The Matter With Morris (27 page)
It was Libby who brought up Tyler’s name, hesitantly. “Did Mom tell you?” she asked. She was looking at Morris.
Morris nodded. Shrugged.
“She’s nuts,” Meredith said. “She’s letting him off the hook.”
“It’s not about him,” Libby said. “Can’t you see how relieved Mom is? It’s like she’s been born again.”
“More like she’s in love. And now she wants us all to meet him,” Meredith said. “I’m not. I’ll tell you that. I’d tear his eyes out.”
“You might surprise yourself.” Morris the peacemaker. He didn’t believe himself, but he knew that Meredith needed some words of guidance, some regulation.
At the curb, before he said goodbye, he said that he planned to take their grandpa to the memorial service at Vimy Ridge Park on Remembrance Day. Did either of them want to come along? Meredith said she had no interest, and she skipped towards the car with a quick wave, avoiding having to hug him. Libby said yes, she would like to be there. She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. “Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked. He said he was good. He was satisfied. That was enough, he said.
The first column he would write upon his return (and he would return) would be an apology. He would apologize to his wife, his children, to the good readers who had trusted him, to his son Martin, to the writers he had stolen from. Bellow, for instance. What did he say?
We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end … People frightening one another—a poor sort of moral exercise.
What he would not do is apologize to the prime minister, or to the CEO of Colt. These were managers of death. Rewarded for their sins. If Morris still
sounded
slightly mad, so be it. He was in fact sane.
On November 11, he drove to the Remembrance Day Service at the memorial to the forty-fourth Battalion of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles in Vimy Ridge Memorial Park.
His father and Libby were with him. He’d asked Lucille to join them, but she’d said softly that she was fine with not going. “Okay, Morris?” And so three members of the Schutt family hovered at the edge of the gathering and watched a man in a white robe read a Bible passage from the Sermon on the Mount. The words floated upwards and were carried away by the wind. In the bare branches of a nearby tree, a young boy perched and watched the goings-on. A group of soldiers performed the three-gun salute. Morris heard the sharp cracks as the guns fired and he observed the people present and he realized that he both belonged and did not belong. His father was cold. He had a blanket over his lap and Morris had found a toque and mitts, but still his father was shaking. He gave him coffee from a Thermos and his father looked up at him and said, “Thank you.” Then he asked, “Is it Martin? Is he gone?”
Morris said that yes, he was, and his father, with brilliant clarity, saw that he had missed something. And then the lucidity in the eyes disappeared. A soldier with a trumpet played a song. The wail and wonder. The wind blew. Reaching for the last note, the trumpet faltered, slightly off key, and then faded away. A lone soldier, dressed as if he had just stepped out of World War I, stood at attention near the cenotaph. A middle-aged couple who had perhaps lost a son laid out a wreath. The crowd, as if responding to some silent call, surged forward suddenly and laid poppies on the wreath. Touchingly, surprisingly, Libby joined
them. Grandpa Schutt called out, agitated, and when Libby returned she took her iPod and gently positioned the earbuds for her grandfather. He sat quietly, and then began to sing, humming at first and then breaking into words, haltingly and finally with more force, drawing the attention of those nearby. He sang “Everybody Knows,” his voice strong and clear. People stared. Some fidgeted. Morris wondered if he should quiet his father, and then decided no. Libby crouched and held her grandpa’s hand. Across from the park was a church. He thought that if at this moment he could gather in his arms all those who loved him, he would have maybe fourteen or fifteen people in his circle. Wasn’t that enough? He would turn fifty-two in a month. Time was slipping away. He could die soon, and his life would be incomplete. He was only halfway through Book IX of
The Republic.
He had intimate things to say to Lucille. A place must be found for Martin’s ashes. Libby must grow up. Meredith required love; Jake as well. He stood in the cold and the wind, and he knew that when he got home he would pick up his ballpoint pen and write all of this down in his journal. There was still much to solve and much to consider. Take note, thought Morris. Here I am.
The author is thankful to Levon Bond for his guidance regarding military details.
I have begged and borrowed from many writers: Plato, Cicero, Petrarch, Dante, Shakespeare, Søren Kierkegaard, Jacob Boehme, Theodor Adorno, Paul Tillich, Leo Strauss, Reinhold Niebuhr, Allan Bloom, Terry Eagleton, and finally and most avidly, Saul Bellow.
All quotes from
The Republic of Plato
are from the translation by Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1968.
The quote on page 3 attributed to Jacob Boehme is taken from
Personal Christianity,
by Jacob Boehme, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co.
The excerpt from Petrarch on page 8 is taken from
My Secret Book
by Francis Petrarch. Translation copyright 2002 by J.G. Nichols.
The line on page 102, attributed to Theodor Adorno, is taken from
Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life,
by Theodor Adorno, Verso. Translation copyright 2005 by E.F.N. Jephcott.
The quote on Socratic Restoration on page 128 is taken from
The City and Man
by Leo Strauss, University of Chicago Press.
The lines on pages 140, 154, 213, and 249, attributed to Cicero, are taken from
Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4
(Books 3 and 4), University of Chicago Press. Translation copyright 2002 by Margaret R. Graver.
P. S.
Ideas, interviews & features
Author Biography
Meet David Bergen
About Writing
The Matter With Morris,
an essay by David Bergen
Further Reading
David Bergen
D
avid
B
ergen
was born in Port Edward, British Columbia, and, due to the peripatetic lifestyle of his pastor-father, spent his early years moving about Western Canada. The family eventually settled in Niverville, Manitoba, a small farming town south of Winnipeg that would become the template for his first novel,
A Year of Lesser.
