john ashbery
1927-2017
the pick-up
As I mention in My Year 2004, I first met John Ashbery at a reading of his work in
1977 at Folio
I did keep in touch with John, moreover, over the next years, sending
him issues of Sun & Moon
magazine, and a couple of years later, I published two prose poems in Sun & Moon, which I believe I then
described as micro-fictions.
And I must have been in touch with him in the early 1980s since in 1983 I included his short work “Description of a Masque” in my Contemporary American Fiction anthology, published by my Sun & Moon Press in that year.
I recall that he was invited for a dinner in Washington, D. C. soon
after, I believe by Marjorie Perloff, but I have no memory of the actual event,
and I have the feeling that Howard and I did not attend. Another fellow
graduate student, Donald Duncan, however, had been there, and someone who had
attended (perhaps Marjorie herself) reported the next day that John and he had
played “footsy” throughout most of the meal, a story which I felt was quite
hilarious.
That same day, sitting at my desk in the large “bull-pen” I shared with
numerous other graduate student teachers, I was told that I was wanted on the
phone. The fellow student who’d picked up the call, whispered, in awe, “It’s
John Ashbery.”
John wanted the telephone number of Donald! I chuckled and gave it out.
I don’t know if they ever did get together, and I resisted asking Don about the
event. Perhaps John only wanted to establish a friendship, or, if the gossip
was correct, maybe we wanted to apologize.
I report all of this, indeed, with some hesitancy given my admiration
for John’s long-time partner, David Kermani, who has had to deal throughout
their years together with John’s fabled alcoholism—a disease, I should add, I
shared. Does it truly matter?
In the 1990s I published a large selection of John’s poetry, with his
approval of my selection, in my anthology, From
the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990. And I
continued to correspond irregularly with him throughout those years.
At some point during those years, I mentioned Ashbery in the context of
my Sun & Moon Press as a gay poet, perhaps even including him in the
context of several others such as Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and perhaps
even Allen Ginsberg. Many of the major gay writers and other artistic figures who
had come to national notice beginning in the late 1940s and 1950s has a very
uncomfortable relationship with broadcasting their own sexuality. While anyone
in their sometimes vast literary circles knew that they were gay, they did not
announce the fact in their own general work or correspondences, in part,
because of the still strong homophobic attitudes that dominated the times, but
also because they didn’t want their sexuality to define and describe their own
writings and compositions. The early hostile reactions in the early 1960s to
gay writers, composers, and artists outlined in Michael S. Sherry’s Gay
Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (2002), made
clear, given the attacks of figures as various as Edward Albee, Tennessee
Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Barber, Gian-Carlo Menotti and numerous others,
that it might be better to remain somewhat closeted.
Coming of age in the twilight of that gay closeted age, and recognizing
fully the talents of the writers, artists, and composers with which I was then
involved, I had no longer any such reservations, and simply presumed, rather
naively I now realize, that someone like Ashbery would be delighted to finally
be identified with a generation of other gay man and lesbians who had now
become well known, including Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, both figures
central to my own publishing.
But more savvy New York City figures such as Charles Bernstein, were
amused by my actions, Charles somewhat humorously observing that I had been the
one who “outed” John.
Ashbery never spoke of my unintentional “outing,” nor did we ever
discuss his gay activities, even if he had personally called me about a
possible gay hook-up. He must have perceived me as the totally out young man I
was, who have lived a fairly wild gay life in New York City in the late 1960s
and who was now living an openly in a gay relationship with my long-time
husband, Howard.
In the immediate years after, I dined with John twice at Marjorie
Perloff’s house at intimate dinners, with only Marjorie, me, and another
younger gay poet whom she’d invited provided he’d drive John home at the close
of the evening. In both of these occasions, John seemed quite sober and talked
easily about poetry and everyday events. He is soft-spoken with a wonderful
sense of humor. I also didn’t treat him like the celebrity he was, refusing to
probe into his long-ago friendships with O’Hara and other notables. I treated Ashbery
more as a contemporary friend than as a curious academic. The reason I don’t
remember what we discussed is simply that we talked as ordinary friends. I
resisted even asking him to send me poems for publication, knowing that he had
major publishing houses interested in his work.
