Love, Daddy: Letters from My Father

By David Rae Morris, Willie Morris and Kaylie Jones

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781496838582

David Rae Morris

David Rae Morris's photographs have appeared in numerous publications including Time, Newsweek, USA Today, the New York Times, and National Geographic, as well as in Missing New Orleans, Before (During) After: Ten Photographers' Visual Reactions to Hurricane Katrina, Katrina Exposed: A Photographic Reckoning, and My Mississippi, published by University Press of Mississippi in 2000. He has made several documentary films including Yazoo Revisited: Integration and Segregation in a Deep Southern Town, which won the “Most Transformative Film” award at the 2015 Crossroads Film Festival in Jackson. He was born in Oxford, England, and grew up in New York City. He and his longtime partner, Susanne Dietzel, live in New Orleans.

Book preview

LOVE, DADDY

Love, Daddy

Letters from My Father

DAVID RAE MORRIS and WILLIE MORRIS

Foreword by KAYLIE JONES

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Publication of this book is generously supported by the Bookfriends of the University Press of Mississippi.

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Any discriminatory or derogatory language or hate speech regarding race, ethnicity, religion, sex, gender, class, national origin, age, or disability that has been retained or appears in elided form is in no way an endorsement of the use of such language outside a scholarly context.

Frontis piece: My father in front of the fireplace at our country house in Paterson, New York, circa 1968.

Copyright © 2022 by David Rae Morris

Photographs © 2022 by David Rae Morris

Letters © 2022 by David Rae Morris and JoAnne Prichard Morris

Foreword © 2022 by Kaylie Jones

All rights reserved

Manufactured in Canada

First printing 2022

∞

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951355

Hardback ISBN 978-1-4968-3857-5

Epub single ISBN 978-1-4968-3858-2

Epub institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3859-9

PDF single ISBN 978-1-4968-3860-5

PDF institutional ISBN 978-1-4968-3856-8

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Uma Rae

I am a father too now, and I comprehend more than I once did the lines of Dr. Gibbs in Wilder’s Our Town: I tell you, Mrs. G., there’s nothing so terrifying in the world as a son. The relation of father to a son is the damnedest, awkwardest—. Surely it is one of the most fundamental of human relationships, deep in the blood and primitive in its intensity, baffling in its emotions and ambivalences, in the pain and joy on both sides.

—Willie Morris

What It Takes for a Son to Understand a Father.

Parade, August 26, 1984

CONTENTS

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Bridgehampton

Part Two: Oxford

Part Three: Jackson

Epilogue

Notes

Kaylie Jones with my father at the publication party for New York Days at Elaine’s in New York City, September 1993.

FOREWORD

In spring 1975 my parents sold our house in Paris and moved us, and our Parisian antiques, to an old farmhouse surrounded by potato fields in Sagaponack, New York, not five minutes from Willie Morris’s house in Bridgehampton. Willie, upon seeing the Louis XIII furniture, christened our house Chateau Spud. Willie had abandoned the New York literary scene a few years earlier, renting a small house in sleepy Bridgehampton, which at the time was the Hampton you drove through on your way east or west. There were three bars on Bridgehampton’s Main Street, Bobby Van’s, Billy’s Triple Crown, and J.G. Melon’s. The first two are where Willie would hold court and you never knew who you might find sitting at his table. It might be a landscaper, a truck driver, or Truman Capote, or Kurt Vonnegut.

Willie’s son David Rae, my brother Jamie, and I were all around the same age, and Willie devised all kinds of family-friendly get-togethers so that we would be included in the festivities. And always, there would be massive amounts of alcohol on hand. This is where I learned to drink, because while we kids were included, we were distant moons orbiting planets that were circling Willie, our blazing sun. No one was paying much attention to us, and it was easy to sneak smokes and booze, and no one ever tried to stop us, either because they did not notice or they did not care.

