THE PRESS SOUTH TOWARD HOME

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01314R000100620018-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 15, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 25, 2004
• Sequence Number: 18
• Publication Date: June 1, 1970
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

Liu 13
Approved For Release 2004~I03NI, nA-RDP88-01314Rl
THE PRESS
South Toward Home
"Very few people really know Willie
Morris," says David Halbcrstam of his
friend and editor at Harper's magazine.
"On the first level-perhaps you've read
his book, North Toward Honte-you vi-
sualize some terribly brilliant, worldly
young editor. Then you meet him-the
second level-and you confront this
drawling, rather slovenly, Good Ole Mis-
sissippi Boy, all wide-eyed and awed by
the Big Cave, as he calls New York
City. And you say, 'My God, this guy
is a fraud.' Then there's a third level,
one he doesn't let many see, where you
discover behind these two guises this
very complicated, enormously sophis-
ticated, strong man."
Third-level Willie Morris is now ac-
cessible to those who don't know him
in the 120th Anniversary number of
Harper's, out last week. This time he
has turned south toward home, going
back to his hometown of Yazoo City'
(pop. 14,000, slightly more than 50%
black) in these days of court-ordered in-
tegration. The 22-page result, entitled
"Yazoo . notes on survival," is
thoughtful, deeply personal and brutally
honest. Morris, now 35, leaves nothing
out, not his ex-wife's hatred of Yazoo,
not even an intensely Southern "pre-
monition that had been working its way
up my frontal lobe . . . that I would
meet there, on my home ground, a vi-
olent death, perhaps even a death ac-
companied by mutilation and unfath-
omable horror. My premonition had an
animal force to it, unlike the other pre-
monitions in my life. Some bastard is
going to kill me in Yazoo."
Alluvial Soil. Morris was not killed.
But the fear is always there, and Mor-
ris' essay witnesses the collision of boy-
hood recollections and journalistic re-
mood: the white postman playing cards
with three Negroes on his route; the
white father who will not send his chil-
dren to the white private school, be-
cause it is based on "pure ole hate."
And, Morris writes, "I would see among
blacks a new commitment to Mississippi
as a place, as a frontier for redeeming
some lost quality in the American soul
. This generation of children, white
and black, in Yazoo will not, I sense,
be so isolated as mine, for they will be
confronted quite early with the things
"HARPER'S" EDITOR MORRIS
The third level is now accessible.
-York Jewish Intellectual Establishment.
Little did he know."
Morris knew. He brought a Texas
friend. Larry King. to the magazine,
lured Pulitzer Prizewinner David Hal-
herstam away from the New York
Times, and persuaded his friend and fel-
low Southerner William Stvron to run
a 35.000-word excerpt from The Con-
fessions of Na: Turner in Harper's at a
fee several times smaller than he could
have got elsewhere. But his official dec-
laration of independence came when
he signed Norman Mailer to recount
his experiences at a Washington peace
march.
Writers' Prerogatives. Mailer turned
in 90,000 words. Morris read them all
and deliberated with Executive Editor
Midge Dectcr for most of a drinking af-
ternoon before deciding to run the piece
in full, turning over a whole issue of Har-
per's to what was probably the long.-st
magazine article ever published, "The
Steps of the Pentagon." In book form,
as The Armies of the Night, it won a Pul-
itzer Prize for Mailer.
As an editor, Morris acts more as a fil-
ter than an originator of ideas, but his
greatest strength is in understanding, in
Halberstam's words, "writers' prerog-
atives, what they feel, what they are,
what is important to them." Often what
is most important to them is to he .
given the freedom to write in the length
and style they want to. Last week, Mor-
ris' broached a story idea to his old
Texas classmate, Bill Moyers, who had
just been dropped as publisher of Long
Island's Newsday. "Take a month, rent
a car, see the country and do a piece:
..on America," were Morris' only in-
structions. "What appeals to me about'
doing it," says Moyers
"is that Willie
,
it took me years to learn, or that I has no hang-ups about style, tradition, .
"
.
y
ality. Or, as the author puts it, "the old .. zoo Herald. A decade later he came should sa
- - - - r - - - . . . ' - ' . . . . . . . . "?~?y w NUUUC aucuuon wnen, as stu-
be both Southern and American." Mor- dent editor of the University of Texa'
ris' roots are sunk deep into "the black newspaper, he editorially accused the
alluvial soil" of the Mississippi Delta, Governor and state legislators of col-
and "the, pleasant, driftlcss Southern lusion with oil and gas interests. He
life" is his heritage and the source of was asked to resign, but refused. The
his sensibility. But he has been 15 years university countered by appointing ar
away: to college in Texas, to England faculty supervisor for the paper. The;
as a Rhodes scholar, back to Texas as next day Morris wrote that the ap-I
an editor of the two-fisted weekly Tex- pointee would "bring to the Daily
as Observer, and the past seven years Texan . . . the sensitivity of high sal-I
in Manhattan. Driving through Yazoo's ary and position."
"streets which are a map on my con- After four years in England, Morris;
sciousness, I see the familiar places-the returned to his gadfly role, as editor of
'hills and trees and houses, in a strange, , the Observer. John Fischer, editor of,
dreamlike quality, as if what I am see- Harper's (himself a former Rhoden
ing here is not truly real, but faintly scholar who liked to keep tabs on that'
blurred images caught in my imagination elite tribe), then called to offer him an ed
from a more pristine time." iting job. Morris took it, and for four
The Mississippi that he rediscovers re- years worked quietly in Manhattan. In
tains its "extraordinary apposition of vi- 1967, at Fischer's urging, Harper's pres-i
olcncc and gentleness," but is also sub- . ident, John Cowles Jr.
made Morris;
,
tly changed. Segregated schoolhouses the youngest editor in chief of the old
nave not learned at all.
length-no preconceived ideas of shap-
Morris' journalistic learning, or non ing a writer. He is much more inter.
learning, began at age twelve, when " ested in me and what I might have to
he became sports "editor" of the Ya-
sa
than in his own idea of .what I
STA4
-- ---- ------- -- -
although classrooms e a ned black ing him editor," says one Harper .c staff
and white. Morris shows the new er, " } , Fischer's revenge o' New