction. A typical reservation was that of Alfred Kazin: Despite Morris’ “many symbols, his showy intentions, his pointed and hinted significances,” the novels were “without the breath and extension of life.” The seeming detachment of Morris’ narrators from their material, and of his characters from their lives and from one another, echoed for many readers the cool geometry of the peopleless photographs of Great Plains settings in The Inhabitants (1946) and The Home Place (1948). The appearance in his eighth decade of the memoirs Will’s Boy, Solo, and A Cloak of Light answers many questions about Morris as a man and a writer, and reinforces his image as a detached observer of human existence, including his own, as well as an ironic humor which accompanies that detachment.

The three volumes cover the period between Morris’ birth in Nebraska in 1910 to the end of the summer of 1960, when he is about to begin a new life in California with his second wife, Jo Kantor. Will’s Boy emphasizes his youthful years in Nebraska and later in Chicago, concluding during his third year at Pomona College. Solo, subtitled An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933-1934, recounts a Wanderjahr spent mainly in Austria and Italy. A Cloak of Light deals with Morris’ years of struggle to support himself, develop as a writer, and find himself as a man. Although all three volumes, especially the more expansive first and third, use the vignette as their basic structural unit, each is a unique mixture of thematic emphases.

Will’s Boy, a slender two hundred pages long, possesses the most evenly flowing chronology (though it seldom refers to specific dates, being a product of recollection rather than of research), the clearest preoccupation with recounting family history, the most humor, and the warmest tone. It contains many examples of Morris as storyteller: how on a crowded baseball field he failed to get Babe Ruth’s autograph but managed to come away with the back pocket of Ruth’s Yankee uniform; how as a young adolescent in Chicago he received a ceremonial kiss from a stranger who turned out to be Queen Marie of Romania; how he discovered that his former stepmother was a well-advertised hula dancer at the Gaity Theatre. The book’s central irony is that though his mother died a few days after his birth and his father neglected him for various women and failed business ventures, Morris reached age seventeen with “abundant optimism,” perhaps the unwitting gift of his father, whose inexhaustible scheming inspired the creation of the title character of My Uncle Dudley (1942). Nevertheless, the dominant fact of Morris’ childhood was loneliness.

Remembering his early life is a solitary task. His infrequent references to dates reflects Morris’ own uncertainty about the chronology: An only child and virtually an orphan, he has no family scrapbooks to consult or other minds with which to compare memories. Because he was shunted to so many different people in so many different places, physical movement was the only constant of his young life; it was not until his high school years in Chicago that he could impose some order and meet people who could guide and inspire him. Not coincidentally, it was here that he discovered his interest in art. To show the proximity of his life and art, Morris develops a striking, self-referential technique: He interrupts the narrative by inserting numerous italicized quotations from his published work (especially his novels) to show how important the dislocations of his youth became as inspirations for his artistic vision of life as journeys, brief relationships, and guarded emotions.

Solo—which might have been subtitled “Europe on a Dollar a Day”—in 196 pages portrays a somewhat more self-aware protagonist, but like Will’s Boy it emphasizes movement and the picaresque view. The basic structure of the narrative follows the travel of Morris the picaro from the United States to Paris, Austria, Italy, Paris, and back to the United States. Changes in time exceed those of geography: From the self-congratulatory optimism of Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress exposition, Morris traveled to Monsieur Deleglise’s castle, Schloss Ranna; there medieval routines were far older than the Hopi hat and cigar-store Indian the proprietor valued as emblems of the primitive. Nearly half the narrative describes Morris’ winter at Schloss Ranna, and most of the rest of his tour through Italy with a fellow student from Pomona whom he barely knew. Of the three volumes, this one conveys the clearest sense of time: Seasons determine movement. Its first six chapters show an innocent abroad, an escapee from his own life, a young man who jokes with future victims about the coming war. The seventh ironically portrays a “young panhandler” in Paris who deliberately spends his passage money and begs at the American embassy for a free ticket home, who works in the pornographic book racket, who is told by a Spanish dancer that he is “a person of good character,” an idea he has never doubted.

