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daily nebraskan
tuesday, September 22, 1981
Eegionalistic writer describes bright childhood
By David Wood
Wright Morris, among the greatest regionalists writing
today, was born in 1910 in the Platte Valley of Nebraska.
Flis mother died in his first week of life, and Morris'
upbringing was in the chicken-pluckering hands of his
father, Will, a handsome, skirt-chasing fugitive from petty
fraud. Over the years, they moved to Omaha and Chicago.
With the finesse of a Judd family they made a shambling
trek to the land of snowless winters, fruited groves and
failed dreams, California.
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Morris remembers vividly these years that preceded col
lege, and has artfully rendered them into a pleasant little
book called Will's Boy: A Memoir.
It's breezy 200 pages of clean, precision prose are as
well-skilled as stories by Barry Hannah, the terse, sardonic
master regionalist of the South. Morris' Midwestern senti
ments, however, are distinctly more optimistic. Will's Boy
has as much good country flavor as a bowl of Corn Flakes.
The book ends so: "If growing up meant to abandon
these sentiments, Will's boy would be slow to grow up."
It seems true. The 70-year-old author of more than 20
books has remarkably preserved his sense of youth, like
some house of cards made of keen observation, despite
the proverbial winds of time.
Nostalgic images
Whether looking backward at his own boyhood or at
the young, maturing cities of the Midwest, a nostalgia is
implicit in his images, a sunny feel of barefeet akin to the
sentimentalism of Norman Rockwell, but nowhere as sap-
py-
The images Morris conjures are better compared with
the regionalist paintings of Grant Wood or Edward Hop
per - quiet tableaus that are flattened by neatly specified
detail into artificially smooth, generalized, yet accurate
reconstructions.
It is with these taut surfaces of objective recollection
that Morris builds the card house which defines the airy
volume of youth.
He is one of those Merlin types who occasionally ap
pears in the arts. Like Isaac Singer for example, Morris
grows younger with age. Through years, his books gain
hearty vigor, rather than lose it.
His last novel, Plains Song, was a finalist for the 1980
American Book Awards. His The Field of Vision won the
National Book Award in 1956.
Will's Boy is the story of a charmed life, told charming
ly. If his believable history is believed, Wright Morris'
strong, decent character was born into more than thought.
His father's string of failed dreams, his rakish ways and
the various "new mother" he brings home to his "half-orphan
kid" repel the boy, yet never daunt his admiration
of his father, Will.
Philosophically Christian
Seemingly, moral fiber arises naturally from a Protes
tant Midwestern faith and work ethnic. The card house is
a stacked deck. Will's Boy is philosophically Christian. Yet
Morris never preaches and recognizes "the foolishness of
God compared with almighty mysteries of nature."
The book is subtly colored with an almost pantheist
awe, yet does not soft-peddle realities or prettify harsh
ness. Morris includes ugly shadows among his bright ima
ges. A gun-shot mobster lies in the snow near a Y in Chi
cago. Hogs are slit open and bleed for sausage. One of his
"new mothers" becomes a shamelss hula dancer on 4lower
Douglas Street" in Omaha.
"In spite of my experience," he writes, however, "I
had never questioned that this world was good enough as
it was, if not the best possible."
Morris' anecdotal history is pre-eminently of happi
ness. He remembers sledding the hills near Central High,
or being a skating stock-boy with "Monkey Wards" in
Chicago. He remembers bringing basketball and sin of ri
valry to a Seventh-Day Adventist college in Boise, where
he was expelled after four weeks.
Morris is gifted in his clear, clean writing. His rich
scenes are at once short and spacious, his picturesque
characters at once two-dimensional and recognizable.
Will's Boy is wise, yet simple, abbreviated, and yet some
how complete.
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Photo by Jim Alinder -urtesy of Harper and Row Publishing
Wiight Morris
Dan Fogelberg tickets
continue to sell well
Plenty of tickets are still available for the Dan Fo
gelberg concert scheduled for Nov. 1 in the Bob De
vaney Sports Center, Martin Wood of the University
Program Council said.
