Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry

beautiful enemies

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Beautiful Enemies friendship and postwar american poetry

andrew epstein

3 2006

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2006 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Epstein, Andrew. Beautiful enemies : friendship and postwar American Poetry / Andrew Epstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references. ISBN 13 978-0-19-518100-5 ISBN 0-19-518100-X 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Friendship in literature. 3. United States—Intellectual life— 20th century. I. Title. PS323.5.E67 2006 811'.5409353—dc22 2005032423

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For my mother and father and for Kara

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CREDITS

ortions of chapter 7 appeared in an earlier form in Raritan 19.3 (Winter 2000), as “Frank O’Hara’s Translation Game.” “Lithuanian Dance Band,” copyright © 1973 by John Ashbery, from Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, by John Ashbery. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers” and “Some Trees” from Some Trees, by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1956 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. “Spring Day,” “Plainness in Diversity,” “Soonest Mended,” “Summer,” “Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox,” “Song,” “Bungalows,” “Sortes Verginlianae,” Rural Objects,” “Young Man with Letter,” “Clouds,” and “Fragment” from The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1966, 1970 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. ”Street Musicians”and “Saying It to Keep It From Happening” from Houseboat Days by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1975, 1977 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. “The New Spirit” and “The System” from Three Poems by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1970, 1972 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author

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Credits

“A Wave” from A Wave by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1981, 1984 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. “The Skaters” from Rivers and Mountains, by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1962, 1966 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author Excerpts from the writings of Amiri Baraka reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc., on behalf of Amiri Baraka. Excerpts from previously unpublished writings of Kenneth Koch by permission of Karen Koch and the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. Excerpts from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Graville-Smith, administratrix of the estate of Frank O’Hara. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Excerpts from previously unpublished writings of Frank O’Hara by permission of Maureen O’Hara.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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t will probably not come as a shock that a book about the relationship between friendship and writing would begin by acknowledging the profound importance of various friends and mentors. One of the themes of this book is the notion that no piece of writing is an island—that no author writes in isolation, but rather within a web of other works, collaborators, and friends. My own case is of course no exception. If not for the encouragement, insight, and advice of many people over a long period of time, this book simply wouldn’t exist. I am grateful for the support I received while a graduate student at Columbia University, and I wish to thank several people in Columbia’s English Department for being especially indispensable to the evolution of this project. I had the remarkable good fortune of working closely with the late Kenneth Koch, and I am forever grateful for the unique window that knowing Kenneth granted me onto the poetry and poets he knew and loved so well. Jonathan Levin has been an exemplary advisor and sage guide who believed in this project from the very beginning, and I am very thankful for his insightful suggestions, crucial advice, and constant encouragement at so many steps along the way. I also want to thank Ann Douglas and Edward Mendelson for their incisive criticism and guidance, and Columbia’s Americanist Dissertation Seminar, especially Caleb Crain, Michael Elliot, Claudia Stokes, and Joshua Miller, whose questions and suggestions were always helpful and productive.

x Acknowledgments I would also like to acknowledge the many other scholars and poets who have read and commented on parts of this book or otherwise offered their support. Marjorie Perloff ’s profound generosity, sharp advice, and interest in my work have been essential to me at many stages of this project. For their helpful feedback and general encouragement, I am grateful to a number of writers whose close ties to the original New York School poets offered me a valuable, “first-hand” perspective, including David Shapiro, David Lehman, Ron Padgett, and the late Joe LeSueur, and to many other poets and scholars, including Richard Howard, Terence Diggory, Alan Michael Parker, Kimberly Benston, Alan Golding,Timothy Gray, Daniel Kane, Libbie Rifkin, Steve Evans, Jennifer Moxley, Lytle Shaw, Chris Stroffolino, and Kevin Killian. For many eye-opening conversations about our shared preoccupations, a special thanks to Michael Magee. I also wish to thank Frank O’Hara’s sister, Maureen O’Hara, for discussing her brother, his poetry, and his friendships with me. For their help with archival materials, I thank Rutherford Witthus, at the Dodd Research Center of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Rodney Phillips at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, Leslie Morris at the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and the librarians at the Columbia University Rare Book Room. I am also grateful to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, which enabled me to make substantial progress on this project. I am indebted as well to my current institution, Florida State University, and its English Department, for their generous support. Many thanks are due to the chair of my department, Hunt Hawkins, whose tireless assistance and wisdom have been invaluable, and to my colleagues Rip Lhamon, Barry Faulk, Mark Cooper, Leigh Edwards, David Kirby, Mark Winegardner, Erin Belieu, Jimmy Kimbrell, and Ralph Berry. Thanks also to my research assistant, Nicholas Allin, who was extremely helpful and diligent. I have also been lucky to have great friends far from academia to keep me sane and laughing, and for their friendship and interest in my work I want to thank Ashby Jones, George Anderson, and Matt Easton. I would also like to thank everyone at Oxford University Press, especially my two editors, Elissa Morris, for believing in this book and seeing it through the beginning stages, and Shannon McLachlan, for expertly shepherding it through its final phases with enthusiasm. I am also indebted to the two anonymous readers who reviewed the manuscript for Oxford University Press and whose perceptive, valuable feedback made this a better book. A portion of chapter 7 appeared in Raritan in an earlier version; I am grateful to the editor, Richard Poirier, for publishing it, and it is reprinted here with permission from Raritan. The support of my family has been most important of all, and I cannot begin to thank them adequately here for all their love, generosity, and belief in me. To my parents, Ellen and Leonard Epstein, my biggest fans and best counselors, I owe everything, not least the love of language, learning, and poetry they instilled in me

