The Help Me Through
Some times life glows.
I hope I have helped even a fraction of the people who’ve helped me in my life. At every stage. Always, always, a hand has reached out from behind a curtain, through a fog, at the corner of an accidental turn. Help from a person or a new experience that has swept me to another way of seeing. Every day I look back—and that’s what I do when I write, I look back, even if it’s to five minutes ago—every day I look back, I’m rebuilding my life in retrospect. Richard’s granddad and grandmother owned a pub in Bury, Lancashire, where Richard’s family lived for a while, starting around 1955, before they moved to a house outside Liverpool. The pub was called the “Help Me Through the World,” and it was mostly referred to as the “Help-me through.”
As soon as I heard the name of this pub, I loved it, and I loved its significance to Richard. Bury was where he knew his great uncle Freddie, who, after serving in World War 1, had spent his life working in a steel mill. Freddie loved children, especially Richard, who was five when he moved to Bury. Everyone loved Richard. Richard was born with a gene for charming people. Freddie was Richard’s guide from his life in Leicester, that was situated in the 20th Century, to Bury, that was pretty much still a Victorian world with soot-blackened brick houses, gas lamps in the streets, and horse-drawn wagons to deliver goods. Freddie spoke a Lancashire dialect with “thy”s,“thou”s, and “thine”s. He stood with Richard on a hill overlooking the town and said, “Count the chimneys, remember the way they look, our Bud, because there won’t be a one of them left soon.”
The other night we watched Uncropped (Amazon), a documentary about the photographer James Hamilton, directed by D. W. Young. The connection between this film and the pub is that life sometimes glows. A sweetness rises off Jim, who thinks about his experiences in a front-row seat of the past fifty years, a sweetness rises up as he moves around his apartment in the city and his house in the Hamptons. That sweetness smiles at the edges of his photographs. It’s the joy you see on the faces of the people he shot. They are happy to see him and hear his astonishingly even-pitched voice express a thrill at meeting them. It’s a beautiful film and slyly comic, the way Jim’s photos are, although he can also find the formal, classical dimension in a drive-by shot of a lonely bit of road out a car window.
I love the way the film shows the oddball, accidental roll of a life, moving from this job and that job at various publications—for a very long time he and Sylvia Plachy were staff photographers at the Village Voice. It also shows how, once Jim knows he’s an artist, he doesn’t need to know a lot more to shape a life or move out of the apartment he found in the 1960s, where he still develops film in his bathroom.
Starting in the 1960s, he chronicled the vast creativity in reporting and narrative writing that burst from newspapers and magazines before corporate control chased this energy elsewhere. He’s still producing images with his own unflappable vision. On gigs with writers, he’s mostly with men, mostly men talk in the film, mostly Jim mentions men as collaborators. He is a person looking for connection. It’s people he’s after, whether shooting wars, or fashion, or food. Men fall in love with his even-tempered presence that doesn’t ask for reassurance or love.
There’s a moment in the film when one of the talking heads remembers that everyone was attracted to Jim, and they were. He was good looking and talented and he had a who are you, oh wait, you’re gone already quality about him. He mentions he didn’t hang out at the Voice. He’d deliver his work and be off to whatever was next.
How does he know when to click what he sees, and how does he know he’s seeing something worth clicking? There’s so much pleasure in the way these questions are unanswerable. A lot of his art is in finding the moment he’s looking for in the pile-up of clicked images.
If you want a taste in words for the sly, unruffled wit of Jim’s outlook on life, maybe it’s his quip recalling his mental state after being hit by a car in 2009. He’s lying in the street, and his foot is just about detached from his leg, and in this period he’s having a terrible time at the paper he’s at. He’s lying there, wondering if he’ll be able to walk again, and he says, “My first thought was, at least I won’t have to work at the Observer again.”
One of the most loving and animated talking heads in Uncropped is Richard Goldstein, who worked closely with Jim at the Voice and was at the paper all the time I wrote there for roughly twenty-five years, starting in 1974. In the doc, Richard G. evokes the Voice as a contained collision he couldn’t get enough of, and this is exactly the way he operated in my memory. Never for one moment did he take for granted the pleasure of being at the party everyone wanted to be at.
The other day we were texting, and he was looking back at a floating state of insecurity—would they let him stay or boot him out? I never knew he felt this way or anyone other than me felt this way. The thing I want to tell you is how much Richard G. helped me and a zillion other writers. For a while he was editing the TV section, and I liked writing about TV, obviously. We’d stay in the office pretty late, and somehow, no matter where we started, the talk would turn to sex and how it was a tide pool inside you, you never knew what would swim up.
