Living With Books

...Although McKee seemed not to mind, and Boyd made nothing of the occurrence, it has never, we gathered, been long out of Mrs...

...As no two spectators see the same bullfight, so no two readers read the same book...

...Lehmann's friend and patient, Paula Kahler...

...For fifty years and more, his physical, his external life has been the epitome of passivity...

...Forty thousand latent heroes, as many gorings, so many artful dodges it beggared description, two hundred thousand bulls, horses, mules and monsters, half man...

...That is certainly not to say that the book is made up of raw material: on the contrary, everything in it has been processed to a degree almost unparalleled in contemporary American literature: but the aim of Morris's disciplined and devoted craftsmanship is to transform the reader into a participant in an adventure of the imagination...

...more seriously...

...half beast...

...There is also an element of transformation in the Scanlon story, for the old man—in this respect working exactly as an artist does—has managed to take a body of extraneous material and make it his...

...Perhaps Paula Kahler, who calmly knits throughout the bullfight, is also living a dramatic and colorful inner life, but we do not know, for "she" remains utterly inscrutable...

...Those in the bullring...

...This is the theme of transformation...

...For fifteen years now Morris has been writing his novels and building his world, and the reader of the earlier novels will recognize in The Field of Vision a number of themes that he has made peculiarly his...

...Scanlon, however, is passive in a peculiar degree, and by that fact he reminds us of Will Brady in The Works of Love...

...Lehmann's...

...But the inner life that unfolds, never more than briefly interrupted by the coming of live hulls and the departure of dead ones, has a dazzling vitality...

...McKee and me couldn't be happier...

...The relations among the seven soon reveal a clear pattern...

...At the same time, unlike the others, he keeps a knowing eye on the bullfighters...

...But it is Boyd who uses the word, and it is the case of Boyd that raises the most interesting questions...

...Lehmann and of the enigmatic case of Paula Kahler, and he never forgets the McKees' grandson, named for a father who was named for him...

...To Morris, for whom nothing is more important than profound and many-sided human relationships, there are both irony and mystery in the fact that a marriage can exist, endure, and even in appearance succeed without such a relationship...

...Paula, having accomplished her great transformation, is at peace with herself and the world...

...To an even greater extent than Morris's earlier books...

...If no two persons see the same bullfight, which is a comparatively simple thing, obviously we cannot expect any two human beings to have the same experience of another human being...

...This is not an arbitrary demand on the author's part but the logical consequence of his conception of the imaginative process...

...They have a kind of charismatic quality, a special grace that distinguishes them from and gives them power over other people...

...Recognizing this, Morris feeds the reader's imagination instead of trying to impose upon it his own vision, He gives his insights as the material on which the reader must work...

...but they are memorable failures...

...McKee's father, an old timer called Scanlon...

...Walter McKee had looked up to Gordon Boyd, a bold, imaginative youth, one who would try to walk on water or rip a pocket from the uniform of a baseball player...

...Boyd has always had the ability to effect some degree of transformation in the lives of others—witness three generations of McKees but what he seeks is a way of self-transformation, and at the end it is strongly suggested that he has found it...

...Completely withdrawn both from them and from the bullfight are Paula Kahler and old Scanlon...

...The novel lasts only as long as the bullfight lasts—a couple of hours at most...

...We also know some small part of what Boyd knows about himself...

...Four are from Nebraska: Mr...

...If he has withdrawn from life, at least we know what he has withdrawn into...

...Working as a chambermaid in a hotel, she strangled a man who attempted to assault her, and it was then that her sex was discovered...

...Lehmann has learned to reduce his involvements to a minimum...

...A sensitive, almost saintly youth, subjected to unbearable pressure, Paul Kahler has become Paula, and that is that...

...A sound, likable, by no means stupid man...

...There is also in the book a new theme, though perhaps it was foreshadowed by the strange and wonderful story of the dancing chipmunk in The Huge Season...

...Lois Scanlon hadn't met Boyd until after she was engaged to Walter McKee...

...McKee knows by instinct how to protect his passivity by a mask of conventional activity...

...and Mrs...

...What happened in Polk...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'The Field of Vision,' by Wright Morris, A Significant and Enriching Novel The scene of Wright Morris's new novel, The Field of Vision (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50), is a bullring in Mexico City, and the characters, seven of them, are lined up on the shady side...

...And yet we see each character in the novel through the eyes of other characters...

...Cordon Boyd, for instance, is related to the uncle in My Uncle Dudley, to Agee Ward in The Man Who Was There, and to Charles Lawrence in The Huge Season...

