 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Morris (Langlo) West (1916-1999) - wrote also under the pseudonyms Michael East and Julian Morris |
|
Australian writer whose best-known works include The Devil's Advocate (1959) and The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963). Although primarily a novelist, Morris West made his reputation with Children of the Shadows (1957), a nonfiction account of the slum children of Naples. West's books have been called "religious thrillers" – they combined religion and political intrigue with an international setting and topical subjects. The author was a number of year a member of Christian Brothers before starting his career as a writer. 'The men of the Vatican are concerned as well with immortality and eternity. The too undestand man's need for an extension of himself beyond the limit of the fleeting years. They affirm, as of faith, the persistence of soul into an eternity of union with the Creator, or of exile from His face. They go further. They promise man a preservation of his identity and an ultimate victory even over the terror of physical death. What they fail too often to understand is that immortality must begin in time, and that a man must be given the physical resources to survive before his spirit can grow to desire more than physical survival. . . .' (from The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West, London: Heinemann, 1963, p. 20) Morris Langlo West was born in Melbourne, the eldest son of Charles West, a traveling salesman addicted to gambling, and Florence Hanlon; she worked as a cleaning lady to support the family when Charles had spent all his money on horse racing. Both of his parents were of Irish descent. For a period of his childhood, West lived with his aunt. West studied at St. Mary's College, St. Kilda, Victoria, and at the
University of Melbourne, receiving his B.A. in 1937. His aim was to
become a Christian Brother, and for several years he was a member of
the Order. From 1933 he taught in New South Wales and Tasmania, but
before taking his final vows, he dedided to leave religious life. During the World War II West served in the Australian Imperial
Forces Corps of Signals, in the South Pacific, from 1939 to 1943. "I
learned in the war the value and the fragility of human life," Morris
later said in A View from the Ridge: The Testimony of a Twentieth-Century Christian (1996). While
stationed in Queensland, West wrote his first book, A Moon in My Pocket (1945),
based on his experiences in the religious order, and published under
the name of Julian Morris. The work, which questioned religious
customs, became a bestseller. Three of his early novels were set in the South Pacific. In 1943 West became a secretary to William Morris Hughes, former Prime Minister of Australia. "What I didn't know was that I was one of a long line of his secretaries, which at that time numbered 72. The old man would in furious anger sweep his desk clear of papers and say pick them up. I survived three months." ('Behind the Best Sellers; Morris West' by Edwin McDowell, The New York Times, 9.8.1981) After his discharge from the Army, West was a publicity manager at Radio Station 3 DB in Melbourne for two years, and founder, later a managing director of Australian Radio Productions Pry Ltd (1945-54). During this period West wrote and produced soap operas, including The Burtons, sponsored by the BEX Company, which made headache powders. In 1951 West suffered a breakdown, and was hospitalized for three
weeks. He sold his share of the business, and settled with his second
wife near Sydney as a writer. In 1955 he moved to Sorrento, Italy, to
start a new life. His play of Daughter of Silence
(1961) was set in the Province of Tuscany. This courtroom drama
revolved around the question of why a young woman named Anna Albertini
shot Gianbattista Rosati, the mayor of a small Italian town. Prior to West's marrage to Joyce Lawford, his secretary at ARP, he was married to Elizabeth Harvey, who ran a hairdressing business. They had two children; Morris Julian West, the source of one of his pseudonyms, and Elizabeth West, who became a nun. In 1965, he got a civil divorce from Elizabeth Harvey and married next year in a civil ceremony Joyce, thus placing himself outside the Church. With her he had three sons and one daughter. After 1954 he was a film and dramatic writer for the Shell Company and the Australian Broadcasting Network. From the 1950s West lived abroad. Between the years 1956 and 1968 he lived in England, and later in Italy, Austria, and the Unites States. In Vatican he worked six months as the Vatican correspondent of the London Daily Mail. He was given orders not to intrude the privacy of the Pope. West returned to Australia in 1982. Only three of his novels were set in his home country. All of West's books reflect his Catholic faith, but his criticism of
the Church did not make him popular in the conservative
Catholic circles. West also wrote a number of political thrillers, such as The Salamander (1973), a story about new Fascism in Italy, and Proteus
(1979), in which the central character, John Spada, runs both a
multi-national corporation and a secret society. "From now on, I'm not
Spada Consolidated. I'm Proteus . . . Before I die, I'm going to fight
one decent battle with the bastards of the world." (Ibid., p. 103) As a novelist West made his international breakthrough with The Devil's Advocate (1959),
