In Memoriam: Bill Harrison

Bill Harrison died this past year. Full name: William Neal Harrison. An orphan, he was raised by an elderly Dallas couple and educated at Texas Christian and Vanderbilt Universities. He wrote nine novels and fifty short stories in a writing career that spanned five decades. He also founded and, with his friend Jim Whitehead, for many years ran the graduate writing program at the University of Arkansas. At the time of his death, just one week short of his eightieth birthday, he was retired and living with his longtime wife and sweetheart, Merlee, at their home in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Bill’s second novel, In a Wild Sanctuary, was probably his best one. It’s about a suicide pact among four graduate students at a school much like Vanderbilt. Well-constructed and deftly delivered, it tells its sad story with confidence and command. The reviews were uniformly good. John Leonard of the New York Times said of Bill in his review that he was “that rare young writer who writes equally well about action and ideas.”

In the mid-seventies he wrote a short story about a dystopian American future in which armed men competed for deadly stakes on roller skates in a rollerdrome. He called it “Rollerball Murder.” It was made into a movie titled Rollerball that became a cult classic and is still seen from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and elsewhere, usually late in the evening. It starred James Caan of “Godfather” fame. Bill also wrote several novels set in Africa, a place that intrigued him. One of them, Burton and Speke, about the co-discoverers of the source of the Nile, also became a movie in the nineties, under the title Mountains of the Moon.

Late in his career Bill wrote a touching short story about his life with Merlee. It appeared in the Missouri Review in 2002 and was called “Eleven Beds.” In it he traces the joys and sorrows of their fifty-year relationship by focusing serially on all the beds they had slept in, beginning with the sleeping bag they share as teenage lovers on a lake in Dallas and ending with them cuddled together, an old couple now, on a mountaintop in the Ozarks. He calls the story’s characters “Will” and “Myla,” since the piece is officially fiction, but the names don’t fool anyone who knew them and aren’t meant to.

I first met Bill Harrison in 1963. He was teaching literature and writing at Texas A&I College in Kingsville, Texas (now Texas A&M, Kingsville), having recently completed a year’s stay at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he had studied under Phillip Roth. I was living in Kingsville and covering five south Texas counties as a roving reporter and feature writer for the Corpus Christi Caller Times. I don’t remember how or where we met, but I’m guessing it was during one of my many forays onto the Texas A&I campus in search of feature material. Bill had just published his first short story in the Saturday Evening Post, and perhaps I had come on campus to interview him about that. The story was called “A Man of Passion,” I remember, and was about a fellow, a mild-mannered college professor type, who lacked it—passion, that is. Bill was thrilled, of course, by his publishing success, and I became thrilled, too, for him, and that became a basis for our friendship.

One of his students at Texas A&I at the time was a husky fellow named James Crumley, an ex-serviceman hoping to be a writer himself. Bill introduced me to him and the three of us, along with our wives, began to spend time together. Kingsville is a small town, with not much going on, so we hung out mostly in each other’s living rooms and backyards. Bill was working on a novel, his first, called The Theologian. It would eventually be published by Harper’s. Crumley was trying to write short stories for the class he was taking from Bill, and I began trying to write short...