Mysteries, Mountains, and Living Voices:

Living Voices, Dualities, Mountains and Mysteries:
The "Peripheral Vision" of Robert Morgan

Robert Morgan is fond of quoting Hollis Summers, who said, "The point of a story is always the point beside the point." "Peripheral vision," then, as Morgan sees it, is what is important in a poem or story. Speaking about writing to Suzanne Booker in a 1984 interview, Morgan said, "It is not so much what is said as what is evoked, is enacted, by language . . . (Good Measure 137). Certainly, the vision evoked in Morgan's writing and the "spots of time" that he has created in such poems as "Cellar," "Blowing Rock," "Mowing," and in stories like This Rock, The Truest Pleasure, Gap Creek, and The Hinterlands, have been shaped by the "living voices" that he grew up with and by the mysteries of the mountains of Appalachia. Writing, for Robert Morgan, is essentially a matter of "giving good measure" to his reader--in other words, delivering "more than is expected, more than is required" (GM 6), in order to create a crystalline moment that the reader will carry with her long after the volume has been laid aside. Morgan's poems and prose are undoubtedly rich in "good measure."

The recognition that Morgan has received is testimony to the extraordinary quality of his writing. A James G. Hanes Poetry Prize and North Carolina Literature Award in 1991, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and New York Times Notable Book Award in 2000 for Gap Creek, an O. Henry Award for "The Balm of Gilead Tree" in 1997, a Publisher's Weekly Notable Book Award for The Truest Pleasure in 1995 are just a few of the honors that have come to Morgan prior to the 2003 Appalachian Heritage Writers Award sponsored by the West Virginia Humanities Council and Phi Kappa Phi. Beyond such plaudits, however, one finds the solid craftsmanship of a studied artist and a complexity or duality that informs every facet of Robert Morgan's work.

In his 1970-75 journals, Morgan hints at the complexity of his nature and thus his writing. He writes about yearning, as a young man, "to break from the farm and small town, from the fundamentalist faith, into secular self-knowledge and expression." At the same time, he recalls, he was "equally drawn back to that ground along the withers of the Blue Ridge, to Old Man Early singing hymns under the oak while we worked in the fields, to the family closeness around the kerosene lamps, to the promise of signs and wonders and the land my people had cleared" (GM 109). After Morgan joined the Cornell faculty in 1973, he found himself drawing more and more on his North Carolina roots, the memories and images of the family farm near Zirconia. In one sense, he has been like the red owl in his 1972 poetry volume, Red Owl, searching for "the eye's dream behind the light":

The sun is awake all night

Flying unseen

Through the earth searching

Streams and caverns for prey, counting

The buried metals and feeding on blackness,

moist stenches, vapors of sleep.

She goes down herding light through crevices and roots,

Through mud and the leaflike veins

Where milk grows in the sleeping cows.

Rivers pour east to float her into view

And shadows lie down

For her rising, then travel across

To the next valley

On pilgrimage

To the ranges beyond her.

They are the eye's dream behind the light. (Red Owl 57)

Capturing the elusive "eye's dream behind the light" has been the literary work of Morgan for the past thirty years, first as a poet prior to arriving at Cornell and then as a fiction writer. Like the red owl gliding between valleys, however, Morgan glides easily between poetry and prose, and to understand and appreciate his work in one genre, knowing the other is essential. Most of what Morgan has said about writing good poetry applies equally to his crafting of fiction. For example, he has written about the "crystalline perfection in the living voice" and how such "motion and stillness at once" creates an iridescent literary moment (GM 4). The crystal metaphor is an apt representation of the compactness and spareness of both his verse and prose, as Morgan attempts to evoke, in the richness of simple details, refracted insights and images of reality. He is, as Marianne Moore was want to say of such writers, a "literalist of the imagination." Yet Morgan's finest literary successes occur when he is able to connect "the instant with all times," irrigating, as he says, "a present that seems otherwise diminished" without such a connection (GM 16). Hence his stories and poems often recall a bucolic, vanishing time or they detail a nostalgic object from the common and everyday that both ignites a memory and sparks personal insight. This connecting of past with present is at the heart of his art. Morgan writes in his short essay "Appalachia":

