Wright Morris’s 1948 book Home Place is about as dull and uneventful a book as I have ever read — and I could not love it more. An antidote for the times if ever I’ve found one. (An antidote for his times as well, it’s worth noting.)
Most of what Morris holds forth in this little book is held forth slant. Some of it is in the story, which is fiction and describes a single day with a man returned to his home farm from the city with his wife and two kids, and some in the images and in the layout, which contains for every page of text a black & white picture from a Morris family farm in Nebraska. (The final 20 or so pages, with only a portion of text on the page for each picture opposite it, is a stunningly slant move that works on memory in way you’d just have to read the book for.)
But Morris can also look a thing in the face in a way most of us would have to admit we are inspired and guilted by:
I put my hands up to my face, as it occurred to me, suddenly, how people looking in a Daily News photograph. A smiling face at the scene of a bloody accident. A quartet of gay waitresses near the body slumped over the bar. God only knows why I thought of that, but I put up my hands, covering my face, as if I was there, on the spot, and didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t want to be violated, that is. The camera eye knows no privacy, the really private is its business, and in our time business is good. But what, in God’s name, did that have to do with me? At the moment, I guess, I was that kind of camera.
Was there something holy about these things? If not, why had I used that word? For holy things, they were ugly enough. I looked at the odds and ends on the bureau, the pin-cushion lid on the cigar box, the faded Legion poppies, assorted pills, patent medicines. There was not a thing of beauty, a man-made loveliness, anywhere. A strange thing, for whatever it was I was feeling, at that moment, was what I expect a thing of beauty to make me feel. To take me out of my self, into the selves of other things. I’ve been in the habit, recently, of saying that if we could feel anything, very long, it would kill us, and that we get on by not even feeling ourselves. To keep that from happening we have this thing called embarrassment. That snaps it off, like an antisepsis, or we rely on our wives, or one of our friends, to take the pressure out of the room with a crack of some kind. That’s what I was about to do. For once in my life I didn’t, but as I had to do something I went into Ed’s room, opened the bureau drawer, and called, “Oh, Peg!” When she came in I said— “Ed used to hunt. He used to go off for a day at a time, with a dog and a gun, up the river. When I was a kid there was still a wolf or two around here.” I said that, then I closed the drawer, making it clear that we could mind his public business, but leave his private business alone. There were several snapshots on the mirror and I looked at them—for my mother—but I didn’t turn them over to read on the back. “Well, she’s not there,” I said, and came back to the table, pulled out a chair, and looked at the old man’s shoes on the seat.
For thirty years I’ve had a clear idea what the home place lacked, and why the old man pained me, but I’ve never really known what they had. I know now. But I haven’t the word for it. The word beauty is not a Protestant thing. It doesn’t describe what there is about an old man’s shoes. The Protestant word for that is character. Character is supposed to cover what I feel about a cane-seated chair, and the faded bib, with the ironed-in stitches, of an old man’s overalls. Character is the word, but it doesn’t cover the ground. It doesn’t cover what there is moving about it, that is. I say these things are beautiful, but I do so with the understanding that mighty few people anywhere will follow what I mean. That’s too bad. For this character is beautiful. I’m not going to labor the point, but there’s something about these man-tired things, something added, that is more than character. The same word, but a new specific gravity. Perhaps all I’m saying is that character can be a form of passion, and that some things, these things, have that kind of character. That kind of Passion has made them holy things. That kind of holiness, I’d say, is abstinence, frugality, and independence—the home-grown, made-on-the-farm trinity. Not the land of plenty, the old age pension, or the full dinner pail. Independence, not abundance, is the heart of America.