A: Right now I'm in the phase of pretentiousness. During the late '60s I had a lot of fun by making mild departures in style — wearing white suits instead of blue suits, things like that. That was very shocking and unusual in 1963. Suddenly things reached a point beyond which it really wasn't worth going, as far as I was concerned, when Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in body paint.
There's one direction in which clothes can go that still annoys the hell out of people, and that's pretentiousness. If you wear double-breasted waistcoats, which I rather like, that annoys people. Spats more than annoy people: they infuriate people. Try it sometime if you don't believe me. They think that this is an affront. It stirs up all sorts of resentment. We're in a period now in which the picture of the East Side really is of the man living in the $525,000 co-op, leaving the building at night, both clothed in turtleneck sweaters with pieces of barbed wire and jeans, going past a doorman who is dressed like an Austrian Army colonel from 1870.
Q: Do you do a lot of drawing?
A: I have a regular feature in Harper's. I do one large drawing each month, with a caption.
Q: What's your artistic background?
A: I never was trained in art. I worked for a commercial artist a number of summers when I was in high school. And I learned anatomy from drawing boxers in Ring magazine. It was the only way I could think of to learn anatomy.
I've had two gallery shows of drawings. … And I'll have a book of drawings coming out next year. I find myself very vain about my drawing. I guess I don't feel as sure of myself as I do in writing; therefore I'm always straining to get people's reactions to what I've drawn.
What I do mostly is caricature. I try not to make them too cartoony. This is a period that absolutely cries out for good caricature. Part of it is that the great caricaturists used to be people who were determined to be fine artists. Every artist, whether he was good or bad, learned anatomy very thoroughly. He learned how to render landscapes, buildings, and learned something about costume. So the ones who didn't make it as easel painters might turn to doing caricature, and some of them were spectacular.
We all grow up thinking we're in an era of progress, because we have had so much technological progress. But it simply doesn't work that way in art and literature. We're living in an era — to use Mencken's phrase — of the "Sahara of the beaux arts."
I wrote about that in The Painted Word. In fact, I'm doing a sequel to that now. It will be an article for Harper's magazine. I'm moving into the areas of architecture and serious music and dance. It's very enjoyable to work on a subject like that after a long haul of writing about astronauts — essentially because it's easier.