By Michael F. Duggan
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you may suppose. -Walt Whitman
East Side, West Side, all around the town
The tots sang “ring-around-rosie,” “London Bridge is falling down”
Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O’Rourke
Tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York
Things have changed since those times, some are up in “G”
Others they are wand’rers but they all feel just like me
They would part with all they’ve got, if could they once more walk
With their best girl and have a twirl on the sidewalks of New York. -James W. Blake
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. -Sam Phillips
Pete Hamill is gone. He was as New York as stickball, egg creams, Coney Island, and the Brooklyn Bridge. Like the Dodgers, he is gone forever. How do you write about a writer like Hamill? With clipped, declarative sentences, of course. Beyond that it is hard to know where to begin and what to include and what to leave out from such a rich life.
He was born in 1935, the eldest of seven children of Northern Irish Catholic immigrants from Belfast. His father lost a leg in 1927 after a severe soccer injury turned gangrenous. His first home was Brooklyn, that innermost of outer boroughs relative to Downtown and the only one to have had an independent identity as Manhattan’s twin city prior to the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898. As a young child, his mother walked him across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time after seeing The Wizard of Oz, and for the rest of his larger-than-life life, he regarded the towers of Lower Manhattan to be the real Emerald City. In a recent interview he characterized his upbringing as “poor” but not “impoverished” because he had a library card.
Hamill came of age during Brooklyn’s Golden Age of the 1940s and 1950s (see: Woody Allen’s Radio Days, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir, the Great #42, most of the writing about “Dem Bums” during this period, and the movie Brooklyn). As a kid I caught a fleeting glimpse of this world when we lived near my mother’s parents in Middle Village in Queens during the 1960s. Elements of the American mid-century and before lingered there as late as the 1969 World Series or shortly thereafter. It was part “the center of the world” and part small town manifested as neighborhoods (New York cannot be taken whole and so your neighborhood becomes your world). My mom’s upbringing in Queens and my girlfriend’s family in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Maspeth were all a part of this mostly lost world. But things really have changed since those times, and if there was ever a place and period in recent American history that legitimizes nostalgia as an ennobling emotion, it is this.1
Perhaps because he grew up in a plausible Halcyon Age that seems to have concentrated what was good about the United States, Hamill believed that much of what is justified as progress is actually the destruction of good things, things that worked, things that still resonate. To him New York exemplifies the tendency of change-for-the-sake-of-change more than any other American city, and in doing so, tramples on much of what is, or was, good about it. In this sense, he is a plain-talking conceptual cousin of Jane Jacobs and his views are sympathetic to the ideas she presents in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
But Hamill’s life was not all sunshine and roses. A sensitive tough guy familiar with dysfunction, the low life, and the streets, he drank too much as a young man in a culture of drinking and fought in bars. He briefly saw the inside of a jail in Mexico City that included both solitary confinement and a large, crowded room where two men fought over a young woman with bricks. His first publication was a beat-inspired poem after meeting Jack Kerouac in 1957 (in a bar, of course). He quit drinking by sheer force of will and the easily-spoken rationale “that I only had to give up one drink: the next one. If I didn’t have that one drink, I’d never have another.” It worked. All of this is recounted in his brutally honest 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life.
Coming out of this world of “sunshine and shadow” (and after a hitch in the navy and his stint in Mexico on the GI Bill), Hamill seems to have crossed paths with every writer and musician from the Great American Mid-Century. If A Drinking Life is a confession, then his later member, Downtown (2004), is a love letter to his city. His reminiscences of lower Manhattan in this book are fascinating in their insights and an education in themselves. As a historian, Hamill is so compelling because he is non-theoretical and because he lived so much of what he describes. He saw it with his own eyes. A streetwise realist, he “hated abstractions” and believed that ideology is “not thinking [but] a substitute for thinking” leading to snares. His knowledge is intimate and he knew most of the people about whom he writes. Like many New York writers, this local intimacy also creates cosmopolitanism out of the urban provincial.
