A complete and compelling account of a masterful American poet
Nathan Kernan | Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler | FSG: £25.00
Reviewed by Ian Pople
James Schuyler’s poetry contains extraordinary descriptive precision. His Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, The Morning of the Poem, concentrates on the everyday, the accretion of events. Nathan Kernan suggests: ‘The effect is not so much descriptive, as one of putting the reader in the position of making the same discovery, at the same time, as the poet’. Kernan quotes Schuyler on this subject: ‘Often a poem “happens” to the writer in exactly the same way that it “happens” to some one who reads it.’ These observations are particularly apt in relation to the poem ‘February’:
A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can’t see
making a bit of pink
I can’t quite see in the blue.
The pink of five tulips
at five p.m. on the day before March first.
The green of the tulip stems and leaves
like something I can’t remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.
Here, the interpolated first person is a necessary adjunct to the struggle to describe. The poet struggles to see what might be necessary in the scene, and the reader is almost made to struggle too. But the reader is drawn in almost unwittingly because the poem embodies the struggle to perceive.
The James Schuyler who wrote that beguiling poem quoted from above, and who emerges from Kernan’s very readable biography, is nothing if not complicated. Schuyler’s long-term friend, the painter Robert Dash, commented of ‘Jimmy’ (as he is referred to throughout the book) that he ‘had a way of moving into your heart and staying there. I mean there was no one like him, and there was no one who had been like him before, and so when you knew him, he just moved into a place that was totally unoccupied and took over.’ That sense of Jimmy’s ‘taking over’ is evidenced by his arriving at the home of the painter, Fairfield Porter, in 1962 and not leaving for another ten years. When Anne, Fairfield’s wife, suggested Jimmy might leave, the reply was: ‘I’ll think about it.’ Think about it he did – for another three years. In fact, Porter and his family had taken Schuyler in after he had had a series of serious mental breakdowns, some of which required him to be hospitalized. Complicating matters further was that Porter was also half in love with him.
Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923 to parents who were both journalists, and divorced when Jimmy was five. Kernan attests that Jimmy had a complicated relationship with father figures from that early age onwards. His mother, Margaret, married again, to Berton Ridenour, whose surname Jimmy used for a long time. Ridenour had been married twice before, and had lost a twelve-year-old son in a drowning accident. Ridenour was particularly strict, and suffered from depression after losing much of his income in the Depression: ‘nutty and cruel’, Jimmy called him. Kernan attributes much of Schuyler’s need for ‘alternative families’ to this disturbed childhood. This included the gay milieu of New York, where Schuyler moved in 1944. It was here that he met Chester Kallman, and W.H. Auden (Kallman’s long-term partner).
It was Kallman Schuyler credited with initially encouraging him to write. However, it was while he was sharing a house with Auden and Kallman in Italy, typing up the poems that Auden subsequently published in the book Nones, that Schuyler became intimately immersed in poetry. This in spite of the fact that his reaction to Auden’s work at the time was: ‘Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.’ Schuyler later noted that D.H. Lawrence’s free verse acted as a ‘counter-inspiration’.
In 1949, Schuyler returned to New York. From this point on he wrote and submitted early poems. Kernan describes these poems as containing aspects of the New York School idiom with which Schuyler is most closely associated, ‘a kind of near-conversational insouciance, with touches of wit or occasional light whimsy.’ It is from this point on, too, that Schuyler came into contact with the other major figures of the New York school, initially Frank O’Hara, with whom Schuyler’s work is often associated. John Ashbery, too, as well as New York painters such as Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, and Helen Frankenthaler.
What followed was a life of considerable struggle, with mental illness and an array of (often abusive) gay relationships, out of which emerges the poetry. The poetry is described by Ashbery in his introduction to Schuyler’s Selected as ‘dazzling in its lyric grandeur and its American plainness.’ Of course, Ashbery cannot be described as unbiased. But another of Ashbery’s comments does seem to catch Schuyler’s greatness: ‘There is no space between the story, always the same, and the way of telling, which is as invisible and vital as the air.’ Finally, Schuyler entered a period of stability and sanity in which he finally felt able to give readings, which were greeted with considerable acclaim for their lovely, calm adroitness.
Kernan’s biography is the kind of thing that inevitably advertises itself as ‘definitive.’ However it certainly feels complete, and is a compelling account of a major poet who too often flies under the radar, especially on this side of the Atlantic.