Pete Hamill - Piecework

The older I get, the more I am humbled by the difficult standards of my trade. About many things, from the meaning of baseball to the nature of human beings, I was far more certain at thirty than I am at sixty. Each day I learn something new. This is not, of course, my hobby. It is my pride that I have been a professional from the beginning, paid for every published word, unsupported by foundation money or government grants. But although I’m a professional of my trade, I struggle each day to retain the innocent eye of the amateur. I do piecework, and with each piece, I’m forced to begin again, to try to find something fresh in the familiar, to look at my subjects as if they’d never been written about before.

What do you do? asks the stranger. I’m a writer, I answer. On some mornings, this reply can still astonish me. Like so many other writers, I wanted in my adolescence and young manhood to join an entirely different guild.

The craft of cartooning first grabbed my heart when I was eleven years old, and that adolescent passion gradually evolved into a desire to be a painter. My first short stories and essays were written at Mexico City College in 1956, when I was studying painting there on the GI Bill. My first published words were two poems that appeared in 1958 in the literary magazine of Pratt Institute, where I was a student in the art school. The first words I wrote for money appeared the following year in a Greek magazine named Atlantis, for which I worked as art director; the story was in English, and I was paid $2.5. On the night in 1960 when I walked into the city room of the New York Post to try to be a newspaperman, I was working days as a commercial artist. I was twenty-five years old, a high school dropout from a poor family in Brooklyn.

A few years earlier, the desire to be a painter had been derailed by several factors: a failure of will and the need to earn a living. I was uncertain of my talents as a painter, afraid of committing to a vocation that might give me a life of prolonged poverty. So I found work in an advertising agency, and though I was proud to be making my way in the world, I didn’t much like the way I was doing it. There just wasn’t much romance in designing letterheads or laying out catalogs. But within months of sitting down at a typewriter in a newspaper city room, even with a substantial cut in pay, I felt exuberant and free. The graphic arts were set aside; I went to work at mastering the writer’s trade.

When I started writing for Dorothy Schiff’s wonderful afternoon tabloid, I had no plans for the future, no certainties about a career. The Post was seventh in circulation among the city’s seven dailies; we all knew it could fold the next morning, so it was imperative to live for tonight, for the next edition, even if that edition might be the last. I definitely wasn’t there for the pension plan. Newspaper people were flamboyant, hard-drinking, bohemian anarchists, with great gifts for obscenity and a cynicism based on experience. Or so I thought. I loved being in their company, in city rooms, at murder scenes, or standing at the bar after work.

For me, the work itself was everything. I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters, and one of their lessons was that the essence of the work was the doing of it. At twenty-five, I thought I had started late and therefore had to hurl myself into the work — and the life that went with it. In my experience, nothing before (or since) could compare to walking into the New York Post at midnight, being sent into the dark, scary city on an assignment, and coming back to write a story for the first edition. No day’s work was like any other’s, no story repeated any other in its details. Day after day, week after week, I loved being a newspaperman, living in the permanent present tense of the trade. I had no idea as a young man that from my initiation into the romance of newspapers would flow novels, books of short stories, too many screenplays, a memoir, and millions of words of newspaper and magazine journalism. I didn’t know that I was apprenticing to a trade that I would practice until I die.

This is not to claim that I’ve produced an uninterrupted series of amazements. Reading over a quarter-century of my journalism for this collection (my first since Irrational Ravings in 1970), I have often winced; if I’d only had another three inches of space, or another two hours beyond the deadline, perhaps this piece would have been better or that piece wiser. There were newspaper columns that I wish I’d never written, full of easy insult or cheap injury. There were many pieces limited by my ignorance. Too many lazily derived their energy from the breaking news to which they served as mere sidebars. Others were about figures who were once famous and are now obscure (and hence have been excluded from this collection — any footnotes of explanation would be longer than the originals). Sometimes I completely missed the point, or didn’t see the truth of a story whose facts were evidently there in my notebook. But this is not an apology. It is the nature of such work that it is produced in a rush; the deadlines usually force the newspaper writer to publish a first draft because there is no time for a second or third. Once that piece is locked up in type and sent to the newsstands, there is no going back; the writer can correct the factual error, but it’s too late to deepen the insight, alter the mistaken or naive judgment, erase the stale language that was taken off the rack. He or she can only vow never to make that error again and start fresh the next day.

Early on, I understood why these hurried writings were called pieces. The built-in limitations of the form were the enemies of thoroughness; the very best a journalist could hope for was to reveal fragments that stood for the whole, like an archeologist working in a ruined city. When I started writing magazine articles, with their longer deadlines and expanded space, some of those problems were solved. But I was still at the mercy of the people I interviewed. The journalist can prepare well, listen carefully, and, thanks to modern technology, record what he hears with absolute fidelity. But human beings lie. Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Actors lie. Victims lie. Statistics lie. The objective reporter writes down the lies and tries to check them against other sources. But sometimes one lie is merely countered with another lie and the reporter is forced by the standards of objectivity to print both.

To be sure, at the heart of every story there is a bald fact or two. The body of a man lies in an alley. The body can be measured and weighed and checked for scars or tattoos, thus providing new facts to the cop and his unofficial collaborator, the reporter. The dead man’s wallet might reveal the facts of his identity: a name, an address, an age, his bank, the number of his driver’s license. All facts, if the credentials are legitimate. Wives or lovers or rivals will speak about the dead man and add a few more small facts about his life and death. But the best detectives also know that the facts don’t always reveal the truth, certainly about an entity as complicated as a human being. The facts can’t record the dead man’s final thoughts, or his dreams, desires, confusions and ambiguities. They can’t explain the meaning of his life.

That’s why so many journalists turn to writing novels: to get at the truth beyond the facts, about themselves and others. If reporters stick around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the guilty are sometimes innocent and the innocent probably have an angle. Things, as the philosopher said, ain’t what they seem to be. Nor are people. I’ve known many newspaper reporters whose lives were permanently soured by what they had witnessed and their work ruined by a self-protecting indifference. Others survived, usually by fealty to the dailiness of the enterprise. They plunged into the moments of the story and its writing and left it all behind when they were finished. Or they distilled what they knew into fiction. The trick was to see the world as a skeptic, not a cynic, while allowing for the wan possibility of human decency.