A Cloak of Light is the most ambitious and far-reaching of the three volumes. At 306 pages, it is more than half again as long as either Will’s Boy or Solo. Its foreword, coda, two sections of family photographs, italicized quotations from Morris’ fiction as well as from the previous volumes of memoirs, and almost three full decades of adult experiences convey the growth of a callow man into a mature one. The topics emphasized are those which shape an adult life: the finding of a spouse, relationships with in-laws, searching for a vocation, and making a living. There is considerable personal success during these years: several Guggenheim fellowships, a National Book Award, invitations to teach and lecture. These personal subjects, however, do not bring with them a sustained sense of intimacy. Morris notes that Catherine Drinker Bowen took offense at “my reluctance to share what I considered my private life,” and he gives his readers no closer look at the private man. The narrative once again is made up of brief vignettes, usually no more than a page or two in length: a host of character sketches ranging from Indian chamber maids and village auto mechanics in Mexico to Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Frost, and Loren Eiseley. The only systematically portrayed character is Morris’ second wife, Jo, who dominates the last fifth of the narrative. The narrator’s transformation is striking; the excitement of love and a truly intimate human connection enter the narrative for the first time just as Morris claims they first entered his life.

Critical Context

Readers of the modern phenomenon of autobiography-as-rebuttal who are used to authorial self-inflation and self-justification will find Morris’ volumes quite different. Morris has no sense of himself as a figure of great importance. He has always been something of an enigma because of the quiet eccentricity of his fiction; whereas he is willing to answer basic questions about himself, the genesis and place of composition of his various major works, the real-life models for some of his protagonists, and his favorite settings and people, he remains a private individual. He tells no tales on others, either: His vignettes of fellow literary figures such as Robert Frost, Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Leon Howard, Kitty Bowen, and others are sometimes ironic but never unkind. The dominant presence in the three volumes is a man who feels lucky with his life and his accomplishments, who makes no great claims for himself and has no reason to snipe at anyone. There is a kind of modesty throughout the narratives, as if to assert—as his phototexts do— that a careful look will reveal the depth and significance of the common man’s experience.

To the tradition of contemporary writing from the American West, these volumes—especially Will’s Boy and A Cloak of Light—will be distinguished additions because they work so hard to overcome the merely regional. In addition to giving a skillful picture of growing up on the plains in the early part of this century, Morris also makes it clear that a writer can and must escape the limitations of family, region, and history. He transcends the image of the Western writer tied to geography and hampered by lack of sophistication. He does not strike out against the dominant East and its ignorance of and condescension to the West. Instead, the summary in A Cloak of Light of the ideas in his critical study The Territory Ahead (1958) attempts to integrate all American writing in a cultural context whose largest forces are felt by writers from all regions. Of all Western writers, only Wallace Stegner and Wright Morris have made such serious use, without apology, of Western experience.

Bibliography

Abbey, Edward. Review of A Cloak of Light in The New York Times Book Review. XC (February 17, 1985), p. 9.

Allen, Bruce. Review of A Cloak of Light in The Christian Science Monitor. February 28, 1985, p. 20.

Booklist. LXXXI, November 1, 1984, p. 323.

Crump, G. B. The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation, 1978.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, November 15, 1984, p. 1091.

Knoll, Robert E., ed. Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses, 1977.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. January 20, 1985, p. 2.

Madden, David. Wright Morris, 1964.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVI, July 12, 1984, p. 58.

Simon, Linda. Review of A Cloak of Light in Library Journal. CIX (December, 1984), p. 2272.

Virginia Quarterly Review. LXI, Summer, 1985, p. 80.

Washington Post Book World. February 3, 1985, p. 3.

World Literature Today. LIX, Autumn, 1985, p. 599.