High Life

4 April 2009

Manhattan power

Ellis’s novel was a brave effort to bring New Yorkers back to reality. Twenty years before New Yorkers had lost their way, he tied mergers and acquisitions to murders and executions. I remember being in Elaine’s with him when the bad notices came in. I was very drunk and tried to do what drunken friends always do, and always manage to make it worse. ‘It’s because they’re bigots, Brett, because you’re gay,’ I told him. ‘Nothing to do with the book.’ Brett howled. That’s when his and my publisher, Morgan Entrekin, stepped in and told me, ‘What the hell’s the matter with you, that’s the worst thing you can say to Brett.’

Like London and Paris, two cities I’ve lived in and loved, New York has given birth to many a myth. Mostly in one’s imagination. Novels, plays, essays, and poems by giants such as Whitman, Wharton, James, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Wolfe have confirmed the myths I have imagined, and cocktail parties with superannuated Wasps, lunches with ethereal creatures, and dinners with mysterious Transylvanians confirm it even further. New York is the grail we’re all seeking.

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David Short

April 4th, 2009 1:52pm Report this comment

The bad notices over American Psycho were not because BEE was gay (this is the first I've heard of it ever since the book was published); it was due to it being a very, very bad book, and doubly disappointing after the totally brilliant work of the NYC brat pack authors of the Eighties.

And since when did Taki stand up for liberal attitudes?

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