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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Before long the IRS was on Willie’s case for unpaid taxes. And soon Willie stooped in his yard to pet his beloved black Lab, Pete, and discovered to his horror that the dog wasn’t sleeping but had died of old age. At that point Willie’s friends might not have been surprised had a camel bit him. One of the hardest blows came in 1989 when his editor at Doubleday, Herman Gollob, wrote to say he was turning down Taps. "It was nobody’s fault," says Gollob. "We wanted a plot-driven novel. Willie wanted a lyrical, episodic book." But Willie was crushed. "I hired Herman to run Harper’s Magazine Press," he grumbled.
During his hardest years, Oxford pals remember, Willie obsessed over many of "my old writers" getting rich while he failed to prosper. He would shake his huge head at the mention of David Halberstam’s "big books" or my musical comedy hit, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. "It wasn’t like he really resented you guys," says Miskelly. "He was actually proud of you. But I think your successes made him feel inferior, like he couldn’t keep up."
A ray of light finally broke through the clouds. Her name was JoAnne Prichard. An editor at the University Press of Mississippi, she worked on Homecomings, a book that Willie collaborated on in 1989 with artist Bill Dunlap. Willie and JoAnne had known each other for years. They first met during our 1967 trip, when Willie spoke at Yazoo High #1, where JoAnne taught. "Every time Willie came to Yazoo over the years, I saw him at a dinner party or somewhere," JoAnne says. "He wrote the introduction to my and Harriet DeCell’s history of Yazoo County. Harriet and I were in New York once and met Willie and his entourage at Elaine’s." Romance blossomed in the spring of 1989.
In April 1990 Mississippi senator Thad Cochran and his wife, Rose, gave a party in Washington to celebrate Homecomings. Willie’s sense of drama led him to make a surprise marriage proposal from the podium in the Senate Caucus Room. They were married in a private ceremony on September 14. The next day they went to the Ole Miss-Auburn football game, then drove to Willie’s hometown to spend a one-night honeymoon at the Yazoo Motel: pure Willie!
They made their home in Jackson, and the idle, angry Mr. Hyde of the eighties was replaced by the witty, mischievous, social raconteur of an earlier time. He began to help young writers, and he was working again. In 1989 Willie published Good Old Boy and the Witch of Yazoo, a tale he concocted about a witch who lived along the Yazoo River; he threw in skeletons, crazed cats, you name it, and melded them with historical fact. Once the story became popular, the Yazoo Chamber of Commerce put up a headstone in Glenwood Cemetery telling of the Witch of Yazoo’s foul if legendary deeds, pleasing Willie to no end.
New York Days—a story of his time in the Big Cave, which he considered a sequel to North Toward Home—appeared four years later. It received some excellent reviews, most notably a long hymn of praise in the New York Times Book Review. Overall, however, the response was mixed.
Old friend Bill Clinton invited Willie to the White House more than once, and he spoke in Austin at the LBJ Library. During events attendant to the PEN/Faulkner Awards at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Willie was swarmed at a luncheon in the Capitol by senators and congressmen. He drew more attention than any of the dozen or more writers being feted. Afterward, he said with a pleased grin, "I guess they haven’t forgotten me after all."
To celebrate Willie’s sixtieth birthday, in 1994, more than five hundred people packed Hal & Mal’s in downtown Jackson. A federal judge presided over a trial in which a handcuffed Willie was found guilty of "shameless and habitual hyperbole, highfalutin language, perpetual childhood, and excessive late-night sentimentality." He was sentenced "to be smothered in the continued love, affection, and mirth of your thousands of fans."
In 1995 Random House published Willie’s small book My Dog Skip. It was a pleasant little tale, often sentimental, but also warm and funny. The book caught on, enjoyed good sales, and the movie rights were sold. When Willie and JoAnne attended the premiere of the movie version, it proved to be a great emotional high for him. "That was my life on that big screen," he said, his voice breaking. "I cried in the cab from the screening room all the way to our hotel."
I think Willie was happier than he’d ever been. He was tremendously excited about his next book, which he was plotting, in his usual manner, on three-by-five note cards that he lined up across a long writing table. (He never made peace with computers; JoAnne said he "closed his eyes" on passing near hers.) The book was to be called One for My Daddy: A Baseball Memory. It would have opened with one of Willie’s earliest memories—his father teaching him to attack a baseball with a level swing of the bat.