Willie had a few quirks. He never answered his phone, unless the caller knew the code (two rings, hang up, call again). But sometimes he would change the code without telling anyone. The only time he really liked to use the phone was to play practical jokes. He nailed everyone in my family quite a few times, putting on various accents, pretending to be the highway commission arriving with bulldozers to put a new highway through our kitchen. Willie was so good at his practical jokes that my dad actually told the real cultural attaché from the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, who was trying in halting English to invite him to a symposium in Moscow, to fuck off and hung up on him.

Over the next year, my father raced against time to finish his book, Whistle, the last book of his World War II trilogy that began with From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line. He had elevator chairs installed in the stairways so he could get up to his office under the eaves, often putting in twelve-hour days. My mother and Willie, seeing the writing on the wall, drank and drank and drank and buried their dread beneath their raucous dinner parties and nights out at Bobby Van’s.

During our second winter in Chateau Spud, my father’s condition markedly deteriorated. He spent many weeks in Southampton Hospital, slowly drowning because his heart couldn’t pump the liquid out of his lungs. One winter night, Willie and my father were sitting in the kitchen with a jug of white wine, and I overheard them discussing the ending of Whistle, and what Willie should do if my dad died before he finished the book. I was seized by terror, but I pulled myself together, because I knew throwing a tantrum would not help my father finish his book. It had always been clear to me that his work came first, above all else, and as a family we had to support him in that endeavor, no matter what. Right now, he needed to finish his book, and that was the entire focus of our lives.

I went into my bedroom and on a sheet of blank typing paper I wrote up a proclamation naming Willie my godfather. I presented it to my father and Willie, still sitting at the kitchen table, and they dutifully signed the document. In my sixteen-year-old mind, this contract was as binding as a legal adoption. It ensured that Willie would always be there to watch over us, and to protect my father’s literary legacy. Neither Willie nor my father said a word about the document, but they understood. From then on, Willie called me his goddaughter.

I talked myself into believing that they were merely being cautious. That there was no reason to believe my father wouldn’t finish his book. I refused to accept that my father was dying.

Willie was never one to discuss his feelings, unless it was extremely late at night and he was very drunk, and he would grow maudlin and begin to cry and rage at the injustices of the world, and proclaim his abiding love for us, and for David Rae, who was back in school in New York City. Willie missed him fiercely.

When David Rae and I were applying to colleges that winter, our senior year, Willie organized our campus visits, and he, David Rae, my mother, and I visited colleges together, because my dad could not travel. In mid-April, I received my acceptance to Wesleyan, my first choice, and Willie stopped by, and we drank champagne. He told me that if I made Phi Beta Kappa at Wesleyan, as he had at the University of Texas, he’d give me $200.

My father died three weeks later, on May 9, at Southampton Hospital, leaving his book unfinished. Willie dutifully pieced together the last four chapters of Whistle, transcribing my father’s tape-recorded notes. My mother, Jamie, and I clung to Willie as if he’d taken over the job of captaining our ship. I can’t begin to imagine how painful and difficult this must have been for him, a man who lived alone and drank too much and avoided emotional entanglements. But he stepped into that unenviable position as the abiding friend my father had trusted with this most sacred task.

During the following year, while I was away at college, Willie wrote and published a beautiful memoir about my father, James Jones: A Friendship, which is filled with emotion, all the grief and sadness Willie could not verbalize in any other way. But, according to my mother, he was sinking into a deep depression. He sequestered himself in his little Bridgehampton house and was back to drinking hard liquor, when before he’d mostly been sticking to white wine. He no longer would answer his phone, not even with the code. I know, because I tried several times to call him from my dorm’s hall phone.

And then, quite suddenly, in 1980, Willie left Bridgehampton for good and moved back to Mississippi, where he became writer-in-residence at Ole Miss. Willie’s disappearance from our lives was a terrible blow, but I understood, at least on an intellectual level, that the weight of our grief had been too great a load for him to bear.

