The Good Times and Heartbreaks of Jeff Hamilton

             Above all else, the gods hate writers.

It might be because triumphant supernatural beings are jealous of their positions and wish to destroy those pitiful humans who would pretend to rival them and create worlds.

It might also be because the gods don’t exist and artists do. Maybe the gods resent artists because of that fact.

Jeff Hamilton was a lifelong resident of New Hope and Solebury who as a young man created a book called Going Native about his adventures living with the Mbuti pygmies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At nineteen, he spent about a year with the pygmies, wrote a diary while there and took photographs. The diary and the photographs eventually became Going Native.

It was a flop.

The book was financed by a local restaurateur at a cost of about twenty thousand dollars and self-published by Jeff. He had tried one publisher after another prior to his book’s publication but all gave it the thumbs-down and tossed it back to him like Zeus tossing thunderbolts back down to earth.

“I asked one of them, why can’t I get published?” he complained to me. “Everybody’s telling me no.”

It was a denial from on high that I had heard often, or not just often but always, about my work. In response, I took the same course as Jeff did and self-published a little children’s book called, The Twelfth Elf of Kindness, and it flopped, too. I spent about fifteen hundred dollars on it that I saved up from bartending in New Hope. I might as well have spent the money buying air.

We had both been kicked aside by the gods of publishing, and we had a bond because of it, a brotherhood of two failed writers. We would discuss our frustrations with publishers and the craft of writing. Since we had similar experiences, we had similar gripes. We didn’t understand the jealousy of gods, or their indifference, but we believed they existed and feared that their judgments were valid.

I think it created interior maelstroms of frustration in both of us, but we moved on because we had to.

Jeff was the son of the well-known Broadway set designer, architect and restaurateur Jim Hamilton. Jim had a workshop in Lambertville where he designed and constructed his sets for Broadway in the 1970s and later created Hamilton’s Grill in L-ville, a wonderfully evocative place with perfect soft lighting and an ambience and fare loved by locals. His daughter Melissa was chef there and later gained fame in that trade and as a restaurant owner and editor of a restaurant magazine.

Jeff had the family’s great love of eating and drinking, but he did not follow them into the business.

Instead, the became The Marquis de Debris, which was his humorous name for the business he created that cleaned out estate properties and either disposed of the junk or sold what was valuable.

Jeff was a social anthropology Stanford University graduate with obvious talents that were ignored by others. His new identity as the Marquis de Debris was a curious one, given those talents, and the incongruity of his identities was not lost on his father.

“I paid seventy thousand dollars for a Stanford education, and this is what I get? A junkman?” he commented.

At least Jeff could make a living as royalty in the fields of debris. That is, mostly he could make a living. Collecting the worn-out artifacts of those who had passed away was hard work but sometimes lucrative. I ran into him in a bar outside of town one night after he had sold off an item, I think it was a screen from the nineteen-thirties, for five hundred dollars. He seemed intent on spending a good part of his new cache of gold in that one night. He bought me a beer, asked if I wanted something to eat, which I declined, and we talked about our struggles as writers and in our new vocations, he as The Marquis de Debris and me as a bartender and small-town journalist.

“Sometimes all I have for dinner is a can of beans,” he said. “A can of beans. Other nights are like this.”

He relished those other nights.

Although he did not go into his family’s restaurant business, he did personally embrace its mission. He loved to consume and imbibe. He combined his talent for art and antiques and his love of food to create an annual sale of his collected treasures at his rented barn in Solebury, where he provided the elaborate refreshments. He traveled to France at one point, staying in the Normandy region for an extended time, and told me he considered moving there, for France is the great mecca of food and drink, and he might have to leave the farm where he lived and stored his goods.

There was a restlessness in him from the time the gods rendered their decision on his book. Writing was his true desire and passion, I believed, the thing he thought made him real. I believed that too of myself at one time, but eventually rejected it and simply went on writing what I could without expecting any divine reward.

He continued at his craft. He published a second book, How to Self Publish or Perish, and eventually he chose to perish.

I think that self-destruction is not what it appears. Others have a hand in anyone’s demise who chooses that way out, whether it be friends or family or distant deities.

Even if gods and their judgments don’t really exist and aren’t really valid or real, their arbitrary decisions take their toll.

Sometimes it’s better to accept reality for what it is, the eating and drinking and rollicking good times that Jeff Hamilton created, than suffer from what edicts false gods hand down from on high.

It’s a bitter pill for any artist to swallow, but the alternative is more heart-breaking.