Luc Sante’s fascination with New York City has fueled an unconventional writing career that is now in its fifth decade. For the uninitiated, Sante — who is coming to The Mercantile Library on Sept. 13 to deliver the Albert Pyle Urban Lecture — is an author of rare insight and singular prose on topics as diverse as folk photography and the poetic inclinations of Patti Smith to politics and the ever-evolving nature of urban environments.
Sante’s literary and life journey began when he visited the United States in the late 1950s after his father lost his job in a woolen mill in Verviers, Belgium.
“Right away my life is tied up in the life and the death of the city,” Sante says regarding his family’s move to the U.S. due to the flagging fortunes of his hometown in Belgium.
As a 5-year-old, he was immediately altered by New York City, a place that remains at the forefront of his life as an artist who has so often used his considerable gifts to illuminate the work of others.
Sante’s two best-known books, 1991’s Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York and 2015’s The Other Paris, are impressively researched and deftly written portraits of almost cinematic grandeur, each centered on the gritty underbelly of perhaps the two most preeminent cities of the last 150 years.
“I first saw New York as a small child,” he says, recounting how he and his family moved back and forth from Belgium to the U.S. multiple times before finally anchoring themselves northeastern New Jersey. “I started commuting to New York when I was 14 because I had a scholarship to a Jesuit high school. I had a two-hour commute each way, so I saw the city.”
After high school, Sante enrolled at Columbia University to study with Kenneth Koch, a Cincinnati native who was a preeminent figure in the New York School of poetry in the 1950s and ’60s.
“I started living there in 1972, and I saw New York go from fun city to Escape from New York in less than a decade,” Sante says. “I then saw the whole recuperation of the Reagan years and beyond. I just sort of saw this panorama of death, rebirth, whatever. But I also became very concerned — as if I were an ornithologist who had been living in a forest for many years studying a bird species that were most likely to become extinct, and those were the ones I most identified with.”
Sante was enamored with New York’s artists, misfits and bohemians, who were men and woman determined to find their own unique path. In the ’70s, he found himself at the center of a cultural revolution; he witnessed first-hand the rise of Punk Rock at CBGBs, a music club in East Manhattan.
“If you arrived in New York in the 1970s you were struck by this enormous paradox…Here you are in the world’s city, the capital of the 20th century, the city with all those iconic skyscrapers, but the power seems to have run away from the city,” Sante says. “It seems like the city has become this anarchic place. This was a little bit disconcerting at first, but then you realize that actually it gives you a certain amount of power.”
Initially, Sante thought he’d be a Rock critic; he began submitting reviews to Rolling Stone in 1968 at age 14 and was an early fan of Paul Williams’ Rock mag Crawdaddy!
“These Rock critics, the earliest generation of them, were very literate and interesting people,” Sante says. “I got a lot of recommendations. I remember being led to detective novels, being led to Thomas Pynchon by Rock critics who just alluded to them sideways in their reviews.”
But it was Sante’s work at The New York Review of Books that eventually kick-started his writing career. His first piece appeared in 1981, and he’s been a fixture in its pages ever since. Along the way he’s written for a plethora of entities: film criticism for Interview and Wigwam; various topics for The Village Voice, The New York Times, Artforum and Vogue; crime criticism for Spy; essays for Criterion Collection’s film releases; and, more recently, a screenplay of sorts for the 2017 Bob Dylan quasi-doc Trouble No More.
Beyond Low Life and The Other Paris, his books include an investigation of the photographic genius of Walker Evans and Kill All Your Darlings, a collection of pieces he wrote between 1990 and 2005. He was even a proofreader at Sports Illustrated for a time.
Sante’s writing, no matter the topic or forum, is informed by his love of music — specifically that of his ’60s and ’70s coming of age.
“I was always trying to find ways to do on paper whatever it was that the music did, trying to use the rhythms of the prose to approximate music,” Sante says. “Almost everybody I knew was music-obsessed. It was just such a constant presence. It wasn’t just CBGB; it was also what was on the radio. We were listening to as much Disco as we were to Punk. Every kind of music was coming from everywhere. It was out on the street as much as it was in your apartment.”
Patti Smith was an especially inspiring figure; he first saw her in concert at age 19. It was everything he hoped for and more.
Decades later, Sante’s review of Smith’s biography Just Kids includes a comment about Smith’s desire to “pass on the spark” to future generations of artists. It’s a spark Sante hopes to pass on as well.
“I imagine something I write being stumbled on by something like the 13-year-old self that I once was — some kid from somewhere who will be inspired to go on and read and explore,” Sante says. “It’s a long chain, a great continuity.
“These traditions circle the world and then travel through the centuries. That’s something that’s very important. Sometimes it seems like technology is set to vaporize all that, but I hope in my modest way, hoping that the world will not end tomorrow or within the next few years, that there will be time for some kind of tradition to keep going.”
Luc Sante will deliver the Albert Pyle Urban Lecture at The Mercantile Library (414 Walnut St., Downtown) on Sept. 13. More info: mercantilelibrary.com.
This article appears in Sep 5-12, 2018.