Rick Moody: Hotels of North America

For example: Michelle Perry, while assembling these pages, used payroll data to track the author to an address on the Upper West Side of New York City, an apartment never once alluded to in Morse’s prose output. Perry, in fact, taxied up to Morse’s presumptive building and waited around until a superintendent made himself obvious, at which point she ventured a few inoffensive queries designed to bulk out the biography of the writer of this collection. Did the superintendent perhaps know a man called Reginald Morse? Had the superintendent seen a tall middle-aged balding man, a little bit heavyset, living on the fifth floor (per the payroll stubs, he lived in 5C)? With, perhaps, a female companion? The super, according to Perry, pointed out that almost every floor in the building had its share of balding heavyset men, though he did admit that he knew of at least one or two people on the fifth floor who might have fitted the description: affable, talkative, unemployed. On the basis of this scanty information, Michelle Perry waited around for a couple of hours, marking up this manuscript with a red pencil in the process, and did the same on a couple of subsequent days, without ever catching a glimpse of Morse himself. Indeed, it turned out in a few weeks’ time that there were eviction proceedings under way for 5C, on whose button was written only the word Shy.

Were these mysterious facts intended to entice me, over lunch, into the writing of an afterword? It is true that in the following days, in the midst of a stalled book of my own, I began poking around on the web a bit.

I could and did find traces of Reginald Morse, of his essence — when I was willing to surrender the middle name, that is. He couldn’t have been the R. E. Morse of Biloxi, Mississippi, for example, who had died in a hurricane-related traffic mishap in 1999 after racking up gambling debts. His family was interviewed on their front lawn, on the local news, the night of the tragedy, video footage available on YouTube. Weepy and regretful, they forgave him everything. With the Biloxi Morse out of the way, I tried a few other middle initials online, just to see if any led to the author of these reviews.

There was an R. L. Morse in Fairfax, Virginia, and astute readers of Morse’s writings will note that on one occasion Reg Morse did in fact visit a hotel in Fairfax (see pp. 87–91). This R. L. Morse of Fairfax is a lawyer in private practice whose main line of business is real estate closings. I corresponded with R. L. Morse by e-mail a couple of times, and he seemed tickled by the possibility that he was a furious and infamous hotel reviewer, and if he was putting me on, he did a very good job of it. R. L. Morse explained, in the most genial way, that he didn’t much like to travel.

There is a Reginald Edmund Morse of Tuscaloosa who works for the State of Alabama in child protective services. I had a hard time reconciling the number of weeks that this Morse, who goes by Reggie, gets off each year (ten business days) with the R. E. Morse who was constantly on the move, whose permanent address is a matter of debate.

R. G. Morse of Darien, Connecticut, comes from a long line of Morses, a family who manufactured candles in the state of Massachusetts over the course of centuries. R.G., the scion of the candle-making (and now air-conditioning) fortune, is in his early sixties and is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer, about which he is reasonably cheerful, an accomplishment, under the circumstances. Interestingly, R.G. told me that he is a keen student of famous hoaxes, for example the Ern Malley affair of the early twentieth century. According to R. G. Morse, Ern Malley was a modernist poet created one afternoon by two embittered premodernists (in Australia) in order to embarrass the editor of an Australian avant-garde periodical called Angry Penguins. Morse went on to allude to a number of other prominent literary hoaxes, including such celebrated imaginary writers as Wanda Tinasky, Adoré Floupette, and JT LeRoy, which led me to wonder if perhaps the Reginald Morse writings were the work of some prominent contemporary author in disguise. Talking to R. G. Morse didn’t persuade me that he was involved with the work of our Reginald Morse (he said he was too ill to travel, and, if he were going to assume a pseudonym, would he really alter just the one initial?), but it did open up for me questions about fraudulence, about the relationship between the fraudulent and the genuine, and about the ways in which the fraudulent can sometimes feel closer to the truth than the supposedly genuine.

Last, I contacted an R. E. Morse in Canada, a person for whom this was not a legal name, as it turned out, but rather a pen name. R. E. Morse of Regina, Saskatchewan, was the author of numerous books about Canadian trees, plants, and birds (published mostly by the Modeste and Callahan imprint of Toronto), such as Conifers of the Canadian Rockies, Coastal Ecosystems of Nova Scotia, and Tapping Your Own Sugar Maples! books often lavishly illustrated and dating back to the early seventies. The work of R. E. Morse (of Canada) is so historically bound, in terms of its look and feel, that it is hard to imagine this R. E. Morse having lived into the digital era at all. Moreover, this Canadian R. E. Morse was a woman. The possibility of gender imposture in the hotel reviews intrigued me, I’ll admit, so I made a few inquiries among acquaintances, and these friends turned up the e-mail address of Ms. R. E. Morse, environmentalist and nonfiction writer. And so I did, at the risk of intruding, write to her:

Dear Ms. Morse,

Is it possible that you are the Reginald Edward Morse who wrote the popular online posts about North American hotels? I have been, as a sort of hobby, or perhaps as a bit of an obsession, chasing down the identity of this mysterious writer for some weeks, though I seem to be a long way from any definitive answer. Do you know anything about him? Any help you might provide in this regard would be most welcome.

My best wishes,

Rick Moody

Some weeks passed. Then, one Sunday, there was the familiar ping on my computer that indicated a new message, this one the most welcome reply from the writer I now understood to be a former prima ballerina, one of fewer than two hundred in the world so honored, Marina O’Shea, of Prince Edward Island, Canada:

Dear Mr. Moody,

I am most interested by your note, though unhappy to have to admit that I have no information regarding your Reginald Edward Morse. I do observe, however, Mr. Moody, that your own name sounds a bit like a pseudonym. I will tell you, in an indecorously self-involved way, that when I stopped professionally dancing, after a hip injury, and had to do something with my life, I chose the natural world for the locus of my writing because it was less taxing than the world of my dancer friends. Plants yielded to study and admiration without complaint. I enjoyed their company for decades, though I am now slowing down somewhat. I wrote to make some money, and I traveled a great deal, and that is the only aspect of my life that seems akin to your R. E. Morse. I am always glad to make the acquaintance of another writer, however, and especially one with whom I share some common interests. That said, I have never been to Tulsa. Nor Cleveland, though it’s not far from Toronto. Perhaps you will be wondering how I chose such a tragicomic pen name, and in my case it had to do with a lover I once had who said that my birth name, Marina Orla O’Shea, sounded a bit like the word “morose.”

With all best wishes,

R. E. Morse

Ms. O’Shea and I wrote back and forth for a while, at least when there was something newsy to discuss, and on one occasion Marina sent me a few haikus about her favorite Canadian broadleaf trees, such as the white mulberry. Then, three or four months after we had commenced our correspondence, Marina died rather suddenly. I was left with that acute sense of loss that you can have only when your friendship with someone is still in the planning stages. You see, I had confided in Marina O’Shea, as I had in no one else, about the extent of my Reginald Morse problem, which was that even though I hadn’t even agreed to write this afterword yet, I was already expending more time on investigating Morse’s identity than I was on my own work, without as yet having learned anything substantial at all.