The American poet James Schuyler composed his first significant poem during a nine-week stay at the Payne Whitney Westchester psychiatric clinic, in White Plains, New York, in late 1951. That fall, Schuyler, still a fresh face on the New York arts scene after an extended sojourn in Europe, had begun to introduce himself to friends as the Infant Jesus of Prague, a sixteenth-century wax-and-wood statuette clothed in embroidered vestments, and claimed that he had received from the Virgin Mary a package of Du Maurier cigarettes. The poem, called “Salute”—the word itself implies a toast to good health—was written as a step in Schuyler’s convalescence, between sessions of weaving belts and crafting moccasins for visitors. They included W. H. Auden, Schuyler’s old mentor, who footed the bill for the hospital stay, and a new friend, Marianne Moore, whom Schuyler called “entrancing and somehow a little terrifying.”
“Salute,” like many of Schuyler’s best works, is a form of strenuous mental calisthenics presented as an easygoing nature poem. “Past is past,” it begins:
You could memorize this mayfly-brief poem in an hour but devote a lifetime to pondering its teachings: “is / not to have thought to do / enough?” In certain moral and legal scenarios, no, not at all, but, for poetry, it seems to be more than enough, and it may be necessary. Though the actual “clover, / daisy, paintbrush” weren’t gathered that day (other, more enticing pastimes likely awaited inside that “cabin”), “Salute” preserves them in Schuyler’s proprietary solution of pert melancholy stirred into gloomy sweetness.
Poets sometimes orphan their early work, but Schuyler stood by “my all-important ‘Salute,’ ” as he described it, perhaps because of its weirdly elastic temporality. The poem was a souvenir of the fleeting moment of its composition, its irregular right margin suggesting words jotted on scrap paper. Yet Schuyler kept “Salute” around to mark the phases of his career. In 1960, the poem appeared in an influential avant-garde anthology, Donald Allen’s “New American Poetry.” Schuyler used “Salute” to conclude his much belated first commercially published volume, “Freely Espousing,” printed in 1969, when he was forty-six, and to open his “Selected Poems” in 1988. That year, the reclusive poet was persuaded to give his début public reading, at the age of sixty-five. Schuyler took to the stage with some difficulty and, his catarrhal baritone thickened by years of illness, began again at the beginning: “Past is past.”
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Nathan Kernan’s intrepid new biography of Schuyler, over thirty years in the making, is “A Day Like Any Other” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It plucks its title from “February,” another of Schuyler’s early poems. The phrase seems at once blasé and foreboding; we say “it was a day like any other” when, uh-oh, catastrophe awaits around the bend. (“Another day, another dolor,” Schuyler once quipped.) Jimmy, as most everyone called him, knew many such days, when ordinary life gave way to what a friend called his “incandescence”: the normally courteous gentleman in the blue crewneck sweater and wrinkled khakis, a prized playmate of his friends’ young children, might appear in the kitchen and darkly intone, “Harm may befall the infant.” During one spell, in 1971, a housemate contemplated knocking Schuyler over the head with a cast-iron skillet but feared that the blow would only provoke him. Visitors expecting the serene, beatific presence that we meet in Schuyler’s poems sometimes found instead a naked man covered in rose petals or a terrified soul “sitting on his bed, holding out a plate of scrambled eggs in front of him, frozen in place and trembling.” Twice, Schuyler set fire to his apartment by smoking in bed; the second time, he ended up in an intensive-care unit for weeks and received extensive skin grafts for third-degree burns. In the seventies and early eighties, at his lowest point, Schuyler lived in a series of institutions, flophouses, and residential hotels, drinking throughout the day and relying on so many pills that a friend said, “You could hear them rattling in his pockets.” His hair grew long and matted; after contracting gangrene as a result of diabetes, he had two toes amputated. “Poor Jimmy,” Schuyler’s friend John Ashbery once wrote. “He told me that life had been after him with a sledgehammer.”
