From the book BRIGHT, PRECIOUS DAYS by Jay McInerney. Copyright © 2016 by Jay
McInerney. Published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf
Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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ONC E , NO T S O V E R Y L ONG AG O, young men and women had come
to the city because they loved books, because they wanted to write novels or short stories or even poems, or because they wanted to be associated with the production and distribution of those artifacts and with
the people who created them. For those who haunted suburban libraries and provincial bookstores, Manhattan was the shining island of
letters. New York, New York: It was right there on the title p
­ ages—­the
place from which the books and magazines emanated, home of all the
publishers, the address of The New Yorker and The Paris Review, where
Hemingway had punched O’Hara and Ginsberg seduced Kerouac, Hellman sued McCarthy and Mailer had punched everybody, ­where—­or
so they ­imagined—­earnest editorial assistants and aspiring novelists
smoked cigarettes in cafés while reciting Dylan Thomas, who’d taken
his last breath in St. Vincent’s Hospital after drinking seventeen whiskeys at the White Horse Tavern, which was still serving drinks to the
tourists and the young litterateurs who flocked here to raise a glass
to the memory of the Welsh bard. These dreamers were people of the
book; they loved the sacred New York texts: The House of Mirth, Gatsby,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s et al., but also all the marginalia: the romance and
the attendant ­mythology—­the affairs and addictions, the feuds and
fistfights. Like everyone else in their lousy high school, they’d read The
Catcher in the Rye, but unlike everyone else they’d ­really felt ­it—­it spoke
to them in their own ­language—­and they secretly conceived the ambition to one day move to New York and write a novel called Where the
Ducks Go in Winter or maybe just The Ducks in Winter.
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Bright, Precious Days
Russell Calloway had been one of them, a suburban Michigander
who had an epiphany after his ­ninth-­grade teacher assigned Thomas’s “Fern Hill” in honors ­En­glish, who subsequently vowed to devote
his life to poetry until A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man changed
his religion to fiction. Russell went east to Brown, determined to
acquire the skills to write the great American novel, but after reading ­Ulysses—­which seemed to render most of what came afterward
­anticlimactic—­and comparing his own fledgling stories with those
written by his Brown classmate Jeff Pierce, he decided he was a more
plausible Maxwell Perkins than a Fitzgerald or Hemingway. After
a postgraduate year at Oxford he moved to the city and eventually
landed a coveted position opening mail and answering the phone for
legendary editor Harold Stone, in his leisure hours prowling the used
bookstores along Fourth Avenue in the Village, haunting the bars at
the Lion’s Head and Elaine’s, catching glimpses of graying literary
lions at the front tables. And if the realities of urban life and the publishing business had sometimes bruised his romantic sensibilities, he
never relinquished his vision of Manhattan as the mecca of American
literature, or of himself as an acolyte, even a priest, of the written word.
One delirious night a few months after he arrived in the city, he accompanied an invited guest to a Paris Review party in George Plimpton’s
town house, where he shot pool with Mailer and fended off the lisping advances of Truman Capote after snorting coke with him in the
bathroom.
Though the city after three decades seemed in many ways diminished from the capital of his youth, Russell Calloway had never quite
fallen out of love with it, nor with his sense of his own place here. The
backdrop of Manhattan, it seemed to him, gave every gesture an added
grandeur, a metropolitan gravitas.
Not long after he became an editor, Russell had published his best
friend Jeff Pierce’s first ­book—­a collection of stories; and then, after Jeff
died, his novel, two of the main characters in w
­ hich—­it could not be
­denied—­were inspired by Russell and his wife, Corrine. Editing that
book would have been difficult enough, given its n
­ ot-­quite-­finished
state, even if it ­hadn’t involved a love triangle featuring a married cou-
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