Peter Hujar and Paul Thek: Reborn

On Andrew Durbin's The Wonderful World That Almost Was

The tone of Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, a dual biography of the artists Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, is authoritative, sophisticated, and bracingly unsentimental, even tart. Durbin takes large risks here with structure and emphasis, giving us just a taste of their childhoods and dealing with their deaths in an epilogue; what really ensorcells him is their young adulthood, their twenties and thirties, when they were a golden couple in the underground artistic world of Manhattan in the early 1960s.

Durbin is the author of two novels, MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020), and he brings a novelistic imagination to this biography, which he researched over a five-year period; it is clear that he is so steeped in his subject that he can tell you if drinks were watered down at a certain bar or even what a club smelled of as you walked in. Durbin will not only tell you that Susan Sontag owned a rocking chair that squeaked, but that when Hujar rocked in it he somehow managed to not make a sound, and this granular amount of detail always reveals something about the characters in the book.

Sontag dedicated her name-making collection Against Interpretation (1966) to Thek, who gave her its title, and her author photo was taken by Hujar. This was a period when Sontag, Thek, and Hujar were hanging out all the time, talking, laughing, and going out dancing. Durbin makes you understand this earlier hedonistic Sontag so that when the more-familiar imperious Sontag surfaces in the 1970s, driving off after a shared airline flight with Thek and leaving him stunned in the lurch, it has an impact the way it would in a novel. Sontag is quoted here saying “perhaps with some chagrin” that Thek would likely be only a footnote in art history, but of course she was famous for changing her mind.

Characters sometimes come alive in this biography for two-or-so colorful pages, like the bold sexual adventuress Felicity Mason, who was both matron and vixen. Here is how Durbin describes Steve Lawrence, who would collaborate with Hujar on a visual publication called Newspaper: “Lawrence was tall, with a narrow face bewitched by acne scars that snagged his natural handsomeness with something boyish and arresting.” Note the unusual use of the verb “bewitched” here, the way Durbin makes Lawrence seem to stand in front of us in one evocative sentence. This is how he describes Andy Warhol, for whom both Thek and Hujar sat for screen tests: “What Warhol divulged was the guts of his era, the squirming insatiable human desire to be seen and to be known and to be wanted and to be loved, and how terribly empty, how terribly sad all that attention could be. It might even kill you.” That last little rhythmic sentence is like the flash of a knife.

It sometimes feels like Durbin, through sheer concentration, has managed to somehow enter this past so that he can introduce the people there like a host at a party, and he often treats them with a winningly dry humor. Part of this conjuring act comes from how Durbin intimately understands the period he is writing about and its attitudes, so there is none of that tiresome worry and explanation so common now in biographies. There is a degree of obsessiveness here in the writing that matches the obsessiveness of Hujar and Thek when it came to their work. (The word “feral” for Durbin seems to be a term of approbation.) Cult figures in their own lifetimes, Hujar is now the better known of the two because his photographs can be easily discussed, exhibited, and shared, whereas Thek’s own sculptures, paintings, and installations were often lost to time.

The cover of the book, which shows Thek and Hujar in swimsuits early in their relationship, is extremely alluring, so much so that when the biography was first announced I printed the cover and put it on my desk. In staring at it (very happily) for a while, what finally strikes me is the tilt of Thek’s head, the slight squirmy-cuddly angling of his body, next to Hujar’s straight posture and uncharacteristically sunny smile. Though he was neglected in his lifetime and had a temper that limited his opportunities, Hujar is seen in Durbin’s book as practically a savvy networker when compared to Thek, who could never seem to stay in one place for long and who gradually descended into something like madness. Hujar accepted his own sexuality while Thek, who was raised Catholic, had a self-defeating longing for marriage that no woman could believe in for long.

Hujar’s work gains more fame by the minute; do an image search and you can see why. When he photographed Fran Lebowitz (a close friend) or John Waters, they were still youthful strivers, but now they are luckily both beloved cultural institutions who can talk Hujar up very excitingly. Nearly all of Hujar’s models seem to understand what he is looking for, which seems to me a curious in-between mode where the mask of their persona is just halfway off. (In the photos of Waters, he is doing the Hujar look better than just about anybody else, and that look seems to be Sexy Corpse.) In his best-known photo of Sontag, she is stretched out on her back, all image, the Dark Lady of Letters, yet search out his contact sheet from that session and you can see her trying out campy poses (back of hand to head) and even staring into the camera at Hujar with what looks like a direct appeal of love.

It seems fitting to end this piece on a description of Hujar’s last photo session with Thek. It was 1975, and Hujar was getting photos together for a book that Sontag was doing the introduction for. He and Thek had been on the outs for a while; they had a lot of damage between them, and at a certain point there was one insult too many. The photo of Thek below is so beautiful to me in its desperation, its scream of finality. And Durbin twists the knife by quoting a letter that Thek wrote Hujar afterward when he was in a more reflective and reasonable mood than usual: “Any time you want to make love, just ask me,” Thek wrote. In this one line, Thek strikes a note of true Greenwich Village religion, the wonderful world that was where love at its best was free.