Morgan's Things

FEATURED AUTHOR—ROBERT MORGAN Morgan's Things____________________ Fred Chappell ONE OF THE HALLMARKS OF ROBERT MORGAN'S poetry is an insistence upon the power of the object, the usually homely, usually palpable thing that implies and embodies both a personal and a cultural history. Representative poems bear such titles as "June Bug," "Radio," "Bellrope," "Water Tanks," "Church Dust," and so forth. William Carlos Williams' famous dictum, "No ideas but in things," takes a different turn in Morgan's thought. His things conjure up a universe of ideas as well as of observations, memories, and longings. The seeming simplicity of a single object can burgeon into complex manifolds of idea. "Rearview Mirror" is a prime example; only ten lines long, it suggests volumes of cosmological theory. Morgan often employs objects in his fiction in the same way that he does in his poetry, but the effects are sometimes different and can be equally complex. In poems like "Manure Pile," the object is studied with a close, fixed gaze, judiciously described, until mental associations come flocking to it like honeybees to a rodent carcass and it begins to seethe and throb with possibilities and implications. In most cases, the objects in his verse unfold themselves, revealing recesses of fresh but orderly surprise. But in the fiction, and particularly in the short fiction, the object may be used to stabilize the narrative, to bind it to theme, to serve as leitmotif for character and structure, and to link to other stories, drawing them into affinitive thematic compass. The best short-story volume for study ofMorgan's objects is The Balm of Gilead Tree (Gnomon Press, 1999), not only because it includes selections from the earlier collections (The Blue Valleys, 1989; The Mountains Won't Remember Us, 1992), but also because of the structural design of the book. The Balm ofGilead Tree provides an episodic, roughly chronological, and strongly thematic history ofthe southernAppalachian region. The different historical periods, with the characteristic episodes, are customarily differentiated by particular objects. The history begins in the sixteenth century with the incursion of Hernando de Soto into the wilderness of the Cherokees as he searches for riches, and it continues through the eighteenth and nineteenth 19 centuries as the mountains open to the outer world with the construction of roads and bridges and the region is transformed by the frightening changes brought about by the Civil War. In the twentieth century come the two world wars and the crushing encroachment of industrialism. These huge historic movements and gradual revolutions of rural life are enacted in brief stories that are mostly tightly circumscribed and specifically localized. The common themes that run through all of them—greed and exploitation, poverty and endurance, virtue and corruption—are often attached to certain objects. The first story in the book, "The Tracks of Chief de Soto," offers a clear example of the usage of contrasting objects. The story is told by a young Cherokee girl who is planting corn seed in the early springtime. Upon the correct timing and the prescribed manner of this planting the survival of the clan depends. The image of the corn and its attendant urgency are in the girl's mind all through the story as the Spanish marauders invade the village to rape and destroy, to enslave the women and elders and children and to set them digging for gold. Corn, which represents life, and gold, representing destruction of the land and of kinship with the land, are opposed to each other. It is the gold which triumphs. Gold and silver, and their cognate image, money, are recurrent in the volume. In "Kuykendall's Gold" the object at stake is an actual pot of gold, stashed away by a lustful old miser. Except for the fact that Morgan chooses to narrate from a young woman's point of view, this story could have been included in the Decameron or Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles or in scores of folk ballads. In "A Brightness New & Welcoming" the main opposed objects are a clean spring in contrast to a filthy well that Civil War prisoners must drink from; but here again gold appears in the form of John's coveted...