Wright Morris is, in my opinion, the least-appreciated great American writer of the 20th century. How under-appreciated? Well, the last book-length critical study of his work was published in 1985 and his only biography, Haunted: The Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris by Jackson Benson, was self-published. Fire Sermon and A Life are among his finest works, a pair of novellas that tell the story of the last weeks in the life of 82-year-old Floyd Warner. We first see him through the eyes of Kermit Oelsligle, the eleven-year-old boy who’s come to live with him after his parents were killed in an accident:
It is a long city block to the grade school exit where the old man gleams in the sun like a stop sign, and that is how he looks. He wears a yellow plastic helmet and an orange jacket with the word STOP stenciled on the back of it. The flaming color makes the word shimmer and hard to read. He might even be a dummy—the word GO is stenciled on the front of the helmet—but anyone who knows anything at all knows it’s the boy’s great-uncle Floyd. He’s actually pretty much alive but those who don’t know it cry out shrilly, “Are you a dummy, Mr. Warner?”
Floyd Warner is a man of set habits and few words and he and Kermit had achieved a truce of sorts, living in the oldest trailer in a trailer court full of old people in a seaside California town. But then Floyd’s sister Viola (“who had faith enough to save half the people in hell”) dies and the two have to travel to Nebraska to deal with the estate. They hitch up the trailer to Floyd’s 1928 Maxwell and creep their way east.
They manage a few hundred miles a day, mostly traveling after the sun goes down, but Floyd finds himself relying more and more on Kermit, who ends up doing most of the driving. After passing a couple of hippies a dozen times or more along the way, Kermit stops to pick them up, which infuriates Floyd, but he hasn’t the energy to kick them out. And so the four of them make it to the mostly-deserted town, surrounded by prairie, where the farmhouse where Floyd grew up and Viola died stands, full of abandoned furniture. One of the hippies knocks over a lit kerosene lamp and the place burns to the ground.
Disgusted with everything, Floyd unhitches the trailer and drives off in the Maxwell. At this point, Fire Sermon ends and A Life begins. Now Floyd travels south and west, to the New Mexico ranch he bought as soon as he could be rid of Nebraska and where he and his wife lived until she died of cancer nearly forty years earlier. With his old, slow car, he has to drive the back roads, but that suits his temperament:
It was a comfort to Warner to be off the freeway and back on a road where the turns were at right angles. One reason he had put the car up on blocks in California was that the winding roads were confusing. In the space of ten miles the sun in his eyes would be around at his back. The lack of any right angles made it difficult for him to find his bearings. With the angles gone, what did a man have left but up and down? It now occurred to him that up or down pretty well covered his available options, up to heaven with Viola, or straight to hell with everybody else.
As he passes through Kansas, he picks up George Blackbird, a native American just discharged after serving with the Army in Vietnam. Neither he nor Blackbird are talkers, but Blackbird’s company starts to open Floyd up to the richness of the life he mostly let pass by:
Gazing in the direction from which he had come, he seemed to see his life mapped out before him, its beginning and its end, its ups and its downs, its reassuring but somewhat monotonous pattern like that of wallpaper he had lived with, soiled with his habits, but never really looked at.
A Life transforms as we read from a terse, sparse comedy to a mythic journey. Floyd Warner, the old man unsatisfied and unimpressed with the people and places he’s spent his years with, finds a resting place in an ending that is both bleak and beautiful. Like his fellow Nebraskan, Willa Cather, Wright Morris writes things that are so simple on the surface and so deep and complex underneath (though unlike Cather, Morris can be laugh-out-loud funny). This was the third time I’ve read Fire Sermon and A Life and they only grow richer with each reading.