Literary N.Y.C. in the ‘60s : NEW YORK DAYS, <i> By Willie Morris (Little, Brown: 400 pp., $24.95)</i>

“I came to the city, and it changed my life.”

With this deceptively simple sentence, Willie Morris begins “New York Days,” a book he offers as sequel to “North Toward Home,” his “autobiography in mid-passage” published a quarter of a century ago.

The city, of course, is New York City, the Big Apple, or, as Morris called it in his earlier book, “The Big Cave.” And the life that was changed had not exactly been an uneventful one: an idyllic childhood and adolescence in Yazoo City, Miss., pop. 7,000, from which town spread northward the fecund and vast and enigmatic Mississippi Delta, which has been called the “most Southern place on Earth,” with all the good baggage (the land, the people) and bad baggage (race) a phrase like that must travel with; college years in the early 1950s at the University of Texas, where by his senior year he was courting not only beauty queens but also controversy as the nonconformist editor of the “Daily Texan” in those days of the “silent majority”; and in 1960, after four years as a Rhodes Scholar, returning to the Lone Star State to assume the editorship of “The Texas Observer,” a free-wheeling newspaper that tangled regularly with the oil and gas big-boys and hard-nosed politicians, including then-Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson.

In this second memoir, Morris takes us into the heady literary world of New York City in the 1960s--”a time in which everyone seemed to know everyone else and where everything of importance seemed to happen first”--but his story of those days doesn’t move in a strictly linear way. Like memory itself, the narrative indulges tangents here and there, or circles back to embellish certain episodes, before plunging onward in a prose style at times approaching the Biblical.

He summons up boyhood memories of Yazoo City during World War II, or his days at Oxford, where on one particular afternoon the Joshua Reynolds stained-glass windows in the chapel off the quadrangle were almost destroyed because of the author’s passion for baseball.

The primary focus, however, is on his years at Harper’s, the country’s oldest magazine. He went to work for that venerable publication in 1962, and was groomed to take over the helm. In the spring of 1967, at the age of 32, he became the eighth editor of the magazine, the youngest in its (then) 117-year history.

Speaking of his predecessor, Jack Fischer, Morris says he was “known throughout publishing circles in the city, among contributors around the country, for his parsimony, which may have been one reason why a disproportionate number of Harper’s articles were written by rich people, diet faddists, housewives, dilettantes who indulged in quaint foreign travel, and verbose retired professors and diplomats, too often grindingly arid.”

That situation would change in a big way under Morris’ editorship. His vision was of a magazine “that had to be read, to take on the ‘Establishment,’ to assume the big dare, to move out to the edge, to make people mad, to edify and arouse and entertain, to tell the truth.”

To help him realize this mission, Morris hired four contributing editors, “a euphemism for staff writers”: 33-year old David Halberstam, who had already made a name for himself writing about the Vietnam War for the New York Times and would go on to greater fame as one of the major writers of his generation, probably best known for his “The Best and the Brightest,” which had its genesis at Harper’s; the outrageous Texan, Larry L. King, whose many intimate and moving and hilarious essays for Morris were collected in book form, and who later became a zillionaire with his play, “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”; Brooklyn native John Corry, a former reporter for the New York Times, who had a fascination with the ‘60s and an uncanny ability to write about that decade’s various manifestations from an unpredictable angle; and Marshall Frady, a preacher’s son from Georgia, who had worked for Time and the Saturday Evening Post and whose political portrait, “Wallace,” remains a classic on the aberrations of Southern politics.

A list of the other writers Morris attracted to Harper’s reads like a Who’s Who in American Letters. Among their number were George Plimpton, James Dickey, Bernard Malamud, Arthur Miller, Robert Penn Warren, Walker Percy, Larry McMurtry, C. Vann Woodward, Alfred Kain, Pauline Kael, John Updike, Truman Capote, Herbert Gold, Jerzy Kosinski, Joan Didion, Philip Roth, William Styron, Irwin Shaw, W. H. Auden, Gay Talese, Joe McGinnis, Seymour Hersh, J. Anthony Lukas, Robert Coles and Bill Moyers (Morris’ old classmate at the University of Texas).

