Oregon daily emerald., April 21, 1972, Page 8, Image 8

Fire Sermon
by Chris Houglum
I wish I had time and space to tell you what there is
to know about Wright Morris. He is our most gifted
neglected novelist, which is a left-handed way of saying
he is one of the best living. Period. This seems ample
reason for booklovers to flock to libraries and bookstores
in search of his work, but as yet no stampede seems
forthcoming, and a number of his earlier books remain
out of print Some intelligent, responsible, and respected
writers have expressed their admiration for his work
(which has been in evidence for more than a quarter of a
century), likewise numerous academics and informed
members of the reading public. He’s been written up in
prominent national magazines, and a Wright Morris
Reader is out which makes much of his work accessible
by placing representative selections from his books in
one volume. Still, his name lacks the currency of
Bellow’s and Roth's and Pynchon’s and Kesey’s, and
while recognition commensurate with his achievement
may at last be on its way, it seems like a long, slow ride.
‘‘Fire Sermon,” his fifteenth novel, should help things
along, because it is brief and beautifully crafted and
deeply alive to the estrangement everywhere evidenced
in America today.
‘‘Fire Sermon,” like a number of Morris’s novels,
seeks to dramatize the problems of the past as it is
manifested in the present. One of Morris’s abiding
concerns has been with “the forces that both salvage
human life and destroy it; the pitiless compulsion that
testifies, in its appalling way, to the spirit’s devious
ways of survival." For Morris, who is a real master at
depicting the significance of the everyday, the critical
forces which shape human life are often revealed in
people and events of small moment, attempting, in that
elusive, ambiguous second which is the present, to
reconcile that which is receding with the possibilities
which seem to emerge from the same instant.“Fire
Sermon” dramatizes this problem by depicting the ef
fect of a young hippie couple on a twelve-year-old or
phan, Kermit Oelsligle, and his 82-year-old grand-uncle,
Floyd Warner.
Hermit, recovered from injuries sustained in the auto
accident which claimed his parents, moves into Floyd’s
trailer home in Kubio, California, where he is expected
to help out around the place, attend school, and stay out
of the way. For Floyd Warner proves to be a stubborn,
taciturn, invective-spewing loner with an almost
chromosomal disposition to privacy, silence, and hard
work Friendless and long a widower, he is accustomed
to defining the world largely on his own terms. This
produces an insulation from change which seems all the
more effective for being largely unconscious. An en
counter with a young black employee of a Rubio
supermarket is instructive:
They both watch each item as the cashier.
Miss Tomlin, rings it up. The young man
who puts it in the brown bags is Skip
Fletcher, a basketball star at Rubio High
Sc hool The boy is afraid to look for his
face in the big muff of hair. The old man
says, "Put all of that in three bags, will
you, boy?" Kermit has been waiting for
him to say that, and now that it is said he
takes a grip on the cart. The old man holds
up the- line to open the sack of Hershey
kisses, fish one out, and fumble with the
foil wrapper He pops in into his mouth and
moves toward the door. In no way what
soever does he show the faintest inkling
that he has just escaped with his life Skip
Fletcher doesn’t show it either stuffing his
hand into a bag. but everybody else in the
market knows it. and just waits for Floyd
Warner to dropdead The boy is so sure that
one day he will if first Skip Fletcher
doesn't kill him that he has a little speech
that he plans to give when they ask him
what in the world happened This speech
will explain, as most Rubio people know,
that the old man calls people "boy" if they
are younger than he is, which includes all
but four or five people in the county. He
says "boy" like other people say "Hi." He
doesn't mean one thing or another by it, he
likes white boys just as little as black boys,
and possibly even less than people in
general
If this com fort a ble obtuseness seems absurd and
offensive. Floyd is unaware if it Kermit learns partly
from Floyd’s fragmentary conversation, partly from the
correspondence of Floyd s elder sister Viola that when
younger he appears to have travelled much of the
country, tried several occupations, been something of a
lady's man. His advancing years have seen the
deterioration of what was once a vital and adventurous
spirit to its present circumscribed orbit. And although
some of the worldliness and practicality of that buried
life is communicated to the impressionable, ignorant
and untravelled Kermit, Floyd’s horizons crowd him,
and his “violent streak” is directed almost reflexively
against all potential agents of transformation: revealed
religion, the “young heathen” members of a local hippie
colony, the mindless bureaucracy of the postal service.
But with the death of the invalid Viola, the horizons
of both Floyd and Kermit are pushed back. They decide
to travel east to Chapman, Nebraska in Floyd’s ancient
Maxwell, intending to auction off Viola’s belongings and
move into the abandoned family residence. For Kermit,
the excursion is to be an adventure, more travelling than
he’s done in his short life. For Floyd, the trip is a return
to his original home, to its past with its abiding hatreds
(for the memory of his father, loves (for Viola, despite
her lifelong religiosity) and confusions. Kermit ap
proaches the sojourn with the unschooled and therefore
supremely pragmatic outlook of the very young. Floyd,
his hopes colored by his history and the sense of place
which is a vital part of it, is disturbed by this freedom:
...a new, wider freeway led into the
mountains, and the old man called the
boy’s attention to the color of the leaves.
Born and raised in California, as he had
been, he had little or no idea of the change
of the seasons, the whiteness of winter, or
what it was like to look forward to spring.
