On this episode we’re talking about Wright Morris. We’ll focus on two of his stories from his Collected Stories: 1948-1986, published in 1986.
We’ll start off with “The Origin of Sadness”—and then stay tuned for a short bonus conversation about “Real Losses, Imaginary Gains.”
My own fascination with Wright Morris started probably 30 years after this story collection was published. He was prolific and published novels, memoirs, stories, and even photography and had a long career in writing that started in the late 1940s.
But it was, I believe, 2016 when I first read an essay by Peter Orner about Wright Morris. It was in Orner's memoir in essays, "Am I Alone Here?” Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live. The story by Morris he wrote about was “A Fight Between a White Boy and a Black Boy in the Dusk of a Fall Afternoon in Omaha, Nebraska.”
I confess I wasn’t familiar with Morris’ work before this.
He may not be the most popular writer. However, he is for me now, of course, the kind of writer that Orner and I adore—perfect for this podcast.
What is it that we love? Well, as Orner said in his essay, “No writer I could name builds his prose so completely around answerable questions.”
Orner discerns this quality in Morris’ novel Plains Song (different from Kent Haruf’s Plainsong).
Says Orner, “[He] specializes in what I’ll call inarticulate wonderment.”
I remember being struck by this description. “Inarticulate wonderment.” His characters walk around in this state of awe that is difficult to articulate but is also something we recognize.
There’s a strangeness in these stories. But it isn’t weird for weird’s sake. There isn’t anything gratuitous here. By its very definition, strangeness is just out there, different, odd, peculiar. Yes, and—with Wright Morris—what is strange in his stories is discernibly real.
And as with so many other things we talk about on The Lonely Voice, you just have to read the story to know what I mean. There’s that "inarticulate wonderment" again.
In “The Origin of Sadness,” there’s a guy named Schuler who is unconventional. OK, he's odd. He is a guy who likes what he likes—canned grapefruit over fresh, his wife Doreen’s shiny black hair, cough drops—and in one almost unbearably beautiful moment in this story—remembering that he was once “an adventurous child.” Remembering. Schuler ruminates on his memories and the way the passage of time informed, not just his work, but his life.
All stories are about loss. A protagonist has lost something, searches for it, doesn’t know it’s missing—and that becomes the problem. For Schuler, what he “was really seeking” is the "origin of sadness."
He can be stopped in his tracks by “fossil forms, like a packet of letters, undisturbed since the moment of pressing,” and consider both their beauty and their long, quiet, history right there on the cold, packed ground at the edge of an arroyo and feel his “elation” turn to a “numbing pang of loss” at the silent solitude of those relics lying there alone.
Is it valid to say those fossils were able to “slip time’s noose” because Schuler found them? Did he find what he was looking for? Did he learn that sadness never ends?
