Living with Books

...But in this book Morris deliberately turns that probing imagination toward the subject that he has hitherto avoided...

...The night after Eva has left he reflects: "Stripped down, like that car in its ditch, to what we referred to as the essentials, I possessed nothing under that moon but my past...

...The point about Cannibals is that it is the first since My Uncle Dudley in which the tone he wanted is one of excitement, so that the reader is swept on from page to page...

...We know that before the war Horter had serious literary ambitions, and his story could be full of soul-searching, bitter lamentations, and longings for the past...

...Thus we are rushed pell mell into two love stories and a romantic expedition...

...The beach in question, one of the best, is near where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea.' It is on the beach that they meet "this little chick with her hair in a pony tail," Billie Harcum, who turns out to be very much to Mac's taste...

...An essentialist, that is...

...There is only one of his novels to which Love Among the Cannibals can be compared, and that is his first, My Uncle Dudley...

...That much I could take with me, if I cared to, and I did...

...Horter makes an exception of "her," meaning Eva...

...I mean it's here and now, and all that once was or is yet to be isn't...

...That it should be surprises the careful reader of Morris, for up to this point his work has been uncommonly homogeneous...

...Horter writes: "Was I saying—until I met her—that the pitch of this age is phony...

...A strip of sun and sand where the sex is alert, the mind is numb...

...It's phony as hell, but as Mac once said, 'What the hell, man...

...It is a story about a song-writing team, Macgregor and Horter, the latter being the narrator...

...Here the action starts when Dudley and the boy-narrator, stranded in California during the depression, decide to get hold of a car somehow or other so that they can drive to Chicago...

...evoking the mood of the Twenties, is steeped in nostalgia...

...He is scornful of the entertainment industry of which he is part, and in general he has a grudge against the phoniness of contemporary culture, but he has retained an eagerness for what he can accept as reality, and for him Eva is real...

...Living with you has made me something of a realist myself...

...And without much more preface than that, the four of them take off for Acapulco...

...As I have repeatedly said, Morris is a wonderfully sharp-eyed observer of the contemporary scene—his ears, too, are of the very best—as well as a devoted and subtle craftsman...

...The time comes, as Horter has known it must, when the Greek meets another man—this one a professor of marine biology—who is necessary for her development, and she leaves the party...

...The trip is to end badly for both Horter and Mac, for Horter because he loses his girl, for Mac because he gets his...

...Billie, who speaks only in cliches, is herself a cliche from head to toe—the Memphis belle in the wilds of Hollywood...

...So Morris, I think, telling two love stories, one sordid, one romantic, has worked in and through cliches toward reality...

...This is true in a general sense of all his books, but in a very specific sense of those I have just mentioned...

...He put this question to himself in The Inhabitants and The Home Place, two books in which his talents as a photographer were joined to his talents as a writer, and in The World in the Attic, which is a sequel to The Home Place without the pictures...

...Beaches are the same the world over, you peel down, then you peel off...

...In both books the movement seems perfectly casual and perfectly right, although Cannibals, of course, coming later by 15 years of hard labor, is a richer and more rewarding book...

...For Horter she is a dream woman, an incarnation of Robert Graves's White Goddess, a figure like Faulkner's Eula Varner...

...In Cannibals Mac and Horter are on the beach, and they meet a chick, and the next thing we know they are in Acapulco...

...In these books and in The Man Who Was There and The Works of Love, the center of his inquiry is the Plains States, and in crucial episodes of The Field of Vision he returned to the region of which he is a native...

...Jealous of the men she has had and the men he knows she will have, he realizes that he is letting himself in for heartbreak, but he is willing to pay the price...

...The little inessentials have been stripped off...

...When Mac says, "It's real," as he frequently does, you know that it, whatever it may be, is uncommonly phony...

...Indeed, after the excursion to Acapulco, during which she displavs many varieties of bitchiness, pretentiousness and inanity, she succeeds in roping him into marriage...

...In each of his books Morris has been extraordinarily successful in establishing the tone that he wanted...

...The story of Eva—"the Greek"—and Horter is something else...

...they serve you up raw meat, dark meat, or flesh nicely basted in olive oil...

...yet he knows that his dream of her is not free from cliches, and he knows that he must work through the cliches to reality...

...But what is new is more impressive than what is old, not only because Morris has eliminated nostalgia and introduced sex but also because he has evolved a literary technique quite different from that which he has been perfecting in his recent work...

