The Matter With Morris (28 page)

Critic Philip Marchard called Morris “in one crucial sense, very much a Bergen character.” Do you feel there’s such a thing as a “Bergen character”?

I don’t know what “a Bergen character” is, though my characters are usually attempting to understand their own morality as they bang up against something that is much bigger than themselves.

Do you feel you know your characters well before you begin writing, or do you get to know them as their stories unfold?

I knew Morris more intimately than I had known previous characters, but I didn’t know everything—a good thing, as the pleasure of writing is discovering the characters and seeing how they behave.

In what ways did your Mennonite upbringing influence your writing about Morris?

I am always influenced by my upbringing, and this spills over into my writing. I had fun putting my words and doubts and skepticism into Morris’s mouth. He is working out his beliefs and questioning his greed, and he wonders if, like his parents, he could have lived a simpler life, realizing of course that nothing is simple.

I understand you and your father agreed to disagree on the content of your books. Was it a struggle for you creatively to come to terms with this?

I would have been surprised and disappointed if my father had not disagreed with what I was doing. If he had agreed, then I would have known that I had failed at my attempt to push against the strictures of my background. I was very aware that I could not allow my father to look over my shoulder as I wrote. There is something hurtful in that, and in his wisdom he perhaps is more generous than I am.

Steven Hayward of the
Globe and Mail
said of the Herzogian sensibility of the novel that you mastered this material, giving it a specifically Canadian context and infusing it with new life. Others were critical of the similarities to
Herzog.
How do you feel about these reactions?

I give a direct nod to Bellow; Herzog shows up in my epigraph. I was basically saying, “This is what I’m doing, Herzog is my model.” Was this a sort of “anxiety of influence”? Sure. Those who believe we must create “new” stories and be original are deceiving themselves. We stand on the shoulders of the writers who came before us, and that’s what I was doing, in a very large way.
Herzog,
to be sure, is a much more complex novel. Stylistically I could not emulate Bellow. Impossible. However, I saw no problem having Morris struggle as Herzog does: with fidelity, friendship, mortality, love, and children, all the while genuflecting to the great historical thinkers.

In Morris’s grief over his son’s death, he rereads the classics of philosophy; some that you read are listed under Further Reading. Which ones resonated most with you?

Cicero, when he is grieving the loss of his daughter. And Plato’s
Republic,
along with Allan Bloom’s commentary. I reread
The Republic
several times, finally coming to understand that it would take a long time to work through the layers. The whole idea of the city-as-soul made for great fun; and of course Morris walks through his own city, trying to understand himself.

You infused this story with more humour than your other novels. Does this signal a change in you as a writer?

I doubt that I will change. Morris, the character, has a certain wry, self-effacing humour. I suppose if I find another character like that, I will lean once again towards humour, aware of course that being “funny” is all about taste.

For all that
The Matter with Morris
is about loss, as well as grief and mortality, do you feel it’s an optimistic novel?

I do. I didn’t intend this, but Morris made it that way—which is a testament to how characters will determine the movement and tone of a story.

What compels you to return to certain themes, such as loss, as you’ve done in your short story collection and six novels?

If a novelist isn’t writing about death, he isn’t doing his job. I read this somewhere once, and it’s true. We shouldn’t take this in an obvious way, where the story has to be about “death” or “loss of a loved one,” but in a broader sense where the story grapples with an awareness of mortality, even if the character is seventeen years old. And so I return to these themes. It’s a working out of my own minor story, one attempt after another to come to grips with my own transience.

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About the book

About Writing
The Matter with Morris,
an essay by David Bergen

A number of years ago, my then nineteen-year-old son began to study philosophy at the University of Winnipeg. He brought home books that he was reading, and he left them lying about. I would pick them up and read certain sections, and then I would ask him about a specific idea or an author, and so we would converse. As we spoke and argued and debated, I remembered that I had once been enamoured of certain old books and authors, and discovered that I had missed out on others. Now, at a much later age, I was returning to these writers.

My reading began with Petrarch,
My Secret Book,
a book not written for broad consumption and yet full of heart and wisdom. From there I moved on to a very close encounter with
The Republic.
With some consternation, I admit that I had never read all of
The Republic,
and so I entered it now with a particular ignorance and a specific hunger. I was surprised by the humour, the irony in the writing, the complexity of the thought. I was also taken by its clarity and its relevance so many years and civilizations hence—and for example, the idea of the balance that we must find between reason and passion. I was raised in a religious home, where the Bible was the guide, and I found in Plato many similar ideas: justice, truth, moderation. I also read Cicero, specifically
Cicero on the Emotions,
which was written after Cicero’s daughter died quite suddenly.

While doing this reading, I was considering a character for my next novel. I knew the character would be male, middle-aged, that his son would be killed while fighting in Afghanistan, and that the death would implicate other people, in this case the young soldier who accidentally shoots him. The novel would take place after the son’s death, and it would cover approximately a year in the life of Morris Schutt. Cicero’s description of grief and distress (gauntness, pain, depression, disfigurement) suited Morris, though the disfigurement would be more moral and spiritual, and not physical.

