For a group of American poets of the 1950s and 1960s – John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch – the term New York School, borrowed from the label given to some abstract expressionist painters, never made that much sense. Over time, it has made even less. There was never any “school” as such, other than maybe a lurking feeling that they arranged these things better in France (take a bow, Guillaume Apollinaire). Or Italy. Or Spain. Or Russia … But for the moment, our scene is in America, the insatiable America of the milkshakes, the jazz, the silver dimes, the affordable rents and the evolving language. Above all, these poets were friends, living in and out of each other’s pockets and apartments and jobs, drawn by the allure of collaborative forms, novels and plays, not to mention music and painting, which they regularly seemed to prefer to poetry for their inspiration and reference and vocabulary.
As its members themselves would point out, the New York School was almost symmetrically full of anomalies. They were all men except Barbara Guest (who, apparently, finds herself listed only to be unlisted again). They were all Harvard graduates, except Schuyler, who failed to take his degree at an establishment that he was pleased to call “this little dump in West Virginia.” They were all gay and didn’t teach, except Koch, who was straight and made a career at Columbia, where, as Schuyler put it, he could have taught a golf ball to write a pantoum. They were all at some time in the armed forces, except Ashbery, who was rejected on grounds of his homosexuality. They all spent formative years in New York City, except Ashbery, again, who was on a scholarship in Paris. Even then, to call Schuyler a New York poet, when for most of his life he lived elsewhere, on Long Island, in Maine and Vermont, feels wrong. It’s not as though he was an unrepentant urbanist like O’Hara, who couldn’t admire a tree “unless there was a subway handy”. Or when New York could rouse in Schuyler such feelings as:
that terrible city, city of the living dead, of sensuality without love, where people have eyes of glass, feet of rats, and soiled hands … aspirin and chewing-gum and a deeply silent sadness.
That kind of Baudelairean horror is not what “New York School” is about.
O’Hara’s early death in 1966 and Ashbery’s long life – he lived to be ninety, making him, as it were, the Stephen Spender of the group – did their bit to produce further distortions and distensions. But perhaps the factor that does the most to explode the label is the slow dazzle of Schuyler (1923–1991). He was, if you like (I’m not sure I do, but what are labels for, if not, like the yellow banana over the pink banana, to peel off and stick back on?), the Elizabeth Bishop of the group, the one who started way back in the pack and went on to win what wasn’t in any case a race.
What sets Schuyler apart from the rest is that he was, at least some of the time, a lyric poet in the old, timeless sense, like Percy Shelley or John Donne or François Villon or Horace. (Tell it not in Gath: like Robert Lowell.) Don’t be deceived by the frequent shifts of angle or the often colloquial register, such that you might suppose the function of a poem is to give words their first airing in the written language. Schuyler’s poems rarely stray from the immemorial tasks of lyric: the passing of time, the alternation of the seasons, the briefness of pleasure. They satisfy the stern requirements of writing with the gay means of speech. “A few days”, goes the long title poem of his collection published in 1985:
are all we have. So count them as they
pass. They pass too quickly
out of breath. Don’t dwell on the grave
which yawns for one and all.
Will you be buried in the yard? Sorry,
it’s against the law. You can only
lie in an authorized plot but you won’t
be there to know it, so why worry
about it?
It is the marriage of this odd, apparently unstriven-for purity of purpose with the informality and flipness of his resources that sets Schuyler apart. At the end of twenty centuries, it is still “ubi sunt” and “O lente, lente, currite noctis equi”, even if it is called “Simone Signoret” or goes: “Goodbye Jim. / I remember him / yelling / singing, sig- / naling / waving a hand- / ful of meat. / How proudly / we hail! Dying / and living / salute you / dead. Wave on / Jim’s dong.” (“Jim Morrison”) The coincidence of the names reinforces the suggestion that, as someone said, in truth all elegies are to the elegist.
In Schuyler’s work, flowers and friends are recorded, hospitalizations and dogs. The poems remember days (“a nothing day”, “May 24th or So”, “a day like any other”, days without end) and follow freaks of the light, clouds, blossoms, snow. Their detailed visual descriptions match their eerie instability of tone. As a result, readers of Schuyler have the sense of a thoroughly discontinuous life, one that hangs obliquely or invisibly between moment and sated moment. The extraordinary resourcefulness of his descriptive vocabulary (when I read the Selected Art Writings, I had the impression he never uses a word twice) and the ability to bounce back from low moments, say, in his “Payne Whitney Poems”, give one a sense of the writer as invulnerable, charmed. “The great bard of breakfast”, I once dubbed him, with his comfortable casual clothes and his imported Tiptree jams and his Times.
That’s all I knew. My familiarity with the voice in the work seemed to mask my unfamiliarity with the life. I didn’t feel I needed to know. I was content to think of the poet as a sometime resident of the Chelsea Hotel, or in Maine, among painters and musicians and trees. It didn’t often occur to me that I had remarkably little sense of the overall architecture of the vita and the person, of the background, the narrative, the phases, the addresses, the relationships, the things that stitched together my – or anyone’s – momentary Schuyler. I had the gossipy poetry without the gossipy poet. Nathan Kernan, who knew him towards the end of his life, and in 1997 edited his Diary, has triumphantly and, I must say, saddeningly, remedied this. A Day Like Any Other is a compassionate and unassuming biography, and a marvellously engrossing book, but it takes one’s innocence regarding its subject.
