On Autumn Lake Read online

  But Whitman or no, there are numerous lakes and shorelines to be found in John’s poems, and a persuasive list of examples to demonstrate how Rochester and its environs once lent their climate to his work. His poem “The Chateau Hardware” is in effect a greeting card from the place that formed him. Anyone who has lived beneath the gray skies of Rochester can acknowledge the truth of the opening line, “It was always November there.” I loved this poem the moment I read it, a feeling that was intensified when John pointed out from the car the location on Monroe Avenue of the mundane hardware store that had provided the allusive title. In the rush of time, both the store and its sign—Chateau Hardware—were gone.

  As our own days rushed by I was the lucky witness to additional scenes newly transfigured in his poems: the weigela that does its dusty thing in “Grand Galop,” the cool downtown shadow of the bus station in “The One Thing That Can Save America.” In the gap between the occasions and the poems I had a measure of the abiding concentration it would take to transform the local; and do it without the oracular pretension which, as I was discovering in the work of formerly favorite poets, might not age so well.

  John wasn’t the only member of his family with insight into his work habits and raw material. On Elmwood Avenue we drove by the vast Rochester State Hospital, an asylum for the mentally ill. One afternoon we saw patients assembled on the grounds, apparently for their exercise, which led him to recount how he and his mother had passed this same asylum and likewise seen patients brought outside for exercise. “Look, John,” said his mother. “Isn’t that sad? I suppose you’ll go home and write a poem about it.”

  His mother’s prediction was later repurposed and passed to me, as in a kind of inheritance. I had acquired a passion for the orchestral suite Three Places in New England, by Charles Ives, in particular its haunting third piece, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” Because that piece is short I made a tape on which it repeated continuously, so I could listen while writing. John was aware of this fixation. One day we took the northern route to Pultneyville and at the town of Sea Breeze came to a bridge across the mouth of Irondequoit Bay. He turned to me and said, “I suppose you’ll go home and write a poem called ‘Irondequoit Bay at Sea Breeze.’”

  His erudition was not always noble. We were invited to dinner by my friend Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at George East-man House and finally at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Bob was the expert who would be brought in to testify at the obscenity trial in Cincinnati that the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe were art; but at this point his eminent career was still ahead. John posed a question about our favorite composers, to which Bob replied with enthusiasm that he’d been listening to some music that was really terrific, the Brandenburg concertos by Johann—he pronounced the full name —Sebastian Bach. John let out a punishing sigh. “That’s like saying you discovered the Sistine Chapel!”

  My friend’s face went slack and I was furious. Imagine if his beloved grandfather had greeted John’s childhood enthusiasms with derision. But we were not children and that, perhaps, was the point. Art isn’t a doting grandpa, as John may have painfully learned, but a lover whose escalating demands cannot be satisfied.

  There would be other lessons that art was a jealous mistress, but none more memorable than on the morning I arrived in Pultneyville to pick him up for our first ride farther east along the lake. It was October, bright and chilly, and his mother, then seventy-nine, was raking leaves in the front yard. She was not making much progress. She had a scarf wrapped around her head and her nose was dripping. As John came out of the house she said to him—and she had a voice that could rise in a nasal whine to match his own—“John, if you were any kind of a son at all you’d help your mother with these leaves.”

  John, his hand already on the car door, turned briefly back and replied in exasperation, as though she should have known better, “Mother, I’m a poet!”

  No doubt he was right; though the example was stern, perhaps suspect, and hard to emulate. Sometimes there is nothing there, he once remarked, but you have to proceed on the assumption that something is, or you write no poetry at all. I got to see that proposition in action, following yet another tour on blue Ontario’s shore, when he sat down with pen and a pad of yellow paper to write the poem “On Autumn Lake.” It isn’t his greatest and it has an opening line that has always made me cringe. Yet there are certain moments as well expressed as if they were in French. By this time I’d written some new poems of my own that surely profited, in the sense of profiter de, from his suggestive taunt at Sea Breeze on Irondequoit Bay. He never said he liked these poems, only that they marked a breakthrough. So it privately took my breath away when he offered the yellow pad for inspection and I came to the freshly written lines:

  Turns out you didn’t need all that training

  To do art—that it was even better not to have it.

  In his last email to me, John recalled the longest trip we made together in the car. Then, early the Sunday morning of September 3, 2017, it was too late to reply. I’m glad he had the last word. I loved the man; and could be ready at a moment’s notice to resume our rolling curriculum on autumn lake.

  LITERARY HUB, 2020

  A VOICE LIKE THE DAY

  Because my name appears in his poem “Dining Out with Doug and Frank,” I should probably disclose that James Schuyler was a friend of mine—though of the two of us, Doug and Frank, it was Frank he really liked. Over the years this preference was our source, not of tension, but of new humor and affection. One August evening, when I was coming out of the building where Frank and I live in New York, I found Jimmy, as we called him, standing across the street with Raymond Foye and pointing up in the direction of our apartment windows. Kind as he was, Jimmy had a voice of abrupt authority, and on this occasion he summoned it to announce, “We are going up to see Frank.” My surprised explanation that Frank was out of town gave him the perfect opening to reclaim his advantage: “I know.” People who never saw the three of us together sometimes nervously suggest that “Dining Out with Doug and Frank” betrays a similar amusement at my expense. They do not need to be embarrassed. James Schuyler was arguably the most perceptive observer I knew, in person or in poetry, but it was perception without malice.

