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INTRODUCTION Stories of Belonging Greenville, Mississippi, 1910 On December 5, 1910, William Alexander Percy spent the better part of the day in his law office in Greenville, Mississippi. He was to argue a railroad case in court the next morning, but his mind was on other things. The fifth of December that year was a rain-soaked Monday. In the mail Percy received a letter from Harold Bruff, his best friend and likely his lover from Harvard Law School. Bruff, recently diagnosed with tuberculosis, informed Percy that he was leaving the country; his doctor had advised him to take six months of vacation to rest his body. Bruff’s job as a Manhattan attorney, his doctor said, was not conducive to recovery. Percy wrote in his diary that night that Bruff’s letter “filled me with longing” and left him stuck “midway between exasperation and restlessness.”1 Will Percy and Harold Bruff had met at Harvard in 1905. The two lived in a rooming house called Winthrop Hall, a recently built Gothic structure with a fireplace in each room, hardwood casing around the windows, and a long trough in the basement for bathing. The Charles River was just visible from their bedroom windows.2 Percy—of slight build, with brown hair and blue eyes, his face bearing both his father’s strong jawline and his mother’s dimpled chin—was the more mild mannered of the two. Before law school, he had attended college at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and after graduation he had lived in Paris for a year. He was a piano player and a poet. Those who knew him described him as soft-spoken and magnetic , a person in whom others confided. His poetic temperament and quiet humor offset Bruff’s brusque, lawyerly style. Percy admired Bruff’s frank New York sensibility, which enlivened their conversation and counterbalanced his own Mississippi reticence. When Percy wrote his autobiography near the end of his life, he described being with Harold Bruff as “ecstasy.”3 Bruff was one of those whom Percy referred to as a “Mayflower princeling ,” so common among Harvard students at the time: Bruff could trace his 2 : Introduction ancestry on his father’s side directly to a man who arrived on the Mayflower. Through the centuries, the Bruff family rose in prominence in New England life, and most of them were established and engaged in business in New York by the early 1700s. Harold Bruff’s father, William Jenkins Bruff, grew wealthy in the gun and munitions business. Harold Bruff grew up on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights, a block off the promenade overlooking Manhattan. He went to Phillips-Andover Academy. At Yale, his peers voted him “Brightest Graduate,” and he went directly to Harvard Law School, where he became an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Harold Bruff was in many ways an ideal counterpart to Will Percy: where Percy was romantic and temperamental, Bruff was ambitious and resolute; where Percy was small in stature, Bruff was stocky and thickset; where Percy’s face was angular and melancholic, Bruff’s was round and friendly. While at Harvard, Percy and Bruff were inseparable. They traveled to Europe together, to New York, to Chicago and New Hampshire and Maine. They bought season tickets to the Boston Opera and learned the scores on the piano. Percy wrote that “every concert was an adventure and usually we’d be plumed and dripping fire as we made for the Brattle Street trolley through the winter murk.”4 After law school, Percy moved home to Mississippi to join his father’s law practice, though he traveled regularly between Greenville and New York to see Bruff. Bruff loved Percy’s visits and what the energy of the city did for their relationship. “You must stay here many days,” Bruff wrote to Percy before one such visit. “There are so many distractions that seem to frighten away the desired mood but maybe—who knows?” Beyond this, New York was a place they could “see lots of each other and possibly even talk ‘de profundis ’—but that is very difficult.” The difficulties, though, seemed at the time less pronounced in New York than in Mississippi. In Mississippi, Percy felt alone. He had not lived there for eight years, and he often second-guessed his decision to move south. He wrote in his diary: “The maelstrom of New York sucks in more and more of the people I love.”5 On...

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