We tend to write best about cultures that have almost melted into the past. The blue valleys, the fog-haunted coves, the tireless milky waterfalls, are still there, but the people with wisdom in their hands and humility in their hearts, have slipped away forever, unless we find them in our own words, and in our own hands and hearts. (2)

Morgan has referred to himself as a writer with a "'Chinese mountaineer' sensibility,” someone with “a calm and lucid feeling for things in their objective fullness"(GM 127-28). The observation powers of a scientist and the sensibility and descriptive powers of a poet created in Morgan a unique approach to writing. In the short essay "Nature Is a Stranger Yet," he writes about leaving the mountains for the university environment, yet at the same time never really leaving: "In the almost forty years since I left, I have continued to live there in the imagination, in the geography and landscape of language, the geometry of poetry" (2). Morgan's quiet attention to detail and analytical insights come in part from an appreciation of the natural world instilled by his mother, Fannie Levi Morgan, and also from the influence of his study of science and math, which were to have been his major at North Caroline State, until he found himself in a creative writing class taught by Guy Owen in spring 1963. Owen stressed the importance of authentic "voice" and the accuracy of details. "He told us that writing came alive through details," recalls Morgan (Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series 280). Leaving NCS to become a math and English double major at UNC, Chapel Hill, where he graduated in 1965, and then on to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he received his MFA in 1968, provided Morgan with a diverse educational background and probably answered the needs of a uniquely divided creative nature, one both intensely analytical and fertilely imaginative. Morgan has written that "science is our new language for talking about experience.” Yet he is quick to add that "science is just vocabulary"; it is in the “humble and ordinary" that one finds fodder for art (GM 111).

The creative duality of Morgan's nature is, however, the richest source for his story-telling and poetic music-making. Morgan believes that every moment has a two-fold vision--one linked to the natural world and to the spiritual. The spiritual world infuses the physical with a transcending essence that illuminates one's perception and clarifies one's understanding. Morgan has written: "I want to dramatize nature, the vegetal, the unsayable" (GS 114). Similar to Hopkins' use of "inscape" (the specific design of individual identities) and "instress" (the universal essence underpinning this individuation), Morgan's poetry creates not only vivid and highly charged images, but it also has an unusual musical dimension as well--the music infused in his work again the product of his background and training as a student. Morgan remembers that music "was something orderly and spiritual, almost crystalline with precision, compared to the clutter of the barn and beanfields." He writes, "I practiced Mozart and Beethoven sonatas. I practiced scales and trills and arpeggios as my fingers loosened and grew alert through calluses and blisters. The music cooled my sunburn and offered alternate spaces and time." Morgan recalls that he purchased "lined notebooks" in order to compose his own compositions: "Music was the highest and most accessible language" (Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series 273).

Beyond the similarity to Hopkins and the influence of Wordsworth and Thoreau on his work, however, the apparent romanticism in Robert Morgan's writing is far more complex than the pastoral evocations found in the Green River stories and Zircona poems. Indeed, in some ways, his work is more naturalistic than romantic, and Morgan himself suggests a dimension beyond the pastoral nostalgia that critics have found so appealing in his writing. In "Writing the Mountains," he says: "I was never interested in portraying a pastoral world, a simpler world, but in dramatizing the complexities of the seemingly plain, the sharpness of the everyday, the cruelties of the conventional, the isolation of the rural. I wanted to show the thresholds of the theatrical in the ordinary" (2). The dualities of flesh and spirit, imagination and reason, sexuality and spirituality form the cornerstones for Morgan's writing. Such complexities are reflected in his poetry and readily discernible in The Hinterlands (1994), The Truest Pleasure (1995), Gap Creek (1999) and This Rock (2001), four extraordinary novels that detail the struggles and hardships of several interconnected families, all living and working, at some point in their lives, in the Green River Valley of the Western North Carolina mountains.

