The Book on Willie Morris
He was known as a merry-eyed glad-hander, a good ol’ boy who launched his career as the influential editor of the Daily Texan and the Texas Observer.
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When we returned to the office, Blair’s secretary met us just across the threshold—as if she’d been posted in ambush—and said, "Oh, Mr. Morris! I’m so sorry you’re leaving us!" Willie and I exchanged sharp glances, and he bolted toward his office. "They’ve accepted my resignation!" he said, sounding shocked. "Didn’t you think they would, Willie?" He shook his head and murmured softly, "No."
A few days later Halberstam, Corry, Frady, Kotlowitz, and I resigned; two other editors quit the next day. We swore that we’d never write for Harper’s again. The following day Mailer and Styron, to show support for Willie, joined our pledge. We have all kept it.
EXILE
After the adrenaline receded, after the Harper’s fight faded from the headlines, reality hit Willie Morris a numbing blow. The Big Cave had suddenly become "large and hostile"; should he even see a Harper’s magazine at a news-stand, he averted his eyes as if looking away from an obscenity. He felt at loose ends: no appointments to keep, no agents or writers calling, no salary to pay his bills. "I missed the perks and the perquisites of power at first," he said years later. "But I don’t miss it anymore. Power is like cotton candy: It tastes good, but it don’t last."
Job offers poured in, but Willie didn’t bother to respond until months later, when he sent short form letters saying thanks but no thanks to all. He was heartened by supportive letters from Robert Penn Warren, Alfred Knopf, Jr., Bill Bradley, and others. One read, "I will never forget how good you were to me to take time out to see me twice in New York, when I was coming from and going to Oxford … I hope you will find some purpose and peace of mind. Know that a lot of us who can’t even scrawl an intelligent sentence are grateful for the work you have done at Harper’s. And of course especially for North Toward Home." It was signed by Bill Clinton.
Motivation, though, was lacking until Willie complained to Bill Moyers of no certain goal. Moyers said, "Willie, you’re only thirty-seven, and you have a good typewriter." And that, somehow, got him started. He fled the Big Cave as if a bear were chasing him, going one hundred miles east of Manhattan to the southern shore of Long Island. The flat terrain and potato fields reminded him of Delta cotton patches; the land had the same brooding quality, he thought, of his native place.
Slowly, he began work on a children’s book, Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood, that would win him another award from the Texas Institute of Letters. He published the novel The Last of the Southern Girls, but brutal reviews caused Willie so much distress that he later told a few friends he had considered suicide. Somewhere in there he began writing an early draft of Taps. In the meantime Willie wrote occasional pieces for magazines, went to Washington for a stint at the now-defunct Washington Evening and Sunday Star (where he collected a hushed-up DUI ticket), and picked up random lecture fees. Life was pretty hardscrabble, however, as attested to by letters from Celia and her lawyers dunning him for overdue child support.
They wrote love letters compared with Willie’s mother, however. It was as if "losing" his respectable job qualified him, in Mama’s mind, for additional flayings. She complained of his not calling her, not writing her. She was direct in hoping his work would not embarrass her or the good people of Yazoo. She had read in Time that "you and Mailer are heavy drinkers" and "it hurt." Mama cautioned that drink had made Thomas Wolfe fat and that Willie would himself look less fat if he would wear suits and ties rather than turtleneck sweaters on television.
Time and again Willie heard that, because of him, Mama Morris couldn’t sleep, walked the floor, had anxiety attacks, felt desolation. On Willie’s fortieth birthday he received from Mama a check for $50 (which he never cashed) along with an original poem saying she once had a son who now is gone and is no more.
Willie liked hanging out at bobby Van’s in Bridgehampton, where he regularly met writers Truman Capote and John Knowles. Both of their careers were truly behind them, and one might fairly say that Willie too looked as if his literary zenith belonged to the past. "We didn’t talk about writing much," Willie later said. He might have added they didn’t do much of it either. All three "exiles" did, however, manage to get charged with driving under the influence at various times.
What stability Willie found came from another author, James Jones, who lived in a rambling farmhouse in the midst of potato fields near Sagaponack—"Chateau Spud" Jones called it. At the time, Jones was intent on finishing Whistle, the final book of his World War II trilogy. Knowing that he didn’t have long to live because of congestive heart disease, he didn’t drink nor idle away many hours. Willie and Jones became so close that Willie promised he would finish Whistle if Jones couldn’t. Willie was sitting at a bar in Bridgehampton on April 15, 1977, when Jones walked in and said, "Your Mom just died. I’m sorry."
