In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor - Hardcover

King, Larry L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1586483846 ISBN 13: 9781586483845

Publisher: PublicAffairs, 2006

Synopsis

Willie Morris, the famously talented—and complex—writer and editor, helped to remake American journalism and wrote more than a dozen books, with several classics among them. His time at the head of Harper's magazine, where he was made editor at age thirty-two, is legendary. With writers like David Halberstam, Norman Mailer, and author of this book, Larry L. King, Harper's became the magazine to read and the place to be in print.Morris was friend, colleague, or mentor to a remarkable cast of writers— William Styron, James Jones, Truman Capote, George Plimpton, Gay Talese, and later in life, Barry Hannah, Donna Tartt, John Grisham, and Winston Groom. In Search of Willie Morris is a wise, sometimes raucous, and moving look at Morris that conveys the energy and activity of the years at the top and the troubles, talents, late rallies, and mysteries of his later life. Written with the affection of a close friend and the critical insight of a fellow writer, it is an absorbing biography of an extraordinarily gifted literary man and raconteur who inspired both wonder and frustration, and who left behind a legacy and a body of work that endures.

About this title

About the Author:

Native Texan Larry L. King is a novelist, journalist, and playwright. He is the only writer to be a finalist for a unique "Triple Crown" of American letters: a National Book Award, a Broadway Tony, and a television Emmy. The author of fourteen books, King has been a contributing editor at Harper's, New Times, Audience, Parade, The Texas Observer, and Texas Monthly. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife-lawyer-agent, Barbara S. Blaine.

From The Washington Post:

Just about any adjective will do for William Weaks Morris, as a man and as a writer: bold, maddening, influential, self-destructive, charming, slippery, original, paradoxical, brilliant, childish, witty, accomplished and, of course, mercurial. That is the word Larry L. King uses in the subtitle of this portrait of his "old friend and mentor," and it is exactly the right one, for Morris was as mercurial as the most spectacular supernova. He soared into the heavens in 1967 as editor of Harper's magazine and author of a superb memoir, North Toward Home, then fell spectacularly to Earth in 1971 when he resigned from the position he loved so passionately. The remaining three decades of his life were mostly a struggle to regain what he had lost; he got only part of the way there.

King, who knew Morris well and loved him deeply, has done his old friend the considerable (and rare) favor of writing an honest book about him. "I am not at all comfortable about being the instrument of revelations," King writes, " . . . but I set out to write this book with my eyes open -- knowing that Willie Morris was an imperfect man in an imperfect world. And I truly think that, despite some moments of personal discomfort, at bottom the best editor I ever had would not have wanted me to pull my punches." Whether this is true is at least open to debate. Morris tended toward a romantic, rose-colored, selective view of his own life -- North Toward Home probably is closer to fiction than strict autobiography, though that in no way diminishes it -- and whether he would really enjoy seeing all the details of his sloppy life spread out across King's pages is far from certain, but King probably is right that the editor in Morris would respect this effort to see him through clear rather than tinted glasses.

Morris is remembered now, outside the exceedingly narrow bounds of Manhattan magazine journalism, for North Toward Home and a few of his other books, most notably My Dog Skip (1995), a sunny recollection of his beloved boyhood companion that was made into an equally sunny and modestly successful movie. His four years as editor of Harper's may be fondly recalled by a few readers of a certain age as well as by the writers who thrived under his editorship, but mostly they have faded into the dim past inhabited by journalists whose fame lasted only as long as they themselves did, if that long.

The details of Morris's editorship therefore are less interesting now than the details of his life. Yes, he had a merry run at Harper's: He turned that stuffy old magazine into a true envelope-pusher; he advanced the careers of many variously gifted writers, among them David Halberstam, Marshall Frady, John Corry and Larry L. King himself; he had the guts to turn over an entire issue of the magazine to one writer, though since that writer was Norman Mailer the wisdom of the decision certainly can be questioned; he also greatly enhanced the career of William Styron, by giving over much of another issue to a long excerpt from The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel that caused intense controversy but also brought its author well-deserved fame.

To Morris's credit, he believed in writers and was willing to take risks on their behalf: "Perhaps one thing set Willie Morris apart from all other editors, in the eyes of writers: Far more than others, he was prone to permit whatever space a writer needed for a given work. That does not mean that he encouraged, or accepted, careless spewings. So long as a writer used the space he needed wisely and well, however, the sky was the limit. Willie did not believe, as virtually all magazine editors do today, that readers' attention spans were no wider than butterfly wings."

