Plains Song Read online

  PLAINS SONG

  For Female Voices

  WRIGHT MORRIS

  INTRODUCTION TO THE BISON BOOKS EDITION BY

  Charles Baxter

  © 1980 by Wright Morris

  Reprinted by arrangement with Josephine Morris

  Introduction © 2000 by the University of Nebraska Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Bison Books printing: 2000

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morris, Wright, 1910–

  Plains song: for female voices / Wright Morris; introduction to the Bison Books edition by Charles Baxter.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-8032-8267-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  1. Women—Great Plains—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Great Plains—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3525.O7475 P5 2000

  813′.52—dc21

  00-033784

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-8032-8331-2

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Plains Song

  INTRODUCTION

  Charles Baxter

  The Japanese have a word—sabi—that refers to any object that after many years has acquired a quality of what we might call “noble shabbiness.” This noble shabbiness might be imagined as the weathering of a piece of furniture that has been worn smooth by use and age. Nothing you buy at the mall can possess sabi. Only those objects that have been worked and touched for a long time can have it. Sabi is found not in the beauty of youth but instead in the beauty of wear and tear, the beauty of something that has stood the test of time and is still standing in spite of everything. Sabi is the acquired soul of a created thing as it grows old.

  Readers unfamiliar with the writings and the photographs of Wright Morris should be on the lookout for that quality in Plains Song, but its presence here does not fully explain the special beauty of this narrative, which on its surface is an account of three generations of women (and a few of their men) living on the plains in Nebraska. Be warned: the book and its characters may appear to be simple, but this narrative is somewhat devious, and some of its treasures may remain hidden from the casual reader. Plains Song is a wonderfully strange novel and only gets more strange and beautiful the more you look at it, like a photograph that slowly reveals its truth under very close inspection. It gives us a set of characters, carefully and lovingly preserved, who in their habits of thought and behavior may seem rather unfamiliar and even odd, given their distance from us. Most of them possess a human form of sabi, and they live among objects that have acquired it as well.

  Morris’s characters are defined more by silence than by speech, more by work than by pleasures taken—and by a sense of privacy so severe that not even the novel’s narrative will violate it. Short as it is, the novel takes its time, and time, finally, is one of its major subjects.

  Wright Morris’s fiction—a major achievement in American letters in this century—spanned the interval from the publication of My Uncle Dudley in 1942 to that of the novel you hold in your hands, published thirty-eight years later. Plains Song was Morris’s last major work of fiction, and it looks and feels a bit like a testament, a compendium of much of what its author had known and seen and thought about for a considerable part of his life. A twilight effect hangs over it, as does the sense that events are being viewed from a middle distance by someone who was once a part of the scene he describes but is no longer. At the same time, the book is particularly relevant to many of our contemporary concerns, particularly to our ongoing discussions of the power relationships between men and women. In its own way, Plains Song could be called a feminist narrative, though its feminism is not exactly like anyone else’s and has no clear agenda. For one thing, the word love almost never appears in this novel. Its characters may sometimes feel love, but it is nobody else’s business if they do, including the reader’s. Plains Song is not that kind of book. Marriages do take place here, but they are as accidental as an exposure to poison oak.

  The author of this text was born in Nebraska, and though he lived most of his life away from the Midwest and was as sophisticated and worldly a writer as anyone might imagine (he wrote more than a dozen novels, several volumes of literary criticism, and four photo-texts, one about Venice), he seems to have been most deeply possessed by the local details and habits of thought with which he was surrounded as a child. In this respect he may resemble his fellow Nebraskan Willa Cather. His fiction treats down-home subjects with a great technical cunning, with the result that his characters are neither falsely enlarged to heroic proportions nor ironically diminished by condescension. It may seem like an odd thing to say, but his characters always appear to be about the right size—the narrative always manages to get their proportions right. (In an age of television, movies, and hype, this achievement is more uncommon than you might think.) To get them right, the author does not love his characters by gushing over them; instead, he does them the honor of paying close attention to them. His novels are, therefore, acts of lyrical attention rather than high dramas, and a good reader might do well to bring a close attention to what Morris has set down, with such precision and care, on the page. He liked slow readers—he said so many times—and those who took careful notice.

  In one of his books of photographs, he wrote that it was his aim “to salvage what I considered threatened, and to hold fast to what was vanishing.” In some sense, he was the novelist as collector, a preservationist, a person on whom very little would ever be lost.

  Reading slowly then let us start with the photograph that appears again and again throughout this book. Morris was a remarkable photographer, as I’ve noted, in addition to being an outstanding writer of fiction, and he has affixed one of his own photographs to the beginning of each chapter. This photograph, “Reflection in an Oval Mirror, Home Place, 1947,” (though it is not labeled as such in the novel) apparently presents us with a domestic scene. But it is something of an optical illusion. We must take a closer look at it.

