Stephen Koch

Book lovers who are convinced that civilization is coming to an end got one more reason to pound the table last week when the Washington Post announced that it will shut down its freestanding book supplement, Book World, and fold its reviews and coverage into other parts of the paper. That is not good news, and when I heard it I gave that well-pounded table a couple of good, solid whacks myself. I began my career writing reviews; I have often reviewed and been reviewed in Book World. I count as a friend the dynamic Michael Dirda, who was for many years the force behind the supplement. (Happily, Michael will keep on writing his wonderful book column for the Post; the paper will continue to publish an abundance of reviews; and—very revealingly—Book World will appear as usual on line.)  The National Books Critic’s Circle has greeted the news of Book World’s demise with an orchestrated chorus of outrage, to which I join my voice, which only yesterday cursed the closing of the New York Sun and the end of what was—hands-down—the best coverage of the arts I have ever encountered in any newspaper. Morning coffee will never again reach the heights it knew with Adam Kirsch and Francis Morrone and Eric Ormsby were on my breakfast table.

Yet I for one do not see civilization coming to an end quite yet.

Is it too banal to point out that all journalism—certainly including literary journalism—is right now in the process of transformation? Is it complacent to notice that this is not necessarily all bad?  The truth is that journalism’s two prime tasks in civil society—disseminating information and shaping opinion—have never been more lively in this country than they are at this moment.   To cite my old classmate and contemporary Bob Dylan, (if anybody wants to hear, someday I’ll fill you in on Dylan and me) whatever’s not busy being born is busy dying. People are coming to books very differently than they did in 1975, or 1995, but they are coming to books, and through changes in technology and the critical vocabulary that represent a vast democratization of the discourse that nothing can stop. It’s true, we don’t know where we’re going, and most what’s done swims in a shore-less and smelly sea of mediocrity. But speaking as somebody who was around in 1975, take it from me, the sea of mediocrity was also shore-less in the good old days, and it didn’t smell one bit sweeter.

Meanwhile, much is much better. I can get to a Michael Dirda column (and his archives) in seconds. There was a time when months would pass between American publication of a piece or review by the superb Clive James—for my money, the best all-round cultural journalist now writing in English. I can now check in with Clive James—see, hear and read him—any time I want. I have his books endlessly to reread; but I also have his delicious television interviews, and his current commentary, not just the stuff from the big guns but easy throwaways like his recent musing on K.D. Lang and Roy Orbison. I count easy access to www.clivejames.com  as something less than the end of civilization.

Journalism is dying right now because it is being reborn. This is as it should be.  Some of the changes make me sick and others make my heart leap with anticipation. Any transformation is both a birth and a death. That can be scary, and sometimes I’m scared too. Just remember: Longinus—who was appraising books even before me—understood that fear is an aspect of the sublime.

So-Book World, (print version), fond farewell. We saw some sweet times together, didn’t we?

Mike Dirda—don’t miss a pitch.

Clive James—take it to the limit one more time.

And everyone else, repeat after me: There were no good old days.

Peter Hujar is turning into history. The man I knew has become his art, and the art is spinning off a set of myths, some based in fact, some not.

Meanwhile, I gape at this statistic: If he’d lived, Peter would now be seventy-five. What hits me hardest about the throngs coming through his exhibitions is their youth. Not one fan in fifty is Peter’s own generation. Most were children when he died; there are six-footers assessing Candy Darling on her Deathbed (pictured below), who in 1987 hadn’t even been born. For them, Peter Hujar is his art.

But more and more they want to know his story.  Here’s a start.

Peter was rooted in the now-vanishing mean Manhattan streets of his beloved Weegee. His father was a small-time bootlegger; his stepfather was a small-time bookie; his mother was a waitress in a small-time diner. It was all very Damon Runyon stuff, and it stayed with him to the end.

Even the story behind his loft on Twelfth Street and Second Avenue, (later David Wojnarowicz’s studio) could come from Guys and Dolls.  It was originally the rehearsal space the once-famous “Yiddish Art Theater,” where the very young Marx Brothers, still “Minnie’s boys,” rehearsed in the same room where Peter did his great Portrait of T.C. (pictured below. T.C., herself, by the way, was a stripper.) Peter moved in during the seventies, when it was vacated by its sixties occupant, the Warhol drag star Jackie Curtis. Jackie, in turn, was in the loft through the good offices of his grandmother, a neighborhood legend known as “Slugger Ann,”  who had spent the thirties as a dime-a-dance girl in Times Square, picking up her nickname from what she did to dime-a-dancers who got a little too friendly during the slow tunes. After that, for three decades, Slugger ran a bar —”Slugger Ann’s”—kitty-corner from the loft, where she held court and micromanaged everything semi-legal (like lofts) in the neighborhood, while her grandson Jackie went from being a toddler on the barroom floor to perverse fame in Andy Warhol’s entourage.

A classic merger of Manhattan high and low. Like Peter himself.

Hujar’s early childhood was grim. The bootlegger father abandoned the waitress mother without a penny while she was pregnant. Since Rose Hujar couldn’t work keep her job in the diner and raise her son alone, she left Peter in the care of her Ukrainian mother and father on their farm in New Jersey. There Peter was at first protected by his grandmother from a passel of other relatives he remembered as a pack of screaming, ignorant, drunken, lust-and-greed driven brutes who robbed him of the natural happiness of being a little boy and filled him with a child’s resolve—later the grown man’s resolve—never, never, never to think, feel, live or breathe like any of them.

And he didn’t. The man I knew was deliberate, observant, reserved, very smart, slow to speak, a little severe; a blend of intimacy and distance for which the camera was a perfect metaphor. His manner was studied but completely unaffected. He was really incapable of phoniness. I never once saw him fake anything, and that alone made him innately elegant. The horror of New Jersey was concealed beneath the surface, an unstoppable undercurrent of anger.

The farm had one saving grace. When he was around ten, Peter was given a Brownie camera. The kid was ecstatic and—innovative from minute one—used it to take pictures of cows out in the fields. Not incidentally, Hujar kept photographing cows for the rest of his life…

As many critics have pointed out, Hujar’s animal pictures are portraits. I’d add that they are often self-portraits. The man saw himself in their faces.

That fateful Brownie was probably a gift from Peter’s mother Rose. She would often appear on the farm with a little gift for her boy. They practically gave Brownies away in those days, and those gifts mattered.

Rose spent a lifetime being bitter over all sorts of things, not least the trap motherhood had sprung on her. Was that understandable? Sure. Yet some people can get past bitterness. Rose couldn’t—and that made her an impossible mother, unable to love a son who became, in his entirely different way, impossible. (Okay. Difficult.) Mother and son were opposites with much in common. Whatever love Rose once felt for Peter slowly hardened into something grotesque, and Peter’s reciprocal bitterness about Rose—defeated love, grief indistinguishable from rage—was depthless.  Everything conspired to wreck their bond. By the end, there was nothing left but the wreckage. 

And talk about distance! Rose retired to the Bronx, but it might have been Timbuktu. When Peter became sick, she did not visit. When he was dying, she did not come. When we offered to send a car to bring her to and from his funeral mass, she said no.

Years before, when some of Peter’s work had been given a glowing review in the New York Times, he’d called Rose to tell her that he was being discussed as an important artist in America’s newspaper of record and suggested she might want to take a look. She answered in a voice of solid ice, “Peter, you know perfectly well that I don’t read the Times.”

How Hujar, around age eleven, made the transition from the sodden farm to Manhattan, and how he broke through to his destiny as an artist must be stories for another time.

Until next week!