Kiss and tell in the New York poetry world

James SCHUYLER’S poems are, like Caravaggio’s paintings, neither drawn up nor drawn out (in terms Schuyler the art critic would have appreciated, not disegno, but pittura) but insistently in and of the very moment of their creation. They picture not a world but a cosmos. His letters (as complementary to his poetry as Earth is to sky) are the exact topographical maps of that cosmos he fashioned in which neither archons nor legislators operate. (He often declared how much he hated telling people what to do. Of course, then he would present a trick in his poems -- often a trick ending -- that you were supposed to know.)

The letters of “Just the Thing” begin in 1951 when Schuyler was 28, done with the U.S. Navy in World War II and finished with serving as W.H. Auden’s secretary in Italy. He was just coming into his own as a poet, forming bonds with Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and other poets of the New York School, a close-knit circle of friends whose poetry became known for its experimentation and intimacy.

“Dear paysage choisi,” he begins a letter to Ashbery dated “a Friday in December ’68 (never mind which)” (it’s a deliberate echo of “Votre ame est un paysage choisi” from “Clair de Lune,” a poem Verlaine wrote to Rimbaud). In relation to the Ashbery-O’Hara crowd, Schuyler had the role, I believe, analogous to that of the older brother with two kid-brother prodigies to put through college, working to help them while educating himself on his time off. Perhaps because of his war experiences, his adamant admiration for T.S. Eliot and that early “apprenticeship” to Auden, they all respected him, loved him and listened to him.

The early letters in this collection show Schuyler experiencing an identity crisis -- that signal affliction of the post-Freudian narcissistic age, aggravated in Schuyler’s case by a war-related post-traumatic stress disorder worsened by the unbridled consumption of alcohol and the wondrous array of potent pharmaceuticals then flooding the market.

The 1950s, jinx days and all, were nonetheless an invigorating period for the fledgling poet, a time in which spirited and talented types regularly sailed to Europe on the last great ocean liners (sending back postcards detailing their reactions to battered European culture) and faithfully reported on what parties the correspondents had missed. Here is Schuyler in rare form in a letter to Koch:

“At five p.m. on New Year’s eve I was sound asleep. Then I woke up and went to a New Year’s eve party at Jane and Joe’s. They have become New York’s leading party givers. Everybody was there. Joe’s parrot flew across the room and landed on Lorraine Smithberg’s bun! or chignon. Gene Smithberg tried to quiet her but she kept screaming she wanted to see the parrot RIGHT THERE ON A SPIT IN THE FIREPLACE NOW! .... The Gay Nevelsons kept on drinking and dancing. Rudi (Burckhardt) was there with Edith (Schloss) who had on something funny around her neck.... Arnold kept saying he was going to drink less in the New Year while his cup ranneth over. Esther Leslie looked gloomy until about 2:30 a.m. when Frank decided she was the Swan Queen and threw her on the floor. They looked very happy lying there on the floor.... Some of the boys -- Joey, George Montgomery, Johnny Button, Alviny Novak -- went off to a boy party given by Bernard Perlin. ‘He called up central casting,’ reports Alvin, ‘and said send one of each.’ Lincoln Kirstein insulted everybody -- George the most -- so George fell down and then went to the Remo ‘because if I fell down there at least it wouldn’t be in front of people I know.’ Others went on to the club.”

(By which I am fairly certain he means the Everard Baths.)

Avid gossips, thrill-killer bridge players with no political ideas, no religion and no time to spare, they all got very wound up over each other’s libidinal commitments, yet still managed to get work done. Schuyler’s reputation grew, and over the years many awards would come his way, including a Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1981, but all of this was accompanied by breakdowns and hospitalizations, poor health and financial difficulties.