In the novel, Morris Schutt is stumbling towards a discovery of himself, attempting to understand how one should live the best life. Because I was fifty-one when I started the novel, and my main character Morris Schutt is fifty-one, it was not hard to imagine Morris harking back to the books he had read as a young man, before he got caught in the vicious cycle of what he refers to as “the pursuit of money and status.” And in some ways I was simulating his intellectual voyage: I read and didn’t understand Plato; and then I was overwhelmed and piqued; and I became confused. Like Morris, I had no wisdom. I was lost. Morris’s reading, his heavy underlining of various passages, his dipping into a book and then becoming overwhelmed, all of this represented my own reading experience.

Early on in the writing, Morris became the character, I disappeared, and so the story took over. Morris, bereft and angry and tired
of the failures he sees around him, nevertheless remains hopeful. He is looking for a teacher and a guide. He is not looking for someone to bring light into the cave, but for someone to direct him up out of the cave. He finds this in reading Jacob Boehme, and Adorno, and specifically Plato. Boehme has a very religious, mystical element to him, which reminds Morris of his youth and his pastor-father; Adorno offers him a more secular, almost mischievous, sacrilegious view. And Plato, of course, is a guide, someone he can trust more than he can the writers of, for example, the Bible, which for Morris comes with too much baggage. He is not an intellectual, but he is sincere and industrious in his search, and this is all that is required. He is also full of contradictions—he tries to be rational and moral, and then is overcome by passion and desire.

I knew, before I began this novel, that the death of Morris’s son in Afghanistan would be the engine driving Morris. This singular event forces him to reassess the first half of his life. Throughout the novel, Morris is struggling with the sacrifice of his son. He had no part in the sacrifice and yet the sacrifice was made. If he has laid up treasures—his family being the greatest treasure—then what does it mean to lose that treasure? The irony of course is that it is only when the treasure is lost that he understands that he didn’t fully appreciate its value.

I was also aware of Saul Bellow’s character Herzog, who writes letters that he never sends (to dead thinkers, to priests, to great writers, to philosophers). Morris writes letters as well, though Morris, unlike Herzog,
actually sends the letters that he writes. The homage to Bellow is intentional; in fact, Morris Schutt says at one point, “I am not Bellow’s Herzog…. I am not a free thinker, and I am not going mad, but like Herzog, I will persist. I will keep thinking.” Because to think, to reason, to find a balance between wisdom and passion, this is Morris’s main objective. And he fails. And then he tries again. Finally, Morris discovers, it is the seeking of balance, rather than the achievement of it, that matters.

“The soul is
the
philosophic question, and it is his concern for this question that distinguishes Socrates from his predecessors.” That quote comes from an interpretative essay by Allan Bloom at the end of
The Republic,
and this idea hangs around the edges of my story. In a loose way this is a “conduct” novel. It asks, through Morris as its mouthpiece, how to live the best life, how to live the good life, and how to seek one’s soul. It also asks what freedom is, which is why Morris walks the streets, absurdly asking people, “Do you have freedom?”

Yet I was aware while writing that the characters had to win out over the ideas. In fact, the characters had to contradict the ideas; they had to reveal the messiness of life as opposed to the moral ideal that Morris wishes to impose on his own existence.

This is a contemporary story, set in 2007, and its main action takes place over three months, with a number of flashbacks. Morris is the main character and it is his tone that
controls the narrative. I wanted the reader to feel that the story was being told in the first person, even though it isn’t. I wanted the reader to descend into the mind and soul of Morris Schutt, to feel his anguish, his lust, his lostness, his craving for connection. I wanted Morris to be raw, to love his daughters and his grandson ferociously, to miss his wife Lucille very much but not understand how to reclaim her, to fear what he sees in his ailing father, to fear in fact his own mortality and to rail against it. I wanted a man who, like most of us, is slightly bewildered by where he has ended up. A man who hungers for knowledge but instead chooses desire. I also knew, almost immediately, that though I was dealing with weighty themes, the voice of Morris Schutt was distinct, playful, and surprising. I did not fight the voice, but simply let it fall into place.

And what a pleasure it was to let Morris loose, to allow him to stumble and grasp and to make mistakes and then bull his way back into the fullness of his life. He is a man who teeters, falls, and then rises again. This is Morris Schutt, forever hopeful.

Read on

Further Reading

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What follows is a list of books that I read while working on
The Matter with Morris
(though I certainly did not complete all of them):

After Theory
by Terry Eagleton

Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4
by Cicero (trans. Margaret R. Graver)

Herzog
by Saul Bellow

Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life
by Theodor Adorno (trans. E.F.N. Jephcott)

My Secret Book
by Francis Petrarch (trans. J.G. Nichols)

On the Aesthetic Education of Man
by Friedrich Schiller (trans. Reginald Snell)

Personal Christianity
by Jacob Boehme

The City and Man
by Leo Strauss

The Courage to Be
by Paul Tillich

The Divine Comedy
by Dante Alighieri (trans. Allen Mandelbaum)

The Republic of Plato
(trans. Allan Bloom; preface and interpretative essay by Allan Bloom)

The Symposium
by Plato (trans. Seth Benardete) “What Is Political Philosophy?” by Leo Strauss

Also:

Bits and pieces of Reinhold Niebuhr Bits and pieces of Søren Kierkegaard

Copyright

The Matter with Morris
Copyright © 2010 by David Bergen.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition © September 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40439-6

A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

Originally published in a hardcover edition by
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2010
This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2011