THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST WAS: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, by Andrew Durbin
Group biographies are growing all around us. Some are bouquets. Others are underweeded gardens.
Andrew Durbin’s beguiling new book, “The Wonderful World That Almost Was,” plucks two intertwined flowers from very trampled terrain: the midcentury art scene as it edged into the increasing commercialization and decimation of the 1980s.
One is Peter Hujar. He is the photographer most known for his 1963 black and white image of a tortured-looking “Orgasmic Man,” used on the cover of Hanya Yanagihara’s best-selling novel “A Little Life,” and for “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed,” a highly stylized 1973 portrait of the transgender actress and Warhol superstar that made its way into major museums. (A recent movie portrayed his friendship with the writer Linda Rosenkrantz.)
The other is Paul Thek, the painter and sculptor who produced provocative “meat pieces” inspired by catacombs in Sicily, and cast his own body for “The Tomb” (1967), widely and perhaps incorrectly presumed to be an effigy of the hippie.
For 20 years the two men were variously friends, lovers, “brothers, with an intimacy such that sex was hardly the most important thing,” collaborators and sort-of antagonists. They were born a year apart and died a year apart, both of AIDS, while in their early 50s, and this parallel gives their story a compressed, urgent momentum. (And, when other Peters and Pauls enter the chat, an occasional confusion.)
Named after one of the many notebooks Thek kept, “The Wonderful World” is a study of their art (Durbin, a novelist, is also the editor of Frieze magazine); their shifting social circle, which included Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon; and the unconventional, partly hidden forms that love can take.
Most significantly, the two men formed a shaky tripod with Susan Sontag. Thek slept with her, proposed marriage and gave her the title to the influential 1964 essay “Against Interpretation.” Hujar photographed her for his collection of “Portraits in Life and Death,” which included shots from the catacombs.
Thek was erratic, frenetic and often broke; Hujar “known among friends for his almost eerie capacity for stillness and self-control,” Durbin writes. “When he sat in Susan Sontag’s famously squeaky rocking chair, it never made a sound.”
Hopscotching to various colorful idylls — Coral Gables, Fla.; Ponza, Italy; tiny Oakleyville in the magical Sunken Forest of Fire Island — and roosting in Rome, Amsterdam, Germany and “the dreary gunmetal gray of Manhattan,” the book has some of the heady air of a Paul Theroux travelogue. It’s a vacation without leaving your own rocking chair.
Durbin has done his homework, and seems to have enjoyed it. Along with the notebooks, he mines correspondence, tapes, classics of criticism; other people’s papers and archives, clippings — Thek used newspapers as canvases — photographs and interviews.
Every time a live quote from Fran Lebowitz pops up you want to stuff another dollar in the author’s glass. “I was reading a book about the Holocaust, and there was a Nazi general named Hujar,” she recalls of Peter’s search for his father. “I brought the book to show him. ‘Don’t long for your father. He was probably related to this guy. ’”
Durbin doesn’t dwell on the biological families they fled to form the “coteries and tribes” that became one of Hujar’s fascinations. But Paul was born George Joseph Thek in Brooklyn — one friend thought he changed his name to avoid the association with Georgia Tech — and grew up in Floral Park, L.I. His own father was uncomfortable around the son peers identified early as a “sissy boy,” and his mother was a neglectful alcoholic.
Peter was raised first by Ukrainian grandparents on a farm in New Jersey, which gave him an E.B. White-like relationship to animals. (Lebowitz: “If you look at those pictures of cows, they look like people.”) His mother, a waitress who eventually remarried a bookie named Snookie, drank too, but warmed to one of Peter’s early lovers, the painter Joseph Raffael, as a kind of second son and source of intellectual enrichment.
Paul and Peter don’t meet in a thunderbolt but rather drift together and apart. As Hujar connected intuitively to animals, so did Thek to the ocean. (“He was always the first one to the beach and the last to leave,” remembers one friend.) Like Yves Klein and Pablo Picasso, he had a signature blue. Unlike them, his name is faded denim.
Both men were averse to schmoozing — “they abhorred the cocktail circuit”— and ambivalent about posterity. Photography was not yet accepted fully as art when Hujar was doing it; Thek had a special knack for temporary installations.
“They were obsessed with death, and if they can be said to have shared a subject, it was almost certainly death,” Durbin writes. But his “Wonderful World” is a proper resurrection, fertile and vivacious.
THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST WAS: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek | By Andrew Durbin | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 496 pp. | $36
Alexandra Jacobs is a Times book critic and occasional features writer. She joined The Times in 2010.
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