If only I had met John in 1969 when I was living in New York City, leaving the city just a week before Stonewall. But I knew little about poetry in those days, and his name might not even have registered. But I was intelligent enough that I would have quickly caught on, and perhaps cute enough to attract his eye.
I also saw John read on a couple of more occasions, one of which was
memorable because midway through the reading in downtown Los Angeles with Peter
Gizzi, he stopped and announced, “I have to pee.” We waited for quite a while,
finally be told that he had fallen in the bathroom. Soon after, he returned and
simply continued his reading as if nothing unusual had happened. I do believe
his lover David Kermani and accompanied him on this trip; but if I remember
correctly, he was justifiably angry with the situation, and didn’t even rush to
check on John’s survival. Living with an alcoholic certainly does change one’s
empathy in such situations.
I was pleased to be invited once
more to a small gathering with John on April 12, 2001 at my friend Martin
Nakell and Rebecca Goodman’s home, and could share an evening again with him.
John had been feted at Chapman University, where he had been that year’s guest
speaker, an event which, because of the distance to the city of Orange, in the
county south of Los Angeles, I had skipped.
I am sure Howard had also been invited, but either he was busy or simply
wanted to have a night in, so I invited my former senior editor, Diana Daves to
join me as she had at numerous such events. We often joked that I was her other
husband, and she, mine.
Photo Credit: Douglas Messerli
As usual, Marty and his wife Rebecca were running behind schedule, so
our guest had not yet been delivered to the house. Since Diana and I had
arrived before everyone else, they asked if we might pick up John at this
hotel. We readily agreed, and set off.
John and David were staying at the Bel Age, an elegant hotel on North
San Vicente that was very close to the Nakell’s condominium. Meanwhile, Marty
had telephoned John, letting him know that we were on our way.
The Bel Age sign is nearly
invisible as one travels south on San Vicente, and I was convinced anyway that
we were heading much further south, since I had long ago confused two different
locations. At one time the Bel Age had contained a restaurant called L’Ermitage,
and, accordingly, in some vague reverie, I directed Diana to drive several
blocks south to Burton Way, where the Raffles L’Ermitage hotel stood. Checking
at the front desk, we found no John Ashbery was staying there! What to do?
Since Marty had mentioned that the hotel was quite near his home, we
determined to scour Sunset Blvd. With the density of traffic and long pauses at
several stop lights, more than a half-hour had slipped by, and by the time we
reached Sunset and San Vicente, another ten minutes had passed—all in the time
of what should have been a two-minute trip.
Sure enough, there was the Bel Age! As we drove into the driveway, Diana
called out to our poet friends: “You wanna ride, boys?”
“Where were you?” John asked. “We took the Rio Route,” I quipped. I
tried to explain our roundabout voyage and the cause of the confusion. He
laughed, but clearly felt somewhat annoyed that he should be so late to his own
celebration. Clearly, I had lost the art of “picking up.”
The good company at Marty’s and the hefty amount of liquor we all
consumed quickly brought him back to high spirits. The food was excellent, and
the liquor flowed so quickly that Becky had to sneak out to buy some more gin.
Their filled liquor cabinet had been emptied.
At one point John announced that in the morning he was traveling to read
at Berkeley. “They’re such phonies up there,” he declared, “that I’ll fit right
in!”
Later,
Marty challenged John to a tequila-tasting contest, and the two of them drank
late into the night as we and other guests said goodbye and slipped away. Both
he and John, he told me latter, had to stop on the three-block trip back to the
hotel to pee in the bushes on that major Los Angeles thoroughfare, and
accordingly the trip back to the hotel also took longer than anyone might have
imagined.