Adversity – guignon, maybe – started with Schuyler’s genes: the depression that ran in his father’s family, and his father’s addiction to gambling. Schuyler’s rather more forceful mother divorced him, to the bewilderment of the boy, who was just six at the time. His mother remarried, and the family moved from the portentousness of Washington to East Aurora in upstate New York; a half-brother was born; Schuyler will have grown up with the loss of centrality and status and affection. An acquaintance later noted, “he was always on the defensive against being hurt”. It’s unclear what prompted the choice of Bethany College in West Virginia, where in 1943 he flunked out and joined the navy. After a mysterious spell AWOL in New York City, he was dishonourably discharged “because of unfitness” (the cant of the time for homosexuality). A fourth of the way through A Day Like Any Other, Nathan Kernan sums up his subject like this: “Young though he was, Jimmy was already something of a failure himself: a failure at college and in the navy, and a failure so far at producing any writing to speak of.”
Schuyler’s early efforts were in prose; many of them have been lost, and not much was ever published. There were four stories in a magazine called Accent in 1951: they were Schuyler’s first publications. To poetry, which has a way of springing out of defeat – it is a form of repechage – he came later still. Unusually late. He and his lover, Bill Aalto (“Finns are murder when they drink” – Schuyler wasn’t joking), were friends of Chester Kallman, then of W. H. Auden. After the war, they followed them to Italy, to Capri and Ischia: Schuyler had come into a small inheritance from his grandmother. He was Auden’s unofficial secretary, typing some of Auden’s poems (“they’re in Nones”). “If this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself”, he said. Wrong, perhaps, and wrong again.
Even as he was rejecting, for himself, many of the formal and traditional aspects of Auden’s verse, he was being made familiar, to his fingertips, with the poem as a physical object, with the extending, breaking, and “turning” of lines, the architecture of stanzas, the shape of the poem on the page. He learned to make a poem before he wrote a poem.
Kernan writes beautifully about this unusual form of apprenticeship, as he does about Schuyler’s poetry throughout, even while protesting that his is a Life rather than a literary biography.
Thereafter, things to some extent took their course. Poetry eventually finds its own. In the 1950s in New York, Schuyler fell in with poets his own age, and in a setting where fame and money weren’t involved. Nothing particularly seemed to ride on their poetry, which in any case wasn’t the sanctioned poetry of the time. Hence, perhaps, its jauntiness and lack of ceremony. It didn’t seem to be about status, much less a living, so much as being there and being witty. It was neither an escape from personality nor immune to remarks. For five years in the 1950s, O’Hara and Schuyler were flatmates. Letters crossed the Atlantic to Ashbery. The poets had jobs, working in galleries, working in bookshops, or were kept by their better-remunerated lovers, who were painters or musicians. There were chapbooks, theatricals, readings, more chapbooks. Everyone else outperformed Schuyler, whose first published poem, the gorgeously unassuming “Salute”, appeared in 1952:
Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like that gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.
His utterly delightful novel, Alfred and Guinevere, was bullied by editors and flopped on appearance in 1958; his first trade book of poems, Freely Espousing, was not until 1969, his first public reading in 1988. One can hear his surprisingly gruff and sullen voice in corners of YouTube.
Adversity and drama were Schuyler’s regular contexts. He was at times looking to be adopted. “Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed eleven years”, was Anne Porter’s memorable description of his descent on her and Fairfield Porter on Long Island and Maine. His friends, whom he kept for decades (though there were also many enduring breaks, among them one with O’Hara), tended to take against his lovers, whom he kept for weeks or years. “He looked sort of like a Brooks Brothers salesman”, Ashbery said of one instance, Bob Jordan, the “you” of the “Loving You” series of poems, “which is what he was.” But even his friends – Ashbery, O’Hara, Ron Padgett, Kenward Elmslie, perhaps all of them – displayed a kind of shattering helplessness when confronted with Schuyler’s mental instability, variously described as bipolar disorder, periods “of megalomania-paranoia” and, most eloquently, “a rather sinister air of purposefulness about trivia.”
If the conjunction of law, medicine and money was not their element, still less was it Schuyler’s. The dark, preppy, sylph-like youth – though he seems never really to have been young – grew his hair out (he looked, in his own description, like “Buffalo Bill’s mother”), and put on weight from drugs and alcohol, so that, in his own words, he “instantly gained 800 pounds and now look like something you find glowering in a back alley of Naples”. His friends collected money for his hospitalizations, and to arrange somewhere quiet in the country where he could convalesce. When, late in life, he had a little success – a Pulitzer prize, a Whiting award, the sale of his papers to UC San Diego – “Jimmy again had fleeting thoughts of travel to Venice or Rome, but in the end the prize mostly went to pay medical bills”. His almost lifelong dependency by the end left him as an outpatient or a charity case. He became a diabetic and lost some toes. Young caretakers were found to look after him in his room at the Chelsea. He fell out with them or fell in love with them. He lived into the early Aids epidemic, which carried off many who had been dear to him.
Michael Hofmann’s most recent book of poems is One Lark, One Horse, 2018. His next will be called Caret.
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