HEATING UP HARPER'S

In 1967 Willie Morris, then thirty-two, wrote a charming book about his journey from Yazoo City, Mississippi, by way of Texas, into a passionate menage a trois, a simultaneous love affair with the Big City and Harper's, the magazine of which he was about to become editor-in-chief. It was called North Toward Home. Now he has written a sequel, a story both exuberant and rueful of the transports of that love affair and its sad conclusion five years later. The new book is called New York Days but could as fittingly be called South Toward Home. In it, Harper's magazine plays the role of beloved wife and Manhattan, with her vampish array of salons and saloons, celebrities and eccentrics, is the irresistible mistress.

Much of New York Days is taken up with Morris's enjoyment of the New York scene. He writes rhapsodically, more in the lush style of his beloved fellow southerner Thomas Wolfe than that of his more cosmopolitan friend Tom Wolfe, about celebrity-studded parties, roistering interludes with major writes and artists, as well as gossip-column habitues at places like the late Empire Chinese restaurant in Murray Hill, in high-society penthouses or at Elaine's, the joint imagined by some of its patrons to be the Upper East Side version of London's Mermaid Tavern with even worse food but without, alas, any Ben Jonson. Famous names jump off the pages like corn from a popper.

But the assignment here is to review the other part of the story, the romance between editor and magazine, so it is necessary to invoke a practice long observed in the British House of Commons to deal with possible conflicts of interest. There an MP, once he has announced that he has an involvement in a matter before the House, may ethically pursue that interest. I was editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Monthly for a fourteen-year period that included and extended beyond Morris's 1967-71 reign at Harper's. We were friendly but highly competitive rivals. Each of us was chosen to bring new life to a venerable journal grown tired, and whose audience was dwindling. Each felt he was putting out a publication of singular if not unsurpassed importance with a budget that amounted to little more than a smile and a shoeshine. And each of our tenures as editor ended in traumatic, nasty collisions with nasty owners.

Competitive as the two magazines and their editors were, and though we protected our editorial plans from each other as surely as Macy's and Gimbel's once did, we shared ownership of a sales organization that sold advertising for both. By its nature this arrangement allowed us to know or surmise a great deal about the other's financial condition ad differing modes of management. So it is no surprise to read Willie Morris's description of the problems approached them. They were painfully familiar.

The magazine he inherited from its longtime editor Jack Fischer had a circulation of about 280,000, was subjecting its owners to a deficit of about $ 150,000, was paying as little as $ 300 50 $ 600 per article without expenses. "My overwhelming priority," he writes, ". . . was to improve the pay for writing." With a yearly editorial budget of less than $ 250,000 (somewhat higher than mine), Morris badgered agents and publishing house editors assignments for less than they deserved -- "a matter of matching the right writer with the right subject, and of approaching the great writers when they were between books and willing to take magazine assignments that truly fascinated them."

This diligence brought into Harper's some fine writers who had not appeared there before, and inspired such attention-generating feats as Norman Mailer's celebrations of the raucous sixties and himself, not necessarily in that order, with his magazine-length articles about the anti-Vietnam-war march on the Pentagon and the rise of the feminist movement. Eventually Morris put a team of several writers on modest retainer, among them David Halberstam and Larry L. King, one of those Texans whom Willie describes as America's closest thing to Aussies. He sent them out into the country with credit card accounts to write about what interested them. Many of their pieces gained much attention, particularly in journalistic circles, and some even induced spasms of envy at the offices of The Atlantic in Boston.

Yet this radical departure from past practice induced new problems. For one thing, it was expensive, at least by Harper's (and Atlantic) standards. With only twelve cracks a year at his audience, Morris (though he may not agree with this) in effect deeded a disproportionate part of the magazine's pages to the same voices issue after issue, and the heavy drain on his limited money for articles obliged him to use their material whether they were on or off their feed.

For a time, Madison Avenue pronounced Harper's to be a "hot" magazine, but -- as is Madison Avenue's wont when confronted with journalism that makes people think -- not hot enough to deserve hefty increases in advertising. Nor did the people out there west of the Hudson respond with a flow of subscription checks. Worst of all, the man who came to own Harper's when it was purchased from Harper & Row by the Cowles family media empire let it be known that he didn't like some of the stuff Willie Morris was printing. In fact, when pressed, John Cowles, Jr., blurted out that he didn't like anything Willie Morris was printing. "Who are you editing this magazine for? A bunch of hippies?" one of Cowles's associates asked. Confronted with this cruel contempt for the efforts to which he was devoting prime years of his life, efforts that had cost him among other things the dissolution of his marriage, Willie Morris could do nothing but resign.

When my own memoir came out late last year, a mini-review in Time said, "It's hard to avoid smugness when recounting one's triumphs, and the author does not always succeed." I accept that as fair comment and I believe it can be fairly said of Morris's book too. But we all know the Boy Scout fact of life: in this society you don't get your bugling merit badge without blowing your own horn.

I don't feel inclined to agree that Morris's Harper's was the absolutely best magazine of public affairs, literature, and ideas being published during the sixties and seventies, and I could easily disprove his assertion that Harper's "was the first major established institution in America to take an adamant stand against the Vietnam quagmire." For at least two years before he became editor, a stream of articles in the rival Atlantic was warning Americans that the Vietnam involvement was tearing their country apart. He in his several years as Morris's predecessor, produced a magazine that was distinguished for its reportage and probity. But nobody I know, and certainly not I, cares to quarrel with that bright, friendly, admirable, "complicated old southern boy" or "Mississippi bullhead," as Willie Morris describes himself, nor deny him any of the praise due him for the achievements he records in New York Days, all with good humor, engaging candor, and appropriate pride.

Morris has the last chuckle when, these twenty years later, he relates the fate of John Cowles, Jr.: he was deposed as head of what is left of the Cowles empire and when last seen was travelling with his wife in a theatrical troupe that engages in nude dancing. Morris's magazine foundered, even ceased publication briefly a few years later, and then was resuscitated by the MacArthur Foundation -- a reminder of how the refusal of the advertising community and the public-at-large to support valuable journals like Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and National Review leaves them dependent on the tax-deductible largesse and the whims of rich benefactors.

Willie Morris no longer needs to worry about that. Now he enjoys the happiness of a new marriage and lives and writes back home in Mississippi, where, he says, "I perceive my country more clearly than I ever did from New York." The big city lives for him now only "in memory and mirage . . . still part of my dreams."

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