Last week’s Mississippi Book Festival provided an opportunity to reconnect with old and dear friends in celebrating extraordinary writers like the late Willie Morris and Barry Hannah with people who knew and loved them – including Willie’s immensely talented son David Rae Morris, now an accomplished writer, photographer, filmmaker and documentarian in his own right.
I moderated a panel presentation on Morris that featured David Rae’s new book “Love, Daddy: Letters from My Father” – a collection of personal letters written by Willie to his son along with David’s wonderful photos and narrative on his complex relationship with his family and David’s trepidations over fatherhood. Morris died in 1999.
David’s book is marvelous and preserves an important literary history. To those who knew and loved Willie, it’s also a tremendous journey through a storied Mississippi life.
Joining us on the festival panel was Lawrence “Larry” Wells of Oxford, the impresario of Yoknapatawpha Press and acclaimed Morris literary scholar Jack Bales of the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Back in 1982, Wells was among the inner circle of Morris’s closest friends. His press published several of Willie’s collections of essays and reprinted several of his significant early works. Willie called him “Boss.”
Along with then-Mayor John Leslie, Ed Morgan, Charles Henry, Clyde Goolsby, David Sansing and Ed Perry, Wells and his wife Dean Faulkner Wells (the niece of Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner) were among the central figures in Willie’s life during his time as writer-in-residence at Ole Miss.
Wells’ book “In Faulkner’s Shadow” chronicles the evolution of Oxford while Morris and mercurial writer Barry Hannah were on the scene there. A strange rivalry developed (mostly from Hannah, Wells recalled) that developed unintended consequences between the two talents.
In those days, interlopers at Willie’s 16 Faculty Row bungalow on the campus on any given evening might encounter legendary writers such as Larry L. King, William Styron, Larry McMurtry, David Halberstam, Winston Groom, George Plimpton and then-young Mississippi journalists Orley Hood, Rick Cleveland, Billy Watkins, Raad Cawthon and me. Wells’ book captures vignettes of many of those moments.
Perhaps the single most valuable reference to the life and work of one of Mississippi’s favorite literary sons is Bales’ “Willie Morris: An Exhaustive Annotated Bibliography and a Biography.” Bales was a great resource for David Rae in researching and editing “Love, Daddy.”
The body of Willie's literary works - 23 books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles spanning from The Daily Texan in 1955 during his college days at the University of Texas until his death - is meticulously chronicled in Bales' book.
A note on the supposed Morris-Hannah rivalry during the Oxford days - Hannah, who died in 2010 at age 67, was one of the most intense and driven people I've known. I met him through Willie in the early 1980s and quite frankly didn't like him then. He was a hard drinker, arrogant, and emotionally flammable. Barry dressed in black most of the time in that era, drove a motorcycle and was despite a soaring intellect ready to fight at the drop of a hat. We didn't mix well in those days.
When I taught journalism at Ole Miss in the mid-1990s, we reconnected and laughed about some of our earlier misadventures. One could sense that teaching had become more important to him. My daughter Kate was at the time one of his creative writing students and she loved him.
In the end, Hannah courageously battled cancer. The excesses of his youth gave way to a certain resignation, but never to defeat or cowardice.
Mississippi never produced a more ardent defender or a harsher social critic than Willie Morris. His son David told festival attendees that his father’s honesty in his iconic work “North Toward Home” remains an important and relevant social criticism of problems that endure in Mississippi.
That gnawing conflict - Willie's love of home, family and heritage tempered with his outrage at racism, hatred and injustice in his home state - would color the whole of his life and his work.
21 comments:
YYYaaaaawwwwnnnnn, SSSSsssnooorrreee, ZZZZZZzzzzzzzz
Yeah, I don’t get it. I am a life long literary enthusiast. Moved to Mississippi at 13. I’ve read authors from all over the North America, and UK. Mississippi authors just aren’t as special as you all make them out to be here. Plenty of decent “Southern Gothic” authors, yes. But there are so many more interesting subjects to write about.
Zzzzzzzzzz....