And by no means last or least, Norman Mailer, who is tied inextricably to Morris’ destiny at Harper’s.

Contracted to write 10,000 words for Morris on the anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington in early 1968, Mailer ended up writing 90,000 words (!) in six weeks (!). Printed in its entirety in the March, 1968, issue of Harper’s as “The Steps of the Pentagon,” the piece was the longest magazine article ever published, and under the title “The Armies of the Night,” it won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Mailer also covered the Republican and Democratic conventions for Harper’s in 1968, and those 100 magazine pages would later become “Miami and the Siege of Chicago.”

But it would be Mailer’s “The Prisoner of Sex” that was the climactic publishing event for Morris. Subtitled, “On Women and Men, Liberation and Subjection, the Body, the Spirit, and Physical Love,” this meditation on the women’s movement was the whole cover for the March, 1971, issue of Harper’s. It sold more copies on national newsstands than any single issue in the history of the magazine. (I remember a group of my college friends passing around the only copy we could find, people practically standing at your shoulder urging you to read faster.) It was also Morris’ last issue as editor of the magazine.

“We were going to remake literary America,” Morris states early in the book, and no one familiar with Harper’s from 1967 to 1971 will doubt that that was exactly what he and his writers did. I don’t know if he created the greatest magazine ever, but I suspect he did. It was certainly the most exciting and adventuresome magazine I’ve ever run across, and I can’t name one in existence today where the great writers of tomorrow could go and find the freedom, the encouragement, or the space they would have found with Willie Morris.

“It will take more than one man to ruin Harper’s,” Alfred A. Knopf, “that towering and crusty presence of New York publishing,” had said in 1967 upon being told that Morris would soon be named editor. But the curmudgeonly Knopf was wrong. He had not reckoned on the owner of the magazine, John Cowles Jr.

Cowles had long been trouble, in the words of one of Morris’ colleagues, “of the rich and dim-witted nature.” He worried the magazine was not “specialized” enough. He disapproved of the staff writers, the money paid for articles, and the editorial content, especially the anti-war stance. For him, “The Prisoner of Sex” was the last straw. He summoned Morris to Minneapolis and put forth a reorganization plan.

The plan was untenable to Morris and he resigned, saying, “It all boiled down to the money men and the literary men. And as always, the money men won. . . . This is the saddest day of my life.” In short order, his contributing editors also resigned.

As mentioned earlier, the Harper’s years--which one knows beforehand will end bitterly--are the primary focus of “New York Days,” but there is so much more here besides. The turbulent events of the 1960s are always throbbing at, or just below the surface: Vietnam, the assassinations of J.F.K., R.F.K. and M.L.K. Jr.; riots in the ghettos of Watts and Newark and a dozen other cities; hippies and yippies; the re-emergence of Nixon; women’s lib. There is the city of New York itself, of which there could not possibly be found a sweeter singer than Morris.

“There were 8 million numbers in the Manhattan directory,” he writes, “and every one of them would have returned my calls.”

Upon finishing “New York Days,” one is inclined to believe him literally. For this book drops names--of the rich and famous, the powerful, the talented and interesting, and the merely weird--the way names were meant to be dropped: with concomitant stories that are enlightening, revelatory, touching, and uproariously funny.

Morris writes movingly of the breakup of his first marriage and of his close relationship with his son, David Rae. There is a more than amusing reverie about how, if he had personally known Elvis, he would have altered his life by having him write a monthly column for Harper’s. And there is a three-page recollection of stepping in dog droppings on the way to a meeting at Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s house that is the funniest of its kind in the annals of American writing.

Toward the end of the book, Morris quotes a J.F.K. improvisation from Ecclesiastes; “A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to fish and a time to cut bait.”

The last two activities are particularly resonant to a Southerner, and I must tell you that when Willie Morris came to write “New York Days,” he came to fish .