His early reading was unguided, he says, and consisted of books that were plot driven: Zane Grey, thrillers, crime novels, and the occasional Margaret Laurence novel. This reading would partially shape him as a novelist. He felt the need to tell a story that had impetus and force and a strong narrative. And shaped by the religion of his youth, questions of faith, too, would come to influence Bergen’s writing, especially his earlier books, which include his collection of stories,
Sitting Opposite My Brother.
Bergen sees himself as a late bloomer. His first published story appeared in
Prairie Fire
when he was thirty-one. He published his first book at the age of thirty-six, and three years later his first novel. He says it took him a long time to find a voice, and the search involved poor but necessary imitations of some of his favourite writers: John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy.
In the late eighties, Bergen moved with his wife and children to Southeast Asia, where he taught English to Vietnamese refugees soon to depart for Canada. The solitude and the removal from Western life allowed
him time to write, and it was here, in a small town in southern Thailand, that he typed out his first stories and mailed them to various publications. The rejections came back slowly, along with the occasional acceptance. In 1997 he returned to Southeast Asia and lived in Vietnam. While there he sought Bao Ninh, the author of
The Sorrow of War,
a novel written from the perspective of a North Vietnamese soldier. Though he never found Bao Ninh, through his search he met numerous Vietnamese poets, artists, novelists, and short story writers.
Upon his return from Vietnam, he published two more novels,
See the Child
and
The Case of Lena S.,
which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction. His years in Southeast Asia would eventually provide the background for the novel
The Time in Between,
awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2005.
The Retreat,
published in 2008, was hailed as “further proof that the late-blooming Bergen is now one of Canada’s very best writers.” Published in 2010,
The Matter with Morris
was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Bergen has won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year three times, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction three times, and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award twice.
For Bergen, structure is one of the most important aspects of novel writing. He worked as a carpenter for several years and says that this taught him something about building a novel. “The foundation has to be there, then the frame, and after that you can lay all the pretty stuff down. If you don’t
have the frame, then the pretty stuff just collapses and the novel ceases to be a novel. It’s just beautiful language and that doesn’t make a novel.”
Vestiges of his Mennonite upbringing are evident in his writing. Raised on the Bible and the stories of the Old Testament and the religious writers such as John Bunyan and Augustine, Bergen is compelled to explore moral complexity through character, which provides a realism that evokes both beauty and cruelty. Live in the world, write about it, he says, and what arrives is a possibility for doubt and belief, for uncertainty and disappointment, and for moments of clarity and joy.
David Bergen, who lives with his family in Winnipeg, received the Writers’ Trust Notable Author Award in 2009.
When did you first know that you wanted to be a writer?
At the age of twenty-one, as I was trying to figure out what I “wanted to be” in life, I came across a description of a journalism program that included creative writing. (This was before Creative Writing programs began to flower.) I didn’t want to be a journalist, but I was drawn to the writing course. Interestingly, it was the only course I ever took, and though it pushed me in certain ways, I discovered that I produced better work and had more fun if I followed my own vision—reading writers I loved, imitating them, trying to find a tone and a style that made sense. I liked the “feeling” of writing, of attempting to tell a story. I learned quite quickly of course that “feeling,” though necessary in small ways, has little to do with good writing.
What were your earliest stories about? Did they plant seeds for any of your novels?
My earliest stories were clunky, poor imitations of writers I admired. One of my first good stories was called “Fat.” I was teaching in a high school at the time, and at lunch I closed my door and wrote with this feverish ache. So in this story “Fat,” there’s a high school teacher who has an affair with a student. He goes to the student’s house for dinner where he meets the mother, who flirts with him. That’s the story. But I remember I was aiming for the dialogue to be edgy, and at some point I realized that there was a layer of grief that hovers over
the house, much like a layer of fat. I never published the story. I recall an editor saying that it was strong, but wrong. I thought he had issues. Did this story plant a seed for something that I would write later? Probably. My themes are my themes: grief, loss, longing. I can’t avoid them. That said, I don’t believe that I went back to any of those first stories and made them brilliant. There was too much that wasn’t working there.
You’ve called
The Matter with Morris
“a real departure” for you. Can you explain?
Writing
The Matter with Morris
felt almost like a free fall; the story came quickly, and the characters arrived fully formed. Morris himself is wry and self-deprecating and lost. His humour, when it shows itself, is understated. This is perhaps what I meant when I called it a departure. Although the book has serious themes, the writing of it felt easy and almost effortless.
Do you typically begin your writing with a character? A scene? A theme? What pulls you to the page?
Character. Everything else will follow if I can find a character that is compelling and believable and large.
How did Morris pull you to the page?
I wanted to understand this man who is flawed and angry and sad and yet who is implacable in his optimism. Morris, though damaged, is honest. I’ve had readers say that
they didn’t understand Morris, or that they didn’t like him. I’ve never understood how “liking a character” is the most important aspect of a novel. Fiction is one of the safest places to explore characters we don’t understand, or characters who frighten us, or characters who do things we couldn’t imagine doing.
Morris is, initially, a character who shares much with you, the author. In what ways is he similar? Different?
This is tricky, because as soon as an author notes similarities, the novel becomes “autobiographical.” It isn’t. That said, Morris, like me, comes from a Mennonite background, he is in his early fifties, he reads a lot, he has children, he comes from Winnipeg, his wife is a psychotherapist, and he is a writer (though, in his case, he is a journalist). Those are basic facts, but at some point the facts leave off and the character becomes more complex and made up. Fortunately, the author gets lost, as he should, and the fictional character is free to develop.