I often wonder what these literary legends could have or would have produced without the habit or disease of alcohol abuse. The many wasted hours of drinking & recovering from alcohol abuse- the ill mentoring of students & other outlandish behavior that would have gotten any other faculty member fired or at least severely reprimanded. Could they have gained prominence without alcohol. Same with Faulkner & so many other writers for whom alcohol abuse had the last word.
You know, Lane Kiffin and Ole Willie sorta favor one another when you compare their likenesses. I had a friend and mentor which I will not name that had a saying , "There are more crazy ass crooked people in Yazoo County per capita than anywhere else in the county". I also firmly believe this statement. I would also describe Yazoo County as a bunch of arrogant piss ants floating on a log down the Yazoo River, with everyone of them thinking they are steering the log....
Sid the Somnambulist yearning for the good old days of the past once again.
@8:12 that’s exactly what your comments are.
They don’t add anything. Just move on. So you don’t care. Not everyone has to be you.
@9:15am
Totally agree.
We MS natives make every post-Faulkner writer out as some literary geniuses producing national level quality work--- and that's just NOT the case. At all.
It's just a hometown hero riding Faulkner's coattails generations later.
Kinda sad IMO.
North Toward Home is a must read. Read it. I asked Willie about it several times while in his usual chair @ the Gin bar
Disagree with the comments about the quality of Mississippi writers. In addition to Faulkner, there are a number of Mississippi writers that are nationally and internationally known - Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, Shelby Foote, and Richard Ford for instance. Not to mention more recent figures such as Jesmyn Ward and Natasha Trethewey, the latter a former U.S. Poet Laureate.
@10:28
Nobody on your list is even fit to wash Cormac McCarthy’s jockstrap.
I read Larry Wells' book, "In Faulkner's Shadow," and Willie Morris and Barry Hannah don't come off especially well. The whole thing is a bit gossipy, but is an interesting look at Oxford in the 1970s and 80s and its heyday as a budding literary locus.
An interesting read on alcoholism and literary creation is Tom Dardis' book "The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer" (Ticknor & Fields, 1989), which explores the careers of Faulkner, Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, and Scott Fitzgerald, and the effect their drinking had on their work.
Ah,the post-Faulkner MS writers cult. A sanctimonious,ethically dubious enterprise.It's difficult to exaggerate the superficiality of the group.
"...ethically dubious"? Not sure I get you. How can a difference in literary tastes become an ethical matter?
"North Toward Home is a must read. Read it. I asked Willie about it several times while in his usual chair @ the Gin bar".
Even I could write a best seller about Willie's
days at Ole Miss back in the 80's.
One third of the book would be about his antics at The Gin, The Warehouse (restaurant section at closing),and his usual stumbling around Oxford with his Lab ... always dazed and confused after 9pm.
Morris was indeed an interesting man to talk with ... when he was sober.
I used to wait on the Morrises when I worked at Amerigo in the early 1990s - they were always very pleasant and easy to deal with. They liked to sit in one of the big circular booths in the back, and would start with cocktails and antipasto, and after a goodish while would order entrees and a big carafe of red wine. They really liked to linger and were always in intense conversation with each other. Interesting couple - and they were great tippers.
Thanks for elevating the level of discourse here, 10:39.
Well 4:36 PM, now that you mention it ... he had calmed down
quite a bit after getting married and moving to Jackson.
We both moved down there after Ole Miss and I encountered him a few more times.
Although still a hard drinker, Willie was much more laid back.
In no way am I trying to tear down his reputation, I'm only remembering my encounters with him.
Actually I enjoy many of his works.
Kingfish, I was wondering what was wrong with you, to suddenly be writing such drivel. But then, I checked for a byline, and see that it's just Sid Salter, name-dropping and virtue-signaling, AGAIN.
@10:39
Funny that you mentioned Cormac McCarthy. He stopped drinking around the time he wrote Suttree (1979) and has kept a healthy weight his entire life. He is still alive and still being published, despite being born 2 years before Willie Morris. His next book will be released in November.
Cormac McCarthy is commonly considered the greatest American author since Faulkner. I have to agree.
Sid's writing contributes very little.
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