When I think about the people who helped me at the Voice, the paper looks like a great, smiling nod of “sure.” You want to write about that? Why not! You think that’s a good idea. Give it a shot. I started at the paper writing about books because I had been a graduate student at Columbia and had read a lot of books. Eliot Fremont-Smith first took my hand and said, “Sure.” Then, for decades it was M. Mark, who launched and edited the Voice Literary Supplement that came out every month as a section of the paper. As an editor, M. was smart, without being handsy. Isn’t that the dream editor everyone wants? Oy, and the food. This girl could take you out fancy, always ending with a tower of profiteroles.
Often in the morning, in search of prompts, I cruise old files on my computer, and the other day I happened upon memories of Swatonah, the summer camp I went to for ten summers in the 1950s. The memories were collected from former campers in 2012, ahead of a reunion I didn’t attend. The other morning when I read the reminiscences, a world came flooding back, a world of help and wonder and freedom so vast it laughs at the measly efforts of language to convey it.
Swatonah was situated in the Pocono Mountains, north and west of New York City. It took about four hours to drive there. In reading the notes, I recognized a physical place, a culture, and a feeling state of great value to so many girls and that I think is mostly lost or invisible in our current time. Inside me, this museum of values remains visible in everything I write.
A quick thing I can tell you is I was happier in this place than anywhere else, and this is a reflection very largely shared by others who went to Swatonah. In my case, I loved being part of a society rather than the littlest one in my family, where, too, I was jealous all the time of the close bond between my mother and my sister. Camp was the larger world, I somehow understood, and if you wait long enough, I told myself, you will live in the larger world, where you will have to fend for yourself but where, too, you won’t be the “Laurie” you are in the family.
Something else that comes quickly to mind it was a world of little girls and bigger girls. It was an empire of girls for two months each summer. The boys’ camp, Swago, was across the lake, and we would see the boys at “socials,” but our daily world of playing sports and coming to know each other in our bunk groups, this was all girls, and it was a freshness that smelled of the baby oil we used to tan our skin. A freshness and centrality of us. Who knew how precious this time apart would be? Why was it precious? Because in the larger world, where we spent the rest of the year, we were made to understand we were not important. We were easy to disregard as serious individuals, and we felt it. We felt it all the time, and it depressed us in ways we had no words for then.
In the notes on Swatonah, often there is mention of Clem, who ruled the waterfront, “magnificent in her tank suit and never without her megaphone,” in the memory of one former camper. Suddenly, Clem is in the room with me—butch and sleek. Is she butch? That’s what comes back in memory, and just as suddenly this sentence forms: All butch women are astronauts.
In the two novels I’ve read by Constance Debré, Playboy and Love Me Tender, the narrator, who is butch and slender and all pared down to white shirts and jeans, the narrator with her closely cropped head and swagger reports she can get any woman she wants, gay or straight, into bed. She calls them “girls,” the ones who sleep with her, and it takes nothing. All she has to do is look at them and they fold. What a shocker. I mean, duh.
I’m four or five my first summer at Swatonah. My sister is there, but I’m not with her. I’m in J bunk, short for junior bunk, and I’m a balled fist of curiosity, same as now. I don’t know what exactly I think of Clem in those days or of the other counselors who are butch. We don’t have that term. It exists, but I don’t know it. I don’t know anything, in the same way an animal knows everything through its senses. I love butch women to pieces. I follow them with my eyes. The way they walk with a rolling gait. The way their t-shirts are rolled above their biceps.
The attraction of butch women and butch girls—and there are butch girls at camp—the attraction of butch females, whether they sleep with girls or with boys, and often you can’t tell who they sleep with unless they tell you, the attraction to me of butch girls is oh my god, what a relief, how cool is that. Do you want to be Madame Butterfly or Amelia Earhart? That is always the question. They both die, but one stabs herself with her father’s sword after her husband abandons her, marries a white girl, and lays claim to her baby. Amelia goes down in her plane, never to be seen again, in a blaze of whatever, looking amazing in her leather jacket, little leather flying hood, and cool cropped hair. Every butch woman is an astronaut, off to planet next, planet not here, planet where we make ourselves real. No help beats that.
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Gosh. I was happiest ever at girls’ summer camp too, and everything you say
about Swatonah is exactly true—“an empire of girls for two months each summer”—just it was Minokemeg in the Wisconsin north woods. It was paradise. The camp director was, I guess you’d say butch, but to us she was just this dark deep well of androgynous authority in a captain’s hat. I adored her abjectly. At least most of the counselors were gay, but we knew almost nothing of it; they were just happy to be free in their own world with each other, and they worked very hard (I realized only later) to give us this marvelous latency-period adventure, like something out of Robin Hood. When it was time to go home to our various midwestern cities, it was traditional to write each other “train letters” and cry buckets.
Another great line, Laurie: "Every butch woman is an astronaut, off to planet next, planet not here, planet where we make ourselves real."