44 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
is like a cracked kettle on which we beat
out tunes for bears to dance to, when
we long to move the stars to pity.” The
perfection of the sentence refutes its
complaint. It’s like Nabokov griping
about how, because he was a native Rus-
sian, his prose in “Lolita” was necessar-
ily “a second-rate brand of English.”
Oh, fuck you.
W
hen Day dreamed, in his fifties,
about a college boy in a multi-
colored bathrobe hanging from a noose,
he interpreted the boy as his “writer-
self,” but noted that the bathrobe re-
sembled mine when I was younger. “And
because Tad sees himself as a writer too,
I am reinforced in two thoughts, which
conflict. To do nothing that will suffo-
cate my nascent self as writer; and noth-
ing that will strangle his ambitions like-
wise, or his opportunities. The conflict
here is that fatherly success might ob-
struct the son. There are plenty of ex-
amples of that. But note also three male
generations of successful artists in the
Wyeth clan.”
Yet he also worried that I was slum-
ming. When I appeared on “Charlie
Rose,” talking with four other writers
about feminism and sex (a topic I’d just
written about for Esquire), he was non-
plussed. “What was the value added for
American culture?” he wrote me. “I won-
der if the transcript of the whole hour
would contain a single utterance of the
word ‘love’? The program should rather
have asked, ‘What makes love some-
times descend into rage?’; or, ‘What are
the ways that anger may be authenti-
cally part of love; may co-exist non-
destructively with love, or may be sub-
ordinated into love?’”
When we talked about a piece of
writing, I would try to articulate why it
moved me, or didn’t, and he would try
to convince me that it was good or bad
for the world. I urged Day to read “Amer-
ican Express,” a James Salter story about
American cosmopolitans that I found
magical. Salter’s Frank said, “Women
fall in love when they get to know you.
Men are just the opposite. When they
finally know you they’re ready to leave.”
Day wasn’t interested in that. He ob-
served that Frank was decadent (true)
and that Salter was frigid (false). Salter,
who wrote elsewhere, “Life is contemp-
tuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in
the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion,
energy, lies: these are what life admires.”
“You can’t build a society on Salter,”
he said.
“Is that the goal of art?”
“It ought to be.”
In 1998, a dozen years later than the
Updike Protocol had prescribed, I joined
the staff of The New Yorker. One of myfirst stories was about two workmen in
Sun Valley who’d dug up a jar of gold
coins on land owned by Jann Wenner,
the Rolling Stone co-founder; each
schemed to take the treasure, but Wen-
ner ended up with it. Day wrote, “It may
be rather nineteenth century of me, but
I wondered what The New Yorker’s goal
was in publishing it. To show the tri-
umph of a New Yorker who didn’t care?”
After I stopped responding to these irk-
some questions, he stopped posing them.I
n his fifties, Day worked at his squash
game and rose to No. 15 in the na-
tional rankings for his age group. Even
as he was holding his own in this rear-
guard action, he wrote a despairing haiku
in a Honolulu hotel room:WHO?
Gimpy dry old man
Lurching into view, hotel
Mirror: oh, myselfHe also began an autobiographical
novel, “Family Laundry,” about a privi-
leged boyhood in Pittsburgh. “What I
aim to achieve in my first novel: a thing
of beauty, terror, and tenderness,” he
wrote. When he was deeper into the
book, he declared, “I am first a human-
ist, next an urban anthropologist, and
only third an artist. I cannot aspire higher,
say, than the level of Galsworthy. That
allows me to admire Thomas Hardy,
without trying to compete with him.”
Day viewed artistry as a quality roped
off for distant magnificoes. He had been
a year behind the playwright A. R. Gur-
ney at Williams and played squash with
him in Buffalo. Gurney came late to his
purpose—the precondition for candor
being his father’s death—and then pro-
duced such lacerating work as “The
Dining Room” and “The Cocktail
Hour.” Yet Day never thought of his
friend as a writer worth venerating. How
could anyone you grew up with be an
artist? Artists inhabit remote cabins or
Russian cemeteries. I found this posi-
tion ridiculous—even Prince lived next
door to somebody—yet oddly persuasive.
In high school, Day wrote a short
story about a boy who sees his mother
kissing Santa Claus. His own mother
hadn’t kissed Santa Claus, probably, but
she’d kissed pretty much everyone else.
His parents sat him down, and Grandpa
Ted said, “We don’t talk about those••