My Friend Willie
Writer Larry L. King talks about his new book, In Search of Willie Morris.
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Now, as you make plain in the book, Willie hated the very idea of psychoanalysis. And I don’t recall you ever wasting any words in praise of head-shrinkers. Yet that paragraph above is one fine piece of head-shrinking. How much a part of your craft is that ability to read people? How did you come by that skill? Where do you get the confidence to trust those assessments and present them to the world? And was it easy to put someone as important to you as Willie on the couch like that? Any idea what Willie would have thought of the assessment?
LLK: I don’t claim to be an accomplished reader of people. And certainly I’ve never thought of myself as having the talents of a “shrink.” Actually, I haven’t had more experience with “shrinks” than Willie had. Whatever I’ve learned was learned in the process of having lived 77 years, having known varied cultures and many people and, as a writer, having become, long ago, a trained observer.
I’m sure Willie Morris would not like some of my “readings” of him. Willie wanted everybody to love him, or at least like him, so he no doubt would be put off by my comments about his using fantasy to escape the real world, his likely being clinically depressed from an early age, and so on. I provided the evidence for my contentions in the book. Readers may make their own judgments as to their accuracy.
texasmonthly.com: Why was Willie so nuts about dogs?
LLK: I never asked Willie why he so loved dogs. I just accepted that he did. Thinking on it, and knowing his home life as a kid was not entirely loving, it may be that Willie needed dogs because dogs love their masters and show it many ways. And if someone loves you, it’s pretty easy to love them back.
texasmonthly.com: You describe David Halberstam as perhaps the most fearless man you ever met. Can you go further into that?
LLK: Halberstam is very intelligent, he’s very confident of his opinions, he takes no guff from anybody—and he will confront any who offend him. He never hesitates to use logic in rebuttal, though that is not to say he isn’t sometimes emotional.
That all sounds like Halberstam’s a difficult man, I guess. But he’s not: He’s a feeling man, a caring man. He’s a great friend. But God forgive you if you make him an enemy—because Halberstam won’t forgive you!
texasmonthly.com: You’ve made jokes about being a “lion in winter.” And in his 2004 book Texas Literary Outlaws, Southwestern Writers Collection assistant writer Steven L. Davis drew a clear distinction between your earlier, “cutting-edge Harper’s journalism” and the essays you placed in magazines like Parade and TV Guide in the eighties and nineties. I believe he even used the term “diminished stature.”
However, your original Willie story in Texas Monthly won the Texas Institute of Letters’ O. Henry Award in 2001. And there’s absolutely nothing “winterized” about the Willie book. I’ve read just about everything of yours I’ve ever gotten my hands on, and I’d put this up there with any of it. There are magazine stories of yours that mean more to me—the pieces on your dad and Louis Armstrong come to mind first—but the Willie book is simply as good as anything you’ve ever done. How does it feel, after forty years in letters, to have published what may be the best work of your career?
LLK: There’s no doubt my Harper’s work for Willie was “cutting edge” stuff compared to most other stuff I wrote for other magazines. That reflects, again, Willie’s putting the right man with the right story. So to that extent, Steve Davis was right. And, also, TV Guide—which he mentioned—gives very little space to its writers, and so there’s not much opportunity to develop much. I think some of my Parade articles were good enough not to reflect “diminished stature.” But I suppose that’s for others to judge.
Most who write about my work give short shrift to my stage plays. Often they don’t even mention them. And I think of the seven plays I’ve written, three are pretty damned good: The Night Hank Williams Died, The Golden Shadows Old West Museum, and The Dead Presidents’ Club.
I don’t know if In Search of Willie Morris is the best work of my career, as you suggest. I’m still very tired from having written it, from going through the editing process and now the promotional process. I’m tired, really, of talking about the book. It’s ridden my life long enough! But, of course, I appreciate the tone of most critics and reviewers, and the nice things friends and/or other writers have said of it. I’ll have to evaluate it against my other work further down the line.
texasmonthly.com: You’ve said your next book will be Safe at Home, a look at life in the states while World War II was being fought overseas. What are your hopes for that project? Any timeline? There’s a great series of pages in the Willie book describing the social and cultural moment that produced him. Is that the kind of thing to expect of Safe at Home?
LLK: I have great hopes for Safe at Home: Life in World War II America. I was less than a month away from being thirteen when Pearl Harbor was sneak-attacked, and I was six months away from being eighteen when it ended. World War II vets are dying off rapidly. So I think this eye-witness account of the American home front is important. Comparatively, not many are left who actually recall it.
And I compare our home front, not so incidentally, with the “home fronts” of England, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union and, to some extent, what was happening in occupied countries such as France and the low countries.
I also open a few years before Pearl Harbor, to set up the pre-war world, and I continue a year or so past the end of the war because many things done at the end of the war—or not done—shaped the world we live in in this moment. So, yes, the social and cultural moments you speak of definitely will be part of that book.
I had written about 150 pages when I put the manuscript aside to write the Willie Morris book. I hope I can finish it two years after this promo stuff is done that I’m now involved in, but it probably will take three years. By then I will be—for real—“a lion in winter”!
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