Kernan picked a hard story to tell. One problem is that you don’t find much evidence of turmoil in Schuyler’s poems. “Even at his most deranged,” Kernan writes, “he could appear, and perhaps be, calm and rational in his writing.” A definitive diagnosis was difficult to make, in part because of the “cocktail of prescription and illicit drugs.” Poems and sequences written in the hospital—“Mike,” for example, composed during Schuyler’s three weeks at the Vermont State Hospital, and “The Payne Whitney Poems”—refuse, as he wrote, to “tell you all of it,” unlike the confessional poems of his contemporary Robert Lowell. You can’t medicalize his style, the way critics have often sought to connect Lowell’s mania with his grandiose ambition and jagged associative leaps: Schuyler always “makes sense, dammit,” as Ashbery put it. A friend of Schuyler’s described his observational state as “mediumistic”: though it’s clear that he struggled, in Ashbery’s words, to live “daily life as he means to lead it,” his poems are usually set on those days when he won the battle—walking in Vermont under an evening sky “the color of peach ice cream,” say, and “stopping to take a leak on dead leaves / in the woods beside the road.”
Schuyler worked in two primary verse modes, ostensibly opposites: we could call them blips and loop-the-loops. The blips are short, ribbonlike lyrics, trimmed to the moment, their sharp enjambments inspired by the Renaissance-era poet Robert Herrick; the loop-the-loops follow long Proustian arcs in margin-busting lines reminiscent of Walt Whitman. Both modes suggest a search for an original way of existing in time, and both spell trouble for biographical narrative, which depends on linear cause and effect. The short poems are like bright, scattered beads—their titles, indicating merely the date (“3/23/66,” “June 30, 1974”) or the time of day (“Sunset,” “Evening”) or the rudiments of the setting (“At the Beach,” “Evenings in Vermont”), hint at how hard it might be to string a life story through them.
The long poems pose an additional problem for a biographer: in these retrospective works, written in the seventies and eighties, Schuyler became a late-breaking autobiographer. The poet’s reminiscences form the core of several poems that rank among the glories of twentieth-century American literature. In “Hymn to Life,” “The Morning of the Poem,” and “A few days,” as well as in mid-length works such as the magnificent “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,” Schuyler began to pry open the passing moments, inserting memories of his childhood and early adulthood, homages to old love affairs, and New York gossip from the forties and fifties. These poems invent verbal models of movement through time, their own temporal construction also serving as their subject, always nonchalantly expressed. “Today is tomorrow,” he reports, or “Guess I’m ready for lunch: ready as I’ll ever be, that is. / Lunch was good: now to move my bowels.” Their recursive paths make tweezing out the “biography” in their recollective passages especially tricky. “A few days!” Schuyler exclaims soon after he surfaces from one of these long reminiscences. “I / started this poem in August and here it is September / nineteenth.” It seems a shame to iron flat such a beautifully crumpled time line, but biographers know that it’s the nature of the job, alas. Past is past.
“To be children of a broken home is bad news,” Schuyler wrote. “Ask me—six mental hospitals.” If the example of Schuyler and many of his contemporaries is any evidence, though, a broken home is good news for poetry. He was born James Marcus Schuyler in Chicago in 1923, and spent most of his early years in the aptly named Downers Grove, Illinois, where his mother, Margaret Daisy Connor, a former newspaper editor and Washington publicist for the Farmers’ National Council, was restless. In “Snapshot,” Schuyler, looking for evidence of the man he became, revisits “photographs / of me in white dresses, / with a tin pail and shovel, / playing with a little girl” and “laughing / with my eyes shut.” The poem, and the fun, abruptly ends when a painful memory replaces those heirloom photos: “Then we moved / to Washington, D.C.”
There, Schuyler’s mother divorced his father, Marcus, “an enchantingly wonderful man, a heavy, jolly, well-read man,” in his son’s view, but a compulsive gambler who drifted back to the Midwest and died young. Though Schuyler reckoned that he had seen him again perhaps twice, Marcus became, Kernan writes, “an increasingly distant figure, but a correspondingly potent abstraction.” In his place, Schuyler’s “gentle Grandma Ella” arrived from Minnesota, “a granny / a child doesn’t / like to kiss,” Schuyler wrote in “So Good,” “the farm smell / a chill sweet- / ness.” She taught her grandson the names of the birds and the flowers, but he learned on his own the crucial lesson of how to find raunchy sex everywhere in the natural world, as when “you touch the pod” of a touch-me-not bloom and witness “the miraculous ejaculation of the seed.” Indoors, Grandma Ella read aloud from a children’s anthology, “Journeys Through Bookland.” Reading and natural observation seemed to complement each other. These two activities, almost conjoined, made up the substance of most of Schuyler’s best days as an adult.