The Hinterlands begins the saga, detailing the lives of three generations of the Richards clan, their stories told from parent to child, their struggles and hard lives progressing along with the course of the road opening up the western lands

--a road that evolves over the generations from trace to country road to mountain turnpike. Petal Jarvis Richards narrates the first part of the trilogy that forms the book, detailing to grandchildren how she and husband Realus settled their mountain cove in 1772. Disapproving parents necessitated their elopement and a journey "west," an adventure that fires Petal's imagination and stokes her courage to defy her parents. An arduous journey along the mountain trace brings them to a mining camp where men are literally tearing apart the mountain in their lust for gold nuggets. This piquant stop on their journey westward, however, almost brings tragedy, as Realus catches the fever quest for material wealth himself. A chilling escape across the mountains and, as it turns out, circuitous trek to the cove where Realus and Petal build their home are only the beginning of their arduous journey together through life.

Many years later, on an afternoon of berry picking, Petal and her three children stray far beyond the boundary of their cove, across the mountain, where she hears the familiar sound of a bell belonging to her father's cow, thus discovering that Realus, fearful that she might not marry him for a such a small homestead just across the mountain, had led her on a circuitous journey to the "west" that actually never went beyond the next valley. Petal is furious that their marriage had begun with such a fundamental lie, and in her anger she considers leaving Realus and remaining with her parents in the settlement. The following day, however, she and the children trek homeward, though she remains angry and hurt. Petal's anger and Realus's chagrin actually serve to save their lives, however.

During the night while both are away from the cabin, marauding Indians devastate the homestead. When Realus arrives home, having spent the night searching for his wife and children, he discovers Petal attempting to set the cabin straight, the Indians having destroyed most of what they own. Contrite and tempered by his deceitful act, Realus offers his wife a witch hazel plant, a symbol for the last blossom in the waste of winter, and together they rebuild their lives, both having passed through a threshold toward adulthood and new-found wisdom. The story of Petal and Realus Richards establishes most of the major motifs of The Hinterlands, indeed of Morgan's oeuvre: the seeming insignificance of human struggle in an infinite, uncaring universe, the importance of community and working together, forgiveness and regeneration, and the interconnectedness of good and evil and oft-times relativity of human morality.

Both "The Road" and "The Turnpike," the next two parts of the trilogy, are about road building, a task that the Richards clan excels in and a metaphor for wending one's way through the turns and twists, hardships and joys of life. In "The Road," set in 1816, Petal's grandson, Solomon, narrates the story of surveying a road to replace the trace, through Douthet's Gap to Cedar Mountain, a monumental task that he hopes will win him the hand of Mary MacPherson. Sol determines to utilize the native ingenuity of his sow Sue in order to find the quickest and most direct route across the mountains--native wisdom having established that pigs will take the most direct route homeward when their stomachs are empty. Sue and Sol's journey becomes an elaborate allegory, one fraught with incredible adventures of a broad but certainly symbolic sort. In one sense, the journey is also an historical overview of the opening of the western lands to settlers, for Sol and Sue come across a representative array of pioneer types: Native Americans who disdain of the making of the road, a group of Melungian girls who mock the narrow hypocrisy of the white settlers, destructive minors who see nothing but material gain from the land, thieving white trash and pandering preachers--not to mention a bevy of natural disasters including copperheads, black bears, rabid panthers, and black widow spiders--all of which offer impediment to Sol's progress as he and Sue survey their road. When Sol nears the end of his journey, he chooses to abandon the adventure in order to help a settler's child who has been bitten by a rattler. His apparent failure, however, signals the true success of the adventure (Morgan's nod to the 19^th-century theme and paradox of "success in failure"). Sol reflects, as he debates whether to let Sue go ahead without him: "I thought about my road and my plans and I seen they wouldn't be worth nothing if I couldn't stop and help somebody bit by a rattler. They wasn't no road that important" (296).

