American author Wright Morris once described himself as "a spokesman for people who don't want to be spoken for and who don't particularly want to read about themselves." Perhaps that helps to explain why Morris is one of the most neglected of major American writers. Although he received both a National Book Award (for The Field of Vision in 1957) and the American Book Award (for Plains Song in 1981), few of his many novels, photo-texts, and essay collections remain in print.
In this passage from his third volume of memoirs, A Cloak of Light, Morris recalls a discovery he made while writing The Field of Vision. Creating genuine vernacular voices for the characters of Walter McKee and Gordon Boyd meant that he had to employ "the very clichés [he] had so often ridiculed."
In Praise of Clichés*
From A Cloak of Light by Wright Morris
My feeling was, at the time I began to write, that if the scenes and characters were appropriate to the writer's emotions, as aroused by these scenes and characters, memory and imagination would so commingle in the writing as to produce gratifying fiction. That seemed true of what little I had written, but it astonished me to find that the very clichés I had so often ridiculed were essential to my materials--on occasion they proved to be my materials.
Not that McKee didn't sort of like Mexico. In the four days they had been in Mexico City ten or twelve people had asked him for the time, then thanked him kindly no matter what he said. He liked that. He paid a little more attention to the time himself. Having it there in his pocket meant more down here than it did in the States.
It was not possible, it occurred to me, to make such an observation about McKee except in the clichés to which he was accustomed. In his nature, which I found appealing, they acquired the luster of a finer metal. His character, indeed, took the clichés of his life and fleshed them out in a way that made them appealing. Slowly I came to realize that these clichés were my subject, and my problem was how to use them, rather than abuse them. As I sometimes felt ambivalent about the character of Boyd--where he overlapped and where he departed from the character of the writer--so I was sometimes troubled by the ambiguous nature of many clichés. How was it possible, I wondered, that they could be at once the truth of the matter and its parody? But so it was I often found them. Later I would ponder the astonishing fact that the truth of clichés contradicted the truths of more sophisticated language, and that the character of a people had its source in their speech more than in their customs. As so often, I would find this impression confirmed in the comments of writers who were there before me, and in the wondrous, mind-boggling perception of Yeats that "in changing my syntax, I changed my intellect."
In my own experience, the written and spoken "cliché" would often embody the history of the American language and, unavoidably, the history of our people, and speak in one breath from many sources. Gertrude Stein testifies to this in The Making of Americans, and I believe my own practice, at its best, confronts this truth in its deep reliance on what is heard and felt when the language is spoken. I speak it to myself, as I write it, in order to better estimate its heft and rightness. In the vernacular it is the cliché that testifies to the burden of meaning that words and phrases from the past bear to us at the moment we speak in the present, where we hear, wherever the language is well spoken, the echoes of the writers who first shaped it. In the vernacular they speak with a familiar accent.
Selected Works by Wright Morris:
- My Uncle Dudley, novel (1942)
- The Inhabitants, photo-text (1946)
- The World in the Attic, nonfiction (1949)
- Man and Boy, novel (1951)
- The Field of Vision, novel (1956)
- Love Among the Cannibals, novel (1957)
- The Territory Ahead, criticism (1958)
- Ceremony in Lone Tree, novel (1960)
- What a Way to Go, novel (1962)
- Plains Song: For Female Voices, novel (1980)
- Will's Boy, memoir (1981)
- Solo, memoir (1983)
- A Cloak of Light: Writing My Life, memoir (1985)
- Collected Stories, 1986
*This passage appears in A Cloak of Light, by Wright Morris, published by Harper & Row in 1985.