He and his friend, competitor, and fellow “deadline artist,” Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017), were at the forefront of the New Journalism of the 1960s and ’70s and would become the newsprint voices for ordinary New Yorkers. By Breslin’s own reverse-snobbish account, they were not “journalists” (“That’s a college word”) but “reporters.” As public intellectuals for the regular Joe, they also became celebrities. With rugged movie star good looks, Hamill, the poor kid from Brooklyn, dated Shirley MacLaine, Jacqueline Onassis, and Linda Ronstadt. At one point he managed two newspapers. He was a shoe-leather autodidact with enough grounding in the outer-borough ethos to know that fame was all bullshit, and a distraction. “Fame was never the goal. [You] can’t write while trying to be famous,” and he never forgot where he came from. But fame followed him and even during this lifetime, stories—legends—abounded.
In 1968 Hamill wrote a letter to Robert Kennedy, spelling out the reasons why he had to run for the presidency. RFK launched his campaign shortly thereafter and carried Hamill’s letter with him. Hamill was with Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel when he was shot. The letter would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Once, in a London bar called The Ad Lib Club, John Lennon, apparently not wanting an American to sit at his table, said to Hamill to “Why don’t you get the hell out of here.” The tough kid from Prospect Park replied, “Why don’t you make me?” Lennon said “What?” “I said, why don’t you try to make me leave?” Hamill answered. Lennon looked down at his drink and smiled. Hamill sat down. Later he would call Lennon “one of the bravest human beings I know.”
He was a war correspondent who filed dispatches from Vietnam, Nicaragua, Lebanon, and Northern Ireland. He covered civil rights in the South. He predicted what he called “the revolt of the white lower middle class” 47 years before the 2016 election.
When a powerful New York City real estate developer, who would later go on to become president, took out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty for the suspects in the Central Park Jogger case, Hamill punched back, writing:
“Snarling and heartless and fraudulently tough, insisting on the virtues of stupidity, it is the epitome of blind negation. Hate was just another luxury. And Trump stood naked, revealed as the spokesman for that tiny minority of Americans who lead well-defended lives. Forget poverty and its causes, forget the collapse of the manufacturing economy, forget the degradation and squalor of millions; fry them into passivity.” The Central Park Five were later exonerated.
But what about Hamill as a writer?
I have long had an interest in novelists who were also reporters—Defoe, Twain, Crane, London, Hemingway, Camus, and Mailer. I also admire reporters with the courage to tell the truth as they see it, even if I don’t always agree with their politics or outlook. Some of these are Andrew Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Chris Hedges, Diana Johnstone, and historically, George Seldes, Lincoln Steffens, Jack Reed, and Martha Gelhorn. Hamill checks both boxes.
A couple of years ago, with Philip Roth gone, I asked some friends if there were any great American writers of the old school left. Heller, Mailer, Updike, and Vidal were all gone. What about Pete Hamill? What I heard from him and others was that Hamill was a great, two-fisted journalistic stylist with little of his own to say. He was an impressive observer but, unlike Camus or Hemingway, there was no unique worldview or original take on things. The consensus, more or less, was that he was an earthy writer in the tradition of other New Yorkers like Liebling, Mailer, and Miller, but not a standalone literary philosopher and commentator on life. So I picked up a copy of his memoir about lower Manhattan, Downtown (essentially a long essay incorporating history with personal memory—an extended love sonnet in prose to a city he spent his life trying to know)—and found it to be rich with plenty to say about life and loss.
Hamill reads like a cross between Hemingway and a harder-edged version of Whitman. For many people, he was New York City personified. He combines Hemingway’s impressionistic realism with what one critic called the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (although otherworldly crossovers and the overlapping “in between times” are also distinctly, but not uniquely, Celtic). He has Whitman’s love for the cacophony of the city—the hive—and is an observer of the first rate with a reporter’s critical eye. He has Twain’s ability to see through shams, usually.
Some critics accused him of being too sentimental. Hamill counters this in Downtown by saying that the inevitable loss and change that NYC inflicts upon its people makes them embrace a deep and profound sense of “nostalgia”—the longing for important things lost or taken. By contrast, “sentimentality” is a superficial, often dishonest, emotion. As he puts it:
“The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Tuesday turns into Wednesday and something valuable is behind you forever. An ‘is’ becomes a ‘was.’ Whatever you have lost, you will not get it back: not that much-loved brother, not that ball club, not that splendid bar, not that place where you once went dancing with the person you later married. Irreversible change happens so often in New York that the experience affects the character itself. New York toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Sentimentality is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody mourns a lie.”
