Living With Books:

...There is a very natural nostalgia in the book, but there is more than nostalgia...

...On every conceivable level, it is a pleasure to read...

...The '20s are the huge season of the title, and to explain what he means Morris quotes from a book that Foley has never finished: "Young men are a corn dance, a rite of spring, and every generation must write its own music, and if these notes have a sequence the age has a style...

...One can say of this novel, as Morris says of a photograph he describes, that it embodies "the mystery, the charm and the anxiety of life...

...He decides to burn his manuscript, for, though he now knows how to end it, it no longer has any meaning to him...

...Dickie Livingston and Lou Baker are added to the cast...

...Thus, past and present constantly confront one another, but Morris handles his two narratives so skilfully that in each the suspense steadily heightens...

...Dickie Livingston and a stranger arrive...

...Not only is he an individual in the sense that Uncle Dudley and Agee Ward are individuals...

...At two o'clock in the morning, the first day of his escape from captivity...

...It might strike him as not much more than a poor photograph...

...Proctor has been a Communist, has fought in the Spanish Civil War, has rescued Jews from Hitler's Europe, has defied Senator McCarthy, but he has never recovered from the shock of Lawrence's suicide...

...he has that hallmark of the major writer, the ability to be always and unmistakably himself...

...A picture is for Morris a challenge to the imagination, and his own photographs in The Inhabitants and The Home Place show how challenging an apparently quite literal kind of photography can be...

...He took out his watch, started to wind it, and saw that time--the captive time--had stopped...

...Dickie lives as if the '20s had never ended, and in 1952 he has "the still young-looking face of an aging juvenile delinquent...

...One savors the variety and suggestiveness of the figures of speech, the brilliance with which the symbols are elaborated, the precision with which the themes are sustained and interwoven...

...And Peter Foley, living in quiet bachelordom and teaching a language "that is not merely dying, but dead," has his unfinished novel, significantly called The Strange Captivity...

...he is simply what he is, a Hemingway character by nature, and that is why he so impresses the others...

...Here, I had no doubt, was a man worth watching...

...Foley, to be sure, puts it differently: "It was perfection, the terror of it, that had killed Lawrence...

...Especially in the past four years, with Man and Boy, The Works of Love, The Deep Sleep and now The Huge Season (Viking, $3.75), he has demonstrated his right to be regarded as one of the major contemporary novelists...

...By contrast, the world of 1952 seems to Foley--at moments, at any rate--ugly, colorless, ruled by conformity and fear...

...What he has invariably done is to invite the reader not merely to read but to read into...

...But other incidents make the second part seem rather too weak, for at times Lawrence seems moved by a desire for death rather than a desire for perfection...

...He had his gesture, his moment of truth, or his early death in the afternoon...

...It seems clear, then, that Foley is finally committed to involvement with the world...

...This, as we shall see...

...In any case, we know what Lawrence is for those who are close to him--that in him, as Foley says, their sun rises...

...At least Proctor, Foley and Lou Baker have faithfully read Hemingway, Fitzgerald and T. S. Eliot...

...I have watched, missing only one of the eight books that have followed My Uncle Dudley, and I have seen Morris grow in wisdom and in skill...

...Like Mark Schorer's The Wars of Love and Peter Matthiessen's Race Rock, the novel presents a group of characters--in each instance, curiously, there are several men and one woman--at two widely separated periods of their lives...

...Peter Foley concludes: "On the other hand, the stranger might not notice it at all...

...I am not sure what this means, nor, for that matter, am I sure that my interpretation of Morris's judgments on the '20s and the '50s is right...

...But Lawrence died in 1929, while they went on living--as captives of the past...

...We are concerned here with the late '20s and with people young enough to have been influenced by the Lost Generation...

...Yet, these are the closing lines of the novel: "A new day was breaking, the dawn like a sheet of clear ice on the pond...

...The scene is transferred to Paris...

...The Lone Eagles were now a covey of Sitting Ducks...

...At the beginning of The Huge Season, one of the characters describes a picture of another character, Charles Lawrence, playing tennis...

...He goes to New York--he teaches Latin in a college near Philadelphia--and phones Lou Baker...

...In that sense you will be right, as I am reading into it most of my life...

...If you think that great champions can be made by eating Wheaties, that great songs can be written on commission, you will be inclined to feel that I am reading something into this photograph...

...Throughout the day, we get indications of what is happening to Foley...

...He had a penetrating eye, a dependable ear, an intimate knowledge of the country, and above all else a feeling for people--especially people like Uncle Dudley, who "did most of the things good souls should do but damn near all of them they shouldn't...

