With Houghton Mifflin's publication this month of Taps, the career of the Southern writer Willie Morris, who died two years ago, has come full circle. Nearly 35 years ago, the Boston publisher launched Morris's career with his first book, the memoir North Toward Home, which was reissued last summer as a Vintage paperback. Now Houghton is happy to publish Taps, which (unless he kept some manuscript a secret) is Morris's last book.
"It makes perfect sense to have Houghton Mifflin publish Taps," said v-p and editor- in-chief Janet Silver. "It's such a wonderful work of fiction. I responded so viscerally to its beauty and grace. There's such a sense of the fullness of life in Taps."
Although Morris is best known for his memoir My Dog Skip, which was released as a movie earlier this year, the novel Taps is one of his most autobiographical works. The central image of a 16-year-old boy playing taps at the funerals of the Korean War dead in Yazoo City, Miss., is something that Morris did. "He actually had the experience and it was so powerful on him as a child," said his widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris. "It brought together and established his point of view on the land, death, and the presence of death in life. In some ways even though this is fiction, the truths in it come from way down deep."
Since the days of their courtship in the late '80s, when she was executive editor at the University Press of Mississippi and acquired one of his books, JoAnne Morris has edited all of her husband's work. "Among his final words to me," she said, were, " 'Get Taps together.' " For her, that meant mostly line editing, or doing what Eudora Welty called "putting the moon in the right part of the sky." She found it hard to get started, but when she did, "it became a real conversation, very intimate, with Willie." Morris regarded Taps as his life's work. "As early as the late '50s he talked about Taps," said JoAnne Morris. "At one point, he gave some thought to publishing it in the late '80s, but it was an earlier version, and he and the publisher didn't agree on what they wanted it to be. He couldn't quite turn it loose. He was always going to do a few little finishing things. One version had the title Echoes, but then he went back to Taps. He said, 'Everything I know that matters, I put in Taps.' "
After such a long incubation period, Morris would be pleased to see the excitement surrounding the publication of this, his second novel. Houghton Mifflin is planning a 50,000-copy first printing, and his wife will do a six-city tour. She will be joined by Morris's friends and colleagues, including David Halberstam and William Styron in New York City. In May, there will be a day-long celebration with writers Rick Bragg, Curtis Wilkie and Jill Conner Browne in Morris's hometown, Yazoo City.
Booksellers who knew Morris are also pulling out all the stops for his "Korean War novel," as he often referred to Taps. "I know we're going to be doing an evening of celebration," said John Evans, owner of Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson, Miss. "Willie was a great friend of the store and a pal. He hung out, held court and brought his friends."
Mississippi native Tim Huggins, owner of Newtonville Books in Newtonville, Mass., who regards both Willie and JoAnne Morris as friends, said, "Even if we don't do something with JoAnne, I'll really be pushing Taps. I like it a lot, it feels more autobiographical than a novel. Some of the stories that are in there are stories that he told me."
It seems fitting that a book named for a tune played at sunset should be the final work in a long and distinguished career. Although Morris left two partially completed manuscripts, "there's not enough there to work with," said JoAnne Morris. "I looked at them very carefully." One was for a novel set in Oxford, The Times at Midnight, and the other a memoir about his father and baseball. Many of Morris's fans will see Taps as his swan song.
