“This is your turf, Jay,” George said, as we navigated the buckling sidewalk on the Lower East side. “I feel a little out of my element.” We were trying to find the bar where we were to give a joint reading, after jumping out of the cab at the wrong spot. At that moment a goth girl with multiple piercings shouted, “Hey George! George Plimpton!” as she passed us. And I realized at that moment that George was never really out of his element, that he was at home, and known, almost everywhere. He was an explorer, and he was an icon, his silver mane and his weathered patrician features as recognizable as his flutey, inimitable accent, that seemed to combine old New York and Cambridge, Mass with a little bit of Cambridge, England. I’ve been thinking about George since I watched the excellent documentary, Plimpton! , directed by Luke Poling and Tom Bean, that recently debuted on PBS.

I first heard that amazing voice over the phone, when I was living in Syracuse, New York, working on an MA in Creative Writing with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff and trying to find my own voice as a writer. I was astonished to find myself on the other end of the phone with George Plimpton, who was calling from the offices of the Paris Review, the esteemed literary magazine that he’d been editing since he and Peter Matthiesson started it in Paris in 1952, which I’d been reading since I was in high school. I’d recently sent in a story to the Review and here was Plimpton, saying he quite liked it, but wondered if I had anything else they might look at.

When I hung up I was exhilarated. It was about five PM and I spent the next few hours reading through all of my fiction to date. Imagining Plimpton reading it, I realized that none of it was very good, that it was all derivative of writers that I admired. The only exception was a single paragraph that I’d scrawled on a sheet of paper at dawn a year earlier, after staggering home from a nightclub. It was written in the second person and it began, “You’re not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning, but here you are.” It was just a few sentences, but they struck me as fresh, original and worth expanding upon. I sat down that night and wrote a story that begins in a nightclub, about a guy who was high on cocaine, mourning the loss of his wife and his youthful dreams of success in the city. I called it, It’s Six AM. Do You Know Where You Are. I finished it that morning and sent it off to Plimpton and a few days or weeks later, I can’t quite remember the interval, I received another phone call, this one from Mona Simpson, then an assistant editor at the Review, telling me that it had been accepted.

That story became the first chapter of my novel Bright Lights, Big City, which I wrote the summer after the story was published in the Jan 1982 issue of the Paris Review. Later, after the book was published, I attended my first New York literary party at George’s townhouse on East 72nd Street. George’s house had been the center of New York literary life since the late fifties, when he moved back from Paris. Everyone went to George’s parties, including politicians and movie stars—and always, very good-looking young women, some of whom worked for the Review—but it was the writers who were the stars. That first night I met Truman Capote, Robert Stone, William Styron and Gay Talese. George led me around and introduced me as his latest find. For some reason he’d gotten into his head that I was studying to be a pharmacist before he’d plucked my story out of the slush pile, and he told everyone how he’d saved me from becoming a pharmacist. It was a pretty good story.

George was riding high at that time after the publication of Edie, the brilliant book he created with Jean Stein about Edie Sedgewick and the sixties. I don’t remember his editing on my story but he was certainly a brilliant editor, as Edie so clearly demonstrated. He was also a great raconteur, the best storyteller I’d ever met. We once went to Hollywood to pitch a screenplay together, and he held the studio excess spellbound, despite the preposterousness of the story we were selling. He took me to the Playboy mansion during that visit, though unfortunately Hef’s girlfriend’s mother was visiting so the evening was a very tame one, enlivened mostly by George’s storytelling.

He invented a form of participatory journalism which made him famous early in his career, playing football with the Detroit Lions (an adventure recounted in the best-selling Paper Lion, pitching against an all star team in Yankee stadium, going into the ring against Archie Moore, and getting creamed at golf with Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. He was a Renaissance Man, and a true man of letters. I don’t know whether he dreamed of writing the Great American novel, like his buddies Mailer and Styron, but I think he lived it. His life was epic. He knew everyone and he tried everything and he went everywhere. And he was an extremely generous friend and editor.

The last time I saw George was a few days before he died in September of 2003, at the Greenwich Village penthouse of literary agent David Kuhn, where we were no doubt celebrating the publication of some book or other. He was as usual at the center of the party, towering over all, surrounded by friends and admirers. We chatted and made a date to have dinner the following week before he left to get to his next party, en route to Elaine’s, where he would eventually have dinner. It was on just such a night, after making the rounds and dining with friends at Elaine’s, that he died, in his bed, a few days later. I think it was an enviable way to go, and as much as I miss him, I’m glad that I can remember him that way, among friends, on his way to the next party.*

No less than the farm, the city has it seasonal rhythms, although here the autumn, rather than the spring, is the season of rebirth and renewal: the time to shake off the torpor and idleness of August, the season of openings—of plays, restaurants, galleries, the season when the big books are published, the fashions of the following year unveiled on the runways, the big charities hold their benefits as the gingko trees turn yellow, Fashion Week giving way to the Film Festival and the big gallery shows in Chelsea, the opening of the Metropolitan Opera and the City Ballet and the art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury which will tell us how rich the rich are feeling this year. Even for those who aren’t Jewish, the new year in New York begins in September. A certain tribal anxiety also, a collective memory of September 11th, and of financial panics past, but we’ve made it past that again this year. Another eerily clear day and clement day.

