A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, Nathan Kernan
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York )
1. Preamble
I should probably start off by saying I’m not a big fan and/or reader of biographies. They are, of course, often full of interesting stuff, but at the same time they are equally as often full of stuff I’m not interested in. There are exceptions: I loved (and still love) Richard Holmes’s books on Coleridge, for example. But on the other hand I read, some time ago, Brad Gooch’s biography of Frank O’Hara and can’t for the life of me remember much about it, apart from the stuff I had already known before I read it, and how it seemed to be rather pleased with itself by being so open about O’Hara’s sexuality; and I haven’t read the recent-ish book about John Ashbery’s early years, while a more recent critical biography I did read of him was quite dreadful, with the words “jump” and “bandwagon” coming to mind. While I’m at it, I might as well admit that prior to reading this biography of James Schuyler I half-heartedly joked with a friend that I really wasn’t sure how interesting it would be, because surely Schuyler had spent quite a lot of his time sat looking out of a window and then writing a poem – a bloody good poem, usually, but all the same he was sat looking out the window a lot of the time (perhaps). In other news, and not altogether very surprisingly, a lot of this book turns out to be taken up with the poet’s love affairs and romantic life, which are/is not always happy and which is/are documented at various points in quite a lot of the poetry, but the details of which I have to admit I’m not desperately interested in . . . . . where was I? Oh yes, it also so happens that, in my opinion, references in the poems to the poet’s love life don’t constitute the highest points of the oeuvre. But while this book is by no means a critical biography, Mr. Kernan – who also edited Schuyler’s “Diaries” (1997) – has things to say about the poems, when the occasion arises, that are insightful, and that – beyond the meticulous research and the evident affection the author has for his subject – is the strength of this book: Mr. Kernan knows the poems and he knows what they’re doing and, importantly, how they do it. Anyway, I’ve never reviewed a biography before, and I’m not sure how to do it without winding up re-writing in very short-form “the life”, although I think that’s what they often seem to do in the Times Literary Supplement. Having said all of which, I’ll have a crack at it. Here goes:
2.
When it comes to a biography, one has to start somewhere. This, of the too-often least celebrated of the four poets most usually referred to as the key founders of the New York School – a school of poetry that does not really exist, unless it does – and which I gather has been some two decades in the writing, begins with a prologue that tells of the poet’s first ever public reading at the Dia Art Foundation in November 1988 which, if you have not seen the video (it’s easy to find) you really should, because it is quite remarkable. When the biography begins for real, in Chapter 1, we are taken back to the 17th century, and one might be forgiven if there’s a temptation to skip over the account of a family tree which takes root that far back but which eventually leads to the poet’s small town newspaper-owning father and politically active and aware mother, and to his birth at the beginning of Chapter 2. One might also be tempted to skip the poet’s childhood, because how often are childhoods worth reading about? And one might be in a hurry to get to what one assumes will be the interesting poet-y stuff when he meets up with other poets and all. But in this case that would be a mistake, for you would be missing out on his parents’ divorce, his mother’s second marriage, and his difficult relationship with his stepfather. You would also miss out on being introduced to Schuyler’s grandmother (“Not everyone is quite so nice as my gentle Grandma Ella”, as he puts it in “The Morning of the Poem”) who reads aloud to him, takes him to museums and galleries, and teaches him about the natural world. She was important. The poet would always credit his interest in and sensitivity to plants and birds – so evident in the poetry – to Grandma Ella’s influence. So no, don’t skip the childhood. You would also be missing out on Schuyler’s first close relationship with a male friend, a boy his own age; they (and I quote) “with each other’s support, were able to explore their queer or ‘sissy’ personas”. We also learn that the two boys read a lot of books, and that almost all of the male prose writers they read in high school were gay. I don’t know if that’s important, but there it is. Interestingly – and this is an early example of one of the things that biographies can do – we learn that Schuyler traces his use of joining sentences together with colons (which is one of the things he does quite a bit in his long poems) to his reading of Harold Nicolson’s Some People. (I love little snippets of information like that! And I just sneaked a quick look at the Nicolson book: it’s true: there are colons all over the place!)
One has to mention, too, Schuyler’s time in the Navy during the war. He absconded, an action he put down to “a kind of breakdown.” When captured, he was imprisoned by the naval authorities, which experience left him “shy and withdrawn” and which might well have been a contributing factor to his later mental fragilities which, unsurprisingly, play a major part in the story of his life. Kernan points out that Schuyler’s mental issues might be traced to this experience, in addition to the trauma of his parents’ divorce and his stepfather’s hostility: “In particular, his difficult childhood and adolescence, marked by abandonment and withheld affection, led him throughout his life to seek out (consciously or not) stable surrogate families to attach himself to in one way or another. In addition, Schuyler had a history of being financially supported, at times, by romantic partners.” One acquaintance quoted remarks, perhaps with a note of cynicism, that “Jimmy had a real talent of being taken care of, and finding people to take care of him.” Later in life, a doctor diagnosed the problem as “schizoaffective disorder”, which is defined by the National Alliance on Mental Illness as “a chronic mental health condition characterized primarily by symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations or delusions, and symptoms of a mood disorder, such as mania and depression.”
