751
BENJAMIN DEMOTT
the plainsman's older great grandsons, Lee Roy Momeyer, works in
a garage (it bears a sign that announces: "HAVE GUNS-WILL
LUBRICATE") and shoots his grease
gun
at college boys who
come too close to the pit, or uses it to "pin the flies to the wall...."
The sister of this figure, Etoile (Eee-toal) Momeyer, the plains–
man's great granddaughter, keeps a card file on bust development
("Under Jayne Mansfield Etoile had written,
Not so hot").
The
father of the two, another of the plainsman's sons-in-law, is a post–
man who reads
Popular Mechanics
half the night, spends years
working on a self-filling fountain pen, drives an old Fire Depart–
ment Hupmobile with a dead red bulb on its roof, comes home daily
from his route to "pick and dress half a dozen chickens," and then
"goes off with his bow and arrow ... Wltil dark." Nor are the other
inheritors of the past less sick or less mad.
It is said of their creator that he
is
the darling of the Litry–
and
Ceremony in Lone Tree
does show signs, like Morris's earlier
books, that he has read other writers beside himself, including
Faulkner and perhaps even Nabokov (Morris is the latter's equal
or superior on the subject of The American Road). It is also said of
him that his people are weightless and insignificant, and as the fore–
going catalogue indicates, the charge is just: Bud Momeyer the
postman stirs only laughter, the burial procession of the quasi–
heroic Westemer stirs only the sense of pathos--there are no giants
on this writer's plains. The defense of Morris need not rest, how–
ever (as
it
has done in the past), entirely on his wit, or on his
power to create out of emptiness a living scene, or even on his eye
for such boondocks of the age as the castrating Female. His strong–
est claim is that alone among American writers he has an intuitive
sense of the present quality of that life of the middle that has been
spoken of here: a sense of waves of
kitsch,
buried Calvinism, bogus
hatred (of the city), bogus love (for the tough old mountain men,
The Pioneers), fear of the bomb and disbelief in the bomb that
now torment and now titillate the millions who still sit on kitchen
chairs instead of on kitchen bar stools, who still play pinochle on
Wednesday nights, who still think they themselves are bringing up
their children. His accomplishment is that of persuading his reader
that the doom of these characters
is
not different from, nor less a
matter to be soberly felt than, the ruin of Village speech, the decay
