New York Days.

• Author: Gaillard, Frye

New York Days, Willie Morris's deeply felt memoir of his time as editor-in-chief of Harper's, has gotten mixed reviews. In a sense, this is another; despite the overall power of the book, it has some curious flaws.

Reviewers have questioned Morris's memory, noting, for example, that his account here differs from that in his earlier memoir, North Toward Home, of how he came to be editor of Harper's. There's also the matter of his endless star-gazing, breathless accounts of parties and conversations with the famous--George Plimpton, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and many others. The list is long, and Morris is still a little awe-struck about it, as if he can scarcely believe he was there.

To make matters worse, many of his accounts are overwritten. There's a hopeless intoxication with the language that at times approaches self-parody. Describing his conversations with a group of homicide detectives in a Fifty-fifth Street bar, Morris writes: "I liked these tough, foul cops and their raw, florid idiom, their cynical yet irrepressible brio, their sports gossip and racy badinage." Later, he refers to the "ambidextrous felicities" of Pete Maravich, and about New York itself he concludes: "Far from being an aberration from the national life the city was if anything the crux and apogee of our contemporary existence, because it somehow brought together, however tenuously, the whole range and spectrum, manifestation and extreme, of the American breed and temper."

That kind of overwriting grows old in a hurry, and yet--in the case of Willie Morris--it's easy enough to forgive. In the course of his long and high-minded career, he has earned a place of honor in American nonfiction, and whatever the quibbles with his latest piece of work, it's important to move on to a larger point: Despite its inevitable imperfections, New York Days is a gripping memoir--brilliant in places--by one of the finest editors of our time.

There were many of us in the 1960s who cherished every issue of Harper's, who felt a kind of passion and fascination for it that we had never felt toward a magazine before and have never felt since. We knew even then that the quality was a reflection of the brilliance of the editor, and that Morris's approach, at its heart, was simple. He hired a staff of contributing editors--writers such as Larry L. King, Marshall Frady, and David Halberstam--and he turned them loose. Frady went off to the Middle East, and Halberstam wrote about Vietnam...