It’s a Dog’s Life : Books: After a career of ups and downs, Willie Morris was ready for fun. So he turned to memories of his canine pal from childhood.

Ol’ Willie Morris. Now there’s a yarn for you.

He gets himself a life that resembles a very large roller coaster. Then, after all those ups and downs, he moves back to Mississippi, where he belongs.

And then, for his latest adventure, he proceeds to sit down and write a tribute to his dog Skip, dead and gone these 40 years.

Now, writing a tribute to a dead dog can be dangerous business, especially for someone who depends on book sales to eat. But for Willie Morris, author, essayist, prankster and late-night raconteur, it was as fun as could be.

Morris, 60, was having some more fun the other day, all rumpled and smoking a cigarette and sipping on a little of this and a little of that at lunch.

And every now and then, the waitress would come by and he’d get a glimmer in his eye and say things like, “We sure don’t have places like this in Mississippi,” in his thick Delta accent.

And the waitress of this fancy Santa Monica eatery would look at him a little queerly, as if trying to decipher whether Morris was putting her on or what.

“We don’t have much wine in Mississippi either,” he told her, fully enjoying both his joke and his wine.

Willie Morris is having a fine old time of it these days in Mississippi, having rid himself of a devil or two from the past, having made peace with himself.

And so it was that he was traveling the country recently, doing book signings and talk shows and the like, peddling this little book that he did for the pure pleasure of it. He’s called it “My Dog Skip” (Random House), a charming reminiscence about life in a much simpler time in rural Yazoo City, Miss.

And the damnedest thing has been happening. People have been asking Morris to dedicate the book to their dogs, both alive and dead.

“This one woman asked me if I would sign the book to Cindy,” Morris recounted. “So I said, ‘Are you Cindy?’ And she said, ‘No, Cindy is my cocker spaniel.’ I’ve been signing books to dogs that are alive and dogs that are in dog heaven. I’ve even been signing them to cats.”

*

Willie Morris decided he wanted to write about ol’ Skip after he completed what he described as “the most difficult book I ever had to write”--”New York Days,” about his four-year stint as editor of Harper’s magazine.

That book dealt with one of the most turbulent times in the history of the magazine, with Morris, appointed editor in 1967 at the baby-faced age of 32, at the helm.

He succeeded in turning Harper’s on its ear--recruiting such stars as William Styron and Norman Mailer, David Halberstam and Larry L. King to work their magic on the staid old publication.

“You couldn’t wait to get to work,” Halberstam said. “It was like a party that went on all day and night, only it was work. It was wildly exciting.”

At the same time, Morris hobnobbed with the rich and the powerful, saw his marriage unravel and made blood enemies with the money people at Harper’s, who thought he was spending too much and pulling in a profit margin that was very much on the thin side.

“Who are you writing this magazine for?” one board member asked. “A bunch of hippies?”

Morris, outraged, stormed out.

He retreated to the eastern end of Long Island, nursing his wounds and hitting the sauce. From being the toast of Elaine’s, he became a disappearing act, but not of his own choosing. And finally, the worst thing happened.

“The phone stopped ringing.”

*

In the nine years he lived on Long Island, his production was spotty--a novel called “The Last of the Southern Girls” and a memoir about author James Jones.

In 1979, Morris had occasion to travel south again, discovering in the process that Mississippi was calling him back. His people--his family--were dying and he was not there for them. And there was a good feeling about the place, a return to simplicity and muggy afternoons, soft accents and slow-moving streams.

“For some writers, it is important to live in proximity of the main landmarks of one’s own past,” he said.

The following year, Morris returned for good, becoming the writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, the place where the shadow of William Faulkner still looms large. There, he taught writing and wrote some himself, this time a book about an intensely recruited high school halfback named Marcus Dupree that served as a way of examining racial changes in the Deep South.

“Coming back was like being reborn for Willie,” said his friend Larry Wells, co-owner of Oxford’s Yoknapatawpha Press. “What he wanted to write about was here.”

Halberstam agreed: “There were wounds and by going home he was back with people who loved him and understood him better.”

Morris brought his writer friends south, giving his students the kind of exposure to big names that normally would have been impossible. He eventually came to occupy the largest lecture hall at Ole Miss. Meanwhile, he had a whole new audience for his practical jokes and telephone impersonations that he had been famous for in New York. Wells described him as “like Hamlet one moment and Falstaff the next.”

People came to visit him now that he was a much more accessible man living in small-town Mississippi. A group of admirers from Texas drove over once to see him and in an intoxicated moment, they all decided the time had come to visit Faulkner’s grave. One of the Texas boys decided the street light was too bright and promptly produced a rifle and shot it out.

“If they had caught us, we would still be in a dungeon,” Morris said.

*

After 10 years in Oxford, Morris moved to Jackson, the big city by Mississippi standards, and at about the same time married his second wife, JoAnne. In the process, he began writing “New York Days,” which would take him 3 1/2 exhausting years to complete. It received praiseworthy reviews as well as stinging rebukes from those Morris impaled between the covers.

And when it was over, Morris said he wanted to do something different, something fun. And he hit upon Skip, about whom he still told stories even though the two parted company when Morris went off to England to become a Rhodes scholar in 1956.

When he was finished, Morris had a book of 122 pages, which is very much a companion to a work that established him, at 32, as a man to watch in the world of writing. That book, “North Toward Home,” was another memoir of growing up in Yazoo City. But as the name implies, it was also about leaving, of moving on. With “Skip,” Morris takes us once again to those dusty streets where no one locked their houses and his pals were Muttonhead and Peewee, Henjie, Bubba and Big Boy. The tone, though, is of a man who has returned and is content with the Mississippi of his boyhood.

Skip, an English smooth-haired fox terrier, came into his life when Morris was 9 years old and he immediately became that special dog that ranks above all the others. Morris taught the dog how to play football and hunt squirrels. He taught the dog to walk to the butcher shop and buy bologna.

Skip once led a pack of town dogs into the Methodist church during services and accompanied Miss Stella Birdsong’s earsplitting quaver with howls of their own. But the funniest of the Willie-and-Skip repertoire was when the dog would drive the car.

In those days, rural kids began driving at a very early age, and Morris began wheeling the family DeSoto around town when he was 13. Morris taught Skip how to prop his paws on the steering wheel as the two of them went looking for people to surprise.

“Cruising through the fringes of town, I would spot a group of old men standing around up the road,” he wrote. “I would get Skip to prop himself against the steering wheel, his black head peering out of the windshield, while I crouched out of sight under the dashboard.”

When Skip died while Morris was in England, the author spent a long, brooding day after he received the news from his father.

“They buried him under our elm tree, they said,” the book closes. “Yet that was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.”

Morris’ parents put up a little stone on Skip’s grave, which now is on display at the Yazoo County Historical Society. And Morris still talks fondly about his best dog.

“What’s more fun than the dog of your boyhood?” he said the other day. “Skip was like a brother to me and I still miss him.”