Acknowledgments xi from a very early age. This book is for them. My sister, Laura Epstein Rosen, and her husband, Larry Rosen, have been a constant source of encouragement and good cheer. Many thanks also to Phyllis, Steve, Jason and Canty Gross for all their support over the years. Finally, I am indescribably grateful to my two amazing children, Casey and Dylan, whose laughter, wide-eyed wonder, and friendship have been a continuous joy, a daily inspiration. To my wife, Kara Gross, I simply owe more than words can tell. Infinitely patient, unconditionally supportive, a sharp-eyed editor and a trusted advisor, Kara has taught me nearly everything I know about the meaning of friendship and love, especially the “beautiful” parts. This book, finally, is for her.

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CONTENTS

Abbreviations Introduction

xv 3

1

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America Community, Individualism, and Cold War Culture

2

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry”

3 “My Force Is in Mobility” Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 4

26

86

Growing Up with Our Brothers All Around John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 127

5 Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 6 “Against the Speech of Friends” Baraka’s White Friend Blues 194

166

53

xiv

Contents 7 “A Rainy Wool Frankie and Johnny” O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 233 Conclusion Notes

287

Works Cited Index

275

345

331

ABBREVIATIONS

T

he following frequently cited works will be referred to in the body of the text with these abbreviations. Complete bibliographic information for these works is provided in the Works Cited section. John Ashbery HBD Houseboat Days MSO The Mooring of Starting Out:The First Five Books of Poetry RS Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987 SP Selected Poems SPT Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror TP Three Poems Amiri Baraka A The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones BM Black Magic: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967 BT The Baptism and The Toilet C Conversations with Amiri Baraka DL The Dead Lecturer H Home: Social Essays P Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note SD The System of Dante’s Hell T Transbluesency:The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961–1995) xv

xvi Abbreviations Ralph Waldo Emerson EL Essays and Lectures S Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson Frank O’Hara AC Art Chronicles 1954–1966 AN Amorous Nightmares of Delay: Selected Plays CP Collected Poems EW Early Writing PR Poems Retrieved SS Standing Still and Walking in New York

beautiful enemies

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INTRODUCTION

Thus we were pitted against the friend who came at midnight and wanted to replace us with a song. We resisted furiously . . . —John Ashbery, “The Friend at Midnight”

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his study of postwar American poetry’s obsession with friendship and its pleasures, limitations, and contradictions borrows its title from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Friendship,” his great 1841 essay on the subject: “A friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. . . . Guard him as thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside” (EL, 351). With this striking oxymoron, Emerson drives home his belief that true friendship, at its most intense and productive, is a wonderful yet confounding contradiction. It is a maddening bundle of opposites—a mix of attraction and repulsion, allegiance and enmity, part blessing, part albatross. This equivocal attitude about friendship and the possibilities for communion with others has reverberated throughout the history and development of American poetry. Poets from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to Frank O’Hara and Lyn Hejinian have wrestled with the irreconcilable tension between friendship (and the threat to independence and alterity it poses) and the primordial American ideal of self-reliance. This book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and nonconformity is central to post–World War II American poetry and its development. By focusing on the work and interrelations of some of the most important and influential postmodernist American poets—the “NewYork School” poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka—Beautiful Enemies investigates the peculiar dynamics of American avant3

