David Morrell: Fireflies: A Father's Classic Tale of Love and Loss

But I had another reason for thinking about Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. Its hero is Eugene Gant, a version of Wolfe. The novel depicts his preadult experiences, including the death of his brother Ben (one of the most famous deaths in American fiction). In the book’s climax, Eugene is about to leave his hometown of Altamont, North Carolina (in real life, Asheville), and to embark on the continuing great adventure of his life (Wolfe’s point is that every life, its pain and glory, is an adventure). Eugene stands to the side of the town square and has a kind of mystical vision in which he sees himself in the equivalent of a filmic double exposure multiplied by thousands. Every version of himself at every age crisscrosses the square. To Eugene ’s continuing astonishment, multiple versions of his dead brother also appear, chronicling Ben’s life in the square. Eugene rushes to him and calls him a ghost, which Ben denies. “But I saw you die,” Eugene objects. Ben replies that he isn’t dead, that he isn’t a ghost. “Then what are you?” Eugene insists, adding, “You are dead… Or do men die?” It’s a Whitmanlike moment, followed by Ben’s asking Eugene what he expects to find by going away. Eugene ’s answer is, “Myself.” He says that he hopes to find himself in the larger world. But where is the world? he wonders, to which Ben replies, “Nowhere… You are your world.” A new significance of the title now presents itself. “Look homeward” now means to look inward as well as outward, that the inside and the outside reflect on each, both leading us to the ideal otherworld from which we came.

These thoughts were on my mind when, after Matthew’s death, my wife and I started having multiple-exposure visions similar to what Eugene saw in the town square. To us, Iowa City was so synonymous with Matthew that virtually every street and principal building reminded us of him, gave us images of him. The library, the record stores, the movie theaters, the ice cream shop, the pizza parlors, the grade school down the street, the junior high a few blocks away. I can still see him coming down the steps of that school, where I picked him up to drive him to the hospital for more chemotherapy. In spirit, he peopled the area, but the memories were a bittersweet refusal to accept the after-Matt present, to deal with what was the case; so finally, in 1992, Donna and I decided that we had to move on. Iowa City had been a wonderful home for twenty-two years. We had raised a family there. We had also lost a son there. The city represented a lifetime. Now, somewhere else, we were going to attempt a new one. Look homeward, angel.

But where to go? One thing was certain-the landscape would have to be different from the lush rolling hills of Iowa. Ocean or mountains were obvious alternatives. By chance, we watched a PBS show called This Old House, which depicted the distinctive adobe pueblo architecture of Santa Fe, New Mexico. I later wrote about this moment in a novel, Extreme Denial (an appropriate title, given my former psychological state). The flat-roofed, sprawling houses with their thick walls, deeply recessed windows, and rounded corners were so unusual that we felt we were looking at buildings in another country. Their clay-colored stucco blended wonderfully with the orange, red, and yellow of their high-desert surroundings. Mountain foothills were covered with junipers and piñon trees. The mountains themselves were rich with aspen.

Those mountains called to us. In April, on my forty-ninth birthday (which, symbolically, I thought of as my fiftieth), we spent a long weekend there. We found ourselves so captivated by the area’s mixture of Hispanic, Native American, and Anglo cultures that four months later, in the most impulsive decision of our lives, Donna and I moved to Santa Fe, where, as Donna described it, we began Act Three. In an amazing spiritual setting (the northern New Mexico light has long been a favorite of painters), we learned to look inward and outward while, equally important, living now. Matt is still with us. Literally. Just before leaving Iowa City, we went to the mausoleum, asked the superintendent to unscrew the glass plates that sealed Matthew’s urn in its niche (the memory of the dove was certainly with me that day), and drove home with the urn in Donna’s arms. He and three cats made the thousand-mile car trip with us. He’s on a book-shelf in a small office off the living room. Sometimes, sentimentally, I put on a Jimi Hendrix CD for him. But it’s a good kind of sentiment, not a looking back but an accepting-just as I look fondly and not painfully at the beautiful white acoustic-electric guitar we gave him shortly before he died and that he was never able to play. It’s in a corner of the TV room. I often put my hand on it as I go past, just as I touch Matt’s urn when I’m near it in the office. Having made peace with Matt’s death, feeling him with us, Donna and I move on.

There’s a lot to move toward. After working as a book publicist, Sarie eventually married. She has a daughter, age four-which, in case you miss the point, means that we’re grandparents. What a delightful child Natalie is. (But then that’s one of the themes of this book-all children are delightful; adults sometimes need to be reminded of that.) How I worry that something might happen to her. But that’s out of my control, just as Matthew’s cancer was. Everything’s an act of faith. We have to accept what is the case. Take the bad with the good, load it all aboard, and do our damnedest to move on. A hard lesson. But I’ve had a lot of years to learn it, and I learn it anew with each passing day.

Look homeward, angel.

January 1999

David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction writer William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy, The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries broadcast after the Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.

Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.

“The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-two books, including such high-action thrillers as Creepers, Scavenger, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series, Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his almost four decades as an author.