The Raw and the Past

...The Field of Vision (National Book Award for 1956), and his popular, irreverent Love Among the Cannibals...

...I n American experience, raw material and nostalgia appear to be different sides of the same coin...

...Our territory ahead lies behind in an idealized childhood, or if in the future, a dreamed future which is in reality the past of a simple "nature" which contrasts with the present of a complex, urban society...

...and that is as good a categorization as any...

...The ability of most Americans to function—as artists, citizens, or men of business—resides in their capacity to indulge in one of these conflicting dreams at a time...

...In his foreword, Morris alludes to it as " a personal inquiry...

...to be all for the future, that is, or all f o r the past...

...Carried to its conclusion this preference begins and ends right Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of Eiiglish, Hobart and William Smith Colleges where we find it—in autobiography...

...The hallmark of these clich?s is a processed sentimentality...

...The genius and progressive drive of a culture that is both the reproach and the marvel of the world is crossed with a prevailing tendency to withdraw from the world and retire into the past...

...Or that the prevailing tendency of Americans was flight...

...Something real...

...Now, after sticking to his novelistic knitting for so long (eleven books in seventeen years, six in the last seven), he gives us what appears at first to be a book of literary criticism...

...it combines literary criticism and social analysis, or rather, prophecy, in much the same way...

...William Faulkner is the latest, but he will not be the last, to pitch his wigwam in the pine-scented woods...

...But more often he seems to identify himself and his fellow writers with the objects of his horror and his compassion...

...its style is distinctive, aphoristic, designed for assertion rather than for persuasion or explication...

...Morris here is a prophet, like his mentor, D. H. Lawrence, to whom he dedicates the book...

...Morris has two central points...

...We are no longer a raw-material reservoir, the marvel and despair of less fortunate cultures, since our only inexhaustible resource at the moment is the clich...

...If The Territory Ahead resembles any one hook it is Studies in Classic American Literature...

...It is allusive and elusive, evocative, witty, captious, grossly oversimplified, dogmatic, sensitive, sometimes bitter, sometimes sad...

...It is a book with a thesis, in the great tradition of books about the American scene, asking again Cr?vecoeur's echoing question, "What then is the American, this new man...

...One thing which makes for difficulty in coming to terms with the book is the casual effrontery with which Morris talks of "we...

...Flight, not from what they had found, but from what they had created—the very culture of cities they had labored to establish...

...Deep in our hearts we know that the best has been lived, that we have now had it, which is why we will settle for a pond, a raft, and Huck Finn...

...On this plane raw material and art appear to be identical...

...WRIGHT MORRIS, after a decade of writing novels which passed almost unnoticed, except among a faithful few, began to receive the attention he deserved with The Huge Season...

...It is beautifully written, full of flashing phrases and insights, arid thoroughly engaging...

...On a practical, day-by-day level this is the preference we have for the man who feels, and the distrust we feel for the man who thinks...

...After two readings of the book, I have still not decided whether I think it will prove to be an important work, or merely passing reflections by a contemporary novelist...

...asking it about the American writer of the past and the present as somehow representative of a mystical and mythical "we...

...It has the same oracular quality...

...I n 1845, when Thoreau went to Waiden, he had a continental wilderness lying before him, and he was hardly in a position to see that he had actually turned his back on the future...

...The territory ahead"—the escape of Huck and Mark Twain from the civilizing ways of Aunt Sally—is in Morris's view the dream of us all...

...was there, I saw, and I suffered, said Whitman, sounding the note, and the preference is still dear to the readers of the Saturday Evening Post...

...Twain's preference for real Life —Life on the Mississippi—is the preference Thoreau felt for facts, the facts of Nature, and Whitman's preference for the man-made artifact...

...But I did read it twice, with pleasure and close attention...

...It is the root and the flower of the anti-egghead platform in American life...

...Inevitably the book suffers by comparison with its famous predecessor, but Morris invited the comparison...

...The first is that, beguiled by the raw material of our vast continent, American writers have fancied that "the facts" alone would suffice, that the transforming imagination was unneeded...

...But it is more than that...

...it is not the work of a scholar or a professional critic...

...An endless flow of clich?s, tirelessly processed for massmedia consumption, now give a sheen of vitality to what is either stillborn or secondhand...

...Sometimes the "we" appears to be a "they," and Morris expresses the familiar opposition of the sensitive artist to the insensitive others...

...Something the hand, as well as the mind, could grasp...

...technique and form have been suspect and ignored...

...Today he is a Recognized Author, reprinted in paperbacks and a regular at writers' conferences where he deplores the tendency of the public to look at and listen to the novelist instead of reading his novels...

...He describes Thomas Wolfe as "the artist as cannibal...

...In the eyes of the world we are the future, but in our own eyes we are the past...

...To writers and readers alike the raw has been the real...

...The impotence of material, raw or otherwise, receives its widest advertising in his mammoth showcase—almost everything is there but the imagined thing, and all of it bigger than l i f e ." As the wonders of our New World have become familiar and the vein of novelty exhausted, we have retained our old sentiment for "the facts...

...Henry James emerges as the hero because, as Morris sees it, he alone got out of the climate of failure, not by escaping into a mythical past but by fronting the present squarely and transforming his raw material into art...

...The rawer the material, the more nostalgia it evokes It is little wonder the American mind sometimes wonders where it is going, and what, indeed, it is to be an American...

...He is writing about Americans, himself and all the rest of us, including Thoreau and Fitzgerald and Twairi and Whitman and Hemingway and Norman Rockwell, all together, all at the same time...

...It is a hard hook to classify...

...I have quoted at such length because the genius of the book is not in the ideas, which are conventional enough, but in their expression, not in the raw facts but in the form in 24 The New Leader which they appear after they have been passed through the hopper of Morris's imagination and transformed by the technique of his style...

...Morris's second major point is that American writers have continually faced backward, evoking a mythical past as they evaded the present and the actualizing future...

...The prevailing tendency of Thoreau's countrymen—his more gifted countrymen—is still to withdraw into a private wilderness...

...On the evidence we might say an American is a man who attempts to face both ways...

...Nostalgia rules our hearts while a rhetoric of progress rules our words...

...His point is, of course, that American writers have " failed " because they were too much a part of a climate which doomed the artist to failure...

...One feels it as the work of a novelist or poet talking about himself under the pretense of discussing his literary progenitors...