In the end, the plague touched us all. It was not confined to the Oran of Camus. No. It turned up again in America, breeding in a compost of greed and uselessness and murder, in those places where statesmen and generals stash the bodies of the forever young. The plague ran in the blood of men in sharkskin suits, who ran for president promising life and delivering death.
--Pete Hamill, liner notes for Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks," 1975
There once was a time when you could, if you were good enough, make it in this country. You had to have luck as well as talent, and a certain willingness to put yourself out there, a certain immodesty.
Most of us think we missed those times. Whenever we were born, it was a generation or two too late. Or maybe too early. On the other hand, it figures that some of us caught the wave just after it crested and were able to ride it for a while. I'm coming up on 40 years in this business, which was dying (they said) when I got here. I can't complain.
Pete Hamill died earlier this month. He'd always been there; I never gave much thought to his mortality. And although sooner or later everybody dies, you only expect it sometimes. Some poets appear to us as fragile vessels--when Justin Townes Earle, a gifted singer-songwriter, died last week at the age of 38, I was sad but not surprised. Earle always had about him a tinge of gothic doom, the genteel courtliness and tragic charisma of the gentleman junkie.
Hamill did not have that darkness; he didn't write about drowning himself in the Harlem River. Instead he famously gave up drinking because he "had no talent for it."
Instead he wrote, in his 2002 novel "Forever," about an Irish Jew named Cormac O'Connor, who comes to New York in 1741 and is saved from death by Tomora, a dead priestess invoked by an African shaman impressed into slavery. She grants him eternal life contingent on his never leaving the island of Manhattan, not even to see the Dodgers play in Brooklyn.
Cormac fights in the American Revolution, encounters Boss Tweed, Walt Whitman, Duke Ellington and Gustav Mahler, and is there when the towers fall. Through Cormac's adventures Hamill limns the history of a city, growing from backward village to what its partisans credibly argue is the greatest city in the world.
"Forever" seems both slight and ambitious, a self-consciously tall tale that feels more than a little overblown. Hamill was better at small-scaled stories populated with people who might--but for their having been noticed by the writer--have passed for ordinary. He didn't need to invent their lives, he only needed to see them.
Like he saw those women in Vietnam, when he was embedded with a Marine patrol, "the light in their eyes extinguished, their small, shrinking heads looking dumbly from under conical hats, their skin eroded, clay-dry, pitted with the half-healed gashes of the swamp leech." Hamill said in that column he wished he could take us take us there, to make us see. That's exactly what he did.
On the other hand, I understand why Hamill wrote fiction; most newspaper writers would. Journalism is a calling for some but a genre for others; some writers will seek any occasion to indulge their habit. And if someone is willing to cut you a check, so much the better. Plus there's always the gnawing idea that what you're doing is just journalism.
Like the crusty old editor used to say in those days before we thought workplaces could be toxic and advanced degrees should be de rigeur: "It ain't art and you ain't Hemingway, so grind it out."
Pete Hamill loved Hemingway, and he was an artist. But when when he walked into the New York Post in 1960, a high school dropout who'd hammered sheet metal and done a tour in the Navy, he was given the sort of opportunity that was rare then and unheard of now, a job reporting what happened in the city while respectable people slept. And he made of that beat what artists always make.
He lived a sort of Cormac O'Connor life without being restricted to a 23-square-mile area and burying everyone he ever loved. He was a public intellectual in the days when that could make you a celebrity, he might have convinced his friend Robert Kennedy to run for president, and he was one of those who pinned Sirhan Sirhan to the ground. He dated Shirley MacLaine and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at the same time.
He won a Grammy for writing the liner notes to "Blood on the Tracks."
But he wasn't larger than life. He was kind, generous and deeply interested in the work.
I wanted to reread his 1994 memoir "A Drinking Life," but it didn't survive downsizing when we moved into a smaller house. The book is still out there, and can be located with a few strokes on a keyboard.
I quickly found what I wanted: Hamill remembering his days just before he walked into the Post, when he was sharing a $75-a-month apartment on the Lower East Side with two of his boyhood friends:
"In my flat off Second Avenue, or in small dark bars, I filled notebooks with questions about art, politics, my own chaotic ambitions. Sometimes, late at night in the flat, I typed these stories on an old upright Royal I'd bought in a second-hand store and put them in file folders. I tried short stories in the Hemingway manner, more variations on what had happened to me in Mexico, even poems, transcribed from fragments scribbled in bars. But it seemed an arrogant ambition to want to be a writer in a world where Hemingway and Faulkner still lived. Who do you think you are? some collective voice from the Neighborhood called to me. Who do you think you are?"
You ain't Hemingway.
You might want to watch the HBO movie "Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists," a 2018 documentary about the two newspaper columnists that leans a little toward hagiography but makes valid points about the America we have lost.
I am skeptical of newspaper people who style themselves as celebrities, and there is a lot that is problematic in the Menckenian model of intellectual hauteur, arrogance and casual bigotry. But there is something in the movie's thesis that Jimmy Breslin and Hamill, now both dead, represented the last of their kind--working-class autodidactic journalists writing for and about the working class.
Guys who committed just journalism.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
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