The last narrative in the trilogy is Sol's son David Richards' story of building the 1845 turnpike over the mountains to take the place of the road. David, motivated as his father had been to make some tangible accomplishment for the betterment of his mountain neighbors and to win the hand of one of the Lewis girls, tells his tale to his granddaughter. David's building of the turnpike is fairly "high tech" for 1845, utilizing convict labor and dynamite for blasting through the rock. However, like his father's adventure, there are a plethora of pitfalls--coming in one direction from the commercial hustlers who are funding the road and have few qualms about abusing the land and utilizing shortcuts in the process that undermine the landscape and, in another direction, from the natural elements and the mountain itself, which resists the destructive and crass intrusion of nineteenth-century progress. Two themes running throughout the novel dominate this last part: one is the Hopkinsesque idea that man's progress comes at the expense of the land though nature is never wholly spent despite such abuse; the other is the cultural continuity provided by story-telling, particularly among people intimately connected to the land.

The title poem of Morgan's collection Topsoil Road (2000) offers a fitting conclusion to The Hinterlands. Here the poet explores the lust for ever pushing forward to discover new territory, to see what might lie beyond the next green valley:

The first wagon trace into hills

took no grading. A few trees cut

and brush knocked down or pushed aside,

the route went right across the ridge

and down along the branch. Wheels sliced

into leaves and tore the humus,

banged on roots and rocks and ground

the topsoil in the rush toward

the horizon, to step into

the future the West pulled them to.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

When it rained every track became

a runnel . . . the wash burned

deep in wet weather reaching to

bedrock and subsoil and making

new horizons in dust as traffic

plowed . . . and yet

another [passageway] must be found to soothe

the unbearable urge to stride

beyond and back, as eros fed

erosion and wander vision

vanished quick as snow in May. (3)

Morgan's second novel, The Truest Pleasure, follows the hardships and joys of another 19^th-century Green Valley family, Ginny and Tom Powell. The story is narrated from Ginny's point of view and constructed in the style of a bildungsroman or coming of age story. Ginny and Tom have a strong physical bond and connection, but their natures are diametrically opposite--Tom, practical and motivated by material gain, a literalist, while Ginny is a creative, imaginative person, highly intelligent and deeply spiritual. The strong religious beliefs of the two mark them as distinctive as well: Ginny comes from a Pentecostal upbringing, while Tom is put off by the emotional displays of the Pentecostals. Their marriage becomes a long war of wills, for the most part characterized by intense periods of affection punctuated by unyielding estrangement. On their wedding night, Tom and Ginny sit before the fire--Tom, a man of few words and little sentiment. Ginny looks into the fire and says, "People say they can read fortunes in a fire." "A fire is just a fire," Tom responds, and the brief exchange signals portents for their relationship (79).

Yet for all the hardships Tom and Ginny encounter--emanating both from their own natures and from the indifferent and brutal environment in which they struggle to exist--the couple finds extraordinary satisfaction in working side by side on their land and raising their family. Ginny writes to her brother, referring to the task of daily living: "But what keeps you going day after day through spurts and quirks, fits of temper and irritations, is the steady work. I don't know of anything else that would get you through it” (241). Ginny had learned as a child to accept the limitations of human existence and to bend as the wind blows across one's path. Worried about her health and arrested adolescence, Pa takes her to see a Cherokee doctor, who instructs her to imagine herself a bird whenever she begins to worry: "Think of yourself as a pigeon high on a tree or flying over the valley. Think of flying hundreds of miles, of flying close to the sun and over rivers" (68). After the experience with Dr. Match, Ginny discovers a kind of objective enlightenment about herself; she finds "the sunlight" blinding, feeling and seeing the world now more clearly than ever before. There after, her feeling for nature is remarkably keen, and the beauty of the mountains offer her hope and a sense of the future. An emblem for the awesome power of the physical world to engender enlightenment and wonder is found in Sunset Rock, for Ginny a place of epiphany and joy.

