“In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow.” Wright Morris’s The Works of Love opens “West of the 98th Meridian,” in the part of western Nebraska that was sparsely populated in the late 1800s and that remains so today. In the land “where it sometimes rains and it sometimes doesn’t….”
As I’ve written before, Wright Morris is one of the great American novelists of the 20th century, but he tends to get labeled and limited as a regionalist. And it’s due in part to sentences like those above. I have to admit, though I have loved and admired The Works of Love since I read it forty years ago, I mentally tagged it as a Midwestern novel myself. I recalled it as a story set mostly in lonely places, in railroad stations where the express trains from Omaha to Denver don’t stop, in towns where a single hotel serves as the one place where travelers can sleep, eat, and drink.
And it’s true that this is where Will Brady is born and where The Works of Love, which traces the path of his life, starts out. Will’s father dies when he’s still a boy, likely a suicide worn down by failure and the emptiness of the land. You can’t really say that Will is raised here. His mother leaves him and Will makes his way on his own, starting out as a railroad station agent. He gradually works his way east, until he finds himself the owner of a large egg-producing operation outside Omaha.
He also finds himself a father and a husband, in that order. After falling into a sort-of relationship with one of the whores in his town’s brothel, he receives a basket a year or so later containing “a sausage-colored baby” and a note saying, “My name is Willy Brady.” He then weds the widow of the owner of the town’s hotel, not so much out of love as out of a sense that a wife is one of the things with which a man’s meant to furnish his life.
On their first night together after the wedding, Will finds his wife laying in bed, “wrapped from head to foot, as mummies are wrapped.”
It occurred to him that something like that takes a good deal of practice, just as it took practice to lie, wrapped up like a mummy, all night. It took practice, and it also took something else. It took fear. This woman he had married was scared to death.
The wife wrapped up and protected from her husband is an image that stays with anyone who reads The Works of Love. It symbolizes how Will Brady is cut off, shut out, isolated from the people he loves. Which is part of what makes the book one of the most powerfully sad stories in American literature.
But what I didn’t recognize when I first read this book as a young man was that The Works of Love is, fundamentally, a work of absurdist fiction. In an analysis of The Works of Love published in a 1968 issue of Western American Literature, Joseph Wydeven wrote that critics such as Granville Hicks dismissed the character of Will Brady as a cipher, “a person moved paradoxically by an absence of motivation.” They argued that he “seems to exist at times as little more than a receptor of sensual stimuli, unable to convert perception into perception.”
But so is Gregor Samsa of Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Samuel Beckett’s Molloy. To Will Brady, much of life is a baffling mystery. He knows how to perform the tasks that his work puts before him and he does them well, attaining a level of wealth and comfort that others envy and are attracted to. After his first wife leaves him, he manages to persuade a good-looking younger woman to marry him, but she leaves him for “a Hawayan” vaudeville performer while they are still honeymooning in California. He provides for his son’s care but lives apart, often thinking of writing him a letter but rarely managing to send one.
He sees himself as “a traveler, something of an explorer” — except that the foreign land through which he travels is the land of other people:
It was one thing to go to the moon, like this foreigner, a writer of books, but did this man know the man or woman across the street? Had he ever traveled into the neighbor’s house? Did he know the woman who was there by the lamp, or the man sitting there in the shadow, a hat on his head as if at any moment he might go out? Could he explain why there were grass stains on the man’s pants? That might be stranger, that might be harder to see, than the dark side of the moon.
Morris based his story somewhat on his own relationship with his father. A man who struggled with depression and went through a string of unsuccessful marriages and lonely railroad station jobs, he, too, left his son in the care of strangers and seemed to forget about him for years. Morris told of saving up to buy an old pocket watch from a pawn shop, a watch he then proceeded to wrap up and leave under the Christmas tree in the Omaha house where he was staying, so that he could open it on Christmas Day and pretend that it was from his father.
For Morris, bottled-up men like his father and Will Brady were representative men. As he once told the critic Wayne Booth:
When I say, What is there to say about a man with so much of his life left out? I mean the reader to understand there will be plenty, however strange…. Without knowing, and in a sense without really having adequate reason to feel so, I was absolutely confident … that in Brady’s emotionally muted relationships and his failure to relate to others there was the drama, however submerged, of much American life.
Will Brady ends up playing the part of the most benevolent and friendly father figure known to American children. He takes a job as Santa Claus at the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Chicago, and buys a sun lamp to give himself the appropriate rosy complexion. But the harder he chases after the image he thinks the children want, the more his actions become self-destructive, the further he distances himself from others. He no more succeeds in making a connection with other people than Gregor Samsa succeeds in breaking out of his cockroach shell.