Should we mention his time with Auden? Probably. Auden’s a pretty important chap. Schuyler’s thoughts when typing up Auden’s poems, when he was with him and Chester Kallman in Italy, at a point in his life when Schuyler thought of himself as a writer of prose, not poetry, is well-known: “Well, if this is poetry, I’m certainly never going to write any myself.” But as Kernan points out, “Even as he was consciously 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.” Auden crops up quite a bit in Schuyler’s life over the years, even if it’s just for drinks, though he also on at least one occasion helps out with money.
Feeling that I’m already in danger of re-writing the life, I will just say that it’s good to have a fleshed-out version of the relationships Schuyler enjoyed (or not) with John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch, and to read the long-drawn out tale of Schuyler’s long-drawn out stay with the artist Fairfield Porter and his wife Anne. The latter’s famous remark that “Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed eleven years” opens Chapter 14. It’s all quite fascinating.
But it’s the poetry that, for me at least, is what matters most, and as I’ve already mentioned, Kernan is very good on it. This can be seen, for example, in his picking up what may seem like small things, such as linking Schuyler’s father’s newspaper work, and what Kernan describes as “[t]he heterogeneous, collage-like nature of newspapers” to “the dated, daily nature of newspapers . . . reflected in the great many Schuyler poems that bear dates and immortalize particular days”. Or, to take a longer instance, this, on the poem “February”:
With “February,” Jimmy comes to a conscious recognition of the poetic territory
that was his: . . . . free verse put to the service of careful and fluent observation in real
time. “Looking out the window,” yes, but also acknowledging what he could not see,
including feelings and “involuntary memories.” The effect is not so much descriptive,
as one of putting the reader in the position of making the same discoveries, at the same
time, as the poet. As he wrote, “Often a poem ‘happens’ to the writer in exactly the
same way that it ‘happens’ to someone who reads it.”
Schuyler himself said in an interview that he tried to write poems that were like Fairfield Porter’s paintings. In this connection, Kernan looks at the poem “A Blue Shadow Painting”, which he says
takes as its subject the painting that Fairfield had given him and reconstitutes, in a
sense, the original scene through imagining the process of its making, while “Under
a Storm Washed Sky,” dated December 8, 1962, in its close attention to the landscape
and in particular the colors of shadows (a noted concern of Fairfield’s), might also be
describing a Porter painting. Or rather it seems to describe how the scene would be
understood through what a painter could and could not indicate with paint, and by
extension draws attention to the inherently limiting but at the same time transformative
effect of verbal description: “An elm and its shadow are one. / The twigs of a pear tree
are knotted / and glazed with light. The clothes pole / stands empty of purpose, a faint
green / on its shadowed side. A cloud like a slice of mist / slides under the sun and the
shadows momentarily fade.”
This is all good stuff. And Kernan does not ignore the paradox that has surely struck most every reader and/or admirer of Schuyler, that is, how someone with such evident behavioural issues wrote the poems that he did. After a spell in the Payne Whitney psychiatric hospital – where, incidentally, one of his visitors is Marianne Moore – he writes “Salute”, a wonderful poem, and one with which he would always, in later life, begin his readings. Given the context, Kernan’s remark at this point in the story is spot on: “ With few exceptions, Schuyler’s poetic voice seems a paradigm of calm sanity, in contrast to his intermittent breakdowns, periods of delusional behavior, and sometimes messy, on-the-edge existence.”
Elsewhere he says:
Yet even as his personal behavior began to exhibit strains and oddities, most of his
letters, both personal and museum-related, and his reviews remained—with some
exceptions—lucid and sane. Even at his most deranged, he could appear, and perhaps
be, calm and rational in his writing. There was a discipline and a sense of performance
in writing that he could harness, making it hard at times for anyone reading his
letters . . . to reconcile their sensible tone with his actual behavior around the time
of writing.
In the summer of 1985 Schuyler was once again hospitalized but, to what appears to have been almost everyone’s astonishment, this breakdown and hospitalization seems to have triggered something, because after his discharge his behaviour completely changed. In the words of one friend:
It was really quite something, because you’d be sitting in his room and he’d read his
poems to you, which he never, ever, ever, ever did” before. Over the next five years
the changes in Jimmy’s behavior continued to be striking: “He bought clothes for
himself . . . he began to take care of his appearance, he started going to Darragh’s
hairdresser, he bought stuff for the apartment . . . kept the place clean, made his own
dinner . . . he began taking over the management of his own finances . . . began to take
little trips . . . Really remarkable: a miracle really.
And when we get to 1988, we get to the reading at the Dia Art Foundation. The rest, as they don’t say, is biography.
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Copyright © Martin Stannard, 2025
(First published at Litter magazine)
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