By the novel's end, Ginny discovers that the "truest pleasure" is understood as anyone's individual joy, a thoroughly relative thing. Ginny's own joy is to be found in the beauty of the natural world, in the intense religious experience, in the satisfying sexual relationship she shares with Tom (which she associates with religious epiphany, thus signifying the union of flesh and spirit). For Tom, joy is found in the hard work that he puts into Ginny's family farm, which he transforms, by virtue of his energy and effort, into a profitable venture. While Tom's over-reliance on monetary gain becomes an obsession, that obsession does provide Ginny with the resources to raise her children and continue on without him when he dies of typhoid after exhausting himself battling a fire that threatens the farm.

The fire at the end of the novel is significant. The Truest Pleasure is beautifully structured, utilizing the natural elements--earth, air, fire, and water--in a symbolic paradigm (see Rebecca Smith's explication of the novel in "The Elemental in The Truest Pleasure and Gap Creek: Nature as Physical Force and Spiritual Metaphor"). Morgan opens the book with Ginny's "baptism of fire" at a Pentecostal service and ends the story with the fire that almost consumes the farm and does indeed cost Tom his life. Between these two remarkable events is a tale rich in human truth and the complexity of human relationships.

Gap Creek, the Story of a Marriage (2000) is Morgan's award-winning third novel. As the Truest Pleasure, it also traces the tentative relationship of a young married couple, Julie and Hank Harmon, whose family will intersect with the Powells in Morgan's fourth book This Rock (2001). Gap Creek is also dominated by the stark, elemental forces of nature; as fire is the significant element in The Truest Pleasure, water provides a dramatic climax in Gap Creek. Julie Harmon is modeled after Morgan's own grandmother, and Julie's perception and point of view dominate the story from its riveting beginning to its solemn ending. Julie, who tends to view the glass half full, and husband Hank, who can only see it half empty, cross the mountains into South Carolina after they marry, to settle down at Gap Creek, hiring themselves as servants and tenants of old man Pendergrast, a petulant misogynist whom Julie tries in vain to please.

As in all of Morgan's books, Gap Creek minutely details the daily life, costumes, and habits of its mountain folk, portraying in particular the relationship between young Hank and Julie and the hardships they encounter as they start their meager lives in the valley. Fire, flood, sickness, and the death of their child temper their characters; and Morgan's naturalistic theme--human insignificance in the presence of a careless, deterministic universe--dominates the story. Julie ponders the devastation after Gap Creek has flooded its banks and destroyed much of the valley: "The creek would go back to its banks and broke things would rot and turn into mulch and fertilizer. The sun would dry out the mud and silt, and weeds would start growing again" (226). In the wake of such powerful forces, only the solace of work and human connections offer any balm. Julie muses, after she joins Preacher Gibbs's church at Painter Mountain, that she

felt better about living on Gap Creek. We didn't have no money, and we didn't have a cow, and Hank didn't have a job. But there was a fellowship at Preacher Gibbs's church that made you feel connected. In the worst times there is, you can get through with the support of other people. In fact, you can only get through with the help of other people. (250)

By the novel's end, after having struggled to survive, after having been duped by physical and human forces beyond their capacity to manage, they leave the valley for the mountains once more. Julie thinks to herself as she walks away from Gap Creek: "Every step I took in the dark was raising me back toward the mountain and the rest of my life." She asks Hank, as they continue up the mountain, "How much further is it?" Hank answers, "We're only getting started” (324).