...Unlike Schorer, however, who describes the two periods in simple chronological order, and unlike Matthiessen, who relies on flashbacks, Morris has developed an ingenious form: Chapters concerning the past, told in the first person by one of the characters, Peter Foley, alternate with chapters in the third person that describe the present...

...Through his portrayal of these people and what happened to them, Morris seeks to pass judgment on the '20s...

...There is his recollection of the day in 1943 when he appeared before his draft board and came to the conclusion that the trouble with him and men like him was their "gut-deep urge that in surrender was the moral victory, in death and defeat the lasting possession of the lasting world...

...The knowledge that he might be caught with perfection on his hands and still be discontent...

...he is also contrasting two specific periods, the 1920s and 1950s...

...he is an individual in the heroic pattern of the period...

...And if you can't throw your own light on it, it's still in the dark...

...Morris's passion for indirection may sometimes have led him astray, as, so far as I am concerned, it did in The Man Who Was There and The Works of Love, but it is the root of all his successes...

...In The Huge Season, Morris invites the reader to throw his light on some of the problems of growing up...

...As the narrator says in My Uncle Dudley: "When you come right down to it, the last word is just a name, too...

...There is, for instance, the fine parable of the dancing chipmunk...

...The great style, the habit of perfection, united George Herman Ruth and Charles A. Lindbergh, Albie Booth and Jack Dempsey, Juan Belmonte and Jay Gatsby, and every man, anywhere, who stood alone with his own symbolic bull...

...Lawrence, on the other hand, has read nothing...

...Something happens to Peter Foley on this fifth of May to deliver him from his bondage...

...He can do whatever he has a mind to," Lawrence's mother says...

...But there is more meaning than that, for in his ultimate decision Foley is sustained by some conviction, which one has to call mystical, that he is himself the significance and justification of the experiences he has described...

...The figure of Charles Lawrence stands as the embodiment of what Morris finds admirable in the '20s--and also, perhaps, of what he deplores...

...The part of the story that is laid in the '20s begins in a California college, where Charles Lawrence exerts a powerful influence on the imaginations of his roommates--Peter Foley, Jesse Proctor and Ed Lundgren...

...Lou Baker, "a raddled oracle," a not so very glamorous Lady Brett, has moved from country to country and from affair to affair, always working on the novel about the '20s that she knows she will never finish...

...Not only is he highly gifted...

...Morris is not merely examining two stages in the development of a group of human beings, as Schorer and Matthiessen are doing...

...On the day he hears of Proctor's appearance before the McCarthy Committee, he feels that the jig is up: "What had taken more than twenty years to die was now dead...

...In the '20s, Morris seems to be saying, there were individuals--Lone Eagles--who sought not merely to be themselves but to be themselves in a mode of perfection...

...After spending the day in wandering about the city and thinking about the past, he joins Lou and Proctor in the apartment they are sharing...

...Morris is fond of talking about photographs, and one section of The Man Who Was There is built upon a series of pictures of the central character, Agee Ward...

...Meanwhile, we are following Peter Foley on May 5, 1952, the day after he has read of Jesse Proctor's testimony before the McCarthy Committee...

...Morris is saying that, even if the '20s were a huge season, to live in a past era is to destroy oneself, but he is not content merely to say something as obvious, as easy as that...

...may not be Morris's last word, but the book that he has written is in a sense the book that Foley could not complete...

...Here was someone who could write about people who had had little or no formal education--so-called common men--without either condescension or an affectation of toughness...

...In each of his books there is some element of obscurity, not because he doesn't know what he means but because he believes that the more important truths can only be hinted at, never stated...

...It doesn't seem to matter if he kills himself trying...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Wright Morris's New Novel Contrasts The World of the '20s and the '50s IN 1942, I read Wright Morris's first novel, My Uncle Dudley, and was convinced that it was the work of an important new writer...

...In his brilliant description of a tennis match, Morris shows what he means by the first part of that statement...

...But the passage I have quoted applies even more cogently to his fiction than it does to his photography...

...and the climax comes with Lawrence's suicide after he has been injured in a bullfight...

...You couldn't call a man a captive who had lost all interest in escape...

...After moments that are hilarious and others that are almost agonizingly intense, there is a partial resolution, and then Foley returns to the Main Line, to resolve his own problems and face his own future...

...What I do know is that we have here a deeply original way of thinking and feeling, expressed both with great subtlety and with a kind of textual richness that is a joy...

...When Morris is at his best, he achieves a cooperation between the reader and himself that is highly fruitful for the former...