In Frederic Tuten’s new book, “My Young Life: A Memoir” (Simon & Schuster, 299 pp. $26) we discover that, though he earned a Ph.D. later in life, Tuten dropped out of high school determined to live the bohemian life in Paris, spending his days painting and his evenings holding forth in the city’s cafés while romancing the waitresses. The fact that he might need money, which he didn’t have, or speak French, which he didn’t know, never occurred to him.
His inspiration for this enterprise was novels like Somerset Maugham’s “The Moon and Sixpence,” based partly on the life of Paul Gauguin, and Irving Stone’s novel, ”Lust For Life” about Van Gogh. But an even greater influence than these was the movie “An American in Paris” in which a young artist, Jerry Mulligan (played by Gene Kelly) “...lived in a room on the top floor above a café, whose jolly patron and whose rounder, jollier wife loved the American and, it seems, let him live and eat on credit.”
The young Tuten grew up in the Bronx with his mother and his Sicilian grandmother. His father, a southerner from Georgia, appeared and disappeared from their lives regularly, and left them for good when Frederic was 11.
When he left school he got a job in the mailroom of Sperry & Hutchinson of Green Stamps fame. In his spare time he painted. He found a sensuous pleasure in applying paint to canvas but soon realized that he needed to paint more than lines and circles, (the technique he learned from the book “How To Draw From The Model”). He needed real instruction to paint the human form, so he enrolled in the Art Students League. It was the first time he saw a female nude.
In distinction from his love of an idealized Paris, he had a difficult relationship with the very real Bronx. It diminished him in many ways.
When he was out of school and visiting his mother, he says, “I hated travelling to the Bronx — it felt like dying, a little of my coherence, my autonomy draining away with each subway stop that brought me closer to Pelham Parkway.”
An older woman who charmed him with her beauty and sophistication took him under her wing and introduced him to a “real artist,” John Resko, an ex-con who became a mentor.
Frederic admired Resko’s paintings of garbage pails. “They had a gentle sadness to them, garbage pails without friends or a street to belong to. I thought them and their sadness spoke to me, as I had always linked beauty with sadness, my mother being my earliest model.”
Resko encouraged Frederic to finish high school and then to apply to City College, where he found the talk in the cafeteria more stimulating than his classes. At the age of 19 he traveled to Mexico where he studied the work of muralist Diego Rivera and others.
A review would be incomplete if it didn’t include the candid details of his love life, from the clumsiness of his callow youth to, not sophisticated older years, but a time when the women he loved were still more knowing than he. It was only a short time after an attachment that he discovered that the woman he loved was a high-class call girl.
He eventually earned a B.A. from City College and a Ph.D. from New York University. He shifted his ambitions from being an artist to being a writer. Several years after he published his first novel, he headed the graduate program in creative writing at City College in an association that lasted for 15 years, where Walter Mosley and Oscar Hijuelos were among his students. He is currently teaching in the writers’ program at Stony Brook Southampton.
In addition to this memoir (to which there is promised a sequel), he has written five novels and a book of interrelated short stories. He continues to paint and is also a highly regarded art critic. “My Young Life” reveals a man of wit and passion who pursued beauty wherever he found it.