Willie sold his boyhood home in Yazoo City, loaned his mother’s prized baby grand piano to her church, and then rushed north to see Jones, who had been hospitalized. Jones talked to Willie—with a tape recorder running—about how to finish the final three chapters of Whistle. (In the end Willie settled for summarizing them rather than trying the impossible: imitating Jones’s style.) Willie and the Jones family stayed at or near his bedside until, in the early evening on May 9, 1977, the old soldier abruptly tried to struggle up out of bed, fell back, and died.
HOME
Though he remained on long island for another two and a half years—writing James Jones: A Friendship and working stop-and-go on Taps—Willie’s thoughts returned to the South. His friend Larry Wells and his wife, Dean Faulkner, the owners of Yoknapatawpha Press in Oxford, asked Willie to visit their home. They gave a party, inviting writers, University of Mississippi faculty members, select business folk, the best of their politicians. Willie was charmed: Yes, he said, he could live in Oxford. Wells got a job for Willie at Ole Miss and, along with some other friends, secured #16 Faculty Row as housing, furnished the small frame house, and stocked it with utensils and groceries. When Willie and his black Lab, Pete, drove in from Long Island on a December evening in 1979, they had an instant home complete with a cheery crackling fire.
Willie would live at #16 for a decade, though he never concerned himself with making it homey. The only pictures on the wall were of the Mississippi writer Eudora Welty and a faded snapshot of Willie’s boyhood dog, Skip, thumbtacked up. Willie began with the title writer-in-residence and lecturer. "His classes overflowed immediately," Wells says. "The only comparable excitement was a football game." Each night #16 Faculty Row rang with youthful laughter as Willie told stories of the literary world and of the foibles of famous authors. He enjoyed sneaking out to St. Peter’s Cemetery to make midnight calls on William Faulkner and sprinkle his idol’s grave with good bourbon.
In a couple of years, though, Willie wearied of teaching heavy novels and switched to the journalism department. But he didn’t like grading: One who had edited Mailer wasn’t real keen on perusing the raw musings of amateurs. His solution was simple—don’t assign any papers. He began having his dozen journalism students meet for "classes" regularly at a steak house. "The kids were in heaven: steak dinner, beer, wine, no homework, no tests, no papers to write. Professor Morris gave them all A’s," Wells recalls.
In 1981 Willie published Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home; two years later he finished The Courting of Marcus Dupree, about a blue-chip running back from the small Mississippi town of Philadelphia. I rate it among his best books, but it might never have been finished had Willie’s agent, Sterling Lord, not conspired with an Ole Miss student named Rocky Miskelly. "Willie had spent the advance money but couldn’t seem to finish the book. I told Sterling he was drinking a fifth or two of bourbon a day and sometimes added vodka," Miskelly says. The agent arranged for Willie to retreat to an isolated cabin, and Miskelly disabled Willie’s car once he was there. "I took him a pint of George Dickel bourbon each day, and Willie produced pages six days per week. He got a whole fifth of bourbon on Sunday, and the day off." That same year a collection of sports stories called Always Stand in Against the Curve appeared. Then the well ran dry. He would produce nothing for six long years.
There is no creature so miserable as a writer lying fallow. Most true writers have a compulsion to write; they are addicted to it. When they do not write for a long time, they feel guilty, feel worthless, and—often—they drink far too much. They do not know WHY they are blocked or WHEN the condition will go away, if ever. Frustration turns to anger, anger leads to foolish conduct, and after a while people who truly love you seek relief from your whining, blame-placing, angry company. I know. I’ve been there.
And all of that misery also happened to Willie Morris. Old friends will talk about the details now, though not many for attribution. "He really became Mr. Hyde more than Dr. Jekyll," says a man who admired him. In that mode Willie refused to give even his required single public lecture a year at Ole Miss, quit paying rent on his faculty quarters, and effectively divorced himself—unilaterally—of any responsibility to the school.
"He began to hate this town where restaurants closed at ten and bars at midnight, leaving him low and wet with no place to go but home," says a companion of the time. One night as he left a bar, he took a swing at a policeman for no discernible reason, though he missed, thanks to Miskelly. A few months later, when the cops hung a DUI rap on him, Willie claimed it was because of his swinging at a cop that time "and I don’t even remember it."
My Library
