Duncan Hannah was cool his whole life, which is pretty impressive considering most people aren’t even cool for a year. He also stayed cool while living in Connecticut, which is a bit like breathing on the moon.
I first met Hannah on a snowy morning in 2018, during a bitterly long New England winter that would last through May. I was at his home in West Cornwall, a short walk from the covered bridge, to interview him on the release of “20th Century Boy,” a published collection of the personal diaries he kept from 1970 through 1981.
In old photos next to Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol, Hannah appears as the portrait of effortless youth; smooth chest, bedroom eyes, a cigarette dangling from his lip. When not painting, he lived it up among the luminaries of New York’s grimiest decade, bumping shoulders in the dirty downtown bathrooms of Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, The Mudd Club. “A great cross-section of lunatics and rock stars,” Hannah told me.
At 65, layered in a pink button-down, olive sweater vest, and corduroy suit, he had settled into the out-of-time style of the old prep establishment, just the kind he had bucked against. There was a playful wit to this later life style (perfectly captured in a 2019 Esquire Magazine spread) a puckish nod to an Anglo-mania academia dress code that doesn’t exist anymore — least of all in today’s prep school teachers.
We sat in striped club chairs against walls lined with hardbacks, Saki and The Secret History, Tom Wolfe and Tom Swift. Hannah showed me a fan letter he had received from a girl at Phillips Exeter Academy. She had read his diary excerpts printed in The Paris Review that autumn.
The entries start in 1970 when 17-year-old Hannah was a real life angel-faced Holden Caulfield, flung out of his private boys’ academy and into the hallways of a Minnesota public school. He grows out his hair and distributes his own dirty 'zine, records all he takes in: the concerts, the albums, the film — The Stooges, David Bowie, “Chloe in The Afternoon.” He gets into Bard and discovers de Kooning, gets hit on by Allen Ginsberg, loses 20 pounds and fakes a lurid gay life to dodge the draft, struggles with his art professor’s criticism, meets many girls, and has sex the way no one born after the mid-80s has sex anymore, which is to say, thoughtfully. "We get horizontal, a nudging cunnilingus, she tastes like the sea," he wrote in 1973.
“I was thinking, it’s so funny, " Hannah told me as we talked about the fan/love letter, "she knows better, but she thinks she’s writing to the 20-year-old kid.”
What’s so obvious to me now is exactly why the girl at Exeter was swept away by the diaries, that voyeuristic view into the inner life of the ghost of a boy long gone. No 21st Century boy could write the way Hannah did, because no one has a private life anymore. Our diaries exist online, soullessly and self-consciously curated, eager to be discovered by an audience as we posture and pretend. If you don't take photo of yourself reading Keats, did it happen? But in sharing so much, we have lost the personal connection to ourselves. The dangerous thrill the girl experienced was reading secret, literary, lively written by a boy her age, lustfully connected his life, to himself, to his inner world of screw-ups, eroticism, beat poetry, and artistic discovery, none of it ever meant to be shared.
“Duncan Hannah finds himself in the very modern predicament of painting pictures that seem infuriatingly attractive. He has been called “the Barry Manilow of the New Wave” and the prophet of “the Age of Valium,” Glenn O’Brien wrote in the Summer 1984 issue of ArtForum. “He makes beautiful paintings that, like beautiful boys and girls, look like they should be popular. If he’s the prophet of anything it’s that living and painting well is revenge enough.”
His titillating oil paintings were as sincere as his diaries, Hopper minus event a hint of loneliness, a subdued pastel playground of coy pleasure, gamine elegance, and an endless array of perfect breasts — the dreamworld of a dreamboat.
Hannah died this year of a heart attack at 69. When I heard, I opened my copy of “20th Century Boy” and found a piece of hotel stationery he had slipped in, telling me to go read Tim Dlugos.
Dlugos was an openly gay young poet in the 1970s New York scene who continued to write as he died of AIDS complications at the end of the 1980s. In his most famous work “G-9,” named after his hospital room, Dlugos writes, “Duncan Hannah visits, and we talk of out-of-body experiences. His was amazing.” He recalls Duncan’s drunk nightmare in his dormitory at Bard, waking to find an imagined naked boy sleeping on the floor. “He struggled out of bed, walked over to the youth, and touched his shoulder. The boy turned; it was Duncan himself.”
“Collected Works by the Late Duncan Hannah” is now on view at The Cornwall Library in Cornwall, Conn., through Nov. 27.
Photo by Danny Fields
Photo by Danny Fields
Photo by Danny Fields