It’s true that distances are deceptive in Los Angeles, especially when
you travel by car, but that night it must have appeared to John and David that
their hotel existed in some sort of time warp.
As late as 2015, John and I were still communicating. That year I
decided to publish an entirely new “Little Anthology of US Poetry,” writing to
many of my dearest poetry friends. John was particularly generous, given that
by that time his poetry had become so very popular, sending me two new poems
for inclusion, “Featurette” and “Anxious Music.” I think he later asked if he
might print one of the two poems elsewhere, to which I immediately agreed.
His death, two years later was not a total surprise, but washed over me
as an intense sadness. His writing, although always profound, reminded me
continuously of the wit, clever thinking, and indelible timing of so many gay
men of his age—you see I am still, alas, defining him by his sexuality—who met
up, drank, laughed and partied many a night to survive the cold realities of
their everyday experiences. John was a truly gay poet, in the older meaning of
that word, as brilliant and broad-ranging as his work nonetheless was. Like
Frank O’Hara, John was always a member of a world that was somewhat cloistered,
men and women who could take any situation in life, any language you might
speak, and turn it over into an entire universe of complex associations and
possible meanings, forcing you to perceive, for before the “language poets,”
that spoken words were themselves how we think, were the always-ready tools to
comprehend the experience of our lives. The reader was asked to move his or her
mind as quickly as the constantly shifting and almost always humorously
challenging brains of such individuals. Their form of “collage” became a way of
reconfiguring the constant infusion of the images, languages, and actions of
themselves and their friends into the very significance and essence of meaning
in a world that often seemingly had forgotten how to think. Nearly every poem
and work of fiction that John wrote was a voyage into a universe of new
possibilities of significance, one which invited us to imagine and just plainly
think.
Los Angeles, May 2, 2009; October 16. 2024
*
life
in duluth
John Ashbery and James Schuyler Nest of
Ninnies (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1969)
Ashbery and Schuyler
begin their fiction in what seems, at first, an almost conventional mode. Two
people, Alice and Marshall, sit at the dinner table, gently arguing, a
conversation that appears to be between husband and wife. He, quite obviously,
goes to the city every day to work, while she, a 1950s housewife, it seems, is
dissatisfied with life in a New York suburban community, “fifty miles from a
great city.”
Fairfield Porter: John
Ashbery and James Schuyler
Alice seems bored, languid at the very least, disinterested
in the leftovers that Marshall has pulled from the refrigerator for their
supper. Poutingly, she refuses to eat, wanting to go to the city. Marshall
himself is described as sulking, seeking a missing bread basket in which serve
hot bread. Indeed, pouting, sulking, wounding seems to the major activity of
these two, until they are interrupted by a woman, Fabia, from next door, at
which point Marshall seems to come alive while Alice retreats to the basement
to shake their furnace into action. Before long a fuse has blown and a
snowstorm has begun, the three heading off to a hardware store and to a nearby
Howard Johnson’s for a drink.
Throughout Nest
of Ninnies, in fact, storms—both meteorologically and emotionally—are
abrew. None of the characters might be described as emotionally stable, and the
weather, no matter where these figures go, is generally filled with rain, snow,
ice, and wailing winds. And many of them are perpetually drink.
In
this first chapter, moreover, we quickly discover that whatever one might think
are the facts have nothing to do with reality—if there is reality in their
world to be found. Language, in particular makes no true connections. In the
first few pages I’ve described above the characters speak more by association
than through any attempt to truly communicate:
“We of course made no attempt to alter
this old place when we took
it over, beyond a few slight repairs,”
Marshall seemed aware of the
young woman for the first time. “I
wanted to have the fireplace bricked
up because it cools the house, but so
many people commented on it
we decided to leave it.”
“You don’t seem to
see so many people.”
“Look, snow is
coming down it now.”
An especially loud
clang from the basement caused them both to
start. “You sit down and I’ll get you
a cup of coffee. I’ll put on the lights
and call Alice,” Marshall announced.