Willie had planned to start his baseball book on Monday, August 2, 1999. He had asked JoAnne to be certain plenty of writing paper was on hand. About 11:45 that morning, as JoAnne talked to two friends about a book she was editing, Willie called out her name. She found him sitting on the edge of the bed, gasping. "He said, ‘I’ve got to start my baseball book!’" JoAnne says. "’You will,’ I said." JoAnne called for an ambulance and told them to bring oxygen.
He also asked her to get Taps together and then told her, "If anything happens, don’t grieve. Well … grieve a little." JoAnne laughed, but Willie, still serious, added, "I want you to be happy and fulfilled. You’re the best wife I ever had." Suddenly he began to sweat profusely and tear at his pajamas.
The paramedics arrived and put him on oxygen and on a stretcher. As they loaded him into the ambulance, Willie spoke his last full sentence: "Where’s my wife?" "Right here," JoAnne said, climbing in beside the driver. In the emergency room a gruff doctor told her, "We think he’s had a heart attack." JoAnne remembers only snatches of what else the doctor said: "Heart so weak we can’t tell … congestive heart failure … clear fluid from his lungs." She thought, "This should be a wake-up call for Willie. Now he’ll cut down his smoking and drinking and take better care of himself."
Within an hour a nurse told JoAnne, "You might want to call family and friends. He’s very serious." JoAnne’s first call was to his son, David Rae, in New Orleans; soon people began flocking to the hospital. JoAnne was told that Willie was unconscious and that, even if he lived, his brain wouldn’t function normally. "Maybe not," she snapped. "You don’t know how smart he was to start with."
"I had read that hearing is the last of the senses to go," JoAnne says, "so I lay beside Willie on the hospital bed and told him private, loving things. And I hugged him and kissed him." She then opened the door to the assembled friends. One by one they held Willie’s hand and said their farewells. At 6:21 in the evening, 64-year-old Willie Morris stopped breathing; his great heart was stilled forever.
He became the first writer ever to lie in state in the rotunda of the Old Capitol in Jackson, the city of his birth. It was no stretch to believe that Willie Morris, who may have believed in ghosts, had become one. And surely that ghost would not have failed to attend his own funeral, as Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn did in the imagination of Mark Twain. Of Willie’s friends, who laughed and told "Willie stories" even in the company of his still form, Rick Bragg of the New York Times wrote, "His ghost, they said, or his spirit, or—this being Mississippi, where people talk about God without feeling funny about it—his soul, will fly free every time someone cracks open one of his books about home, about family, about dogs and cats and about finding peace in all of it." A lovely thought, that. One to hold on to and act on in the presence of Willie’s books.
Then came the touch that must have made ol’ Willie’s ghost grin. As the pallbearers came forward, the Reverend Will Campbell, the civil rights activist and author, asked the assembled to stand and reward Willie Morris for all the good things he had done in life. As the casket was carried down the aisle, people stood and clapped, somebody whistled, a few more cried, and others smiled despite the lumps in their throats.
Willie was buried where he wanted to be: in the old part of Glenwood Cemetery in Yazoo. In that cemetery he had wandered as a boy with his dog Skip and, as a young father, had run foot races with David Rae. There too he had blown taps for fallen victims of the Korean War, and as he was himself laid to rest, two buglers—one the echo man—blew taps for him. I like it that Willie’s final resting place is a measured thirteen steps from that of the Witch of Yazoo, whose history he invented.
I was in Rome on a long-planned family vacation the day of Willie’s funeral. Waking, I knew what I must do. Thirty-odd years earlier I had written a Harper’s piece for Willie about my birthplace called "Requiem for a West Texas Town." One sentence ran, "For some five thousand salts-of-the-earth, Putnam would still be standing when Rome had only a general store and an old stadium." Something about that line tickled Willie’s fancy; he mentioned it many times, always with a chuckle or a smile.
So I went to the ruins of the Colosseum and said to Willie’s ghost, "Willie, I’m here at this old stadium in Rome. I doubt they’ll sing ‘Jesus on the Five-Yard Line’ at your funeral today; Mississippi has too many tight-mouthed Baptists. But I’m gonna sing it now, Willie, to you and for you—one last time." And I did. Loud and clear, if not excessively tuneful, never mind a few strange looks from gawkers. It seemed to help where I was hurting.
My Library