In early May 1986, I took a road trip with a friend, and we spent several days with Willie in Oxford on our way down to New Orleans. Willie had re-created his salon of writers and admirers—another bar, another house, another town, different famous writers—and despite his generous hospitality, I realized that I had now become an outsider. On our last night in Oxford, Willie had a cocktail party, and many people came to meet the daughter of his great friend James Jones. William Faulkner’s niece, Dean Faulkner Wells, her son Jon, and husband Larry stayed on, and we drank until dawn. I retain only vague and blurry images of that long night that passed in the blink of an eye. At some point, Willie had torn a corner of paper off an envelope and written me a note, which I kept in my wallet for the next thirty years. Whenever I felt gloomy, or lost, or discouraged, I would pull it out and read it.

Kakie Ann—

You are a writer, by God.

PS—Even if I’m dead someday, when my ineffable God-daughter ever gets sad, or depressed, or wonders all over again if it’s all worth it—yes, my darling girl. I love and believe in you.

Oxford

Spring ’86

No one in the world ever called me Kakie besides my father, and I was amazed that Willie even knew this.

After that night of extreme bacchanalia, when my friend and I left our motel and got into the car and headed for New Orleans, we were both still drunk. I cried during the entire five-hour drive, with no real notion at the time of why.

Willie had suggested we meet him in Vicksburg, Mississippi, on our way back north from New Orleans. Willie was keen for me to see David Rae, who was working as a staff photographer for the Vicksburg Evening Post. We waited for David Rae for several hours, drinking at a cocktail table in a fancy hotel bar with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Mississippi River. Willie gave us a history lesson on the Siege of Vicksburg. After the city fell to the Union on July 4, 1863, Vicksburg refused to celebrate Independence Day in earnest until the Bicentennial in 1976.

The history lesson concluded, Willie became strangely quiet. We waited in uncomfortable silence, and Willie seemed relieved when David Rae finally showed up. There was some unspoken tension between father and son, but I had no idea what that was about, and it never would have occurred to me to ask. I dutifully tried to keep the conversation going. The next morning, we were all terribly hung over when Willie drove us to the Vicksburg National Cemetery in his car. He had a bottle of Scope in the console between the seats, from which he took small sips throughout the day.

The Union cemetery had been carefully manicured for Memorial Day. Rows upon rows of rectangular headstones on a perfectly manicured green lawn stretched in even lines to a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Little American flags had been carefully planted alongside each headstone. Seventeen thousand Union soldiers lay here, Willie told us. Afterwards, he drove us to the Confederate cemetery. The moss-covered graves were overgrown with weeds.

Driving back up North, my friend tried to delicately point out to me that Willie was not in good shape. He was drinking Scope, for God’s sake! I know, I said. But really, I didn’t know anything at all, except that Willie was doing his best to move on from the past, while I still could not.

In the kitchen at Chateau Spud beneath of portrait of Jim and Gloria Jones, April 1978.

Now, all these years later, reading David Rae Morris’s brave memoir, reading Willie’s letters to him and looking at David Rae’s photographs, I understand that, despite Willie’s formidable charisma and charm, he was no more emotionally open with his son than he was with me. Which is in great part why Willie’s letters are so important a testament to the complex and extraordinary person he truly was.

My father once told me that Willie had a difficult relationship with his mother, just as my father had with his own mother, but while my father had shed the guilt and shame that his mother had instilled in him, Willie had not. How did my father know this? Had Willie told him? Or had my dad been able to infer this from Willie’s writing? There are very few letters between my father and Willie, due to the fact that they saw each other almost every day during those last two years of my dad’s life.

In Willie’s letters to David Rae, we see a caring, thoughtful father deeply devoted to his son, who counsels and comforts and tries to love him unconditionally. Willie urges David Rae to use Willie’s contacts in his hunt for a newspaper job; David Rae mostly balks at this suggestion, just as I did when my mother wanted me to contact her friends in the publishing business. David Rae and I grew up in the shadows of literary giants; how could we possibly break away? God knows, we tried. My friend Susan Cheever, the daughter of John Cheever, once told me that the children of literary giants are circus folk. Because, when you’re raised in the circus, you learn your parents’ craft by watching them perform, and the outside world appears gray and dreary by comparison. So it was for David Rae and me as well.

