An unblinking look inside the squirrel cage: Duncan Hannah’s 20th Century Boy
When he was growing up in Minneapolis in the 1950s, the painter Duncan Hannah’s father advised him: “You never know what kind of squirrel cage a man goes home to at the end of the day.”
Hannah’s book 20th Century Boy allows the reader full access to the squirrel cage inhabited by this charming man in 1970s New York.
Given the pop cultural familiarity of the place and time, Hannah has pulled off a feat in presenting a fresh and invigorating portrait of the city and its demi-monde.
This is because, as Hannah writes in the preface, 20th Century Boy is not a memoir, but first-hand testimony compiled from the 20 scrapbook journals he assiduously maintained during the 10-year transformation from problem kid private school-leaver to leading member of the New York art scene (20th Century Boy creeps into the 80s; the final entry marks Hannah’s first solo show in May 1981).
Publisher Knopf has done Hannah proud, allowing a hard-backed format which incorporates hundreds of illustrations and examples of the title pages he drew for each notebook, as well as the lists of literature, films and music he was consuming at given times.
In the summer of 1973, for example, we gather Hannah was listening to King Crimson’s Earthbound, the Last Tango In Paris soundtrack by Gato Barbieri and John Cale’s Vintage Violence while reading Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, Claudine by Colette and Lawrence Durrell’s Justine.
Consumption figures large; Hannah inherited his parents’ addictive appetites, and 20th Century Boy records in unblinking detail many misadventures with mind-altering substances. It is equally unsparing when delineating Hannah’s promiscuity and serial car-crash relationships.
But 20th Century Boy is elevated above sex, drugs and rock’n’roll tittle-tattle by the central concern with Hannah’s artistic development, and in particular his devotion to figuration during a period when the approach was mocked and despised. Hannah emerges from his journey – during which he associated with all of the leading lights of that heady world – a deeply romantic figure who may have been scarred by (largely self-inflicted) experiences but is utterly redeemed.
In this interview from CBS This Morning on 20th Century Boy’s US publication earlier this year, Hannah discussed, among other things, the symbolic night he attended a Club 82 Roxy Music concert after-party in the company of David Bowie, Bryan Ferry and Andy Warhol only to awaken 12 hours later in an abandoned fifth-floor apartment in Harlem with no memory of how he arrived there.
And here are Hannah and Debbie Harry exuding unbelievable levels of glamour in Amos Poe’s short Unmade Bed:
Buy 20th Century Boy here.