Then, in what seems nearly a plot contrivance, a cruel stepfather appeared. Margaret Schuyler up and married Berton Ridenour, a construction engineer working on a renovation of the West Wing of the White House. Ridenour was close enough to President Herbert Hoover to score the family an invitation to the White House Easter Egg Roll in 1931. Somewhere there exists a photo of little Jimmy, age seven, playing on the White House lawn. But the stern “old book burner,” as Schuyler later called him, was in mourning for his son, who had drowned at the age of twelve. Kernan wonders whether Ridenour saw his shy, effeminate stepson as his “second chance.” Just as Schuyler was told, around age nine, of a distant family connection to the illustrious Elizabeth Schuyler, the wife of Alexander Hamilton, and “felt he had a name to live up to,” his family renamed him: he enrolled that fall in third grade as James Ridenour. It was not until 1947, at twenty-three, that Schuyler, sensing his vocation and embarking for Europe with his boyfriend, reclaimed his surname.
From the unique terroir of Schuyler’s early life emerged his version of what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “that taste of myself . . . more distinctive than the smell of walnut-leaf or camphor,” the richly individuated interiority, different for every soul, that is the source of style. Years later, the “moods and undercurrents” of Schuyler’s Washington years were the subject of his first publication, “Alfred and Guinevere” (1958), a “light” novel, Schuyler said, adding, “but no one takes his lightness more seriously than I.” The book is an undersung marvel of twentieth-century literature, as well as one of the great prehistories of American queer life. Looking back at a childhood doubled, or perhaps halved, by family circumstances, and further divided by the early realization of his homosexuality, Schuyler allows us to eavesdrop on a secretive sibling pair, a gallant king and fair queen of childhoods outwardly tedious but full of imagined intrigue. Guinevere likes to read aloud from her diary, where she is “one of the leading women big spenders of her day and her example has done much to further the cause of women” and Alfred is a “polar explorer.” But mainly the kids banter in pig Latin or in a screwball repartee fashioned from overheard adult speech. Alfred has a scoop; Guinevere wants it:
The secret is that their father is “going to Europe” for vague business reasons, and maybe deserting the family. But the deeper secret that Alfred and Guinevere share seems to be childhood itself, its orders and codes and lexicons so mysterious to adults.
The book is also an encrypted history of queer friendship. “I like / to be alone / with friends,” Schuyler once wrote—his line breaks, as always, uncorking multiple meanings. Such friendships did not exclude desire and sex, and in later years often fed artistic collaboration. When Schuyler was fourteen, his family moved to East Aurora, New York, just outside Buffalo, and the claustrophobia of family life began to break. Otherwise a standard-issue suburb, East Aurora was the home of a utopian Arts and Crafts guild, the Roycrofters. To steal away to their community buildings, hand-forged in stone and timber, offered, Schuyler later said, “a certain romance.” In East Aurora, Schuyler met a boy named Bernie Oshei, who pored over glossy fashion magazines with Jimmy and accompanied him to the movies. At Bethany College, in West Virginia, where Schuyler flunked out after two years of doing little besides playing bridge, he formed a similar bond with a young librarian. Then, enlisting in the Navy, Schuyler trained as a sonar “radioman” and was assigned to the U.S.S. Glennon, which docked near New York City, whose “lights and activity, not to mention its sexual possibilities,” beckoned. While on shore leave, Schuyler suffered a “kind of breakdown,” as he wrote, and deserted the ship, remaining in New York for twenty-nine days with an older man who paraded him around as his “cute sailor-found object.” Schuyler escaped court-martial only by what was known as an undesirable discharge, signing his name to a statement that read “I am homosexual and of no use to the U.S. Naval Service.”
