Manifesto for Now
Bellow, Saul
Manifesto for Now The Territory Ahead, by Wright Morris. Harcourt Brace. 231 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Saul Bellow TTTright morris' essay is deceptively " relaxed in its manner. It seems to have...
...Against this Morris urges that we look into the living moment, "the magnificent here- and now of life in the flesh," as D. H. Lawrence described it...
...and Fenni-more Cooper to his woods...
...Disaster, in other words, failure, self-destruction, deep drunkenness, the suffering Generations, Lost or Beat, flight or death...
...Some of them become, for me, most clear in Tolstoy...
...and Whitman to the Open Road (I cannot entirely agree with Morris that Whitman was one of those who fled...
...if we can't, then, to the dogs...
...I am not speaking here of his Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, his masterpiece of nostalgia, but of the Death of Ivan Ilyiych in which the dying Ivan tries to discern what there was of reality in his life and finds it only in his childhood...
...Thus divided between nostalgia in feeling and purposiveness in action we beget a confusion which he has the kindness to call nothing worse than "schizoid...
...And why...
...I been there before," says Huck as the novel ends...
...Since Thoreau took literally to the woods (for a while, anyway, but we think of him always there beside Walden Pond...
...But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can't stand it...
...In this confusion of dreams it is the orgiastic future that engages our daytime talents and energy, but the dark fields of the past is where we take refuge at night...
...Not that nostalgia is exclusively American...
...Why do we welcome it, and why do we celebrate it...
...On the one hand we are the builders of bridges and cities, we are makers of things and believers in the future...
...We look inward, we look backward...
...On the other hand we have a powerful, private urge to take to the woods, as we often do . . . To the woods, if we can find them...
...This is the tendency, long prevailing, to start well and then peter out...
...and now that we stand on the threshhold of outer space our self-absorption reaches the most grotesque stage of its development...
...It is the purpose of this book to inquire if the climate of failure is not linked in a logical fashion with the prevailing tendency to take to the woods...
...It seems to have been talked off by this distinguished novelist, his boots on the desk, his thumbs in his galluses, but it is in fact wisely, subtly, formidably reasoned and it amounts in the end to a statement of attitude, a facing up to difficulties, a manifesto...
...But there are many other elements involved...
...and Mark Twain to the Mississippi on a raft...
...asks Morris...
...Millions of Americans have, like him, lit out for territories less well-defined, largely metaphorical...
...He might have cited the late Henry Ford, master of an automobile empire and creator of the nostalgic Dearborn Village, as well as Huck Finn...
...and Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel and Faulkner and even Norman Rockwell and James Whitcomb Riley and Henry Ford...
...Because, he answers, the failures are testimony to the greatness of the tasks: "What does his [the writer's] failure prove but how sublime and grand the country is...
...Now either the organic coil has loosened with the years, or the distraction and artificiality of society have made life strange and false, or the extreme isolation of the person has spoiled that first vivid gift...
...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...
...From Hawthorne to Faulkner," Morris writes, "the mythic past has generated what is memorable in our literature—but what is not so memorable, what is often crippling we have conspired to overlook...
...Publicly," writes Morris, "we create and promote the very civilization we privately reject...
...But where, asks Morris, have these quests left us...
...Those deformed souls in Dante's hell, the Diviners, each so strangely twisted between the chin and the chest that they had to come backwards, since seeing forward was denied them, symbolize the schizoid state of the American mind...
...His answer is that for all the interest and flourish of these attempts, despite the works of genius that have been left us by the great artists of nostalgia, the flight into the Territory can only mean failure and bankruptcy...
...Then he could see, feel, taste...
...The avoidance of our present circumstances, of the faces and minds about us, has gone about as far as it can and much farther than it ever should have gone...
...All are looking back, like Lot's wife, back to the primeval forest, to the free plains, to the village and the farm, to the old barber shop and McGuffey's Reader, to the Sweet Thames unpolluted once, to childhood...
...Why do we expect failure...
...Perhaps we should add to "the past," "the self," since to be so nostalgic is to be absolutely internal...
...and Ernest Hemingway to the Two-Hearted River and then to foreign parts, Morris wants to know what we are up to in the United States and why an industrial nation of the unavoidable present, dedicated to progress, should be so reluctant to leave its childhood...
...I think it best to allow Morris to develop his own argument: "Somewhere between Walden Pond and Boston—at some point of tension, where these dreams cross—the schizoid soul of the American is polarized...
...It is Romantic, of course—it should be enough to name Wordsworth and Proust in evidence...
...Because, Morris tells us, "Deep in our hearts we know that the best has been lived, that we have had it, which is why we don't ask, why we will settle for a pond, a raft, and Huck Finn . . ." In this chain of feeling are linked T. S. Eliot as well as Thoreau and Hawthorne and Melville and Eugene O'Neill of Ah, Wilderness...
...The Kingdom of Heaven is for little children, or for those like them, and our Thoreaus and Huck Finns have in different ways recoiled from the effort, the desperation, the blind falsehoods of maturity and have gone to find the essential facts by the pond, on the Heavenly river or in the Territory ahead...
...The test is in the immediate present...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
