He imagined himself among them now, his own face staring, like theirs, from the makeshift posters on café walls, in the subways.
—David Leavitt, The Lost Language of Cranes

A recent article in Esquire on the power structure of literary New York remarked that there are no “literary hangouts” for people under sixty (“Esquire’s Guide to the Literary Universe,” August 1987). But it all depends on what you mean by “literary.” If we’re to believe Tama Janowitz, the celebrated author of Slaves of New York, there are such things as “literary videos.” So why not “literary cafés” for the young folk? (In the world of fiction, anything is possible!) When The New York Times devoted several glossy pages last spring to “New York’s Spinning Literary Circles”—a sort of life-styles-of-the-rich-and-famous approach to the new literary elite—it featured a supper club on West Fourteenth Street called Nell’s. Nell’s is the same hotbed of intellectual fervor that Vanity Fair announced as the new meeting place for the power brokers, adding, in the magazine’s all too infrequently ironic tone, that the place “flickers with exclusivity.”

And not without reason. Nell is reputed to have turned away from her doors no less than Cher, the former Queen Bee of Studio 54. And who is this sassy redhead? Nell Campbell is a second-rate actress of Rocky Horrorfame who, with the help of the city’s nightclub establishment (who’ve made her hostess of this new venture), has managed to set up