Schuyler moved to New York City twice: in 1944, in time to join W. H. Auden’s opera-mad, gossip-loving circle, and again in 1949, after two years in Europe, to meet a slightly younger generation of poets and painters who would come to be known, reluctantly, as the New York School. The first time around, Schuyler and Bill Aalto, his handsome, hotheaded lover, who eventually threatened to murder Schuyler, formed a kind of quartet with Auden and Chester Kallman, whose passions, according to Kernan, were “poetry, opera, cooking, and sex, not necessarily in that order.” At Kallman’s apartment, above a Balkan restaurant on East Twenty-seventh Street, and later at Auden’s home on the Italian island of Ischia, Schuyler fell in with an illustrious circle of mostly gay artists and writers, including Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, who called Schuyler a “wee wisp of an American belle.” To make a few dollars, Schuyler agreed to type Auden’s poems but was busted fishing his employer’s drafts out of the wastebasket. Schuyler composed an elegy for the “kind man and great poet” many years later, deciding that he had “So much / to remember, so little to / say: that he liked martinis / and was greedy about the wine?”
In 1951, back in New York, Schuyler no sooner found the first friends “of whose work I was absolutely certain” than he ended up in Payne Whitney, composing “Salute.” When he was released, a social and artistic experiment awaited him. The New York School’s core group of Schuyler, Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara were “brothers,” according to O’Hara’s poem of that name: “John’s most sophistical, / Jimmy seriousest, Kenneth large, / locomotive, / laughing.” O’Hara left himself out of the portrait, but Schuyler and others were happy to add their impressions of the brilliant, broken-nosed poet from an old-fashioned Massachusetts family. O’Hara “usually had the ball,” Schuyler said. “He was in high [gear] all the time,” another friend remarked: “high on himself, and his every waking minute, regardless of what he was doing, was vital, supercharged, and never boring.” With O’Hara as “the catalyst,” according to Kernan, there was really no choice but for the members of this brotherhood to write poems. Poetry became the shared argot, the currency, the unit of exchange, and its value was inflated by almost nightly demand for social performance. All at once, a generation of dazzling young people who had studied the canon in deadening classrooms remembered that poems could be, had always been, anything at all—an invitation, an apology, a thank-you note, a recipe, a valentine.
Even the painters in the scene counted on O’Hara to “kind of cobble everything together,” as Ashbery put it. Yet, likely because some of them had an easier time converting their work into legal tender, they often played host. Emerging artists like Jane Freilicher and Fairfield Porter had more money, bigger lofts, and more inviting summer homes. They sponsored the poets, who in turn worked in various capacities in the art world—O’Hara and Schuyler at MOMA and as critics for Art News, to which Ashbery also contributed. The scene’s most distinctive gallery was also its publishing house: John Bernard Myers’s Tibor de Nagy printed elegant illustrated editions of Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch, and, finally, Schuyler, whose “May 24th or So,” from 1966, was his first chapbook.
“A day like any other” in this milieu can be exhausting even to read about, and Kernan doesn’t quite solve the problem of how to capture the caroming social and erotic antics of the scene in orderly narrative prose. Around the time “February” was written, Schuyler was sleeping with the classical pianist Arthur Gold—a former flame, and still the musical partner, of Robert Fizdale, who had flings with both Ashbery and O’Hara. Schuyler spent some portion of his days at Gold’s sublet on East Sixtieth Street, and the rest at an apartment on East Forty-ninth that he shared at times with Ashbery and at other times with O’Hara, who had a crush on Larry Rivers, who was dating Freilicher while being pursued by Myers. The classic accounts of the New York School focus on bustling parties and starry openings and jaunty beach weekends, occasions when its entangled personnel met as an ensemble. “What / confusion!” O’Hara wrote in “A Party Full of Friends.” “Someone’s going / to stay until the cows / come home. Or my name isn’t / Frank O’Hara.”
