Love, Daddy

Letters from My Father

David Rae Morris, Willie Morris

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781496838582
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Biografías literarias

Winner of the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letter Award for Photography Love, Daddy: Letters from My Father examines the complexities of father-and-son relationships through letters and photographs. Willie Morris wrote scores of letters to his only son, David Rae Morris, from the mid-1970s until Willie's death in 1999. From David Rae's perspective, his father was often emotionally disconnected and lived a peculiar lifestyle, often staying out carousing well into the night. But Willie was an eloquent and accomplished writer and began to write his son long, loving, and supportive letters when David Rae was still in high school. An aspiring photographer, David Rae was confused and befuddled by his father's warring personalities and began photographing Willie using the camera as a buffer to protect him and his emotions. The collection begins in early 1976 and continues for more than twenty years as David Rae moved about the country, living in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Minnesota, before finally settling in Louisiana. "All the while my father was writing to me I somehow managed to save his letters, " David Rae writes. "I left them in storage and in boxes and in piles of clutter on desks and in basements. They were kind, offering a love that he found difficult to express openly and directly. He simply was more comfortable communicating through letters." The letters cover topics ranging from writing, the weather, Willie's return to Mississippi in 1980, the Ole Miss football season, and local town gossip to the fleas on the dog to just life and how it's lived. Likewise, the photographs are portraits, documentary images of daily life, dinners, outings, and private moments. Together they narrate and illuminate the complexities of one family relationship, and how, for better or worse, that love endures the passage of time.

PART ONE

My first memory of going with my father to the East End of Long Island was in the summer of 1969. He was still working at Harper’s, and we likely went to visit friends. By 1971, after he had resigned as editor-in-chief, he had rented one side of a house overlooking Georgica Pond in Wainscott, a small hamlet off the beaten track between Bridgehampton and East Hampton. He moved about for several years before moving into a house on Church Lane, just a short walk from Main Street in Bridgehampton. He lived in this house for seven years and at times was very productive, writing his memoir James Jones: A Friendship, various versions of his novel, Taps, and countless newspaper and magazine pieces.

He began to hang out at Bobby Van’s, a local restaurant and bar named after the proprietor, not the actor from Broadway. Bobby played the piano on weekends and had built a beautiful and popular piano bar in the middle of the restaurant. While the Hamptons were already a focal point of New York society and literati, East Hampton and Southampton received more of the attention on the social pages of the newspapers. Bridgehampton seemed to be an unassuming village in the middle of the potato fields and came off as being much quainter. The Hamptons were the most active in the summer months between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when the invading city dwellers would rent houses for the summer, often at exorbitant prices. By the fall, these old towns, many founded only forty or fifty years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock (Bridgehampton was founded in 1656), were transformed back into sleepy farm and fishing communities. Bridgehampton could be lonely and desolate but fertile ground for a writer looking for a place to work without distraction.

Other than the introduction to Good Old Boy, which was published in 1971, the earliest surviving letter from my father is from early 1976. It is typed, but not dated, on Washington Star stationery. That winter, my father had taken a position as “writer-in residence” at the DC paper for several months. His friend and fellow Rhodes Scholar, Ed Yoder, was an editor at the Star, and had helped arrange for the position. During the three months he was there, my father had struck up a friendship with a young investigative reporter from Alabama named Winston Groom, whom he encouraged to write beyond the scope of day-to-day news. Groom eventually left the paper and wrote Better Times Than These, a novel based on his experience in Vietnam, published in 1979. He would, of course, later become best known for his novel Forrest Gump.

My father wrote three columns a week and, for the first time since he worked at the Texas Observer in the early 1960s, faced daily deadlines. I was a junior in high school, and in the middle of a predictable teenage rebellion. I had long, greasy hair and acne and was shy but alert. My father lived in the old part of Alexandria, Virginia, in a narrow house that really was nine feet wide. I came to visit for a week during my spring break. He and I, along with James Jones and his son Jamie, toured the Civil War battlefields of northern Virginia. Jim was in the middle of trying to finish the last novel of his war trilogy, Whistle. My father returned to Bridgehampton in the spring, and I came to stay for the summer. I continued to play centerfield for the Bridgehampton Golden Nematodes, a softball team my father had organized of writers, bartenders, and sons. He loosely managed the team and occasionally played first base. We challenged some of the other, more seasoned league teams to Sunday afternoon contests and often won.

We spent many evenings at Jim and Gloria Jones’s house, Chateau Spud. That fall, Gloria and their daughter, Kaylie, and I had driven with my father to New England to visit several colleges, most notably Middlebury and Wesleyan. My father had the notion that I should attend a traditional southern school, such as Duke or Sewanee. But sensing my reluctance, he suggested the equally prestigious northern schools. Although my high school grades were good, my test scores were mediocre. Since I had been interested in photography and art and was leaning toward a more “alternative” education, I narrowed my choices down to SUNY/Purchase and Hampshire College, neither of which was on my father’s list in his letter of November 27, 1976. At the end of that letter, he mentions that Pete, the black Lab known as the “Mayor of Bridgehampton,” moved in with him at his house on Church Lane. Pete was a well-known character on Main Street. I had written a story about him and the other dogs of Bridgehampton when I interned at the East Hampton Star in the summer of 1975.

I finished my senior year in high school in New York City in the spring of 1977 and decided to attend Hampshire in the fall. In April my grandmother died, and I accompanied my father to Yazoo City for the funeral. Jim Jones died several weeks later. My high school graduation in June brought my parents in the same room for the first time in almost five years, but they were never near enough to greet one other. When my name was called, my father let out a loud “rebel yell” from the balcony. Once again, I spent the summer in Bridgehampton, working in community theatre, playing softball, and preparing for college. I also spent several weeks helping Gloria Jones go through boxes of books in the basement of Chateau Spud, finding lots of treasures, including first editions of Faulkner and John Dos Passos.

As the summer progressed, my father and I had more and more conversations about college. We spent one entire evening going through the Hampshire course catalog over dinner. He was particularly amused that the dormitories were coed and the student newspaper was named Climax. On the morning of my departure, we had an early breakfast (one of the few times my father was ever up that early in those days), and he slipped me an envelope with instructions to read it later. I took a series of ferries to the North Fork of Long Island and then caught the Port Jefferson ferry to Bridgeport, Connecticut. On deck, I read what has become one of my favorite letters from my father. Although it is one of the few letters that was typed, he is clearly reaching out to me, remembering the day he, too, was a frightened seventeen-year-old heading off to the University of Texas on a Greyhound bus in 1952.

By the time I had adjusted to college life, I wrote my father a long letter describing the campus and the strange cast of characters. I lived in an apartment on campus with eight other students at various stages of their academic careers. I had hit the ground running, taking classes, working in the theatre, playing goalie on the soccer team, and taking pictures for the student paper. In the days before emails and answering machines, I am the first to admit that I was not always very accessible; we did manage to speak periodically. I...