  When Jimmy first showed us “Dining Out,” I didn’t like it. It was the fall of 1977, we were together in the sweaty single room where he was staying at 201 West Seventy-Fourth Street, and I remember thinking as I read the manuscript that although I could admit the glamour of poems about John Ashbery and Jane Freilicher, or Wystan Auden (and on a first-name basis, too), I did not understand what our names were doing in such company. We had met Jimmy three years earlier when he was fifty-one and we were both thirty and new to city life. Could he now be making fun of us? But he never made fun of anyone I knew of, not in a cruel way. Gradually I came to understand that when he wrote about John and Jane and Wystan he wasn’t name-dropping, either. To Jimmy these were real people and real people were the kind that counted. Readers of poetry are used to poems that are pumped up with references to Orpheus and Eurydice, to Bogart, and soon perhaps to Bart Simpson. Whether from education or exposure, a reader has some expectation of what these fictions signify, and it seems to be human nature to like poetry that invites us to bring our expectations to a poem and so to feel included when we get there. My own experience with “Dining Out” suggests that someone who brings such expectations to a poem that refers to actual persons, rather than culture heroes or movie stars, is apt to feel excluded instead. Imagine feeling included by fictions but excluded by real life. Yet this was exactly the perversion I was being encouraged to reconsider. It was not important I know who Doug and Frank were, only that as real people caught in real life they were representative, not of something unattainable, but of something I had all around me. They stood for “friends.” They stand for you. When Jimmy put our names in that poem it was a way of saying what to him was always obvious, that we must treat our friend
s and ourselves as if we were the stars, unalterable and moving as the stars.

  It was not long before Frank and I regarded Jimmy as our own moralist of the everyday. He didn’t so much teach as exemplify, which is the way it should be, since even the wisest lesson soon sounds like drivel. I suppose in this case the lesson would reduce to something like being quick to love the world rather than waiting for the world to love us the way it seemed to do those stars on TV. Coming as we both did from religious and consumer traditions that train you to prefer a world that is always strategically somewhere else, Jimmy’s was just the message we needed to hear. “You see, you invent choices where none exist,” says his magnificent “Hymn to Life,” and when I read that line in context, I recognized it as the adrenaline of a new responsibility. The exciting thing about knowing as well as reading Jimmy was to observe how his ethics seemed to emerge directly from the life around us. His ethics seemed earned—not scooped up from elsewhere as if our long civilization was a mere cargo cult in thrall to morally richer aliens, but earned—and from the simplest and most democratically available situations. One evening after dinner at our apartment he was admiring the pink cover Robert Dash had done for John Koethe’s book The Late Wisconsin Spring. It was, he said, “a very fine pink.” But Jimmy, I warned, Bob says it’s the wrong pink. Jimmy regarded me silently for a moment, then in that voice of sudden gravity he said, “Only if you had another pink in mind.”

  We call it the everyday, when it is more likely that experience is the one thing that is not commonplace, the one source of the saving distinctions that give us lives. I have noticed how Jimmy’s readers like to quote in this regard the first lines of “Letter to a Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum?” (“All things are real / no one a symbol”). But because the Jimmy I knew was so faithfully unpretentious, I always liked the blunter formulation, in a poem called simply “Mike,” which went out of print with Hymn to Life and became available again in his Collected Poems.

  Look out

  the win-

  dow cluck:

  it’s real,

  it’s there,

  it’s life.

  In that unembarrassed view it might even be “theory” that dulls one’s capacity for moral response, while flowers and people and the weather are worthy of the most careful attention. I remember how Jimmy would sometimes turn to Frank, who was once plant information officer at the New York Botanical Garden, to verify the exact identity of a fruit or flower. The last request (though Frank had long since left the Garden) came in the matter of “Yellow Flowers,” a poem in which a Coreopsis is distinguished by its sweetness. A fact checker at the New Yorker had balked at this, as might anyone who noses up to the Coreopsis on sale at the local florist. Jimmy was delighted, and perhaps a little relieved, when Frank turned up a scented variety. Fair-field Porter, the master of painterly realism who had been in Jimmy’s judgment his best friend, believed an artist was someone who “distinguishes endlessly”; and the entries that Jimmy made in his journals during the summers spent with the Porter family on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine show him practicing distinctions of his own. Some of these appeared in The Home Book and later in a chapbook published by the Dia Art Foundation. “Differences from yesterday:” begins the one dated June 27, 1968, “the overcast sky is streaked with yellow, Isle au Haut is bluer, and, though only the most feathery of the grasses sway, the surface of the water is crinkled and running.”

