Southwest Toward Home: Willie Morris as Perennial Outsider, Texas as Transitional Space

Abstract

MATTHEW LUTER Davidson College Southwest Toward Home: Willie Morris as Perennial Outsider, Texas as Transitional Space WILLIE MORRIS HAS WRITTEN, “EVERYTHING IN LIFE I HAVE KNOWN TO BE true has come to me as a paradox” (NYD 364).1 Be that as it may, the biggest paradox in this Mississippi native’s body of work may well be Morris himself. In his best-known work, the memoir North Toward Home (1967), Morris oscillates between exasperation with the moral failings of his home state and adoration for the place of his birth and upbringing. His nostalgic remembrances of an idyllic-seeming home are tempered by a grudging acceptance of urban modernity as he moves to New York to become the youngest editor of Harper’s in the magazine’s history. And Morris has a knack for presenting himself as either the bumpkin or the sophisticate, as the situation demands. How do we reconcile this small-town kid and wannabe ballplayer from Yazoo City who has initial trouble landing a publishing job in New York with the high-powerededitorwhocountsNormanMailerandJamesJonesamong his closest associates? And what to do with the material that finds a home between Mississippi and New York in the autobiography, the descriptions of Morris’s college years at the University of Texas and his subsequent stint as a Texas political reporter that constitute the second of the book’s three large parts? Of course, it’s worth recognizing that we all have our paradoxes; Morris, like Walt Whitman and countless others since, can contradict himself because he does contain multitudes. The form of the memoir, in fact, seems to encourage this apparent inconsistency of character: North Toward Home is anecdotal, developmental, dialectical. Still, a successful piece of autobiographical writing needs a uniting formal and narrative structure. James Olney calls autobiography “a monument of the self as it is becoming, a metaphor of the self at the summary moment of 1 Where not otherwise identified, in-text references are to North Toward Home. Intext references to other Willie Morris texts are identified thusly: NYD = New York Days, Y = Yazoo, TH = Terrains of the Heart, SI = Shifting Interludes. 102 Matthew Luter composition” (35).2 If this is true, then I would argue that North Toward Home, a narrative of one man’s political and intellectual formation, reveals its subject to us through the “metaphor of self.” of Morris as the perennialoutsider.HepresentshimselfastooprogressiveforMississippi, too crankily pastoral for New York, and too idealistic for the political machinery of Austin, Texas, whether that machinery is chugging away in the state capitol or in the office of the student newspaper he edited. Perhaps more accurately, though, Morris is the outsider on the inside. In North Toward Home he depicts himself on the outskirts of every community he enters, maintaining one foot firmly within the inner circle of a community’s life while keeping the other foot on the way out the door. Not only is Morris perpetually an outsider, then, he seems perpetually in transition, and more than any other locale in the book, Texas serves as a transitional space for Morris. A native of the Deep South temporarily in a state that, perhaps more than any other, both is and isn’t Southern in the most conventional sense of his time, Morris finds himself ideally suited to speak both progressively and nostalgically while in Texas. I seek here not so much to refute previous criticism of North Toward Home as to extend it by pointing out how some such work, in focusing on particular aspects of Morris’s body of work, has seriously underplayed other equally important features. The small body of existing criticism of North Toward Home has offered several suggestions for fruitful readings of the book, but each emphasizes a particular aspect of this multifaceted work—usually one related to race or Southernness as regional identity— that downplays the possibility of reading the work as about a political and intellectual awakening with implications that are national, not merely regional.3 I want to focus on two aspects of North Toward Home 2 If the self is a “monument” and a “metaphor,” of course, then it’s necessarily a construction, and a textual one at...