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

Cover

Copyright

Introduction

Plains Song

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.