Structurally, This Rock (2001) is perhaps Morgan's most interesting book, as it connects all three previous books in terms of theme and character. While This Rock is a bildungsroman, like many of Morgan's other stories, it sets Muir Powell coming of age story within the framework of the “journey,” and it provides an interesting revision of the biblical Cain and Abel story. Muir (whose name references the 19^th-century naturalist John Muir) is the youngest son of Ginny Powell, and his story is told through the perception of both his mother and himself. Muir, who is both a builder and a lover of rivers and streams, is a curious amalgam of his mother Ginny and father Tom: like his father he has a strong work ethic yet lacks Tom's single-mindedness to complete tasks he begins; like his mother, he is deeply spiritual but is put off by the emotionalism of his Pentacostal roots. After several false starts--a failed attempt at preaching, a failed attempt to get to Canada to make his fortune fur trapping, and finally a failed attempt to build a new church building with Hank Richards, who becomes his friend and mentor and whose daughter he loves--Muir finds his calling and his gift for words when he preaches at his brother Moody's funeral.

Moody (whose name references the 19^th-century evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody) is the brilliant and bad older brother who attempts to thwart his sibling at almost every step of the way. Yet Morgan is not content to give the reader the typical Cain and Abel retelling; rather, his is a revisionist version of the story, as Moody ironically provides the means for his brother to achieve his calling and even sacrifices his life to defend Muir's work. Morgan highlights this human complexity, as well as the interconnectedness of good and evil, as he adds the final vignette at the end of the novel--a story associated with the rock church on the mountaintop that Muir and Hank leave unfinished and which becomes a nesting place for rattlers and the scene of a horrific event that occurs years after Muir and Moody Powell have concluded their brotherly combat. Morgan also suggests that the true rock of the church is not to be found in the cement and mortar of its edifices nor in the rigid orthodoxy of its doctrines, but in the people whose spirituality reflects God's grace.

The unique connection between spirit and matter is one of the most important dualities in Morgan's canon, and it is encapsulated in Muir's “sermon on the mount,” as he preaches at his brother’s funeral, and it is readily seen in such poems as "Blowing Rock." Muir presents the prose version, explaining: "For when we see truly, the vision of every moment is Pisgah vision. The vision of every moment is two fold, this world and the next, the natural vision and the spiritual vision" (312). "Blowing Rock" frames the idea in poetic terms, as Morgan utilizes the image of the wind's moving up the mountain side in order to express the simultaneousness of flesh and spirit. He further suggests a spiritual dimension associated with creativity and imagination, for this place, this unique landscape, where “wind carries pollen and the breath of woods” is a remarkable and inspiring “place to conjure,” to image a world that has both passed from us and, at the same time, lives within us, a place where one can find inspiration to “write the mountains”:

The air that riots up the mountainside

and up the cliff face flames so brusque and bold

it stuns. And what a welling forth a blaze

of inspiration from the deep ravine.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Wind carries pollen and the breath of woods

it passes over. And the fountain air

feels hard enough to life a house away

or throw a leaper back onto the ledge.

. . . What a place to conjure:

the lip of the ridge where breath of deep blue valleys

ascends and keeps ascending like a prayer

or song of praise, of supplication, sent

from busy fields and crossways far below

to oracle the towering element. (Topsoil Road 10)

Works Cited

Jones, Roger D. "Robert Morgan." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ed. R. S. Gwynn. Vol. 120. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.

Morgan, Robert. "Appalachia." http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rrm4/essays/index.htm.

___________. Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Ed. Joyce Nakamura. Vol. 20. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.

___________. Gap Creek, The Story of a Marriage. NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2000.

___________. Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1993.

___________. The Hinterlands, A Mountain Tale in Three Parts. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1994.

___________. "Nature Is Yet a Stranger." http://www.people.cornel.edu/pages/rrm4/essays/nature.htm.

___________. Red Owl. NY: W. W. Norton, 1972.

___________. This Rock. NY: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 2001.

___________. Top Soil Road. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2000.

___________. The Truest Pleasure. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1998.

___________. "Writing the Mountains." http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/rrm4/essays/mountains.htm.

Smith, Rebecca. "The Elemental in The Truest Pleasure and Gap Creek: Nature as Physical Force and Spiritual Metaphor." Pembroke Magazine. 35 (2003): 37-46.

Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt

Professor of English, Shepherd College