which received the Royal Society of Literature's Heineman Award, the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the National Brotherhood Award from
the National Council of Christians and Jews. West depicted the
canonization process of Giacomo Nerone, a deserter, and the Catholic
Church's investigation made by a complex English priest, the "devil's
advocate." West used in this novel his own experiences from the period
when he was working in Vatican and met a number of Cardinals and also
the American Bishop Paul Marcinkus, who served as chairman of the
Vatican bank, and was involved in a financial scandal. West described
the pope as a man who carries the sins of the world on his shoulders. The Shoes of the Fisherman, about a papal election, started West's "Vatican trilogy." Before being elected Pope, Kiril
Lakota, an archbishop of the Russian Catholic Church, has spent two
decades as a political prisoner in a Siberian labor camp. Jean
Télémond, whose controversial opinions are
condemned in the story by
the new Pope, is said to have been based on the character of the famous
theologian Teilhard de Chardin. "Society was not static, nor the Church
either. Whether in the sense of Jean Télémond or in another, they were
evolving, shedding historic accretions, developing new attitudes and
new potentials, groping consciously or intinctively toward the promise
of more light and fuller life. They all needed time—time and the leaven
of divinity working in the human lump." (Ibid., p. 292) West's novel, along with Mario Puzo's The Fourth K (1990), has been called the rock on which all modern pontifical fiction is based. (Mark Lawson, The Guardian, 16 September 2016) Lee Roy
Andersson's overblown film version from 1968, starring Anthony Quinn (Kiril Lakota), Sir
Laurence Olivier (the Soviet premier Piotr Ilyich Kamenev), and David
Janssen (George Faber), who had played Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive television series, was met with lukewarm reviews. The New York Times wrote that "the first two hours are unintelligible." Like in
David Lean's Doctor Zhivago,
most of the outdoor scenes set in Siberia were shot in Finland.
Alex North received Golden Globe for the Best Original Score. The story continued in The Clowns of God (1981), in which the Pope, Gregory XVII, resigns from his office, believing that the world is on the brink of Armageddon, and Lazarus (1999),
about the election of a "law-and-order" candidate to
lead the Church. West's trilogy foretold the rise of a pope from the
behind the Iron Curtain fifteen years before it occurred: the first
volume was published just before
Pope John XXIII died, whom West never met. The Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope
John Paul II in 1978. In The Ringmaster (1991),
a political thriller, West managed to predict the breakup of the
Soviet Union. Much of the story was set in Japan. The Ringmaster of the
title is Gilbert Anselm Langton, a publisher, professional
polyglot and paid negotiator. The Ambassador (1965), written from the perspective of
a fictional American ambassador to South Vietnam, examined the
relationships between the Vietnamese government and the U.S. military
and local officials – the author himself objected the Australian
presence in the Vietnam War. To gather background material, West
traveled in Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong and Japan, and interviewed
President Diem. However, West denied that anything except the basic
situation in the story was drawn from life. "Critics may call my new
book anti-American. I have faced up to this as I've faced up to the
fact that certain Catholics, on the basis of my other books, will
always regard me as a potentially dangerous man." ('A Novelist Named West Faces East,' Life, 19 March 1965) Tower of Babel (1968) was a suspense and espionage story about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The main characters are a hard-bitten Israeli general, a dedicated Arab leader, an amoral international financial wizard, a cynical Jewish double agent, a lovely Israeli sculptress, and a pleasure-seeking Frenchwoman. "What is an agent? A spider who spins a web and waits quietly at the center of it, while unwary flies and mosquitoes are trapped in its sticky meshes. The center of the web is always in a shadowy corner. We do not come upon it quickly or easily. We see the threads first and the trapped insects, buzzing and struggling. . . ." (from The Tower of Babel, New York: Dell Publishing, 1969, p. 81) In The Navigator (1976) and The Clowns of God. West used ideas from science fiction. The latter novel was set at the end of the 20th century. The World Is Made of Glass was West's first play since Daughter of Silence,
which ran on Broadway in 1961. The drama drew a
parallel between psychoanalysis and confession. It was based on a true case study by the famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung,
who wrote his autobiography: "A lady came to my office. She refused to
give her name, said it did not matter, since she wished to have only
the one consultation." (Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung, recorded an edited by Aniela Jaffé, rev. ed. 1961, p. 122) The play opened on Broadway in the
spring of 1982 and was also made into a novel in 1983. West explored a
turbulent period in Jung's life. Dr. Magda Kardos von Gramsfeld (the
name was invented by West) travels to Switzerland to meet Jung,
whose break with Freud started his spiritual crisis.
