The Field Of Vision
by Wright Morris
Award: National Book Winner 1957
Date Read: September 15, 2022
The Field Of Vision was considered a high modernist style of writing when it debuted in 1956 and went on to win the National Book Award in 1957. The novel is character driven, rather than plot driven, digging deeper under the layers of each of the characters, their pasts, their motivations, their life choices and present desires.
Scanlon is the great-grandfather of the present clan who have all traveled, by car no less, to Mexico for vacation. We find them watching a bull fight, which is so objectionable today that it boggles my mind they used to actually do this. Nevertheless, the family are being entertained by killing bulls. Scanlon reminisces about his days on the wagon trail, pushing for westward expansion and how harrowing the journey was. Scanlon ultimately settled in Lone Tree, Texas and as modernism approached, he let it go on by, preferring the ways and means of the past.
McKee is Scanlon’s son-in-law, and appears to be enjoying the bull fight more than the others. He reminisces about his past and remembers the day he became a man; he took a train to visit an uncle he had never met and that uncle made him shoot a pig between the eyes. They dismembered every part of that pig and the stench and trauma of this stayed with him his entire life.
Mrs. McKee, or Lois, is reluctantly watching the fight. She reminisces about how her husband, fiancé at the time, and his best friend Boyd were on the porch and Boyd has the balls, if you will, to kiss her goodnight yet her own fiancé did not. McKee had noticed and didn’t really seem to mind. She thinks about her husband and how he gives her much more freedom than other married men, including letting her gallavant around Mexico with a male teacher they met somewhere along their journey.
Boyd is McKee’s best friend and his son and grandson’s namesake. Although they are at odds every once in a while, their friendship has withstood the test of time and they find themselves together in Mexico. Restless, a wanderer, Boyd has drifted his entire life and never really settled down. He has always strived to become something great, mostly through his writing, but at this late date in his life, his only claim to fame is the pocket he managed to rip off Ty Cobb’s pants at a game when he was a kid.
Last but not least is Lehmann, who I’m still unsure of how he connects to the McKee family. Hailing from Europe and a practicing psychologist, Lehmann became tangled up with a woman/man named Paul/a Kahler when “she” was accused of killing a man who had attacked her. Lehmann became obsessed with the psyche of Kahler and after s/he disappeared from Lehmann’s house one day, he was determined to find her/him. The most memorable part of his narrative is a conversation Lehmann has with Shults. Scults believes Paul Kahler to be a saint. Shults previously believed that evil was a mystery, but through Paul he discovered that evil is everywhere; it is goodness that is the great mystery. Lehmann kept Kahler’s past to himself.
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