Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here

IN SEARCH OF WILLIE MORRIS: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor.

By Larry L. King. Public-Affairs. 353 pp. $26.95

Few magazine editors cast a longer shadow than Willie Morris (1934–99), who took over the top slot at Harper’s in 1967. The 32-year-old Morris rapidly turned America’s second-oldest continuously published magazine (the oldest is Scientific American) from a stuffy old men’s club into a cutting-edge cabaret that, along with Esquire and New York, showcased that path-breaking mix of fictional techniques and shoe-leather reporting known as the New Journalism.

He hired David Halberstam, who wrote long articles that formed the core of The Best and the Brightest (1972), about the hubristic architects of America’s Vietnam policy, and The Powers That Be (1979), about the intersection of mass media and politics. Morris rejuvenated Norman Mailer’s flagging career by turning over virtually entire issues of the magazine to the novelist’s first-person reportage on war protests outside the Pentagon, the 1968 Republican and Democratic national conventions, and the feminist movement, which became the books The Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968), and The Prisoner of Sex (1971). Morris was in steady demand on TV and op-ed pages, and he was a fixture at Elaine’s, the Manhattan restaurant that’s a den of power brokers and literati. How hot was he? “There were eight million tele­phone numbers in the Manhattan directory, and every one of them would have returned my calls,” he boasted in his memoir New York Days (1993), exaggerating only a bit.

Yet in 1971 Morris resigned from Harper’s after battling its then-owners, the Minnesota-based Cowles family, over the magazine’s spiraling costs and, more important, its left-leaning politics. Though only in his mid-thirties, Morris never regained his luster. Bitter and despondent, he decamped from Manhat­tan to the Hamptons for a decade and then to his beloved home state of Mississippi, where he became Ole Miss’s first writer-in-residence. Over the years he published a string of novels, reminiscences, and nonfiction works, none of which achieved the literary acclaim of his precocious memoir North Toward Home (1967). Though his children’s books proved popular, especially My Dog Skip (1995), the basis of a successful 2000 film, his post-Harper’s years and output are rightly seen as a coda to what he called his brief attempt “to remake literary America.”

The central mysteries of Larry L. King’s engaging, personal, and often moving biography are why Willie Morris threw in the towel at Harper’s and why he didn’t get the second act he deserved. As one of Morris’s first hires at Harper’s and a lifelong friend and boon companion, King—best known for coauthoring the musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—seems amply qualified to unravel these mysteries, but, as he acknowledges, he doesn’t altogether succeed. “Why didn’t Willie Morris fight back? . . . Why did he exile himself?” asks King. “I have no single conclusion that will please everybody—or even myself.” Morris was “wounded,” “bereft,” and “angry,” King notes, before suggesting that clinical depression, intensified by boozing and pill popping, helps explain the long literary denouement.

The psychological explanation is doubtless important, but there are social factors to consider as well. Morris’s belletristic vision of “literary America” was wedded to liberal conceptions of good politics and good taste. In New York Days, Morris confessed that he didn’t run a “watershed” essay on Sino-American relations by a pre-presidential Richard Nixon simply because he “did not want Richard Nixon in Harper’s.” But by the end of the ’60s, the tradition to which Morris was loyal was already being eclipsed by fresh understandings of cultural meaning and power. America splintered not just politically but aesthetically too, with new values infusing everything from pop music to partisan politics. It’s no accident that the magazines that defined the ’70s (Rolling Stone), the ’80s (Spy), and the ’90s (Wired) were very different from Morris’s Harper’s in tone and focus. King notes that New York Days, Morris’s last truly serious book, “lacked meaningful candor and tough-minded self-examination.” Whatever personal demons were hounding him, Willie Morris must have felt increasingly out of touch with a world in which he was just one more aging wunderkind.

—Nick Gillespie