Alice’s dim form
appeared in the door. “I think I’ve just blown a
fuse. Hello, Fabia.”
“That’s very funny. The
fuses at our house blew out too. It must be
general.”
As
we move forward into this strangely charted territory, we gradually begin to
meet other characters, Fabia’s brother Victor, who has just dropped out of
college, her parents, The Bridgewaters, while we discover that the quarreling
couple of the first scene are not husband and wife, but sister and brother,
Marshall being somewhat attracted to Fabia, while Alice is interested in the
wayward Victor.
As
these characters (types more than flesh-and-blood figures) are established, we
begin to suspect that the fiction will be a kind of domestic story of their
interchanging relationships and lives. But after a few chapters, in which the
characters half-heartedly attempt to settle down (Marshall is the only one, it
appears, who has a job), Ashbery and Schuyler take the work in an entirely
different direction.
Just
as we grow used to the small cast of figures he has presented us, they quickly
begin to gather others around them as they move forward in space, first to
Florida, then to Paris, Italy, back to New York, and away again, floating in an
out of their original home while adding more and more figures as they go.
One might argue that, after the first few scenes,
Ashbery and Schuyler pick up on Henry Green’s marvelous Party Going just
where it ended, with a large party of figures finally ready to move on. That
group of ninnies is perhaps more British than is this American grouping, but
there are enough French acquaintances, Italian pickups, Pen Pals (does anyone
remember when young men and women had Pen Pals?), school girls, and numerous
others to create a hilarious international “nest” into which and out of which
the figures come and go, just as in Green’s fiction.
If
the language these characters use is absurdly associative and self-centric, so
too are their actions. Time and again characters meet and accidently
reencounter each other as if the whole of Europe and the US were just as small
as the suburban New York community in which the work begins and ends.
Just
as absurdly, in the latter part of the book, the figures pair off in odd
combinations we might never have expected, Alice marrying an Italian pick-up,
Giorgio, who together open a restaurant; Irving Kelso, a mama’s boy and
Marshall’s co-worker, marrying a French woman the group has met in Florida,
Claire; while Claire’s sister pairs up with Victor.
Victor’s
Pen Pal, Paul, meanwhile, arrives at novel’s end with Marshall, the two having
evidently traveled to Duluth and South Bend! As all the other figures move off
in the various directions their lunatic behavior leads them, Marshall announces
that he may move to Duluth; Duluth, he reveals, is big in plastics, and his
company (evidently producing or using plastics) wants to open up a new branch
in that Northern Minnesota City.
I have eyes only
for Duluth. That’s a place where they really
know how to relax
and get the most out of life. I could even
live there myself.
You never saw such steaks.
Paul announces, in
turn, that he likes the US and may not return to his home in
France. Both speak of the delights of South Bend.
Meanwhile
Fabia was saying to Paul, “What was there in South
Bend, anyway?”
“You won’t
believe this,” Paul said, “but it’s true: a Pam-Pam’s!”
“Oh,”
Fabia allowed.
The cryptic reference to
the international bar and restaurant chain suggests far more that it appears,
perhaps even hinting how to read through the characters’ scatter-brained
references.
Bar
Pam-Pam’s was a kind of early bar and coffee house scene somewhat in the manner
of Starbucks today, except that several of the Bar Pam-Pam’s operations played
cool jazz and catered to special audiences.* Cartoonist Joe Ollmann writes
in The Paris Review about a local Pam-Pam’s in New York which
he describes as an “old man bar,” suggesting to me that its clientele are
elderly gays. What Ashbery and Schuyler seem to suggest, accordingly, is that
suddenly Marshall and Paul are an couple who perhaps may be the first to escape
the loony nest into which the dozens of characters have fast settled.
After
having just feasted on Giorgio’s special courses, Victor suggests in the final
lines of the book, perhaps hinting at the new relationship between the two men:
“I’m so hungry I could
eat a wolf. Why don’t we go over the Gay
Chico and have
some refried beans?”