David Rae writes beautifully. His accompanying text shines a bright and compassionate light on the darker side of his father, the man who could not break through his emotional barriers without the help of drink; a subject that could not be breached without Willie exploding in rage, which is why so few people attempted to cross that line. David Rae carefully maps out his father’s successes and failures as well as his own, never shying away from the truth about his father’s alcoholism. But we also see that Willie finally found some peace and comfort in the last decade of his life, when he married again and settled down in Jackson, becoming much more emotionally open in his later letters to his son.

Willie married JoAnne Prichard, the executive editor of the University Press of Mississippi, in 1990. I met JoAnne for the first time in 1993, when Willie and JoAnne were in New York for the book launch of New York Days. He invited my mother and me to dinner at Elaine’s. At that point I was sober one year, and I found it extremely difficult to sit through dinners with my mother. She was quite drunk by the time we got to the restaurant, and took an immediate dislike to JoAnne, who was beautiful, poised, and elegant. My mother became rude and belligerent and began dropping the names of Willie’s old girlfriends. Remember that one? You fucked her too, didn’t you, Willie? I realized my mother was trying to shock JoAnne, whose calm countenance never cracked. My mother, in her insane way, was staking her claim to Willie’s past. I wanted to take JoAnne aside and apologize, to explain the situation, but of course, this was out of the question, because my father’s last two years and all that followed were taboo subjects, too painful to discuss.

On the bench during a Nematodes game with Jamie Jones and Melissa Luppi, July 1976.

In Willie’s 1977-78 letters to David Rae, my father is mentioned quite often. Willie clearly thought about him a lot and put his heart and soul into the writing of James Jones: A Friendship. And there are many mentions of Willie’s novel, Taps, which he’d been working on, off and on, for many years. My father had told me that he’d read the manuscript, about a young southern boy who plays Taps at the funerals of soldiers killed in the Korean War. My father said it was some of the most beautiful prose he’d ever read of Willie’s, but for some reason, the novel wouldn’t quite come together, and it dogged his dearest friend.

The last time I saw Willie was in June 1995, at the launch for his children’s book My Dog Skip. This was a big party, and Willie was surrounded by his old friends and admirers. I introduced Willie to my fiancé, Kevin, and Willie took the time to take him aside to vet him, while people crowded in around them, waiting their turn to speak to the famous writer.

Willie died on August 2, 1999, at age sixty-four. He was only three years older than I am now. My husband, Kevin, and I flew down to Jackson, Mississippi, on August 3 with our eighteen-month-old baby girl in a stroller. Willie was the first writer to ever lie in state at the Old Capitol. We waited in the stultifying heat to pay our respects, pushing the stroller along in a long line of mourners.

Willie was buried on August 5, my thirty-ninth birthday.

In my memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me, I described this day in detail. Willie, who had a difficult time expressing his true feelings unless he was writing or full of drink, was beloved by legions. All his old writer friends—the crème de la crème of America’s literati—showed up for his memorial. I learned facts about Willie’s life that I’d never known. He’d written extensively about race relations, integration, and the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s, and he used the pulpit at Harper’s magazine to cover these subjects. His 1967 memoir, North Toward Home, which put him on the literary map, told the truth about what it was like growing up white in Mississippi in the 1940s and 1950s, and infuriated quite a few people who did not want the truth exposed. He was a primary consultant for the 1996 film Ghosts of Mississippi, about the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963 by a white supremacist. Willie had been, at thirty-two, the youngest editor-in-chief of Harper’s magazine. While he wrote best-selling memoirs and novels, he also selflessly mentored countless aspiring writers, including Winston Groom, John Grisham, and Donna Tartt. But no one mentioned his relationship with my father or the fact that Willie had carried my family without complaint through the darkest period of our lives. My God,