{"id":13055,"date":"2025-09-01T18:10:31","date_gmt":"2025-09-01T17:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13055"},"modified":"2025-09-01T18:10:31","modified_gmt":"2025-09-01T17:10:31","slug":"nathan-kernan-a-day-like-any-other-the-life-of-james-schuyler-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13055","title":{"rendered":"Nathan Kernan, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

A complete and compelling account of a masterful American poet<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Nathan Kernan | Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler | FSG: \u00a325.00
<\/strong>Reviewed by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n

James Schuyler\u2019s poetry contains extraordinary descriptive precision. His Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, The Morning of the Poem, <\/em>concentrates on the everyday, the accretion of events. Nathan Kernan suggests: \u2018The 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\u2019. Kernan quotes Schuyler on this subject: \u2018Often a poem \u201chappens\u201d to the writer in exactly the same way that it \u201chappens\u201d to some one who reads it.\u2019 These observations are particularly apt in relation to the poem \u2018February\u2019:<\/p>\n

A chimney, breathing a little smoke.
The sun, I can\u2019t see
making a bit of pink
I can\u2019t 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\u2019t remember,
finding a jack-in-the-pulpit
a long time ago and far away.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The James Schuyler who wrote that beguiling poem quoted from above, and who emerges from Kernan\u2019s very readable biography, is nothing if not complicated. Schuyler\u2019s long-term friend, the painter Robert Dash, commented of ‘Jimmy’ (as he is referred to throughout the book) that he \u2018had 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.\u2019 That sense of Jimmy\u2019s \u2018taking over\u2019 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\u2019s wife, suggested Jimmy might leave, the reply was: \u2018I\u2019ll think about it.\u2019 Think about it he did \u2013\u00a0for 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.<\/p>\n

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: \u2018nutty and cruel\u2019, Jimmy called him. Kernan attributes much of Schuyler\u2019s need for \u2018alternative families\u2019 to this disturbed childhood. This \u00a0included the gay milieu of New York, where Schuyler moved in 1944. It was here that he met Chester Kallman, and W.H. Auden (Kallman\u2019s long-term partner).<\/p>\n

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, <\/em>that Schuyler became intimately immersed in poetry. This in spite of the fact that his reaction to Auden\u2019s work at the time was: \u2018Well, if this is poetry, I\u2019m certainly never going to write any myself.\u2019 Schuyler later noted that D.H. Lawrence\u2019s free verse acted as a \u2018counter-inspiration\u2019.<\/p>\n

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, \u2018a kind of near-conversational insouciance, with touches of wit or occasional light whimsy.\u2019 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\u2019Hara, with whom Schuyler\u2019s work is often associated. John Ashbery, too, as well as New York painters such as Larry Rivers, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, and Helen Frankenthaler.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Selected <\/em>as \u2018dazzling in its lyric grandeur and its American plainness.\u2019 Of course, Ashbery cannot be described as unbiased. But another of Ashbery\u2019s comments does seem to catch Schuyler\u2019s greatness: \u2018There is no space between the story, always the same, and the way of telling, which is as invisible and vital as the air.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Kernan\u2019s biography is the kind of thing that inevitably advertises itself as \u2018definitive.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A complete and compelling account of a masterful American poet Nathan Kernan | Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler | FSG: \u00a325.00Reviewed by Ian Pople James Schuyler\u2019s 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: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nNathan Kernan, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13055\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nathan Kernan, A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A complete and compelling account of a masterful American poet Nathan Kernan | Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler | FSG: \u00a325.00Reviewed by Ian Pople James Schuyler\u2019s poetry contains extraordinary descriptive precision. 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