Not bad (and those of us who call Bethesda our home can certainly relate to the idea of a place being ruined by destruction in the name of “progress”). And yet I am not sure what to make of it and of the misty-eyed Heraclitus of the Bowery who wrote it. This gorgeous paragraph expresses the universal particularized in the cauldron and intensifier of change that is New York City. He raises love of place to a high faith of loss without the possibility of resurrection, outside of memory. But is his idea of nostalgia fresh and new in a profound way? We all know loss. We all mourn at the “shallow graves” of the recent past now and forever just beyond reach. Just as all matter is really stable energy, all people and things are verbs posing as nouns—physical processes destined to play themselves out, destined to succumb to the second law of thermodynamics. Heraclitus writes that reality is change, and we have all experienced the tyranny of the arrow of time and the capriciousness of life. But so what? Why seems it so particular with thee? Perhaps it is as simple as the realization that nostalgia is a sensibility of someone who has lived a rich and memorable live, and that changes is always dicey, even though, as Parmenides holds, it is inevitable. A future that is different from the past already exists and we are merely walking a path to it and through it in Einstein’s “stubbornly persistent illusion” of the present moment.
Is there a bigger idea here, like a view that human history, change, and progress is nothing more than the progress—the metastasis—of a Malthusian plague species? I don’t think so. It is all personal and proximate, didactic, and elegiac. After all, Hamill believes in and defends something like a Golden Age—the great window of opportunity and the parabolic curve called the postwar United States (again, particularized to New York), which was perfectly coterminous with Hamill’s career. And so we are left taking or leaving him on his own terms.
Hamill also metes out glimpses of his worldview in Ric Burn’s 1997 documentary series, New York. At one point he observes there is no definitive novel about the city in the same way that any number of Dickens’ novels capture London at a certain point of its history. He attributes this to New York’s ever changing “daily-ness” and “a sense of surprise” and concludes that the closest thing to The Great New York City Novel is a local daily newspaper. Perhaps this is why so much of his work is observational or descriptive rather than prescriptive, although there always seems to be a moral. He sees the city as embodying an ineffable kinetic chaos and the reality that “something is going to happen between here and 57th street and you’d better be ready for it.” He adds that “although [the city] insists on routine from a lot of its people, [it] knows that routine is a utopian goal.” Thus the experience of loss and change instills the expectation of new unexpected change. This is clearly realism, and he knows as well as anybody that in order to be vital, cities must also be dynamic.
Hamill’s worldview is too deeply rooted the 20th century, outer borough, son-of-an-immigrant ethos to be original. He is an interpreter-as-exemplar of a code rather than its inventor, and yet his insights and observations amount to insight and instances of originality (like the idea that New York is an “alloy” rather than the more traditional “melting pot” or “mixing bowl”). And for pure writing, nobody today, can touch his lean style. It is understandable that Hamill would embrace this ethos. As the grandson of outer borough immigrants myself, I know that this code can be overpowering in its simple virtues of duty and decency. What is the code? As Hamill puts it:
“Where I came from, the rules were relatively simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts. Never cross a picket line. Don’t look for trouble, because in New York you can always find it. But don’t back off either. Make certain that the old and weak are never in danger. Vote the straight ticket.” Okay, so it isn’t as original as the Hemingway Code’s blend of stoicism and Epicureanism, but it’s pretty damned good and in some ways better (the drinking life he abandoned not withstanding). And nobody ever distilled the code better than Hamill.2
But the Outer Borough Code is quickly passing into history, and is probably as dead in the outer boroughs as Henry Miller’s Yorkville accent is in Yorkville. It was killed off by cynicism born of moral complexity and material success. One of the changes in Greater New York since “those times” was the white flight of the upwardly mobile from the city during the 1970s and ’80s. People born in Brooklyn or Queens during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s are now senior citizens who likely spent recent decades in places like Westchester, Nassau County, and innumerable other places across the country. My family did. If you “made it,” you got out of the city. Many who left now “vote the straight ticket” for the other party, and embrace their own selective kind of nostalgia. The people who remained in the boroughs likely work gig jobs or else are the children of more recent arrivals with their own outlooks. In Brooklyn the children of suburbanites and rich professionals have come back to play at being consciously urban with no real connection to the area or its history or code.