Much as I love the city in September, precisely because I love it so much, I spent most of the month in Long Island, working on the novel, though I did go in to see the revival of Einstein on the Beach at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, one of the most incredible spectacles I’ve ever seen on stage. Glass’s music continues to impress, but that’s been accessible to all since 1976, when it debuted. The great revelation, even for those of us who have seen some of his other work, were Robert Wilson’s tableaux and his staging, the compositions, the lighting, and especially the repetitive, dream-like gesture and motion. Einstein has been hailed as the high point of a certain period, the masterpiece of a collective aesthetic hatched in downtown New York in the seventies, but it still seems utterly fresh; we still haven’t caught up with it.

Also came in to town, for David Salle’s 60th birthday party at Saraghina in Brooklyn, which was packed with the artists, writers and gallerists who are David’s friends. We were all asked to write proposals for David’s autobiography and he asked me to read them to the company. Oddly—one suggestion was “Subjectivity” and another “Objectivity.” Someone scribbled a bunch of squiggly lines which looked like a Cy Twombley sketch, though obviously Twombly wasn’t in the room. Pretty much everyone else was. Originally I was told I wasn’t on the list, and had to talk my way in to David, who eventually vouched for me. My proposal was “My Life in Three Panels.” You know? All those triptychs he paints? I liked Judy Hudson’s title: “I Wish I Could Paint Like Judy Hudson.”

My novel proceeds. At least I’m past the halfway mark. After a weekend trip to California for the Hearst Castle benefit, where we raise money to restore some of the thousands of artworks in the castle—something the state of California doesn’t consider part of its stewardship—I’m hunkering down again out in Sag Harbor, though I will be coming in to do a Q and A with Moshin Hamid, the great Pakistani novelist, tonight. I met Hamid in Jaipur, India last year at the annual literary festival. His new novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, is a kind of satiric Pakistani Horatio Alger rags to riches tale, presented in the form of a parody of a self help book.

The massive southern migration of baitfish and predator species south along the east coast is well underway and I’ve been out on the water off Montauk Point several times with my guide Matthew Miller. My first trip out we had a great afternoon—five big bass and eight or nine false albacore. The striped bass is probably the most prized game fish on the Eastern seaboard, pursued by surfcasters and eel danglers and trollers dragging giant umbrella rigs of lures offshore as well as us fly fisherman. It’s the object of a cult and the subject of many books and it’s one of the tastiest fish in the ocean. The false albacore, on the other hand, is virtually inedible, but it’s one of the fastest and pound for pound strongest fish in the ocean. It looks like a cross between a tuna and a mackerel; shaped like a torpedo with retractable dorsal fin and according to Matthew is capable of swimming up to seventy miles and hour. Catching an albie on a nine-weight fly rod is about as exciting as any kind of fishing I know. You cast to individual fish on the surface when they are feeding, usually on anchovies, and retrieve your fly as fast as you can. Once you hook into an albie you have to keep your hands free of the reel since he will usually unspool a hundred or two hundred yards of line in a matter of seconds and bloody up your knuckles if they’re not clear.

Keith Richards incomporable Life has called forth an avalanche of rock and roll biographies (not to mention the scandalous Mick the Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger, by Christopher Anderson which I read in one sitting) and I’ve been trying to keep up. Read Greg Alman’s My Cross to Bear confirming that Greg really took a lot of drugs and now deep into Neil Young’s Waging Heavy Peace. Neil Young really is as strange as we always suspected. He goes into his Lionel train obsession about as deeply as Keith went into guitar stuff. Leonard Cohen up next.

I’m halfway through D.T. Max’s biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, which I misplaced for a month or so; somewhat eerily, I find myself in it. I spent about a month with Foster Wallace at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, in 1987. He’d just published Broom of the System which I’d read. He was a strange, shy, but obviously brilliant twenty three year old. We played tennis—he usually beat me—drank and talked about our work in progress. He was incredibly earnest, but he also had a wicked sense of humor. We’d both majored in philosophy, he at Amherst and me at Williams. He was writing Westward the Empire Takes it Course, his logorreahic, metafictional sendup of metafiction, which I read in pieces, and I was writing my third novel. According to Max, “Wallace admired the older novelist’s control of voice, and also how he could work after a long night of drinking.” I don’t recall the drinking being very heavy—we were all there to write, after all, but then Wallace was by his own admission much more of a pot smoker. Tonight I will probably discover how he felt about my review of Infinite Jest.

—Jay