I met Willie Morris very briefly when I was about twenty at a political event in our home state of Mississippi. I was expecting a rollicking good time in the brief conversation, but found instead a shy, almost somber, man, nothing like what I would expect from the freewheeling author, essayist, and celebrated former editor of Harper’s magazine. There was more to Willie Morris than I could see in three minutes. But it turns out I’m not alone. There was more to Willie Morris than his friends could figure out in thirty years.
The book In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor by Morris’s friend and former colleague Larry L. King (not “Live”) is part celebration of the Mississippi author’s life, part lament at what couldn’t be known about him. What’s fascinating to me about the book is to see the two dimensions of Willie Morris, Yazoo City boy and New York City literary figure, converging back and forth upon one another. Morris once bragged, at the height of his power as a young thirtysomething editor at Harper’s, that there were millions of people in the Manhattan phone book, and every one of them would have returned his call. He is also a man who drove around Oxford, Mississippi, with a potato in the side of his car, serving as a replacement gas cap.
Morris was a Rhodes scholar, and a friend to a young Arkansan named Bill Clinton. He was the author of an autobiography at the age of thrity-two, a book that I think is his best, North Toward Home. He was also a tragic figure who divorced early and stayed drunk quite a bit. According to King, Morris always insisted he didn’t have a bourbon problem because he could get bourbon any time he wanted.
What’s most interesting about this volume is not the anecdotes about the life of a great writer, although they’re worth the buying of the book. Instead I found most interesting the tragedy that is, as the Bible tells us, “common to man.” Willie Morris, despite all his talent and all his money and all his friends, was afraid to die.
King talks about how, while serving as writer-in-residence at Ole Miss, Morris would do everything he could to avoid being alone at night. He would invite university students over to talk until the early morning hours. He would call friends in the middle of the night. As King puts it:
“It was, a couple of Willie’s friends decided, almost as if night represented death to Willie Morris, almost as if he felt it might smother him unless there were lights and noise and people, that he might cheat the Grim Reaper only by waiting for the deliverance of dawn. Not that Wilie Morris himself ever said anything remotely like that, but his desperation and near panic if he couldn’t find midnight companions, one friend said, had inspired their macabre speculations. And it is a fact that most of Willie’s wee-hours telephone calls to friends all over the nation occurred when he was alone in the night, a disembodied voice from far away apparently being preferable to the awful sound of silence.”
Willie Morris didn’t have much to do with Christianity or the church. He resented the Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night churchgoing of his Southern Baptist childhood. He is now dead. As I read this biography, a love note from a friend, I can only hope that, sometime in the moments before his death, Morris found a light that could overcome the darkness. I can only hope that he cried out for mercy and found a perfect love that casts out fear. I can only hope that he finally found himself journeying, north toward home.
