My 20th birthday was the worst of my life. More than two hundred miles from my nearest family member, I lay fever-ridden in bed with the 1968-model virus then known as the Hong Kong flu. Merely getting up to go to the bathroom was an effort.
A sympathetic friend and fellow newspaper reporter did bring me a birthday cake and a card, but I was more concerned with whether I would make it to 21 than with the fact it was my birthday. Still, I lived off that cake for several days, too weak to leave my garage apartment and way too sick to cook anything.What sustained me nearly as much as the birthday cake was a book my librarian mother had sent me for Christmas: Willie Morris’ North Toward Home. Fortunately, as badly as I felt, I could still turn the pages.
Morris’ book came out in 1967, the same year its 32-year-oldauthor became the youngest editor in the history of Harper’s magazine. Morris’ memoir was an engaging social and political history laid over his account of his evolution as a journalist, first as editor of the Daily Texan, the University of Texas’ student newspaper, and later as editor of theTexas Observer. The book spoke to me, then a fledgling journalist with only a few years’ experience. Beyond that, it kept my mind occupied as the virus ran its course.
In the mid-1950s, Morris had come to Austin from Yazoo, Mississippi, and while his memoir certainly covers his early years in the deep South, his Austin experiences were formative. Years later, reflecting on his recent 50th birthday, he recalled that on his 21st birthday “in a dubious roadhouse near Austin… someone inexplicably smashed a beer bottle over my head.”
When he came to, he continued, “the lines of A.E. Housman, which a [UT] professor had ceremoniously read to me that day, rang through my dizzied brain:”
When I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.
Obviously, I survived not only the flu but turning one-and-twenty a year after reading Morris’ book. (Alas, neither Morris nor I abided by Housman’s wisdom.) Unfortunately, Morris didn’t quite make it to what is sometimes referred to as “young old age.” At 64, he died of heart failure in Jackson, Miss. on Aug. 2, 1999.
I never met Morris, but at least two good friends of mine spent some time with him. Both occasions involved the ingestion of distilled spirits, much more on Morris’ partthantheirs. Steve Speir, a University of Texas journalism graduate who’s done everything from playing minor league baseball in Mexico to working as a city jailer to writing news releases for the state, lived for a time in San Francisco in the early 1970s.
He had gone to a small grocery in the Italian section of the city to buy a particular type of olive oil. Emerging from the store, he spotted a gentleman well-oiled in his own right. In fact, the fellow had been over served to the point of being a clear and present danger to himself.
Seeing a stumbling inebriate in San Francisco was and is not a great rarity, but as Speir got a better look at the man he realized it was Morris. With the sun rapidly dissolving in the Pacific, Speir knew Morris did not need to be in that neighborhood at night. Especially not commode-hugging drunk.
Speir approached him, spoke to him as one expatriate Austinite to another and persuaded Morris to come home with him. A shower, pasta, plenty of coffee and the passage of time eventually got Morris to the point of intelligent conversation and safe navigation. Morris might not have gotten to write as many books as he did if Speir had not rescued him from the street.
In the mid-1980s, another Austin friend ran into Morris on his own turf in Oxford, Miss Ever the chivalrous Southerner, Morris asked her if she would like to visit the grave of another notable writer from Mississippi, one William Faulkner. My friend, a fellow lover of the written word, readily agreed.
At the grave, Morris brought forth two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. They toasted Faulkner and talked and drank into the night, though Morris was more prodigious at both.Before they left the cemetery, Morris obligingly poured a shot for Faulkner and then sloshed it on the novelist’s grave.
Anyone who knows anything about Morris knows these were not isolated incidents. "Mr. Morris," the New York Times pointed out in his obituary, "drank too much bourbon and red wine, smoked too many Viceroys, stayed up too late and caroused too much." Even so, Morris managed to write more than a dozen books. Some were better received than others, but his North Toward Home, along with Billy Brammer’s The Gay Place stand as the two best evocations of Austin as it was in the 1950s and early1960s.
Morris was a Southern writer, not a Texas word wrangler, but rest assured that Morris’ youthful years in the Lone Star State added to his literary voice. Indeed, Morris’ Austin days (and the events of all his days that followed) constitute one of the more important ingredients of that concoction we know as good writing — experiences allowed to ferment in the figurative charred oak barrel of time. For Morris, this literary Wild Turkey proved every bit as potent as the whiskey he drank. This holds true for any serious writer, be they drinker or non-drinker.
Not only do writers benefit from their experiences, the experiences of others enlightens their work as well. As with this essay.
Morris well understood the value of life experiences, those events we see in the rear view mirror of our lives. "The past is never dead," he quoted fromIntruder in the Dust. "It’s not even past."