Hang-Up at Harper's

"I don't feel the professional life of an editor ought to last a whole lifetime," said Willie Morris some time after he became editor in chief of Harper's in 1967. "Ten years is long enough." As it turned out, his tenure lasted less than four. Last week Morris submitted his resignation, and he was amazed to have it quickly accepted.

Morris departed with a new and bitter aphorism: "It all boiled down to the money men and the literary men. And, as always, the money men won." At Harper's, which has run in the red the past three years, the chief moneyman is Publisher William S. Blair. The showdown between them came two weeks ago at a regularly scheduled business meeting in Minneapolis, where Morris found himself faced with a 21-page memorandum submitted by Blair, most of it critical of the magazine's editorial performance. Blair's attack was based largely on economics, but some of the discussion went farther. "Who are you editing this magazine for?" asked someone sharply. "A bunch of hippies?" Morris recalls that "in three and one-half hours, I didn't hear a sihgle good word about my magazine."

He had not heard many from Blair from the time Harper's Chairman John Cowles Jr. put Blair in the publisher's seat in 1968. Blair wanted Harper's to reduce its circulation (currently 359,000) and cut the promotion budget for financial reasons. Morris insisted on continued innovative content aimed at expanding the circulation.

Last week, the battle lost. Morris wrote his resignation and mailed it to Cowles in Minneapolis. He heard of its acceptance thirdhand--from staffers who had been told by Blair, who had been informed by Cowles. Morris called Cowles to protest, but in vain. Then, in a public statement of resignation, he deplored what he called "cavalier treatment by business managers of America's most distinguished magazine."

Out with Mailer. The downfall of Willie Morris was precipitated in large degree by a prominently displayed, controversial article by Norman Mailer in the current Harper's (TIME, Feb. 22). Mailer takes up most of the issue with his caustic treatment of Women's Liberation in general and Kate Millett in particular. The article is loaded with explicit sexual references and slang more familiar to college bull sessions than to Harper's. Morris knew he was taking a chance by printing it. Running the Mailer piece, he says, was "the biggest editorial risk of my life, but I didn't think it would be the end of me."

Mailer characterized Morris' departure as "the most depressing event in American letters in many a year. Under Willie's editorship. Harper's has been the boldest and most adventurous magazine in America. It's damned depressing to feel that another man gets hit because of you. I know I'm not going to write for Harper's anymore." At the beginning of his tenure at Harper's, Morris published Mailer's "On the Steps of the Pentagon," which subsequently won a Pulitzer Prize in book form as Armies of the Night. Last week Morris said: "If I can go in with Mailer, I'll go out with Mailer."

Harper's Executive Editor Midge Decter decided to go out with Morris, and resigned. Other staffers wavered. "I just don't know what I'm going to do," said Contributing Editor David Halberstam. "Willie took a musty, dying magazine and made it brilliant and unpredictable. It was a sheer delight to work for him. He was the best editor I ever had." Even John Cowles said he had a "feeling of sadness" at Morris' resignation, though he did nothing to forestall it.

A soft-spoken but strong-willed Mississippian. Morris cut his teeth on controversy in Texas, where, as editor of the University of Texas newspaper, he accused the Governor and legislators of collusion with oil and gas interests. Later, he continued his muckraking on a feisty weekly called the Texas Observer: Harper's hired him from the Observer as an editor. Four years later, at 32, he became the youngest editor in chief in the history of the oldest U.S. literary magazine. Morris said then that he felt "part of the tradition here." He nourished that tradition by publishing the works of some major and unconventional writers. Not only Mailer but William Styron, Arthur Miller and J. Kenneth Galbraith have written for Harper's under Morris' editorship. He labored hard within the limits of Blair's budgets to pay for the talent he sought, and the rule of thumb of $1,000 an article rose to $10,000 on occasion.

Morris admits that he will miss the prestige, parties and publicity that go with the top job at Harper's. "I wanted to go into my office," he said, near tears, "to see my friends, to start laying out next month's issue. All together, I gave eight years to making Harper's the best. God, how I'm going to miss it." While John Cowles searches for his successor, Morris plans to retire to Long Island to finish a novel.

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