  Jimmy said he never wrote poems about Porter’s paintings, but he did admit in an interview with Mark Hillringhouse that he tried to write poems that were like those paintings. The working principle seems to have been to register your attention, whether in paint or words, before it could be altered by your expectations of how things should, or, as Jimmy would add in the poem “Dec. 28, 1974,” by your wishes of how things might, otherwise be. For me the date of that poem marked the beginning of an intense three-day course in what it would mean to pay attention in poetry. Jimmy, Trevor Winkfield (who would later edit The Home Book), Darragh Park (who was in many ways to take over from the Porters as Jimmy’s chosen family), Frank and I were all staying as year-end guests of Bob Dash at his studio and garden—Jimmy loved gardens—in Sagaponack, New York. On December 28, while the rest of us came and went, Jimmy sat unbudging in a kind of genial secrecy and wrote “Dec. 28,” complete with its now frequently quoted lines about saying things as they are, and its infrequently quoted but to me dearer lines about someone of a “frank” good nature whom you trust. On December 29 he wrote a poem called “‘Can I Tempt You to the Pond Walk?’” in response to an invitation extended to him in those words by Trevor. And on December 30, prompted by an unwanted drama I had allowed to develop, he wrote the uncompromising, one-stun lines of “Growing Dark,” a poem that went in and out of print but reappeared in the Collected Poems. In 1980, on an evening when I was out of town on work, Frank witnessed another demonstration of poetic attention. Jimmy had come for dinner, sat down to sign Frank’s new copy of The Morning of the Poem, and just kept writing. An hour passed before dinner, reheated, was resumed as if there had been no interruption. Afterward Frank opened his book to find not an inscription but a love poem—to Tom Carey. Jimmy called the next day to ask that a copy be transcribed and brought to him. We never saw that poem in print. The aim of paying strict and immediate attention, as Porter once said in reference to Eakins, was to strike through sentimentality. It is possible Jimmy decided the poem he inscribed in Frank’s book had not met this goal.

  By the time the two of us knew Jimmy he no longer lived with the Porters (“Jimmy came for a visit and stayed eleven years,” said Anne Porter) as he did from 1961 to 1972. Once, when he took a company of friends which included us to retrieve some books he had left at the Porters’ house at 49 South Main Street in Southampton, New York, Anne Porter greeted us at the door by saying tenderly, “My, there are a lot of you.” Perhaps she envisioned another lengthy invasion. Jimmy’s friendships with John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara made poetry history. There is no doubt that his friendship with Fairfield Porter was itself a defining chapter in the American culture of the last half of the twentieth century, a friendship that enriched two arts. Frank and I have been able to count twenty-five paintings or sketches Porter made of or including Jimmy, and we have managed to see many of them. None is easily accessible, although the Whitney Museum of American Art does own The Screen Porch, a group portrait of Jimmy, Anne Porter, and the Porter daughters Katharine and Elizabeth, which ought to be permanently on display. In an article in 1960, Porter wrote, “To ask the meaning of art, is like asking the meaning of life: experience comes before a measurement against a value system. And the question whether art has any meaning, like the same question about life, may not be answerable at all.” In the last lines of “Hymn to Life,” proving once again that when great artists steal, they add rather than subtract, James Schuyler wrote, “May mutters, ‘Why / Ask questions?’ or, ‘What are the questions you wish to ask?’”

  David Kalstone described Jimmy’s tone as perfect pitch, and I have wondered ever since what it is that makes it perfect. There are the deftly struck syllables themselves: you hear each note, he doesn’t write with the pedal down. It is not surprising that Jimmy brought a taste for Fauré, Sisley, and Cather into our lives. His poems seldom say look at me, me and my feelings, pity me. They say let us look together at that, isn’t that something?—what love really says in its focus on a third thing. There is no mockery in these poems designed to inform you of the poet’s superior taste or virtue, no one-upmanship. When several of us were together Jimmy often sat to one side, though foursquare as he does in The Screen Porch. You felt as if you were at a Council Fire and any moment true wisdom might be heard, more indigenous and primal than any of the advisories currently to be procured from page or image, and when at last it happened it was as if the DAY had decided to speak. One afternoon we were all discussing favorite poets and the favorite I offered was Whitman. Somebody laughed, and
in a tone sophisticated people once used to indicate there was something embarrassing about Whitman said, “Oh, you probably like ‘Scented Herbage of My Breast.’” I went hot with shame, and knew I had to find a way out, when the Day spoke from the side of the room. “I think that is a beautiful poem,” said James Schuyler. It was thrilling to observe how the tables could be turned, and whatever new shame I felt at my near treason was transmuted instantly into emulation of this man whose honesty had saved me from betraying myself and my heritage for the sake of feeling momentarily snobbish and correct.

  To Jimmy it was apparently only natural to extend his honesty to times when, as he wrote in “Trip,” he was “wigging in, wigging out,” and recovering in psychiatric wards. This is an honesty that seems to astonish people. I am sorry that I, too, once felt it necessary to explain away his fortunes as if I were enhancing him and not proving myself sentimental and smug. Frank always said Jimmy was the sanest person we knew, and in the shape of a life’s gratified attention, I think that was right. In his book on Fairfield Porter, John T. Spike quotes a letter Porter wrote describing Jimmy’s first visit to Great Spruce Head Island in Maine.