Haunted: The Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris, a Biography and a Photo Gallery by Jackson J. Benson (review)

Wright Morris is one of the great enigmas in American literature. Before his death in 1998 he authored more than thirty books and won a National and an American Book Award and several additional honors, including the Western Literature Association Distinguished Achievement Award. Nonetheless, his books never caught on among the general public, and today he is almost unknown outside of select reading circles. Given this state of general neglect, Jackson Benson’s biography of Morris is a welcome arrival for critics and enthusiasts interested in learning more about the life of one of America’s most talented, original, and puzzling writers.

Haunted is a handy supplement to Morris’s three memoirs, Will’s Boy, Solo, and A Cloak of Light. However, readers with a yen for savory new biographical material may not find as much as they would hope, in part because Morris guarded his privacy carefully and also because the available information from Morris’s own letters, interviews, and other writings often includes what Benson refers to as “prepackaged tales” and “polished anecdotes” Morris shared with friends and colleagues or recycled from his fiction and added later to his memoirs (168). As a result drawing the line between the factual and the fictional Morris is difficult. Despite such obstacles the enduring portrait of the artist Benson paints is that of a maverick, totally devoted to his craft and dedicated unswervingly to salvaging the shards of a troubled past through the transformative powers of fiction and photography. Benson provides a reasonable accounting of the key events of Morris’s many lives, including his distant relationship with his father and his odd association with his first wife, Mary Ellen, whom he treated “like a good friend that he was pleased to see for a time and then happy to part from so that he could be on his way” (72). In addition Benson chronicles Morris’s bizarre youthful sojourn to Europe; his love affair with his second wife, Jo; his interactions with fellow writers such as Saul Bellow and Loren Eiseley; and his career as a creative writing teacher. The book also includes twenty-one of Morris’s signature photographs of American structures and artifacts, including such notables as Reflection in Oval Mirror, Home Place, Gano Grain Elevator, and several others, mostly taken from settings in Nebraska and Kansas.

This is Benson’s fifth biography of a writer from the American West, a catalog anchored by his monumental study of John Steinbeck and award-winning biographies of Wallace Stegner and Walter Van Tilburg Clark. For all Benson’s considerable talent as a biographer and critic, however, Haunted is not on a par with his previous efforts. Benson attempts to explain Morris’s artistic development using an archetypal child-orphan framework borrowed from Jerry Griswold’s Audacious Kids: Coming of Age in America’s Classic Children’s Books. Although this conceptual idea is mentioned in the early chapters, he does not sustain it through the rest of the biography. The book is also marred by shoddy editing. The textual errors are egregious and range from unnecessary narrative intrusions and reminders to arbitrary shifts in person, typos, garbled sentences, misquotes, and punctuation and documentation errors. The result is unfortunate and subverts what would otherwise be an excellent biography.