Yeast from Yazoo

...The initial section of Morris' .book ¦—his impressionistic recreation of Yazoo City—reminds one of his praise for Ralph Ellison and Al Murray: "they tried to reduce their experience [as Southern Negroes], not to polemicism, but to metaphor...

...Morris portrays himself as moving farther into a larger world at the University of Texas: "It was a matter, at the age of eighteen or nineteen, not of discovering certain books, but the simple presence of books, not the nuances of idea and feeling, but idea and feeling on their own terms...

...In Morris' own growth lie the nation's past and present...

...But these feelings were no match for Morris' restlessness and ambition, the motives given for his move to New THE PROGRESSIVE York...

...He portrays his life as a movement toward cosmopolitanism—usually gradual, sometimes precipitous, not without pitfalls: "Our literature is filled with young people like myself who came from the provinces to the Big Cave [New York], seeking involvement in what one always thought from the outside was a world of incomparable wonder...

...These two perspectives on North Toward Home are joined through the book's third dimension, which is historical...

...By 1960 industrialization and urbanization had given Texas a much closer affinity with states like Michigan or California than with Mississippi or Arkansas...

...The metamorphosis from country boy to college activist-intellectual need not be doubted to wonder whether the catalytic agents could be simply a disgust with fraternity initiation and an awe toward a graduate student's library...

...Thus, his tale may be viewed regionally as well as personally: South, West, and East...

...An outlander in the big city, his existence is frighteningly modern, almost surrealistic...

...He is first nostalgic and later defensive of his origins...

...His awareness of regional backwardness, experiential rather than intellectual, pervades North Toward Home...

...Life in Yazoo City, Mississippi —the circumscribed world of a small urban center servicing outlying rural areas—is, statistically speaking, the America of yesterday...

...His style is sometimes pointed but seldom heavy-handed, occasionally poetic, and often humorous, with a penchant for exaggeration and for pricking the sacrosanct...

...Unfortunately, at this point North Toward Home falters...

...Lacking the confidence or, at least, the resigned satisfaction of old age, lacking also the carefree rootlessness of today's youth, Morris' view of the past betrays an uncertainty about the present...

...Barely two pages are devoted to his four years at Oxford (during the final year he was married and had a son), which he refers to as "lethargic, dreamy isolation...

...More often it is lost in an ambiguity which seems not to be the author's design...

...It becomes dangerously easy to turn one's back on his own past, on the isolated places that nurtured and shaped him into maturity, for the sake of some convenient or fashionable 'sophistication.'" Inevitably the innocence was lost, and North Toward Home is the act of autobiographical expiation...

...Reviewed by Joseph E. Wick On the surface, North Toward Home is Willie Morris' story of not-quite-coming-of-age in a small Mississippi town, of the achievement of manhood at the University of Texas in the face of fatuous fraternity rites and an administration which did not— or could not, at the tail end of the McCarthy era—believe in the University's high ideals, of a short but eye-opening tenure as editor of the liberal Texas Observer, and, finally, of a successful plunge into the publishing world of New York, where now, at thirty-two, he is editor of Harper's magazine...

...Still, Morris gained an affection for the professionals (most evident in the chapter on Pappy O'DaniePs bid for re-election) and a love for the panoramic variety of the Lone Star state...

...He jumped at the opportunity to become editor of The Texas Observer, covering the state legislature ("human, irrelevant to ivory tower polemics") with the assistance of Bob Sherrill, who "had once worked briefly on a Ph.D...

...Morris' next way station—the University of Texas—represents national progress...

...Morris attributes the philis-tinism of the University and the corruption of the state legislature primarily to the influence of new wealth...

...Within a few years of his matriculation he had become the editor of The Daily Texan who successfully challenged the president of the University on the issue of freedom of the press and brought such notables as J. Frank Dobie to his side...

...His dilemma is that of a generation whose catharsis has been neither war nor hard times but the disorder of change itself...

...Living a life divided between the rural past and the urban present, geared to success yet faintly cynical about its achievement, Morris at thirty-two is uncertain...

...Soon thereafter he was chosen a Rhodes scholar...

...One has the uncomfortable feeling that either Willie Morris was not so naive as he pictures himself in Mississippi or else he had some personal experiences at the University which he has not divulged...

...It is this late coming to this kind of awareness that still gives the intellectuals from the small towns of our region a hungry, naive quality, as opposed to the sharp-elbowed intellectuality of some Easterners...

...Indeed, Morris' own treatment of the race issue is no different from his handling of family and local characters, of the tyranny and liberation of school, or of fundamentalist Christianity...

...Yet even this anti-academic armor did not protect either man from being appalled at what he heard and saw in Texas politics...

...Beyond Texas lay the sophistication of New York: "We had always come, the most ambitious of us, because we had to, because the ineluctable pull of the cultural capital when the wanderlust was high was too compelling to resist...

...significantly, he is repulsed by his brief view of California, America of the future...

...at an Ivy League graduate school before concluding that the city room of any middle-sized daily was more civilized and usually more literate...

...The strength of Morris' observation is not its profundity but its application to his own development...

...Yet there were always secret dangers for these young people from the provinces in the city...

...Save for the racial ambiguities, it could be Anytown, U.S.A...

...Sometimes this quality is consciously captured in the narrative, as in Morris' description of a cafeteria near his apartment...