Pete Hamill - A Drinking Life

When I woke up the next day I wrote a poem in Beat cadences, mixing up the Village Vanguard and Brooklyn College and some bad Kenneth Rexroth, and a few days later submitted it (and another) to the Pratt literary magazine. I was astonished when both were accepted. They were my first published writings.

The confusions deepened. After Mexico, I wanted to have enough money to forget about money and chose graphic design as the way to make a living. But the life of a designer demanded steadiness and clarity, qualities in complete opposition to my image of the wild, free-living, hard-drinking bohemian. Design also required submission to the whole buttoned-down gray-flanneled organization-man strictures of the Fifties. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to accept those tame codes. But in an important way, I used them as a license. Drinking became the medium of my revolt against the era of Eisenhower. Drinking was a refusal to play the conformist game, a denial of the stupid rules of a bloodless national ethos.

I expressed that revolt at huge weekend parties, crowded with students, where cases of beer were jammed into ice-packed bathtubs, and big strapping young women from the Midwest slipped into dark back rooms with various guys, including me. The music pounded, Little Richard meeting Miles Davis, Elvis contending with Coltrane, while the half-digested words of painter-guru Hans Hofmann collided with the lyrics of Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were wild nights in Manhattan too, stops at The Cedars or the Five Spot, with complete strangers saying, Let’s go, man, big party right up the street. And they were right: hard loud whiskey drinking beer-swilling parties were part of every New York weekend. I remember being at two big parties at The Club on Eighth Street, where I first saw Helen Frankenthaler, beautiful in a camel’s-hair coat, de Kooning and Kline cracking wise to each other, women grabbing men by the balls while dancing, men dancing with men and women kissing women. I was at another party in the packed sweaty railroad flat that belonged to the poet LeRoi Jones, who had started publishing a little magazine called Yugen and talked to me in a smoky hallway about Krazy Kat. I spent one glorious night drinking at The Cedars with Franz Kline, talking about women and cartoonists and London art schools. He took three of us to his studio at four in the morning, where he showed us his big new paintings, which were in color. He looked sad and fatalistic when he told us that the dealers hated them. They wanted him to keep doing “Franz Klines,” in his trademarked black and white. I thought: Just like executives at some big company dictating to a man from the advertising agency.

That night, I backed up a few feet from the bohemian ideal. Kline, Pollock, de Kooning all had starved for twenty years before selling any paintings. And here was Kline, at the peak of his fame, worried that the galleries would stop taking the pictures he wanted to make. What if I spent twenty years and nobody ever bought a painting? I thought of Laura’s bitterness, posing nude to pay rent, then vanishing into obscurity. I knew from Brooklyn that poverty wasn’t noble; it was a humiliation. If I chose the freedom of the painter’s life, who would pay the bills? I suddenly understood that I wasn’t painting because I was afraid to discover that I had no talent. If I had no talent, I would starve.

That was the late 1950s for me. Torn between the desire for personal freedom and the need for a proud security, I postponed the choice. I drank a lot. I got laid a lot. In most of the minor ways, I had a very good time.

MUCH OF MY MEMORY of those years is blurred, because drinking was now slicing holes in my consciousness. I never thought of myself as a drunk; I was, I thought, like many others — a drinker. I certainly didn’t think I was an alcoholic. But I was already having trouble on the morning after remembering the details of the night before. It didn’t seem to matter; everybody else was doing the same thing. We made little jokes about having a great time last night — I think. And we’d begun to reach for the hair of the dog.

To save money, I began sharing my seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment with Jake Conaboy and Bill Powers, friends from the Neighborhood. Jake talked about becoming an actor, Billy also wanted to be a painter, and was studying at Pratt. At some point, Richie Kelly came over too, took a flat next door, enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, and began training as an illustrator. Drinking cases of beer, we talked passionately about art, movies, women; we read Pound, Eliot, Camus. We took our own paths through the city but always ended up at the flat on Ninth Street and Second Avenue, in the heart of the Ukrainian blocks of the Lower East Side. And we threw our own parties, mixing together people from the Neighborhood, Pratt, and our jobs. They were noisy, sweating, roaring affairs, full of music, dancing, and booze. In the mornings after, we had to call people to find out what we’d done. For a while, I was going out with a beautiful slender Dominican girl who was saddened in equal proportions by an early divorce and the smallness of her breasts. Jake started going with her sister. We laughed so hard on some nights that my body ached; today I can’t remember a single line that was said.

At some point after Tim Lee returned from Mexico, with a degree in philosophy, Billy found his own apartment and Tim took his place in the third bedroom. A few weeks later, Tom McMahon, my English teacher from Pratt, came home from England, where he’d taken a degree at Oxford. He soon had us organized into a weekly study group. Under McMahon’s direction, we went through Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms; a number of stories in Understanding Fiction, an anthology-textbook edited by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, parts of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading; George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language.” We spent weeks reading and analyzing Aristotle’s Ethics. All of us joined in, making jokes, sipping beers, smoking too many cigarettes. McMahon had a tough, unsatisfied intelligence; he was brilliant in seeing the stylistic surface of a piece of writing but he also challenged every sentimentality, every glib remark, and insisted that we dig and dig until we’d discovered the moral core of the work. Every session left a permanent mark on my own later writing. McMahon truly taught me how to read. No small thing.

Reading drew me deeper into writing, but I showed almost nobody my own Hemingwayesque short stories, Orwellian essays, Kerouackian poems. Surely they couldn’t survive the scrutiny we were applying to Hemingway or Orwell, and McMahon made clear his contempt for the rambling formless style of the Beats. So I practiced writing as a secret vice and kept working as an apprentice designer. I had money now for oil and canvas, but I did no painting at all.

A droll, balding artist’s agent named Tom Fortune used to come around to the agency, trying to sell the work of his illustrators. One day he asked me if I did any freelancing. No, I said, but I could use the money. Did I think I could handle the layout and pasteups for a magazine?

What kind of magazine? I asked.

Well, Fortune said, it’s a little unusual.

What do you mean, unusual?

It’s in Greek.

Within a few weeks I had my first freelance client, a Greek magazine called Atlantis. The office was on Twenty-third Street off Tenth Avenue. The editor was an enthusiastic young guy named Jimmy Vlasto, whose father, Solon G. Vlasto, was publisher of the magazine and a daily newspaper of the same name. Obviously, I couldn’t read Greek, but neither could Jimmy. We had a great time together, laying out stories about Melina Mercouri or holidays on Mykonos, hoping that the leftover text jumped into the correct place in the back of the book. Sometimes it did. Often it didn’t. And at some point I suggested to Jimmy that maybe we should start running some articles in English.