  At first it appears to be a wavery shot of a bedroom or parlor corner, with a door to the right. After a moment, however, we see that we are looking at a reflection in a mirror whose lower edge embellishes the image with an engraved ribbon on the glass. So far, so good. But one of the novel’s characters believes that mirrors are “suspect by nature.” What is there to suspect? In this mirror we glimpse, reflected, a table with several photographs propped up on it, standing beneath two photographs on the wall, the one of a young couple, the other of two children, a girl and a baby. We are looking, then, at a photograph of a mirror reflecting back other family photographs, resulting in a wheels within wheels effect. The old mirror further ages the already aging objects that it reflects, through an effect of minor optical distortion. It’s not a smooth, modern mirror, after all, but an antique one, flawed from the time of its creation. Already this photograph seems to be a portrait of familiar objects that subtly hold time within themselves and are somehow, thanks to the medium of reflection, unfamiliar. But what really compels the viewer’s attention is the door on the right-hand side.

  Before we convert this door into a symbol—a passageway to a different life, an opening to a new future, to love or death—we should look more closely at it, because something is wrong here. The door is casting a shadow on the wall behind it. Also, it is weirdly placed: too near to the table of photographs to swing open, and with its hinges attached to nothing but air. To speak plainly, the door in Morris’s photograph is not a functioning door at all but a piece of wood stored in a room. What at first seems to be a doorway out of the room is in fact a wooden door propped up against the opposite wall. So, in actuality, it’s a door
that leads nowhere, but the arrangement is beautiful all the same. For me, the effect—mirror, photographs, door—is like a view through a telescope, not into the distance but into the past.

  One other observation might be relevant: some pictures manage to catch a moment of noise and swirl and energy and movement, but not this one—what this one catches is a moment of stillness and silence. The arrangement in “Reflection in an Oval Mirror” seems very still. Photographs are visual, not auditory, of course. But they can sometimes convey a sense of quiet, of something being hushed, and that is where we begin this particular narrative, with one of the novel’s central characters, Cora, on her deathbed and the instruction that comes out of nowhere to let her sleep. In other words, reader, be quiet. After all, as the narrative says, “Cora welcomes silence.”

  Cora welcomes silence. This plains song begins with silence, with its welcoming. How can a song, a novel for voices, be made out of silences? Well, the words we are given in the novel are woven around that silence. The typical Morris novel begins not with the jabber of conversation, or yelling, or grand speeches but with an effect of stillness. And very soon in the narrative we are directed to look at the scar, “blue as gun metal between the first and second knuckle,” on Cora’s right hand, a scar that is one of her identifying features. The first explanation for this scar, the one provided by Emerson, her husband, is that a horse bit her, a lame and mean-spirited explanation. But no: she bit herself, so as not to cry out, so as not to make a noise. Readers will find out for themselves what drove her to this extreme measure, when “horror exceeded horror,” and it might have pleased the author that contemporary readers would conceivably have some trouble believing that she would do such a thing to herself under those circumstances. It would throw them—us—into a state of wonder, that she would suffer so over that, scarring herself for life. But our disbelief is simply a sign of our distance from her.

  When a more modern citizen of the world might have complained or protested or simply known better, Cora kept her silence. We should try to understand what is at stake here, what this novel sets out for our contemplation. Few women in our own time would silently tolerate what Cora has to put up with, and few women now in Western society would be shocked by what shocks her. The Nebraska of Morris’s novel is a definitively lost world. But we should be careful not to disapprove of her or to judge her too quickly. Cora defines her life through her chores, that lovely, antique word, and by what she manages to accomplish by means of them. Cora is not notable because of her looks (she is rather plain) or because of what she says. More often than not she is speechless, and too much talk makes her uncomfortable. She is therefore pre-feminist, pre-therapeutic, and pre-lifestyle; her strength is not in any sense political or consumerist. What she has is strength of character, and by the midpoint of the novel she has acquired an even more unlikely quality, the nobility, the sabi, I referred to earlier.

  We do not use that word—nobility—much anymore; we are more likely to use words like empowerment or marginalization. Cora’s nobility has something to do with the ability to bear up without complaint, to take her life as it comes to her, and to regard it as God-given. If you were an ambassador from the future and arrived on her doorstep to tell her that she is a victim, she would be horrified, or more likely, would simply not know what you are talking about. Cora’s responses to her own life are complex but uncomplaining, and they reflect a feature of common existence two or three generations back among women (and men) living her sort of life. We now know the damage that was done with such silences, the abuses and injustices that they covered up. What we are more likely not to acknowledge now is the power of such silences. “Although urged to cry out by Mrs. Kahler, Cora made no sound.” That’s Cora.

  The novel’s irony is that its subtitle is For Female Voices. Well, yes and no. The female voices in Plains Song often express themselves by their silences, an expressive, ongoing, sometimes lifelong silence.