And
so these “cliff dwellers” bid their goodnights, moving off toward the parking
lots and shopping plazas of their empty lives. Life in Duluth might be just the
tonic.
*Steve Fletcher
describes a Bar Pam-Pam in England on the internet:
The refectory in the
college had about as much atmosphere as a cemetery with lights, so a girl
student with whom I was highly smitten, Diane, suggested we go to the Pam Pam.
A coffee bar.
It
was just across Oxford Circus at the junction with Hanover Street and Hanover
Square and the exterior had a South East Asian look about it which was
continued on the inside with low lighting, bamboo and palm trees in jungle
browns and greens.
The
Pam Pam was quite small; it had about half a dozen very low tables and behind
the counter was the first coffee machine I had ever seen. (There was a small
upstairs section too over the counter with no more that three tables).
Scandinavian
open sandwiches were the house speciality (and the only ones on offer)
consisting of a piece of rye bread topped with a piece of lettuce, a tomato and
a hard-boiled egg or a sardine – very exotic.
A
bit pricey too, I seem to remember. But the owner, a Spaniard, was never in a
hurry to get rid of poor students. He also played music: jazz. Not on a juke
box but on a Dansette 78 r.p.m. record player behind the counter.
He
had great taste and I was always asking him what the records were, his
favourites being the boogie inspired piano pieces by Oscar Peterson. Cool
sounds in a cool place.
The
Pam Pam was different and quite unlike the other coffee house I was now also
frequenting – the infamous French coffee/newspaper shop near the corner of Old
Compton and Charing Cross Road, and the Gyre & Gimbleat at Charing Cross.
There
one could rub shoulders with hookers, villains and dealers – plus the likes of
Victor Passmore, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and demi-monde characters like
Quentin Crisp and Ironfoot Jack.
Because
it was just outside Soho and on the edges of Mayfair, which was relatively
quiet at night, the Pam Pam seemed a bit exclusive to the art students of RSP.
I hung out there for about a year and became an ardent modern jazz fan.
Los Angeles, November 8,
2011
*
the gesture always hides the truth
While working on a collection of poetry in 2000, I wrote “through” several poems by John Ashbery creating an original poem which I titled “The Decibels.” My goal in that volume, later assimilated into by collection of poetry title Writing Through was to send the poems I had written to the writers, asking them in turn to either write through the poem I had written about them or to write through my own poetry.
John did write back a very gracious note,
responding that he could not find the time to write in response. Yet, he
commented: “’The Decibels’ seem to me to be a poem that I haven’t written yet
and would like to write, rather than a poem in imitation of my style (whatever
that is). I still hope to write this poem.” I felt that Ashbery totally comprehended
what I was attempting to do.
I’ve reprinted the poem below.
The Decibels
for John
Ashbery
Surface
bends to the restless shifting
of new
arrivals. Our equators glow
with the
human heat. No one had imagined
the storm to
be like this! Hasn’t the sky?
The gesture
always hides the truth,
suspecting,
perhaps, what has been
assigned to
it or drawn from it into the dark
shadow where
it sits. Every utterance
is
half-meant, half-absent, half-full
as amass.
You woke up this morning
pissing
yourself over the gulf.
And the
voyage? I am convinced
there are
some things of importance.
In the
tunnel you placed all those pleasures.
You hyped
the embarrassment back
and even, if
I am not imagining it, laughed!
Another
example of how different
each of us
is. All those people,
all those
faces, all those hands!
As the
majestic ship pulled away,
we wondered
why had everyone gone
as suddenly.
With all that coming
and going,
how can chivalry be sustained?
There is
nothing left but coffee
and whiskey
and cigarette butts.
We sit out
the sunporch to its solitary light.
Keeping warm
now is our primary occupation,
lengthening
the arch. Does the foot jump?
It’s quiet,
too quiet to scream.
Los Angeles,
April 29, 2000
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