True enough, but King does not sufficiently address what may well be Morris's most lasting and least attractive legacy as an editor: He was a prime mover in the "new" journalism, which insisted that the journalist was as interesting as the story (if not more so) and which has had almost entirely deleterious effects that can be felt, or read, to this day. Not merely is the chief assumption behind the "new" journalism wholly untenable -- the journalist who is as interesting as the story has yet to be born -- but so too is the assumption that journalism is synonymous with literature. Though some of Morris's own writing came close to that exalted territory, almost everything Harper's published during his reign was as evanescent as the words you are reading now.

It was generally assumed at the time of Morris's resignation that it was a triumph of that old bugaboo, crass commercialism, over the sacred avatars of Art. Morris himself scarcely discouraged this interpretation of his departure, and it is true that John Cowles, who acquired the magazine during Morris's tenure, was a member in good standing of the Establishment who "coveted the Establishment's good will," which is to say he "reflexively agreed with those who were his social pals and business friends." It is also true, though, that Morris spent Cowles's money prodigiously and ran his magazine with only the most perfunctory nod toward organizational discipline and efficiency. My own hunch is that Cowles tolerated Morris for so long as he did because he understood, however dimly, that Morris was in his way something of a genius, and that he accepted his resignation with tempered enthusiasm. As to its effect on Morris, King writes:

"He was wounded. He was bereft. He was angry and felt somehow betrayed. He felt he had given much to Harper's and got little back. He was sore ashamed of what he saw as his failure, and failure had been such a stranger to him that he didn't know how to react. It was almost as if a bomb had exploded in his head and it took him more than months -- it literally took years -- for Willie to recover from the resulting wounds; if he ever completely healed, I think, it was not until the last decade of his life. So, originally, he hid from almost everyone, like a hermit in a cave, among his whiskey bottles."

For four years, he had been the toast of Manhattan: the boy from small-town Mississippi who became a regular at Elaine's, who "was, indeed, in the laughing presence of 'Betty' Bacall or exchanging friendly barbs with Norman Mailer or sharing drinks with Mickey Mantle or shooting basketballs with the New York Knicks' Bill Bradley -- people he had only seen in the movies, or on television, or had read about before his New York days." When he walked away from Harper's, he lost all of that. He moved out to Long Island and settled onto a barstool at Bobby Van's. He made friendships with James Jones and Irwin Shaw, and from time to time he tried to write, but mainly he just drank. He was also alone, his marriage having dissolved in 1969. He had various liaisons, but "he could become morose, melancholy, or even mean-spirited when nobody was with him except the bottle, and perhaps old ghosts of discontent."

The most notable of these liaisons was with Barbara Howar and was conducted mostly in Washington, where she was a social star during the Johnson administration. Eventually each wrote a book (Morris's was a novel called The Last of the Southern Girls, hers a memoir called Laughing All the Way), and what was most embarrassing was that hers was better than his. That affair eventually died away, and Morris went back to Mississippi. He got a teaching job at Ole Miss -- a sinecure, really -- and continued to write, though mostly not very well, or not as well as he could have. Like too many writers before and since, he was unable to get very far out of his own skin, with the result that he retraced familiar territory over and over again. Occasionally, as in My Dog Skip and My Cat Spit McGee (published in 1999, shortly after his death), he achieved a level of pleasant and affecting nostalgia, but he rarely rose above that.

He did get lucky, though. In 1990 he married JoAnne Pritchard, an editor at the University Press of Mississippi whom he had known, albeit slightly, for nearly a quarter-century. She proved a loving, attentive, supportive spouse who brought a measure of order to his life. She helped him cut back on his drinking (though not enough), and she "welcomed his friends, cued him to tell his favorite stories, encouraged him to write, read his work, and discussed it with him." She "gave Willie his happiest decade," as Morris himself repeatedly declared to King and others, and doubtless had much to do with his metamorphosis into one of Mississippi's most beloved native sons.

Thus his story has a happy ending, but that story always has been more about failure and disappointment than about happiness and success. Morris was a man of bottomless charm and appeal whose friends were -- and still are -- fiercely, admirably loyal to him, but he was also a person of extraordinary gifts who mostly frittered them away. It was his life, and he seems to have lived it more or less as he wanted to, but what he left at its end was a deep sense of loss, of what might have been and only rarely was. Whether it is yet another story of the terrible price America exacts on those to whom success comes too soon is for the gods of such matters to ordain, but it certainly looks like one.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: PublicAffairs
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1586483846
• ISBN 13: 9781586483845
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384