I am not sure that Hamill realized that his staunch ethos may be gone for good. For although he refers to the “sustained purgatory” of New York after the 1960s, and loathed the predatory plutocratic wealth embodied by the super tall skyscrapers of the 21st century, he also wrote that “Somehow our luck held. We have lived long enough to see the city gather its will and energy and rise again, and its people playing by the old rules.” Hmm.
Of course nobody is perfect and Hamill might have been too accepting of then Mayor Giuliani’s law and order crackdowns in the 1990s and the “Disneyfication” of Times Square that helped make the city safe for tourists and the highest bidders. By contrast, as Jimmy Breslin observed in a 60 Minutes segment in 1997, “The city dies unless it’s got some dirt and a little raciness.” Given a choice between the corporate overlords and the prostitutes who used to occupy the area, he told Leslie Stahl, “I’ll take the hookers.” Hamil was well aware of his own contradictions and those of his fellow New Yorkers.
There is something fresh about the no-nonsense, see-through-the-bullshit reporting of Hamill and Breslin, something both painfully and numbingly missing in the homogenized reporting of today’s corporate media. This is to say nothing of the vile propaganda and political entertainment that so many Americans mistake for news. Division is good for business, and when the purpose of the news is profit and manipulation, then the free press is more or less dead.
I came to Hamill’s work relatively late in life. I never met him. All history and biography is selective and my observations are selective, haphazard, secondhand, and incomplete. But to me Hamill was somehow both a univeralist and a tribalist: the city was his territory, but it included all races therein as a universal type, the single category of human beings with all of our differences. He was a progressive in the old sense of the term denoting the tough-guy looking out for the little guy and who fought for simple fairness. At times one senses in him an undercurrent of first-generation, working class conservatism bleeding through his observations in a similar way that old money matrons, new money couples, and prep school boys are seldom the good guys on Law and Order: SVU.
When I heard that Hamill was in failing health back in late January, I sent an email to the members of a book club I belong to suggesting that we read Downtown sooner rather than later. Sometimes we are able to get authors to call in to our meetings, and the possibility of speaking with Pete Hamill would have been a coup. It is now seems like a that I had drafted and was about to send a follow up email when I heard the news that he had died. I was also rereading Downtown.
With Hamill’s death, “something valuable is behind [us] forever.” But as with other things lost, the memory of him remains. I suspect that his journalism and reminiscences will be remembered more than his fiction; if there is no Great New York Novel—if a local newspaper is its closest approximation—then it follows that a reporter must be its greatest writer. As with the Brooklyn Dodgers and all things loved and lost, we must let him go, although we may speak his name with nostalgia. Without devolving into bathos (the kind of word Breslin hated), perhaps the lesson is that brave new generations should not be too quick to dismiss the tears of “weepy old men” when they speak of a better past and provide plausible reasons for it.
His 2003 novel, Forever, is about an Irishman who comes to Manhattan in 1740 and is granted immortality by a dead African priestess on the condition that he never leaves the island. Perhaps that Irishman was Hamill himself, because in 2016, he left his beloved Emerald City and moved back to Brooklyn where he now rests a few feet from Boss Tweed, another larger than life New Yorker.
Notes
- Of course there is a danger in romanticizing or living in the past. Poor Richard chides that “The Golden Age was never the present age,” and Jay Gatsby could not repeat even the superficial details of his own past much less improve upon them. All borough hagiographies should be weighed against darker and more gritty accounts. Hubert Selby’s 1964 Last Exit to Brooklyn and even the artful blend of nostalgia and realism in Chazz Palminteri’s Manichaeist A Bronx Tale are good tonics against uncritical outer borough myth-making (so is Hamill’s own A Drinking Life). After all, primary purpose of history is to embrace what was good about the past and what worked, while learning what did not work and why.
- There is overlap between the Hemingway Code and the Outer Borough Code. Hamill states “The only unforgivable sin was self-pity” in both A Drinking Life (p. 184) and Downtown (p. 8).