To See Ourselves…

originally published August 2, 2006

Still Bill

With all due respect for his opponent who came in ahead of him in the Democratic Primary, I still believe Bill Overend will make the best Solicitor General. Bill has the kind of experience here in Athens that transcends the legal qualifications both men have for the job. (That job, by the way, is an important one, even if you don’t often hear much about it.) Bill knows our town from a lot of different angles, and I think that kind of understanding gives him the perspective to enforce our laws toward making a better community. Also, to me, Jim Martin is by far the better candidate for Lieutenant Governor in the Democratic Primary runoff on Tuesday, Aug. 8. Don’t forget there’s advance voting through Friday, Aug. 4 to accommodate your schedule.

Really Willie

Willie Morris was the legendary editor of Harper’s Magazine in the late-1960s, a quintessential Southern intellectual good old boy who came out of Yazoo City, MS by way Austin, TX as an undergraduate and Oxford, England as a Rhodes Scholar to make Manhattan his own.

His early autobiography, North Toward Home, was full of love for his hometown and home state, but it was also a coming-of-age confessional of a Southern liberal’s embrace of New York City’s urbanity and sophistication. (A local lawyer of my acquaintance once characterized the book to me as “treasonous.”) Willie’s later book, New York Days, recounts the four years when, as editor of Harper’s, he and his friends enjoyed the city while they built a great magazine.

Now comes one of those friends, the writer Larry L. King, to pen a tough-love biography of Willie, In Search of Willie Morris (Public Affairs, New York 2006), subtitled “The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor.” King is a writer/ reporter with numerous non-fiction books to his credit, as well as stage plays (he wrote the script for The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas). He is a Texan and was one of the hard-charging writers that Morris brought on board to make Harper’s one of the most exciting journals of the exciting ’60s.

Come to find out, Willie Morris was a terribly complex man whose extreme extroversion masked a deeper, darker soul beneath the bonhomie and charm: hence the title and the subtitle. King starts out his introduction by stating, “Everyone thought they knew him. Few did.”

Then he immediately shows you where his account is heading, and I’ll give you his words, because he tells it better than I can.

“The private Willie Morris - the brooder, the loner, the man who could lose himself in sleep because wakefulness was too painful, the man who preferred whiskey oblivion to facing problems, the Willie Morris who hid his telephone in the stove or refrigerator to muffle its rings and who called it an instrument of torture, the Willie Morris who couldn’t bear to say ’no’ to writers, friends, or supplicants and so would over-promise and then have to dodge or fudge or run away, the editor who assigned magazine articles and - should they go wrong - might avoid the erring writers rather than convey bad news, the Willie Morris who having hired both Norman Mailer and David Halberstam to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago for Harper’s could not bring himself to tell either of the proud writers that they must share the only press pass he had been able to obtain, the Willie Morris who could stick his head in the sand and think himself invisible, the man who for a time became known (in plain ugly language and in more than one place) as the town drunk, the man who could be as stubborn and unyielding as any mule his idol William Faulkner ever owned - well, that fellow was a complex and puzzling man his adoring public never met.

”No way to rhyme that private, haunted, sometimes terribly difficult soul with the public Willie Morris of legend: the boy-wonder youngest editor-in-chief, at age thirty-two, of America’s oldest magazine, the glad-hander and shoulder-hugger, the merry-eyed Good Old Boy from Mississippi equally at home in Texas saloons and New York salons, the editor who not only was near-perfect in matching writer-to-subject but so adroit a copy editor - pruning excesses, changing a serviceable word to one of more clarity or originality - that writers felt chagrin they hadn’t written it that way. Willie was the pal of presidents and poets, the enthusiastic fellow-reveler of professional athletes and rough-and-tumble trial lawyers, a telephone joker who could imitate almost anyone well enough to fool and gleefully embarrass his famous friends and other contemporaries into making self-serving or pompous statements, an editor who could - and most often did - write better than most who wrote for him, a man generous with gifts even when short of funds, the kind and playful ’Uncle Willie’ on whom kiddies doted and who himself loved kiddies and dogs and cats and all manner of improbable strays, whether they had four legs or two.“

In 327 pages plus that introduction, a bibliography and index and some nice pictures, King gives us a clear-eyed look at his friend and colleague Willie Morris. His is a fascinating attempt to understand this complex man, how he got to be Harper’s editor, how he lost it and how he gradually and painfully put his life back together with a lot of help from his friends, when he would let them. God help us that we should have such a biographer!

Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher editor@flagpole.com

Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher

editor@flagpole.com