Tabloid City

A conversation with Pete Hamill

Pete Hamill’s apartment is a New York bibliophile’s dream. It has high ceilings, wall-to-wall books (loosely organized by global region), and priceless natural light. When I arrive to talk with him about his latest novel, Tabloid City, he apologizes for not having any coffee to offer, explaining that his wife, the novelist Fukiko Aoki, is currently in Japan. (She is apparently the coffee lover of the two.) I tell him that “it’s cool” and also that “water will be fine.” And it is.

Hamill’s book takes place in a manic twenty-four-hour span in present-day New York City, and it’s a singularly bad day for newspaper editor Sam Briscoe. His beloved newspaper is being turned into a website, the love of his life has met with horrible tragedy, and the city is changing faster than he can adapt to, even assuming he wants to. Add to that the threat of an imminent terrorist attack and a vindictive blogger, and you have the makings of a tabloid experience in novel form, something that Hamill, the lifelong newspaperman, knows a little something about.

On your website, you describe yourself as a generalist and not a specialist. This book, Tabloid City, seems to encapsulate many of your diverse interests, including newspapers, art, comics, and New York. You’ve reported on many of these things throughout your career, so what’s the benefit of putting them into fiction for you?

Well, obviously one great advantage of fiction over journalism is the great difference between them. Fiction is an act of the imagination. I can go into the interior lives of people, which I can’t do in journalism. I can’t do that. People can tell me what their internal lives might be, or suggest them, but people lie, too. [Laughs.] And so as a journalist, you’re always skeptical about what people tell you. In this particular novel, I did use the tools of journalism. It’s a cliché about suspending the reader’s disbelief by getting the reportable world down as accurately as possible. And then within that, getting the imaginative sense of these characters, who can be anything — they can be composites, they can be lives that are suggested by people you knew long ago but who are dead and gone — you can take parts of their character and use them the way you want to. And that’s why I think so many journalists do eventually write fiction. Stephen Crane, Charles Dickens, Hemingway, and a whole slew of other much greater writers than I am. But they learned something from the journalism about its limitations. And then you try to use fiction to make some of that work in a believable way. So that’s what I try to do.

So Sam Briscoe, now that he’s retiring from newspapers, is going to go write a novel?

[Laughs.] I think he’s going to Paris with the rest of the people. Get a little night rewrite at the Paris Herald Tribune. There’s only about four people left on the staff. No, I think because it’s twenty-four hours, and the two most important things in his life have ended — this woman that he has been together with for more than twenty years, and the newspaper. And at seventy-one, he’s not going to go apply for jobs anywhere. He just won’t do that. I think he’ll go out and read books…

Is it safe to say that there is a fair amount of Pete Hamill in Sam Briscoe?

Sure. But there is also a fair amount of me in the Mexican immigrant from Sunset Park. The old Madame Bovary “C’est moi” effect that all fiction writers are conscious of. But some of the biography is different, obviously. Sam grew up in Manhattan, I grew up in Brooklyn. His father is Jewish, my father is Belfast Catholic. He’s younger than I am. But also, part of Sam’s character comes from people I knew. Most importantly, Paul Sann, who was the editor of the [New York] Post when I started, in 1960. I remember so clearly one day. Paul’s wife had died just hours before. She was someone he loved deeply. You could tell when you saw them together. It was the small things. Like no New Yorker proclaims how much he loves his wife in public. If he does, we know he’s cheating. And Paul came in to the paper, and I was there, and I saw him walk to his desk, sit down, and write the story of her life and death. Then he checked what was going in the paper and went home. It was a lesson to me as a kid that you can’t escape personal tragedy. And my guy, when he gets the news, he knows that he has to put out the paper too. It’s two murders at a good address, and that’s one of the staples of tabloid journalism.

Briscoe and his coworker Helen Loomis are two characters in the book that have extreme nostalgia for the way things were. Helen especially, who fondly remembers the days before baseball was “played by millionaires for millionaires…”

Me too! [Laughs.] She’s a little of me too.

Well, how much of that nostalgia is rooted in reality? Did the newsroom really use to look like something out of His Girl Friday?

You know what the best newspaper movie of that era is? Deadline — U.S.A. with Humphrey Bogart. I think it’s the best newspaper movie, followed by His Girl Friday and All the President’s Men, and some of the others. Sweet Smell of Success. But when I first [started working at a newspaper], I thought I had gone to heaven. It was rowdy; it was obscene. Nobody got paid enough money, so that they couldn’t move to the suburbs even if they wanted. It was essentially a bohemian trade. A guy would get drunk, throw a typewriter out the window, and go up the block and work for the Journal American. There was a way to do that. The word you used, “nostalgia,” is exactly right for that. Because I feel nostalgia is a genuine emotion. It’s not sentimentality, which is a different thing. Nostalgia is an ache for the things that are gone, that actually existed and that you experienced. I don’t care about any concept of heaven. I was in it. And it was awful in some ways. Nobody had enough money. The Post in those days was on 75 West Street, and they had no air-conditioning. And right across the river, before there was a Battery Park City, there were the United Fruit Piers. So you had the most giant mosquitoes in the history of mankind float into the city room if you’re working nights, and you’d type and slap all night long.

Glamorous existence, that.

Yeah. I didn’t want to go to bed.

Briscoe would rather retire than work for the new website. Is there any kind of fundamental difference in a writer’s approach to publishing on the Internet and publishing in a paper?

No. I think writing is writing. There’s a difference between writing a tweet and writing for a newspaper, but that’s like trying to learn haiku or something. But I don’t think there’s a difference. What I tell the students over at NYU, where I talk about craft, is that the piano didn’t write the music, Mozart did. You have to write at the top of your talent, and it has to be right.

I think what’s going to happen — we’re seeing it now — is the professionalization of Internet journalism. I’m for the [New York] Times or the Wall Street Journal charging for people to have access. This is not a public service. You have to pay money to send someone to Afghanistan. But I’m reasonably optimistic, having seen a lot of these kids at NYU. They have the passion. They want to have lives that are not about making ten million dollars. They’re not saying “Gee, if I could only learn to write this sentence better I’d be famous.” They’re not driven by that. They want to have meaningful lives.

I noticed that you have old comic strips on your wall. I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but aren’t you a little old for comics?

Well, I don’t keep up! I don’t sit around and talk about the greatest new manga that just came out or anything like that. But they’ve played a big part in my life. You can see I have all of these original cartoons on the wall. But they were an entryway for me to get into newspapers, because I was a follower of the daily comic strips in the age of the narrative. There’s still a part of me that when I’m laying out a story, I think [the way] comic book artists do. It was no accident that Updike was a comic freak when he was a kid. Vonnegut, other people. That’s how they started reading.

What are your writing habits like?

It depends on what stage I’m at, because, particularly with fiction, I write longhand. And that was part of getting the journalism out of my hands. It was an accidental discovery thirty-odd years ago. Because I was doing both for a long time. The two ways I dealt with the split were, first, a nap. When I’m finished with the journalism, take a nap and somehow the subconscious starts to make the shift for you. But I’ll write four or five pages longhand, and then I’ll go to the computer and transcribe them, which gives me a second draft. And then sometimes momentum carries me another four or five pages. The longhand was the key to it, though. It felt more like a handmade thing.