Willie Morris left us much too soon. It seems inconceivable to me that now, after our friendship of nearly thirty-five years, I won't be hearing that soft voice calling me from Jackson, Mississippi, on the telephone. For many years he'd addressed me by the name of the narrator of one of my novels. “Stingo,” I'd hear him say, “this is Willie. Are you in good spirits?” When I'd tell him I was or wasn't, or was somewhere in between, he'd then ask the next most urgent question. For Willie the creatures in God's scheme of things that ranked right next to people in importance were dogs, and he would ask about my golden retriever and black Lab. “How is Tashmoo? And how is Dinah? Give them all my love.” Now that impish and tender voice is gone forever.
In 1965, before I ever met him, Willie extracted from me a long article for the issue of Harper’s commemorating the end of the Civil War. Shortly after this I first laid eyes on Willie in the office at Yale University of the South's greatest historian, C. Vann Woodward, from whom Willie had also enticed an essay for that issue. That afternoon I drove Willie into New York City and we got so passionately engrossed in conversation, as Southerners often do when they first meet, about places and historical events and ancestral connections—in particular, our stumbling upon the realization that my North Carolina–born great-great-uncle had been state treasurer of Mississippi when Willie's great-great-grandfather was governor—we got so hypnotically involved in such talk that I missed the correct toll booth at the Triborough Bridge and drove far into Long Island before the error dawned.
I can't imagine a more glorious time for writers and journalists than the frenzied last years of the ’60s when Willie, a mere kid, was guiding Harper’s Magazine with such consummate skill and imagination, summoning the finest writing talents in America to describe and interpret an unprecedented scene of social upheaval, with the war in Vietnam and racial strife threatening to blow the country apart. In the pages of his magazine Willie orchestrated these themes—and sub-themes like the sexual revolution—with the wise aplomb of an editorial master, and for several golden years his creation was the preeminent journal in the nation, not only its keenest observer of political and social affairs but its most attractive literary showcase.
I was a night person in those days, and Willie too was nocturnal, and I think it was partly our mutual restlessness—two excited Southern nightowls on the prowl in the Big Cave, as he called New York City—that cemented our friendship. We also spent countless evenings together in one or another of our homes in the country north of the city. Needless to say, we shared a great deal of strong drink, which helped us know each other better. What I came to know about Willie, among other things, was that an innate and profound Southernness was the energizing force in his life and what made him tick. Not that he was a professional Southerner—he despised the obvious Dixieland clichés—and he got along well with Yankees; he had a richly and often humorously symbiotic relationship with New York Jewish intellectuals, many of whom admired him as much as he did them. It was just that he felt more at home with Southerners, with whom he could share tall tales and indigenous jokes and family anecdotes and hilarious yarns that only the South can provide, and that perhaps only expatriate Southerners can enjoy in their cloying and sometimes desperate homesickness. Even then I had very little doubt that someday Willie would return home to Mississippi.
As I got to know Willie and became a close and devoted friend, I learned certain immutable things about him. I learned that he was unshakably loyal, that he was amazingly punctual about birthdays and commemorations and anniversaries of all sorts, that he drank past healthy limits and that booze sometimes made him maudlin but never mean, that he was wickedly funny, that his country-boy openheartedness and candor masked an encyclopedic knowledge and an elegantly furnished mind, that he was moody and had a streak of dark paranoia that usually evaporated on a comic note, that he was an inveterate trickster and anecdotalist of practical jokes, that his furiously driven literary imagination allowed him to produce several unostentatious masterworks; that in him, finally, there was an essential nobility of spirit—no one ever possessed such a ready and ungrudging heart.
One of Willie's obsessions, aside from dogs, was graveyards. We went to many a burial ground together, from Appomattox to Shiloh. Once, on one of the many visits to Mississippi, he drove me out to a country cemetery some miles from Oxford. We had a few drinks and after a while he took me for a stroll among the headstones. Then, lo and behold, we spied an open book, a novel, propped against a grave marker. It took me a minute to realize that Willie had planted there my first novel, open to its epigraph from Sir Thomas Browne:
And since death must be the Lucina of life…since the brother of death daily haunts us with dying mementos…since our longest sun sets at right descencions, and makes but winter arches, and therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness and have our light in ashes….
He was obviously delighted at my surprise. For Willie, a son of the South and from the town of Yazoo, death was as fitting, in its place and season, as life—the life in which he achieved so much and gained such glory.
[Oxford American, September/October 1999. The title is an allusion to St. Augustine, Confessions, 11.15.20—a meditation on the brevity of our memories of the departed.]