  We should not always think of silences as sinister or as necessarily harboring a wound that needs to be exposed to air. Sometimes silence is a sign of pure wonderment, of quiet, absorbed attention. In the unfolding of this story, Morris’s characters are largely divided into two groups: those who keep silent and those who are somewhat more articulate or (in the terms the novel sets for itself) noisy. The fact of Cora seems to bring forth her opposites, first with her sister-in-law, Belle Rooney, and then with Belle’s daughter, Sharon Rose. Cora’s own daughter is quiet, as is a later (and very eerie) character, Blanche, who is all eyes. At the end of the novel, Sharon finds herself among people whose purpose in life is to make speeches. Counterpointed characterization is very much at work here. Belle, who comes from another part of the country, talks all the time. She teaches Cora’s daughter, Madge, to talk. “Cora,” the narrator observes, “hoped that such speech would come slow to Madge, but even the chickens might learn it if they heard enough of it.” From silence we move slowly and maybe reluctantly to expression, to conversation, and to music. But we never leave those silences behind. They infuriate Sharon, who thinks of this refusal to articulate as characteristic of dumb beasts. But those silences are at least half the novel, and Sharon ends up speechless herself in the novel’s concluding section.

  What I have been saying about the characters in this novel also applies to the novel’s own manner and to its unusual mode of presentation.

  You will notice as you read through Plains Song that the writing avoids standard interior scene construction, by which I mean prolonged dialogue between two or more people, interspersed with moments of action. Defined by an absence of conversation, by its characters’ refusal to speak at length, the novel also brushes off moments that in most contemporary fiction would be highlighted, underlined, and prolonged. Any and all romances in Plains Song take place, for the most part, behind the scenes, and if the novel’s characters feel love, the novel does not let too much of that love become visible on stage. There is a remarkable tact at work here, particularly in the reflections on the relationship between Sharon and Lillian Baumann, all the more powerful because not fully glimpsed.

  Major characters die suddenly, but their deaths are, more often than not, inserted into the middle of paragraphs, and the voice does not rise to emphasize the importance of the event. There is a refusal here to make events larger than they are. The narrative is rigorously anti-inflationary. If you are not paying attention, you might miss some or all of it. When catastrophe strikes, the voice remains even-tempered, as if it were watching these events at a distance or through a mirror.

  This narrative is laconic to a fault, but it is amazingly, beautifully eloquent within the terms that it sets itself. Also, because it refuses to overstate anything, the voice is trustworthy in whatever it brings to your attention. The author, through his characters, is telling you exactly what he knows to be true and what he is sure of, no more and no less. After a while, given all this evidence, the reader thinks, Yes, it must have happened in exactly this way. This is a world.

  Some readers may find themselves bewildered to encounter so uninflected a story, as if the narrative itself has learned a thing or two from Cora. We are so accustomed to over-the-top expressions of feeling, to high publicity disclosures of personal matters, and to the general gratuitous invasion of public life by inflated emotions and events that an immersion into a privacy as profound as the kind experienced by the characters in this novel may at first seem slightly off-putting. We are used to having dramas raised to a higher, noisier pitch than this—any soap opera has more overt drama than this book does. But what you gain in drama you lose in self-possession and dignity and nobility, and finally you may lose the sense of wonder altogether.

  I need to stop at that word, one of Morris’s favorites. Wonder. One of his other novels was titled Cause for Wonder, and in another late novel, Fire Sermon, the protagonist, a boy who is pushing through his early adolescence toward manhood, discards a casual understanding so that he can experience wonder instead. �
��Already he was old enough to gaze in wonder at life.” Old enough, the sentence reads, not young enough. Wonder, despite what people may say about it, is an attribute of maturity, not of youth. Teenagers are often more blasé than old people are. You cannot feel wonder until you give up some of the customary ways of seeing and understanding common events. It is better to come back to them free of knowingness and clichés. You experience a sense of wonder when a familiar thing, something you thought you knew, starts to feel strange and makes your hair stand on end. In Plains Song the strange mixes very closely with the familiar, like that door propped up against that wall. When Cora’s husband, Emerson, dies, she realizes that in her soul he has been a stranger to her all her life, and she was to him—this after several decades of living with him.

  That may be why the focus of this novel, its focusing agent, shifts halfway through the book from Cora to Sharon. A malcontent from the moment of her birth, Sharon can see and express what many of the other characters cannot, because her distance from her own experience, her sense of being at one remove, makes her a perfect observer. Gradually, by force of character, she becomes the eyes and ears of the book, its expressive spy, its artist, toward whom the narrative naturally is drawn. If this book calls itself a song—and it does—then we should look for its musician, and that person is Sharon. The narrator reserves his greatest eloquence for her, and the resulting portrait is loving, exact, and utterly memorable. Sharon becomes the landscape that surrounds her. Here is one description of her as she sits in a car: “The heat drone of the insects, the stupor of the food, and the jostle of the car seemed to blur the distinction between herself and the swarming life around her. Voices, bird calls, a movement of the leaves, the first hint of coolness in the air, were not separately observed sensations but commingled parts of her own nature. Her soul (what else could it be?) experienced a sense of liberation in its loss of self.” That’s beautiful.