My Cat Spit McGee
By Willie Morris
Random House, $17
ISBN 0375503218

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When Mississippi author Willie Morris died in August of this year, President Bill Clinton said the nation had lost a national treasure. Of course, we lost more than that. We lost a piece of our collective soul.

No one expected Willie Morris to die, not yet anyway. Among the many gifts he left behind was his final book, My Cat Spit McGee. He never lived to see it published and that is a shame, for in some respects it is his best.

Morris lived through some miserable years as he came to terms with a divorce, struggled to establish himself as a writer, and battled personal demons. In the final years of his life, however, he found love and contentment with a woman named JoAnne, whom he married in spite of her unrelenting love of cats.

It was in his relationship with JoAnne and Spit McGee, the cat he rescued from certain death, that he finally came to terms with his own mortality. On one level, the book is a humorous, old-soul wise story about a "dog man" learning to live in a household with a furry, white cat. But there is a second level. With My Cat Spit McGee, Morris did what Ernest Hemingway did with The Old Man and the Sea. He took a simple story and, with writing that is honest and true, wove it into a soulful allegory that is timeless in its wisdom and depth of feeling.

That was always Morris's strength as a writer -- his soul. You could see it in his eyes, the way his feelings ran wide and deep like the Mississippi River.

I first met Willie Morris in 1978, when he traveled to Mississippi from his home in Bridgehampton, New York, to promote his book, Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town. After interviewing him for a local newspaper, I asked him to autograph the book.

He did considerably more than that: Knowing that one of my goals was to someday write a book, he admonished me, within the confines of the title page of his book, to never give up in my efforts.

It took me years to publish my first book, but I attribute that publication -- and the numerous books published since then -- to Morris's heartfelt advice, for there was something in his eyes that let me know that he spoke the truth. Actually, he went further than giving me advice: He called his New York publisher and told him to be on the lookout for a manuscript from another Mississippian.

Morris accomplished much in his 64 years. As the influential editor of Harper's during the turbulent 1960s, he turned the staid publishing industry on its ear by putting the magazine's resources on the line to find out the truth about the Vietnam War. He took flack for his stand, but he left an indelible imprint on American journalism. By the time I met him, he had left the magazine and was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Over the next several years, as he made up his mind to return to his native Mississippi, we corresponded quite a bit.

In the year before his death, Morris took Spit McGee to the cemetery where the writer's ancestors are buried. There he introduced Spit McGee to his mother and father and vice versa. Did he sense his own demise was imminent? There is something in the tone of the book that makes you think so.

As he lowered a rose to his father's resting place, he told him something he had always wanted to say in life but never did. "Thank you, Daddy," he said, uttering the phrase aloud so that Spit McGee could overhear -- and perhaps learn a lesson or two about life, about the way life, in its living, sometimes overtakes the utterance of the two words most in need of an audience.

So, thank you, Willie, wherever you are, and rest assured that Spit McGee will find his way home to you, in due time.

James L. Dickerson is the author of two books about the South -- Goin' Back to Memphis and Dixie's Dirty Secret, and most recently, Last Suppers, a book of celebrity recipes.