Jung also has an affair with Antonia Wolff, his former pupil. In the novel, West
tells the story from Magda's and Jung's point of views. The author himself
never underwent Jungian analysis, but he once said that "Jung expresses
something in me. I've been through a lot of emotional wear and tear in
my time." ('A Mellow Morris West Celebrates His Australian Homecoming with the World Is Made of Glass' by John Dunn, People, November 14, 1983) Masterclass
(1991) was a morality tale set in the world of art. "As he drank the
toast he understood with stark clarity the nature of damnation: that it
was self-inflicted and irreversible. You ate the meal you had cooked
through it turned to fire in your gullet. You drank the traitor's cup
to the dregs, but before you set it down it was filled again with gall
and wormwood. The lies you told were graven on stone and you carried
them at arm's length above your head as a sign of infamy. (from Masterclass, Leicester: Charnwood, 1989, pp. 252-253) All his life, West was a keen collector and in addition he was a patron of two major galleries in Australia. "West is adept at portraying the cognoscenti of the art world -- the power brokers, poseurs, pirates, experts, fakers and collectors -- and his narrative illustrates that wealth and a consistent Christian ethic are uneasy companions." (Clifford Irving in The New York Times, June 9, 1991) A View from the Ridge
tells much about West's personal spirtual journey, but it is not a
formal autobiography; he never wrote one. "Human existence is harsh and
dangerous, and there are no easy answers to its dilemmas. God is not
everywhere, or always, in evidence in his own creation." (Ibid., p. 9) At the time of his death, West was
Australia's most successful writer. Morris West died on October 9, 1999, in Sydney, while
working at his desk with his new book, The Last Confession. Its central character was the sixteenth-century Italian philosopher and
scientist Giordano
Bruno, who was burned after a seven-year trial at the stake in Rome.
West, who identified himself with the anti-dogmatic monk, became
interested in Bruno's life when he lived in Rome and saw his statue in
the Campo de' Fiori. Before the release of his 24th novel The Lovers (1993) West said that he has now finished as a novelist. However, he published in 1998 a new thriller, Eminence, which continued his scrutiny of the papacy and the Vatican. The protagonist of the last of his six "Vatican novels", Cardinal Luca Rossini, has been tortured in an Argentine prison in the 1970s. Later he becomes the confidante of the seriously ill pope, and a member of the electoral college. After the death of the reigning pope and during the intrigues of the papal election he must again face his own past and secret love. "So, he had made a choice: to stay within the system, use it as a fortress from which to wage his private wars. The choice was highly dangerous. It involved another rift within his damaged self. He was now both victim and vindicator. By all the beliefs which he professed, vengeance was itself a crime. It preempted the rights of divinity." (from Eminence, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1998, p. 6) After the Cardinals elect him Pope, he refuses the honor. "He was a man of deeply felt beliefs and he was never afraid to take a public stand. In an era in which literature has been trivialised by the entertainment industry, he was a rare and honourable figure." (Michael Wilding, in his review of Morris West: Literary Maverick by Maryanne Confroy, Quadrant, Vol. 49, No. 10, October 2005) Among West's several awards were National Conference of Christian and Jews Brotherhood award (1960), Royal Society of Literature Heineman award (1960), James Tait Black Memorial prize, and Dag Hammarskjöld prize (1978), Universe prize (1980). He was a fellow of Royal Society of Literature (1960) and World Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964). After returning to Australia, he established the Morris West Trust Fund to help the National Library to publish books of value to the national heritage. West was honoured by the Australian government with the Order of Australia (1985) for his services to literature and cultural life. West also received several honorary degrees from universities. For further reading: 'Daughter of Silence by Morris L. West,' in Blood on the Stage, 1950-1975: Milestone Plays of Crime, Mystery, and Detection: An Annotated Repertoire by Amnon Kabatchnik (2011); Morris West: Literary Maverick by Maryanne Confoy (2011); 'The Shoes of the Fisherman,' in Christians in the Movies: A Century of Saints and Sinners by Peter E. Dans (2009); A View from a Ridge by Morris L. West (1996); 'West, Morris L(anglo),' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975). Selected works:
|