...What else is there?' The phony is...

...One of the stories, the story of Mac and Billie, he treats satirically, and he does it up brown...

...She is not in love with Horter as he is with her, but she is attracted to him—she tells him that he is part of her development—and she goes to bed with him at once and without embarrassment...

...Just as they arrive within sight of the ocean, the car's front wheels drop into a ditch, and they proceed on foot to the villa they are to inhabit—a villa that turns out to be in a not very advanced stage of construction...

...In this stripped-down life Billie Harcum naturally fares badly, whereas Eva likes it, and Horter, as he tells her, likes it because he likes her...

...That same night the two men go to a party with Billie, and here Horter sees a girl—he calls her "the Greek" because of her statuesque appearance—with whom he falls in love on sight...

...And the mastery of the vernacular—though the effect here is heightened by having Horter as narrator—is a quality Morris has displayed from the beginning...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Wright Morris Turns to Sex in His 11th Novel, 'Love Among the Cannibals' My enthusiasm for Wright Morris goes back to 1942, when I read his first novel, My Uncle Dudley, and it has found expression more than once in The New Leader—just last year, when I reviewed The Field of Vision, and before that in reviews of The Huge Season, The Deep Sleep and The Works of Love...

...Before this, however, that question has almost always resolved itself into another: "What has it meant to be an American...

...The humor, for instance, is no surprise to anyone who remembers My Uncle Dudley, Man and Boy and the reunion scene in The Huge Season...

...This is Morris's eleventh book, and it is the first in which sex plays an important part...

...There is satire, too, as there has been in most of the earlier books, for Morris's examination of American civilization is critical as well as careful...

...Keen observation and disciplined craftsmanship are apparent enough in his new novel, Love Among the Cannibals (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50), but in many ways this is a new departure...

...and that is all we need to know...

...Nostalgia is just what one doesn't find in Love Among the Cannibals, which exists wholly in the present...

...One finishes the book with the feeling that this is indeed a new Morris, but of course there is a lot of the old Morris, too...

...You've got to take what's phony, if it's all you've got, and make it real...

...Man and Boy and The Deep Sleep are full of echoes of a different sort, and The Huge Season...

...You live your dream," he tells her, "which is to say you're a realist...

...The two men and their completely dissimilar girls— one tight, self-conscious and predatory, the other generous, careless of convention, impulsive—make the trip to Acapulco in a large and fancy car lent to Mac and Horter by the studio for which they are working...

...It is primarily a book to be enjoyed, but, since Morris is a serious writer, one is bound to ask what it means...

...He has not, of course, ignored the existence of sex, but its more urgent manifestations either have been ruled out by the nature of his material or have been disposed of offstage...

...He sees her as "life without its cliches," and he is happy to make love to her, though he knows he cannot possess her...

...It is a very funny business, close to the edge of fantasy but never incredible, and an effective symbol to boot...

...But as we see him, Horter has a good reason for living in the present, and he does so, up to the hilt...

...The question he has always asked, and for that matter is still asking, is: "What does it mean to be an American...

...Of Eva we know that she is large, beautiful, young and passionate, that she was married when she was 14 and nearly died in pregnancy, that she has been a student at the university, and that she earns her living as a nurse maid in a large family...

...I suppose it's a book about what is real...

...They get the car, and off they go, and everything follows...

...And during the next few days, while they make the best of their primitive accommodations by spending most of their time on the beach, the car is systematically plundered and dismantled by the natives...

...With the same inevitability Billie manages to haul Mac in front of a parson...

...The books I have written, and hope to write," he said a couple of years ago, "are apt to bear, on close examination, the stamp of an object made on the plains...

...My story begins," Horter says, "like everything else, on the beach...

...Billie comes from Memphis, and that is all we have to be told about her...

...But she happens to be the kind Mac likes, "the million-dollar baby in the five-and-ten cent store," as Horter explains, and since she also happens to be, in her own mind at least, a singer, with a clear idea of what the team of Macgregor and Horter may be able to do for her, she is not indifferent to his attentions...

...Yet Horter is not wholly unhappy, whatever may be true of Mac...

...We know nothing about them except that they met during the war and have been writing songs, with a moderate degree of success, ever since...

...It is as if he had decided at the outset that, in order to concentrate on the elements of experience that most interested him, he had to avoid the distractions of passion, as if, with so many novelists assuming that sex was the only subject worth writing about, he wanted to prove how much other kinds of experience could yield to a probing imagination...