It led him to ask what, if anything, he
looked forward to. Just as he feared, the
boy didn’t know. He looked forward, that’s
all. If it was evening, he looked forward to
morning. If it was Monday, he looked
forward to Saturday, and that sort of thing.
He just looked forward. Where else was
there to look?
The Maxwell primed for action and the trailer house
hitched to the back, the unlikely pair begin their stub
born crawl eastward, and have their first chance en
counter with the hitchhiking freak couple who are to
figure so prominently in later developments as they
cross Nevada. Floyd passes them up, but on two later
occasions they sight the same young couple, still hitch
hiking and making better time than the Maxwell.
For maybe four or five seconds, it might
have been longer, the old man let his foot
ease up on the pedal—then he saw who
they were and pushed it flat to the floor.
The girl waved both her arms and threw
the boy a kiss as they went by. It didn’t
seem to bother her at all that they didn’t
stop. They were going up an incline, with
the road so straight he could see them in
the rear-view mirror for miles, the sun
gleaming on her yellow hair. How did the
pair of them always end up ahead,
although the old man and the boy always
passed them? Where were they going?
Was it some sort of game?
These questions are characteristic of much of
Morris’s work, particularly with regard to his preoc
cupation with artifacts. The Maxwell could easily have
been sold by Floyd as a well-preserved antique for better
than three' grand, but its link with his past makes it an
invaluable sentimental object for him and he proceeds
to approach the future in ii at little better than a crawl,
effectively allowing the material, as well as psychic
clutter of the past to slow him The hitchhikers, free of
such attachments, make better time, and seem happier.
Kermit, who harbors a secret attachment to aspects of
the life-style of the Kubio freak community, is sensitive
to this contrast, and when a third encounter on the road
finds Floyd amenable to picking the couple up because of
the lateness of the hour, the insidious influence of an
alien culture has already made the youngster receptive
to the two young strangers.
Their names are Joy and Stanley, and when Floy
lets them ride in the trailer while he and Kermit split I
driving, the two start copulating. Floyd catches them
the act when he makes a rest stop, and their abundaij
cool in the face of his rage and indignation impresse
Xermit. You CAN get away with it, be open about it/pd
aside the climate of shame and ignorance fostered u
Stanley later points out) by non-fornicators like Floyd
Just a question of knowing who your friends are,
Kermit’s two new friends put it. This is cause for wonde
and an escalation of the young people’s tentative a|
tachment. It is made bald, which is to say crue
manifest, when the four stop at a roadside diner, ar
Floyd is late following the young people in. They ar
already seated when he enters, and the disposition
circumstances at this moment, although it seems
small thing unless you really look at it, gives Floy
pause.
Uncle Floyd just stood there in the
aisle, winding his watch.
“Sit down, Dad,” said Stanley, but the
boy knew he would not sit down, and dimly
understood why. It was not because of
Stanley, or because of the girl, or even
whatever it was they had been doing, but
that the three of them were now seated in
the booth. They were all young, and he was
old. They were on the one side, and he was
on the other. The boy knew that on the
instant. He knew it better than anything
else.
Joy and Stanley ride with them into Chapmar
where much of the past appears to be buried as deep ai
the town’s cemetery population, which has come to fai
exceed the number of surviving citizenry. Kermif
reflects on this as he watches Floyd view the town fror
the cemetery road:
With all of them here in the cemetery,
what was there -left to see? One grain
elevator, two or three houses, a barn with
a MAIL POUCH sign on the roof, all of it
in what might have been a grove in the
summer but the trees were now either dry
or leafless. The old man in the road would
see what he remembered, but the boy’s
squinting eyes saw only what was there.
He didn’t think it much.
Nor is the family house much, he thinks, littered as it
proves to be with the derelict articles of the family’s
generations. No ghosts: merely clutter removed fror
the context which made it meaningful, the artifact
outlasting their possessors in a jumbled, idiotic]
benignity.
These things, many of them useless, had
survived. Into his pocket the boy had
slipped a coin found in the pocket of a coat,
that had survived all the people that had
spent or saved it since 1879. The meaning
of this escaped him in a manner he found
satisfying. Already he was old enough to
gaze in wonder at life.
These successive apprehensions, which find only the
present abiding and are free of Floyd’s mythical dream-:
bridges of nostalgia and desire, are what serve tol
convince the old man and the boy of the unbridgeable rift j
sprung up between them—the youngster immersed inj
the present, the grand-uncle little more than a dream, an ]
apparition, so wholly is he the victim of his past. Hence, I
when an argument between Floyd and Stanley starts
afire that bums the house to the ground, it’s unimportant |
whether Floyd upsets the lamp intentionally or not; the
end result is the same—the ruin of the past’s edifice, and
a vacuum looming up for him as he takes off on his own
in the Maxwell. “Where did he go?” Kermit asks
Stanley, and Stanley rightly replies “Maybe up in
smoke.”
Joy ends the book by assuring Kermit of fires’
capacity for purifying and transforming, and this seems
one of the deepest statements of the book. Fire took
Kermit from his family in a smoking auto wreck, fire
releases him to himself and the moment with Floyd's
departure And the fire which destroys the house
releases Floyd from his past while offering him room for
the literal death which is the only comfort the present
holds out for him What else is there to look for? Where
else is there to look?