In Brief
In praise of Willie Morris
One of the most moving pieces in the recent Best of the Oxford American anthology is an elegy for the late Willie Morris written by his now famous former student, Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History and The Little Friend. Tartt speaks most eloquently about Morris’ largeness of heart—a characteristic that, in the pages of a new collection of his essays, Shifting Interludes (University Press of Mississippi, $28, 209 pp.), continues to swell counter to the smaller if more immediately catchy ironies of postmodern life. Morris appears here as the enormously respected cultural and political observer who edited Harper’s for nearly a decade and who wrote with passionate astuteness about race, whether under the rubric of sports or movie-making.
Nonetheless, Shifting Interludes reveals Morris to have shone most plangently as an elegiac writer. Subjects for Morris’ elegies include dogs, his years in England as a Rhodes scholar, his time as a journalist and editor, his first marriage, his return to Mississippi, and a sense of the past itself. (“Say, wasn’t there some kind of battle here?” a man asks Morris as they both sit in a bar overlooking the Mississippi River in Vicksburg.) Morris’ excesses as an elegist—his indulgence in sweetly fuzzed nostalgia—and as a person were usually blamed on drink, as Tartt states in her own homage with admirable clarity and lack of euphemism. “The truth was more complicated,” she states, “and had to do with that raw, gigantic intensely tender heart...which he seldom protected in any way but left right on the surface for the world to scratch at.”
Some people, she implies, aren’t destroyed by alcohol but kept alive by the protections—however small, meager, temporary and even illusory—it affords. “How are your spirits, darling?” was Morris’ perennial and sincere greeting to those he cared most deeply about; his own spirits were perhaps too large, too ill-fitting and too naked to loss for our smugly abstemious age.
—Diann Blakely
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