Morris worked in concrete, specific images and sensations. His prose is taut, his scenes immediate. He didn’t indulge in flights of fantasy. And so, it’s easy to think of him as a realist.
But rereading The Works of Love, I saw that I had fallen into a trap of thinking of the book as a realistic novel. We don’t make this mistake with Kafka. Though he gives the reader convincing details that help us feel the plight of Gregor Samsa as he lies helpless, unable to shift his cockroach body, unable to make speechlike sounds, we understand throughout that we’re reading something fantastic. But the realism of Morris’s writing is meant to achieve the same effect: to make us believe there is a man as cut off and bottled-up as Will Brady. So, it would be easy to diagnose him, using today’s terminology, as operating somewhere along the autism spectrum.
Seen symbolically, however, seen in the context of Kafka rather than Theodore Dreiser, Will Brady doesn’t have to be diagnosed. Morris wasn’t really telling the story of a man we’re expected to believe in as a fictional counterpart to any real person — not even his father — any more than Kafka meant us to think of people we knew who’d become cockroaches overnight. Will Brady’s story is a lens through which Morris means to show us something about “the drama, however submerged, of much American life.” When Brady buys a sunlamp, he’s no different from the guy who buys a new truck or bigger TV: they’re both trying to buy some form of happiness. And where it leads him is where all such behavior leads: still standing apart, still wondering why he’s no happier.
The University of Nebraska Press began reissuing Wright Morris’s work in the early 1970s and has shown exceptional support by keeping these books in print for decades as part of their Bison Books paperback series. But though the Press made it possible for generations of readers to discover and come to love Morris’s writing, it also helped reinforce the perception of Morris as a regionalist. The Works of Love was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf. Had Knopf or a similar major New York City publisher reissued The Works of Love, I strongly suspect that we would now recognize it a novel that deserves to stand on the same shelf with Invisible Man, Herzog, and Something Happened.
The Works of Love, by Wright Morris
New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951
(1946) and 
(1948), were pioneering works of photo-fiction, combining Morris’ stark black-and-white photographs of deserted, wind-scarred buildings and abandoned interiors in rural Nebraska with stories of the odd people, mostly of few words, who survived there.
(1952), which I consider one of the very best American novels of its century. For me, to steal an opening line from Ford, this is the saddest story I’ve ever heard. Morris tells the story of Will Brady, a man of the plains, who achieves a great success as an early corporate poultry farmer yet always seems a Grand Canyon away from the people he loves. One of his wives wraps herself up in their sheets to keep away from Will, and when, later, he is broke and working as a department store Santa Claus in Chicago, he writes long letters to a stepson who will never see them.
(1942), was a comic account of a trip from Nebraska to California that Morris made at the age of sixteen with his uncle Dwight in 1926. My favorite Morris novel–a pair of novels, to be correct–takes that journey in reverse. In 
(1971), a wizened, straight-backed old man, Floyd Warner, aged eighty-three, takes his orphaned eleven year-old grand nephew and returns to his family home in Nebraska to settle the affairs of his sister, Viola. Floyd fixes up the 1927 Maxwell he’s had up on block for decades, and, driving well below the speed limit, slowly works his way East. Along the way, they pick up a hitch-hiking hippie couple, and when they arrive at Viola’s place, they find the same empty rooms and collections of silverware and kerosene lamps that Morris photographed thirty years earlier.
, in which Floyd Warner continues his journey, leaving behind the young boy and picking up a somewhat mythical character, Blackbird, who leads him to his death. The two novels trace a symbolic path from the hard and innocent days of the 1920s to the energy and anarchy of Vietnam-era America–yet the one thing one could never say is that Morris ever strays from the concrete and tangible into symbolism.
(1954), 
(1956), and 
(1963). All feature rich, precise descriptive prose, electic mixes of characters and situations, and Morris’ ironic sense of comedy. Then there are two of the best novels written and set in the 1960s: 
(1967), about the one day racing, raping and thieving spree of one Jubal Gainer, a character of pure energy and violence, and 
(1965), which looks at a small California town on the day of JFK’s assassination.
(1980), Morris returned again to a Nebraska setting. In his review of the book, Larry McMurtry wrote, “No landscape moves him so deeply as the somber, muted plains country; for nowhere else is his depth of reference so nearly absolute.” Although the book received better publicity than most of Morris’ other books, it remained, like the rest, better spoken of than read. While the sum of his work represents a considerable richness and variety of writing, Morris never aimed to write for a large audience. Asked to describe his ideal reader, Morris said it would be one who possessed, “A well-established and chronic inclination to read slowly, and reread the line you just slipped by.”