Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

Most of the time, I listened. These were my friends and I didn’t want to argue with them. But in certain ways I was already separated from them. I couldn’t tell them about Laura, because they wouldn’t believe me, and if they heard I was having sex with an old woman (she was forty-one!), they’d probably laugh. On the nights when I wasn’t at Boop’s, or on Saturday or Sunday mornings, I started making drawings for myself again, filling newsprint pads instead of making cartoons. I made great violent drawings of prizefighters, starting with photographs from newspapers or Ring Magazine, then abstracting them, then drawing them from memory, repeating alone the exercises from school. I took stiff classroom drawings of Laura and thinned her out and added Maureen’s face, smudging the features with my fingers to protect her from the judgments of my visiting friends. I began imagining Maureen’s body in detail, seeing her on the model stand instead of Laura, her pale skin blushing, her pubic hair dark and shiny. In those drawings she seemed more real than she did when she sat beside me in the Sanders.

Somehow, making those drawings, I knew that I could lose the Navy Yard, lose Laura, even lose Maureen, but I couldn’t afford to lose art school. That would be losing my life.

BY APRIL, even Laura thought I was getting better.

You’ve got talent, she said one night, but you don’t know anything yet.

What do you mean?

I mean you’re intelligent, you learn fast, but you’re amazingly ignorant. You’re too much in love with being a mug from Brooklyn.

The words wounded me. She was right, and I knew it.

What should I learn? I asked her.

Laura smiled and said, Every fucking thing you can.

She would never go out anywhere with me, obviously (I thought) because she didn’t want her friends to laugh at her with a young man. But she began to show me drawings in art books and from folders of reproductions she’d torn from magazines. None of them looked like Burne Hogarth’s work or Milton Caniff’s or Jack Kirby’s. But I began to sense what Picasso was doing, and Matisse; I saw George Grosz for the first time and Otto Dix and a wonderful draftsman, now unjustly forgotten, named Rico Lebrun. Seeing my boxing pictures, she showed me Stag at Sharkey’s by George Bellows. She showed me pictures by Ben Shahn and Yasuo Kuniyoshi. And then she pulled out some drawings by a man who was doing what I wished I could be doing: José Clemente Orozco. He was a Mexican and drew figures with thick black lines and great bold power.

You’re a draftsman, she said. So study the great draftsmen. You can get to color later. Most artists use color to hide things they don’t understand. Photographers do it all the time.

She smoked her cigarettes and sipped her Canadian Club and rummaged through these files, which she kept in folders in a Campbell’s soup box, and there was always a running commentary.

Jesus H. Christ, I have saved an amazing amount of crap. I oughtta just throw it all out.

Where’d you get it all?

She held up a copy of Art News.

Magazines like this, she said. But do yourself a favor, don’t read these rags. Just tear out the pictures. The writing is usually the most amazing bullshit.

Then she gave me a copy of a book called The Art Spirit by Robert Henri, and I devoured it. I felt connected to Henri because he was a friend of John Sloan. His book was a collection of notes about the study of art, written down by students in his classes at the Art Students League, and first published in 1923. As I read, I heard Henri speaking in Hogarth’s voice, and he seemed to be speaking directly to me.

The work of the art student is no light matter. Few have the courage and stamina to see it through. You have to make up your mind to be alone in many ways. We like sympathy and we like to be in company. It is easier than going it alone. But alone one gets acquainted with himself, grows up and on, not stopping with the crowd. It costs to do this. If you succeed you may have to pay for it as well as enjoy it all your life. …

This struck me as absolutely true; I knew, for example, that when I was alone I made drawings that went beyond the work I did in class. And I hoped I had the courage and stamina to see it through. I would sometimes remember these words while drinking in Boop’s — receiving what I thought Henri meant by sympathy, a kind of generalized human warmth; being, as he said, in company — and know that I should be home at work. Henri’s words became a kind of sweet curse. In my mind, the desire to be an artist had been a desire for freedom: from the routines of life, from the Navy Yards of the world. Until I read Henri, it had never occurred to me that there could be a cost, that an artist must pay a price in loneliness. That idea gave me a romantic thrill.

An art student must be a master from the beginning; that is, he must be master of such as he has. By being now master of such as he has there is promise that he will be master in the future. …

Was I a master of what I had? That is, had I pushed as hard as I could against my crudities, my clumsiness, my lack of skill? I knew I hadn’t. But nobody else at Boop’s had either. Most of them seemed content to go along, get a job, join the army. Who did I think I was anyway? Who was I to think I could go beyond myself?

You can do anything you want to do. What is rare is this actual wanting to do a specific thing: wanting it so much that you are practically blind to all other things, that nothing else will satisfy you. … I mean it. There is reason for you to give this statement some of your best thought. You may find that this is just what is the matter with most of the people in the world; that few are really wanting what they think they want, and that most people go through their lives without ever doing one whole thing they really want to do. …

In the Navy Yard, I met men who were doing hard work because they had to do it; to support wives, children, pay rent. In Boop’s, the guys who were working weren’t doing what they wanted to do. Most of them didn’t even know what they wanted to do. And what about my father? What did he want to do when he was my age, and how had it turned out? What could he have become if he hadn’t left Ireland or if he hadn’t lost his leg? What about my mother? I knew almost nothing about her, except that she was there, she worked, she was smart, she encouraged me to do anything I wanted to do. As Henri did.

An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity. That is what I call self-development, self-education. No matter how fine a school you are in, you have to educate yourself.

Yes.

IN THE LATE spring of 1952, as the Dodgers tried in the new season to recover from the Home Run, and the war in Korea was grinding on, and the papers said that Eisenhower was planning to run for president, everything shifted again. Laura disappeared.

For two nights, I didn’t see her at school, didn’t receive her Yes or No. On the third night, I asked about her at the office. The secretary was annoyed because Laura hadn’t even called. They had to cancel one painting class because they couldn’t find a substitute.

I was suddenly panicky. In class that night, I imagined her burning with some fever, alone in the studio without a telephone. I imagined her careening around the studio, drunk and falling, the blood running from a gash in her head. Or she flipped a cigarette in a careless way and it landed in the files or the turpentine and exploded and she was burned alive. Or a man climbed in through the air shaft window, to hold her prisoner, and was even now hurting her. The lurid scenarios filled my head while I tried to draw a lithe young brown-nippled Puerto Rican model in class. The model was exquisite, with sad brown eyes, and a thin trail of hair from her navel down her stomach to a thick black vee between her legs. But I couldn’t even focus my lust. When the bell rang for the first break, I packed my things and hurried down to Tenth Street.