For this brief, rapidly closing interlude, collaboration spurred what the social critic Paul Goodman called the “physical reestablishment of community.” In fact, “the quintessential works” of the New York School, according to Kernan, might have been not the poems but the absurdist plays written by its members and “inspired by the repartee” of their parties. “I used / to write lots of playlets,” Schuyler explained in “A few days,” but “ ‘Presenting Jane’ is lost.” Ah, but in the decades that Kernan spent meticulously researching this biography, a filmed version of the play was turned up, so admirers of Schuyler can now behold the young, frolicsome incarnations of him, O’Hara, and Freilicher, among others, in footage shot during two weeks in the Hamptons. Furthermore, you can listen to Ashbery and Freilicher, in old age, discuss the play with the biographer, during a 2014 oral-history session, later overlaid on the film for a screening put together by Christina Davis and her team at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room. The layered media—a script, a dramatic performance, a film, a video on YouTube—offer a sense of how the New York School has proved adaptable to evolving tastes and technologies. It’s nearly a miracle to see “Presenting Jane” after all these years, especially for those who knew it by reputation, and Schuyler’s “loss” of it suggests how, even while the New York School was taking shape, it began to elegize itself, to write its own history of fleetingness.
By the early sixties, the New York School had, like a wave, risen toward its own collapse, and Schuyler, recovering from a long hospitalization, took up full-time residence at Fairfield and Anne Porter’s homes in Southampton and on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. “Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed eleven years,” Anne Porter told their perplexed friends. Her husband was in love with Schuyler; Anne, a discreet, pragmatic Boston Brahmin, may have known that the two men were sexually involved, and was happy to have Fairfield’s need for male companionship met. Schuyler became one of Fairfield Porter’s most enduring, and enchanting, subjects. There was no problem getting him to sit still. Porter made the study of Schuyler a kind of cozy, personal Mont Sainte-Victoire, depicting him in a variety of states, alone and in groups, at various times of day, but almost always seated, and often reading. These compositions are gorgeous, but they know their limits. They are depictions of the outward appearance of thinking, not of its strenuous contents.
For that, we have the poems, including a sublime elegy written at the Porters’ house in Maine for Frank O’Hara, who died in 1966 after being struck on a Fire Island beach by a dune buggy. “Buried at Springs” is a poem that O’Hara would never have written—he claimed that he couldn’t even “enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy.” But Schuyler channels his friend’s sentience: “it’s eleven years since / Frank sat at this desk and / saw and heard it all,” only “not the same”—new seaweed, new lichen, new evergreen needles. When Schuyler’s welcome finally wore out, in the early seventies, he was devastated to say goodbye to the “young spruce against the cold / of an old one hung with unripe cones / each exuding at its tip / gum.” Still, the work he’d done at the Porters’ homes, in all those chairs, over all those years, was already a significant contribution to American literature.
Kernan’s biography should send readers to Schuyler’s compact “Collected Poems,” where we find what cannot be captured in excerpts, and what sometimes evades even this filigreed and astute presentation of his life: his brilliant use of embodied attention to contour time, when everything off the page was turbulence. Lying low in his childhood bedroom during the Bicentennial summer of 1976, Schuyler decided that the only way to traverse the days was to throw across them a long poem, like a rope bridge. On a morning he’d designated “the morning of the poem,” he began the work that would eventually bear that title, continuing for weeks:
Whitman had “the smoke of my own breath, / Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine” to keep him busy. Schuyler’s celebration of the damaged body and its persistent joys, including a free jukebox inside the brain and a soft-core-porn channel that we call the imagination, made “The Morning of the Poem” the best keep-profane-the-Sabbath poem since Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”
The decades that saw Schuyler composing these spacious, humane poems, the seventies and eighties, were years of special torment, as friends and supporters withdrew from him, and one younger, often straight-identified love interest after another led him on and ripped him off. These men, nevertheless, were his tethers to the world. Many of his short lyrics of this period are love poems, and though they pine and shudder with the best of them, by the end they’ve usually mellowed, like an unattended highball. What could be more morally attractive than a mild, chivalric claim that Schuyler, in “Saturday Night,” makes on a lover who has left him behind to party on somebody’s “yacht / or schooner or / whatever it is”:
That timeless wish—“Breeze, blow for one I love”—could have been written by Herrick, or by Sappho, for that matter. Schuyler’s poems are the ultimate smooth sailing. But, for their author, this hard truth was undeniable: “Poetry / takes it out of you.” ♦
