North By South

No matter how long they live in New York City, Southern writers and editors never seem to adjust. They may not be able to go home again, as Thom as Wolfe once warned, but they resist making a home of New York. Their work, too, stands apart. To their writ ing, they bring a closeness to the soil, an abiding sense of tradition, a refreshing wonderment at the city's delights along with a certain wariness. All these qualities are much in evidence in two new books by transplanted Southerners, North Toward Home by Willie Morris, and A Pride of Prejudices by Vermont Royster.

While Horace Greeley did not write his autobiography until he was 57 and Henry Adams waited until he was 67, Willie Morris was in more of a hurry. Just six months after becoming editor in chief of Harper's, he has published his memoirs at 32. "It could have been an act of real pretension," he concedes, and it probably is. But Morris decided to "tell it as it really is, to tell the reader something about belonging in America."

Common Cruelty. What Willie belongs to is the dark, doom-laden Mississippi Delta and the town where he grew up--Yazoo (accent on the second syllable) City. He is adept at conveying the violence that simmers beneath the surface courtliness of the Deep South and often erupts in cruelty to Negroes --a cruelty, he admits, that he shared. At twelve, he pounced on a three-year-old Negro toddler for no good reason and beat him up. "My heart was beating furiously," he recalls, "in terror and a curious pleasure." Until he knew better, he thought only Negro women enjoyed sexual intercourse. "They were a source of constant excitement for me and filled my daydreams with delights and wonders."

It was Texas, of all places, that liberated Willie. One night after a bout of fraternity hazing at the University of Texas, "I got mad," he reports, "probably the maddest I had ever been in my whole life--at homesickness, at blond majorettes, at gat-toothed Dallas girls, at twangy accents, at my own helpless condition. I'm better than this sorry place, I said to myself several times, and be damned if I didn't believe it."

So he set to work to remedy the defects at hand; as editor of the campus paper, the Daily Texan, he crusaded against the state's sacrosanct oil-and-gas industry, berating it for taking too much out of the state and putting too little back in. In the uproar that ensued, complete with suppression of his editorials, Willie became something of a local celebrity.

He returned to the attack after graduation by editing the anti-establishment weekly, the Texas Observer, but he also learned some facts of political life. "The heavy hand was not only ineffective," he reflects, "it was usually irrelevant. Humor was essentially a way of surviving, and it was no coincidence that every good man I knew had a deep and abiding sense of the absurd."

With his newfound political knowledge, Willie made the trek to New York in 1963, where he met the traditional rebuffs at the surly hands of cabbies, waiters and landlords. "I had known Mississippi rednecks," he complains, "mother-killers, grandmother-killers, sixth-year graduate students and spitballers who threw at your head; but I had never run up against people so lacking in the human graces." He found that New York literary types were not much better. One after another, the idols of his boyhood came tumbling down when he met them in the flesh.

At a dinner party one night, the guests talked with glib facility about so many topics that Willie complained that he couldn't follow the conversation.

"Well," said one of his dinner partners, peering into the dregs of a drink, "perhaps we are a little idiomatic."

Morris, it is clear, plans to maintain a civil tone in Harper's. "Ideas are not enough," he says. "The human quality has to be there."

Illusion of Paradise. Vermont Royster, editor of the Wall Street Journal, waited until a more conventional age, 53, to publish his first book, a collection of essays on a wide range of topics that he has written over the years for his paper. Consequently, Royster is more reconciled to the aberrations of New York than Willie Morris, and gives some good advice: don't give up. A colleague of his, he reports, decided to trade the New York rat race for a Vermont farm. He soon "learned that paradise is an illusion. In the countryside as in the big city, he found adultery, incest, murder, fraud, brutality, stupidity, sloth, greed, hatred and bigotry."

Royster, in a way, offers his younger colleague at Harper's a word of caution: beware the pitfalls of overestimating youth. "We are all excited by youth and vigor," he writes, "the young because they share it and the rest of us because we remember it. But the greater difficulty is that none of us--even young people themselves--really put as much stock in it as we all pretend to. When we must put the great affairs of life in another man's hands, we almost always turn to the mature--even the fatherly--image." Royster has grown to appreciate the relatively peaceful Eisenhower presidency. "If there was one secret to President Eisenhower's political success--and it certainly was a secret from most of the political writers--it was the fact that the country just felt comfortable with him."

Fatal Faith. Age difference aside, Royster and Morris share a similar Southern outlook. They have an eye for the out-of-kilter detail, the endearing eccentricity that redeems even an opponent. Royster is a conservative, Morris a liberal; yet the politics of both are mellowed by an appreciation of human quality. Though he disagreed with many of Adlai Stevenson's views, Royster saluted his concession speech ("Too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh") in 1952: "I think that nothing better revealed in Mr. Stevenson a quality for leadership than the manner of his yielding it."

Royster has the conservative's ingrained distrust of people with neat solutions. "The fantasy that for every problem there exists a political solution is responsible for the drift toward paternalistic government. In its extreme form, it helps account for that phenomenon of the 20th century, the totalitarian state." While poverty clearly exists in the U.S., he feels that it has been grossly exaggerated. "Believe me," he writes, "in the slums you will also find the tempest-tossed from other lands to whom this 'poverty' is something they fled to from something far worse."

In his thoughtful pieces on foreign policy, Royster shows the same sense of measure. He cautions the U.S. to steer a course somewhere between despair and euphoria, to know its limits yet act decisively within them, to be conscious of the gradations of evil in the world without feeling compelled to try to eradicate them all. "A blind faith in total victory," he writes, "can be fatal because it assumes that evil exists in the world only by sufferance, that all it takes to destroy it is godlike power."

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