Schuyler did find some consolation and support from Fairfield Porter, a big brother-father figure and a painter whose family Schuyler lived with for 12 years in Southampton. He was able to publish two masterpieces, “The Crystal Lithium” and “Hymn to Life,” and found a way to celebrate renewal; in the latter poem, his language is clear, as when he considers the sun

which seems at

Each rising new, as though in the night it enacted death and rebirth,

As flowers seem to. The roses this June will be different roses

Even though you cut an armful and come in saying, “Here are the roses,”

As though the same blooms had come back, white streaked with red

And heavily scented.

In Schuyler’s letters to Porter, he is most revealing about work and life and the strangeness their interaction engenders: “All I mean is that it seems to me merely another instance of American self-consciousness when confronted by one’s oddness, when the oddness is what makes value. Do you think your paintings would keep gaining in quality -- as I think they do -- if you had been one of those dreary artists who hunt for it in their twenties, find it in their thirties and then do it for the rest of their lives?”

Oddness in this context is what editor and critic Leo Lerman always referred to in the native writers he most admired, “a peculiarly American loneliness” in which what is held in common is precisely that every loneliness is different from every other loneliness.

And a 1971 letter to Porter and his wife, Anne, illustrates what boundless reserves of rage and terror Schuyler fought all his life:

“Please write to me at Calais [poet Kenward Elmslie’s summer home in Vermont]. Oh, Fairfield I’ve decided to forgive your rude letter.... M. Knoedler sent me some pollution ($250) in an envelope so I boxed its ears and sent it to the Bishop’s Fund, Burlington.... no I will not lend you a dollar I will give you one. Here. Later ‘No I won’t give you anymore. Why? Because I don’t feel like it.’ Love to whoever is there. Did you catch my act in July 2nd New Yorker? Hope the Kittiwake hits another rock real soon. Love

Yours in Christ,

Jimmy”

The pulsations of Schuyler’s ardor (especially under the influence of drugs and alcohol) could unhinge him, sometimes violently. When his sexual advances were repulsed, he thought himself ugly, which he was not, but the fear he instilled in some was more effectively repellent than any ugliness. In an ordinary man-child this is called throwing a tantrum, but in a child-man and the father-son poet, this reaction is called wrestling with the angel until the blessing, the refreshment, is won.

Schuyler often went off the deep end (blame the irreparable loss of his father, whose son wrote a quantity of, in Pound’s formulation, news that stays news). When he did, he didn’t slither in, or poise on the low board to check his form; instead, he climbed to the top of the diving pylon, ran down the board howling, jumped into the air, clasping his hands around his ankles, and hit the water in a cannonball that emptied the pool in seconds, terrifying not only small children, but adults as well. Even the lifeguards were wary of approaching him as he surfaced. When the blessings of tranquillity came to Schuyler, his real friends were happy; others, bereft of an exhilarating and seemingly inexhaustible topic, preferred to remember him as Crazy Schuyler, Jim the Jerk (he calls himself that in “The Payne Whitney Poems”), at best some Parsifal in an Everard Baths robe, at worst the Devourer.

The letters bring us to 1991 -- the year of Schuyler’s death at 67 -- but not before first giving us a glimpse of him as the archetypal puer aeternus. His letters to Tom Carey in the 1980s, in which he announces his surrender to him are so very moving. “I was talking about you with Dr. Newman yesterday. ‘I’m afraid, Jim, that in the orchard of life you’ve picked a lemon.’ ‘No, no doc: Tom’s a good boy.’ ”

Thus begins the story of Carey, the California actor-poet dreamboat, and Schuyler the beat-up old reprobate, who started scraping around together for some loose hint of God. (I like to quote a line from Tom’s grandfather Harry Carey’s great performance in the film “Trader Horn”: “Terror can become a kind of beauty too, if two fellows will stand up to it together!”) Together they found a few, thus fulfilling a kind of self-made Schuyler prophecy in the first letter in this collection, to art dealer John Hohnsbeen, from 1951: “You know if there’s anything I approve of more than another it’s the sexy road to Heaven.” Tom Carey was not only Schuyler’s beloved, but also the essential catalyst in the startling resolution of forces (and reversal of fortunes) that made Schuyler’s last years golden. *