"It's hard to tell how many we have sold," Wood
said. Wood estimated they had sold 4,500 to 5,000
tickets as of Monday afternoon. He said they could
not be sure how many tickets had been sold yet be
cause they did not know how sales had gone at the
Omaha outlets.
"We've been selling pretty steady," he said. "It
hasn't slowed down yet."
Tickets are available at both unions and Brandeis.
Bogart flicks light up screen tonight, tomorrow
Four films starring Humphrey Bogart
will be featured tonight and Wednesday
night as a part of the University Program
Council's Awareness Week.
Two films will be shown each night at 7
and 9:15 pjn. in the Nebraska Union. Ad
mission is $2 for students with a student
ID card and $3 for general admission.
The 7 p.m. film tonight is the film ver
sion of Herman Wouk's Pulitzer Prize win
ning novel, The Caine Mutiny. Set on the
combat ship "Caine," this Stanley Kramer
production has Bogart starring as the ship
captain who is slowly losing his marbles
and his strawberries.
To Have and Have Not is the second
film tonight. It is the first film starring Bo
gart and Lauren Bacall, whom he later
married.
Along with the fine direction of Howard
, y f iv I i III
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Photo courtesy of United Artists
Humphrey Bogart stars in Casablanca, one of the four films featured in UPCs Bogart
Film Festival,
Hawks this film is remembered most for
BacalTs sultry question of . . . "You know
how to whistle, don't you?"
Wednesday night's films include The
Treasure of The Sierra Madre and Casa
blanca. John Huston won Academy Awards for
direction and writing for Sierra Madre
which tells how the lure of wealth and
greed changes the lives of three out-of-luck
prospectors.
Bogart is unforgettable as Fred C.Dobbs
and is supported by an Academy Award
winning performance from Walter Huston
(John's father) and Tim Holt.
As Rick Blaine in Casablanca, Bogart
plays the jilted lover whose life is disrupted
by the sudden arrival of his former love in
his Morocco bar.
Ingrid Bergman co-stars as the romantic
crutch Bogart hesitates to fall back on.
Casablanca also features performances by
Claude Rains, Paul Henreid, and Dooley
Wilson as piano playing Sam.
'Patriot Game' offers picture
of Northern Ireland conflict
By Chuck Lieurance
Arthur MacCraig's film documentary
The Patriot Game (playing at the Sheldon
Film Theater this week) ranks among the
finest documentaries ever made. The film
deals with a subject about which most of
the world is ignorant, the situation in
Northern Ireland.
reuiew
Obviously, The Patriot Game leans
predominantly to the Nationalist IRA
movement, trying to show that the IRA is
not just an organization of brutal terrorists.
Documentaries, though, are seldom objec
tive and this film presents a strong case, if
not for the methods of the revolution, at
least for the long range goals.
This fim depicts the IRA as the inevi
table result of a nation backed into a cor
ner by imperialist exploitation. It traces
300 years of ruthless colonization, servi
tude and degradation by the deaf, blind
and apathetic Imperial England.
The Patriot Game portrays the British
as a bunch of hard-headed capitalists .dog
gedly hanging on to a country that will
stop at nothing to attain its well-deserved
freedom.
In a comparison of the press conference
footage of the British bureaucrats and the
footage of IRA members, one feels that
this comparison is indeed fair and only
slightly slanted. The documentary photog
raphy of Bloody Sunday, the fust time the
British army used live arms, and Bloody
Friday show the British soldiers in a very
bad light also.
These scenes and others show them to
be far from the peacekeepers they are
made out to be by the English government.
They are accused of being robbers, vandals
and murderers whose sole intent is to drive
the Irish spirit of freedom to its knees.
The Patriot Game incorporates some of
the best documentary hand-held photogra
phy seen in a long time. The film stock has
created a bleak, black and white pall, and
the filmwork gives a sometimes surreal,
sometimes all too real, horror to the riot
and bombing scenes.
The camera seems to be engulfed in the
maelstrom of running soldiers, exploding
Molotov cocktails, and flying rocks. One
shot is filmed entirely through a mud and
water splashed lens, adding to the grimness
considerably.
Even in the intense confusion of death,
beatings and explosions, the image remains
steady and clear as if never to allow the au
dience to detach itself or shrink away to
the comfort of distance.
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