...As for Boyd, his mind is characteristically leaping from subject to subject, but always coming back to the McKees, not so much to their relationship with him as to their relationship with one another: or perhaps I should say, to the lack of a relationship, for it is clear to Boyd, as it is to the reader, that the McKees, in spite of their three children, are unrelated...

...McKee, and who later on disrupted for a time the life of the son they named for him...

...and on that first meeting he had kissed her in front of her fiance...

...It is the early Scanlon, however, the Scanlon who lives by himself in the deserted hotel in the deserted town of Lone Tree, who is like Brady...

...Scanlon resigned from life half a century earlier...

...In this ill-assorted congeries, most of the individuals are completely or almost completely passive...

...after many years of the blackest self-doubt, he is irresistibly impelled to exert his influence on the son's son, and his success is the climax of the novel...

...McKee and the puzzled thoughts of her husband...

...The McKees, for their part, remind us of the Ormsbys in Man and Hoy and the Porters in The Deep Sleep...

...Lehmann, and Dr...

...At the center are Boyd and the McKees, who are bound together by a common past, a past that has been brought sharply back to their minds by the chance meeting in Mexico...

...Lehmann and young Gordon are less abstracted, but we know that the psychiatrist is as much occupied with his own thoughts as he is with the events in the ring, and we infer that the boy is also living a life of his own...

...He is astute enough to realize that the remark is fatuous, but he never quite knows why...

...and are dispatched with or without human casualties, but the novel is really concerned with what is going on in the minds of the seven visitors from the United States...

...Ormsby or Mrs...

...Lehmann, who has learned enough of the story to guess at some of the reasons for this transformation, is content to abide by what he regards as the decision of the personality...

...McKee, Mrs...

...McKee, Scanlon, Boyd, Dr...

...We are taken from one mind to another, though never into the mind of Paula Kahler nor into that of young Gordon McKee...

...this bloody constellation, only two men and six bulls would be missing...

...McKee's and Dr...

...are given to us in multiple images that we can only try to reconcile...

...These are all persons who exert a great and not quite explicable influence on their associates...

...It is not easy...

...Nebraska, some decades earlier we piece together from the troubled thoughts of Mrs...

...As his wife once said, when the century turned Scanlon didn't...

...The other characters, too...

...They are sitting with an oddly nondescript trio—someone named Gordon Boyd who has written plays, a psychiatrist friend of his, Dr...

...Scanlon, meanwhile, wearing a fake coonskin hat like the great-grandson beside him, is away on a wonderful, fantastic adventure of his own...

...The later Scanlon, whose imagination has been released by contact with his great-grandson, seems to me both a more attractive and a more credible character than Brady...

...As a boy and young man...

...Here is the cast of characters, and what Morris invites us—no, challenges us—to do is to look at them and to decide what we are seeing...

...Mrs...

...He thinks of Dr...

...McKee is not so striking an example of the dominating female as either Mrs...

...In all this zoo...

...You see how difficult Morris makes it...

...We have, in other words, four Gordon Boyds, and we must do with them whatever we can...

...Walter McKee, their grandson Gordon, and Mrs...

...The moment McKee runs into Boyd in the hotel lobby, be says...

...I put the pronoun in quotation marks because Paula is really a man...

...reliving his father's hardships and triumphs as a pioneer...

...The really active force is Boyd, who as a boy managed to unsettle McKee and...

...The Scanlon passages are perhaps the most impressive in the novel, a sort of surrealistic version of the pioneer experience, a bizarre but fundamentally accurate rendering of the essence of a thousand tales of the transcontinental crossing...

...He thinks of himself, too, and of his strangely unsuccessful search for failure...

...This crisp sabbath afternoon," Boyd reflects, "forty thousand pairs of eyes would gaze down on forty thousand separate hullfights, seeing it all very clearly, missing only the one that was said to take place...

...The extraordinary example of transformation, of course, is Paula Kahler, whose macabre story, with its puzzling overtones, at least demonstrates the power of the human being to make himself something different from what be is...

...We see McKee's Gordon Boyd and Mrs...

...As I have said, most of the characters in the novel are passive, and that is true of most of the characters in the other novels...

...McKee's mind, and it is very much in her thoughts this afternoon...

...Porter, but the McKees seem to have even less in common than the other two couples...

...The Field of Vision demands the active participation of the reader...

...Lehmann, and so it goes, around and around again...

...Usually they are failures, as Boyd is...

...McKee, on the other hand, has a latent capacity for action, and young Gordon, of course, is unformed...

...he cannot imagine a relationship that is more than superficial...

...The bulls are brought in...

...When the reader does participate, the book becomes a significant and enriching experience...