The Taut Wire of Childhood Memory

By LANCE MORROW

American childhood sometimes emits a note that is painfully clear and haunted. It vibrates through a taut wire of memory from a long way off, even from the opposite end of a child's life. This is not sentimental music. The sound issues from the child as involuntary realist, the one who sees with defenseless clarity and transmits without melodrama or calculation. That child's transparency, a kind of wonder, can break the heart.

The note vibrates, unexpectedly, in memoirs by two veteran newspaper columnists, Pete Hamill (A Drinking Life; Little, Brown; 265 pages; $21.95) and Art Buchwald (Leaving Home; Putnam; 254 pages; $22.95). Both men record bruisingly uncushioned childhoods shadowed by their families' bleak vulnerability in the Depression -- an era that still accounts for more residual haunted notes than Americans realize. Both men are New Yorkers. Buchwald is deadpan-Jewish-funny, with an underlayer of almost quizzical pain; Hamill is Irish saloon-polemical, with an exuberance undermined by a taste for boozy lyricism, machismo and occasional self-pity.

It comes as a surprise that Buchwald, a man of impressively reliable, virtually industrial-strength merriment, was formed by such a grim beginning. Buchwald's mother was mentally ill and, shortly after he was born, departed to spend the rest of her life in mental institutions. Buchwald has no memory of her. His father, a draper at a time when few could afford drapes , was forced to place his four children in foster homes. One of the first was a boardinghouse for sick children, run by Seventh-Day Adventists, where Arthur stayed until he was five. His father visited on Sundays. When Arthur and his sister Doris started singing Jesus Loves Me, their father decided it was time for them to leave.

Buchwald tells the story in the short, strong declarative sentences that are his style -- an artful, solid kind of brick masonry. Twice in his adult years, he has fallen into serious psychological depressions. "For a humorist," Buchwald admits, "I think a lot about death. During both my depressions, I contemplated suicide. My main concern was that I would not make the New York Times obituary page." He consulted a Dr. Morse in 1962: "What made him unique among psychiatrists I have known is that he stretched out on his couch and the patient sat in the chair. Morse would stare at the ceiling as he listened to my story. Occasionally, he would nod his head." Morse asked Buchwald: "Have you forgiven your father for putting you in all those homes?" Buchwald: "Of course. He couldn't help it." Pause. "Okay, so maybe I was mad once in a while, but after all, you can't go blaming everyone for your own life."

An unbearable note arises from a child's humiliation -- when he must impersonate an adult, must pay the price for grownups' failures and follies. Buchwald seems to have got through it with a sturdy and precocious self- possession. He shares with his father, he says, the habit of smiling no matter what -- a sort of armor, a mask of self-containment. Buchwald writes: "I must have been six or seven when I said, 'This stinks. I am going to become a humorist.' " He got some minuscule revenge by refusing to be Bar Mitzvahed, which grieved his father, and by running away to join the Marines once World War II started. The Marines, he says, were the best foster home he had and made him a man.

Alcohol made Pete Hamill's father just as absent as Art Buchwald's mother was. The father, Billy Hamill, who came from northern Ireland, had only one leg: he lost the other after it was brutally broken in a soccer game. When Billy came home from the saloons at night to the family's Brooklyn apartment, he would remove his artificial leg along with his trousers. Pete remembers them hanging over a chair in the bedroom and the smell of vomit. He had his first fight when a boy named Brother Foppiano taunted in a singsong, "Your old man's an Irish drunk! Your old man's an Irish drunk!"

The alcoholic's child, of course, hates what the sauce has done to his ) father: "I didn't want to be like my father," Hamill writes. "I didn't want to be a drunk." Yet drinking meant manhood. It was, he later decided, "the sacramental binder of friendships . . . the reward for work, the fuel for celebration, the consolation for death or defeat. Drinking gave me strength, confidence, ease, laughter." Hamill as a boy was obsessed by the comics, including Captain America, who began as mild-mannered Steve Rogers but then drank a magic serum that transformed him into a brilliant pile of muscles, the scourge of Nazi saboteurs. "The comics taught me that even the weakest human being could take a drink and be magically transformed into someone smarter, bigger, braver," Hamill writes. "All you needed was the right drink."

The first rule of the confessional is: don't brag -- that's not what you're here for. Hamill violates the rule from time to time. His confessional reproduces the clarity and pain of his childhood and many of its other Brooklyn textures -- the street games of ring-o-levio, the tribal solidarities of the neighborhood, the gangs. Then, as the book proceeds to a record of his own long years of drinking (his often passionate column for the New York Post, his marriage that broke up over drinking, his relationship with the actress Shirley MacLaine), it begins to replicate too much of the smelly boasting and belligerent noise of a Blarney Stone bar on St. Patrick's Day -- a time and place that most sane people consider hellish, even if Hamill does not.

In writing A Drinking Life, he faced a technical dilemma -- how to repudiate the booze that did so much damage in his life while reproducing what he still considers the happier side of the drinking, the exuberant good times. The solution might have lain in more detachment -- drunkenness recollected in tranquillity. It might have lain in a more censorious attitude toward booze and all its works. But that would have subverted the romance of drinking. Hamill still seems to believe in that, in some backhanded way, though he switched to club soda 20 years ago. He even gives boozing a momentary political justification: "Drinking became the medium of my revolt against the era of Eisenhower. Drinking was a refusal to play the conformist game, a denial of the stupid rules of a bloodless national ethos." How cunning is the sauce, the shapeshifter.

In his poem Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?, W.B. Yeats wrote (among other things) about the way that promising lives go wrong. For example: "Some have known a likely lad/ That had a sound fly-fisher's wrist/ Turn to a drunken journalist." Some have indeed. Pete Hamill is still a likely lad, too good to go on indulging the drunken journalist.