Summary

### The Mythic 70s

Painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s, a wide-eyed art student hungry for experience and game for almost anything. The city he entered was a landscape of dark industrial streets, deserted alleyways, and thriving underworld clubs like the Mudd Club. It was a place where barriers of taste and decorum were evaporating, and the youth culture was defined by a riot of glam rock, punk energy, and naked ambition. Hannah, who was outrageously and androgynously beautiful, fit perfectly into this scene. He attracted the attention of prominent gay scenesters who found his adamant heterosexuality a source of immense frustration, while his foppish style made him a target for street thugs. Yet, he navigated this world with a prodigious appetite for everything the city offered, drugs, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, and parties.

This book, Twentieth-Century Boy, is not a polished memoir looking back with the rose tint of nostalgia. It is a direct transcript of the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade. As a result, it reads with the immediacy of a report from the front lines. There is no hindsight in these entries, only the reflection of seconds or hours after an incident happened. The reader experiences the adventures as they unfold, witnessing the author grow from a seventeen-year-old junior in high school to a twenty-eight-year-old man in 1981. It is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining account of a now almost mythical time and place. Critics have described it as a gallery of the louche, the lurid, and the illuminating, and as the Dead Sea Scrolls of a mythological Lower Manhattan underground.

Life on the Edge

The journals are propelled by a narrative of sex, alcohol, and the boldface names of the punk rock era. Hannah documents life on the finer line of carving out an identity as an artist while risking self-destruction. The pages are filled with gritty, evocative memories of bad behavior that borders on the hallucinogenic. He recounts waking up from a blackout in a psych ward under the name Modigliani, starting an evening on the Upper West Side and waking up twelve hours later in Chicago with no recollection of leaving his apartment, and being attacked by Jamaican teenagers with machetes in Scotland.

The anecdotes pile up like scenes from a movie. He was mugged at knife point on East 3rd Street, fell for a sweet young artist who turned out to be a high-priced call girl, and had Jean-Michel Basquiat furiously challenge him to a fistfight. He kicked a female ghost out of his hotel room and found himself in limos bound for drag clubs with Andy Warhol, Bryan Ferry, and David Bowie. Hannah writes with self-aware humor and a romantic, whimsical sensibility that serves as a lyrical counterpoint to the gritty nihilism of the punk scene around him. He describes it as a bombardment of sensation, insisting that this is what Manhattan is all about.

However, the relentless pursuit of pleasure takes its toll. As the diaries progress, the aura of glamour begins to fade. The narrative moves from the high spirits of a kid in a candy store to a darker reality. Hannah describes wasting away, hacking up blood, and convulsing with DTs. It seems for a long time that he is destined for a tragic, early death befitting a consumptive hero out of 19th century Bohemia. The journals become breathtaking and detached cautionary tales about the price of excess. They demonstrate the necessity of raw experimentation as a source of discovery and creativity, but they also show the physical and emotional cost of living on the edge. It is a wonder that amidst this endless frat party, anyone could create any art at all.

The Artist’s Education

Despite the chaos, Hannah was deeply serious about his development as an artist. He arrived in New York with a goal to stop being a big fish in a small pond and be tested against the best and the brightest. He believed that living in New York was an ongoing education. His journals reveal a readerly discipline that offers a model for self-improvement. He read before bed and again in the morning, partly to self-educate himself since he resisted being told what to read in school. He viewed himself as playing catch-up with his own tailor-made syllabus, asserting that one’s education never ends.

Hannah noted that most painters he knew were well-read, more so than most civilians, and that reading exercised their visual imaginations. He enjoyed the split consciousness of having one part of him in the life he was actually living and another part in the book he was reading, creating a fictional subtext in operation. For Hannah, art was not just about technique. It was about engaging with cultural input and making it mean something. He was driven by the need to become the kind of artist he could be proud of. This drive eventually pulled him back from the brink. The journals culminate in passages of clarity that are moral without being moralizing. The reader sees Hannah overcome his demons to become a renowned artist, fulfilling the promise he showed as a teenager.

A Lost World

The book serves as a farewell to an entire era of decadence, but it is also an unusually levelheaded portrait of New York in the seventies. Hannah describes a city that was much less populated than it is today and completely broke. It was cheap to live there, which leveled the playing field. There was no hierarchy because no one had any money. Hannah recalls that you would inevitably run into everyone you were meant to meet. The people he knew had wildly eclectic passions without any thought of commercial reward. This led to entertaining eccentricity and a great crossover between highbrow and lowbrow society.

Hannah characterizes the time as the age of Do-It-Yourself. Any enterprise would likely include a mishmash of diverse talents. Because there was little available to them, they took what they could. They worked within their glaring limitations, and the crudeness became a style in film, art, music, and romance. Hannah contrasts this vibrant bohemia with the modern art world, which he sees as a competitive sport with winners and losers, driven by market products rather than personal expression. He finds the current scene anemic, missing the spirit of adventure and the pursuit of beauty that defined his youth. Twentieth-Century Boy captures that folly of young artists without romanticizing it too much, offering a raw, graceful time capsule of a period when it seemed the nineteenth-century bohemians had been reincarnated to raise hell one last time.