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garde poetic communities and the uneasy role of the individual within them. It takes as its starting point a fundamental paradox: that at the heart of experimental American poetry pulses a commitment to both radical individualism and dynamic movement that is sharply at odds with an equally profound devotion to avantgarde collaboration and community. This tense dialectic—between a deep-seated aversion to conformity and a poetics of friendship—actually energizes postwar American poetry and poetics. It drives the creation, the meaning, and the form of important poems, and it frames the interrelationships among certain key poets, leaving more contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. However, despite the ubiquity of friendship, its merging of pleasure and pain, as a theme for major American poets, and despite the significance and complexity of the actual friendships key poets share with one another, the topic has garnered little serious attention from literary criticism. Scholars have generally treated the lyric as the expression of an introspective self ’s interiority rather than as a space where the interplay between individuals, the drama of the social, could be staged—a practice generally seen to be the métier of the novel rather than the poem. When it is not simply ignored, friendship between poets is often treated biographically and celebrated uncritically, often as a kind of colorful backdrop to mention before considering a poet’s work in bracketed isolation—leaving largely unexamined both the impact such close alliances may have had on the aesthetic evolution and careers of key poets and the fascinating ways friendship gets figured within the poetry itself.1 Critics have also been much more likely to focus on relationships and debts between writers and their predecessors than between writers and their contemporaries. This is in part because many studies of poetic influence, and of the evolution of American poetry in general, either knowingly or unconsciously follow from the useful but limited model established in Harold Bloom’s 1972 book, The Anxiety of Influence. Bloom’s famous, controversial theory argues that influence must be seen as a vertical, diachronic, and agonistic relationship between a given poet and a single, monolithic “parent,” whom the belated, anxious newcomer is hell-bent on vanquishing and surpassing. This view certainly underlies Bloom’s legendary championing of one of the central figures in this study, John Ashbery, a campaign which, as many have noted, almost single-handedly paved the way for the poet’s canonization as a major American poet. True to his theory, Bloom casts Ashbery as the rightful inheritor of Romanticism, a poet who nervously builds on and swerves from his primary precursor, Wallace Stevens. At the same time, he strenuously dismisses Ashbery’s connections with his closest peers, the other poets affiliated with the label “New York School.” For Bloom, as for many other critics, Ashbery is “so unique a figure that only confusion is engendered by associating him with Koch, O’Hara, Schuyler and their friends and disciples” (“Charity,” 49). Rejecting the possible importance of Frank O’Hara or Ashbery’s other major affiliates to his poetry on the rather baffling grounds that he is so “unique” that his close ties with other poets do not

Introduction 5 matter, Bloom places Ashbery on a rarefied plane in battle with his predecessors Whitman and Stevens and forcibly removes him from the avant-garde milieu that fostered (and continues to foster) his work. As such, Bloom’s influential reading of Ashbery, reinforced by many subsequent studies, has constructed only a distorted, partial picture of the poet and his work. As Geoff Ward has observed, “the claims Bloom has made for the poetry of John Ashbery have been massive, and form an argument, partly on his behalf, against the whole notion of a New York School of poets”—an idea that Bloom has been “explicitly antagonistic” toward (Statutes, 4, 206 n. 7). More broadly, Bloom’s work has long argued in “opposition to the concept of collective, avant-garde poetry in America” (206 n. 7). Such a reading of American poetry leaves us with a skewed narrative of its development: one that highlights a series of “strong poets” locked in timeless aesthetic combat, detached from history, circumstance, and human community. In contrast, I suggest that we need to be more aware of how aesthetic and cultural forms cannot be fully understood through the study of individual authors in isolation or solely as manifestations of external sociopolitical conditions, but rather should be seen as a product of densely interwoven cultural, intertextual, interpersonal spaces. As Alan Golding has argued, “historians of postwar American poetry tend to underplay the ways in which a sense of collective purpose may have empowered the poets’ work” (From, 121). My own study concurs with, and expands on, Golding’s belief that if we were to pay closer attention to the way poets align themselves with one another, to the material and social practices by which they bond with and resist one another, emulate and oppose, promote and critique each other’s work, it “would force us to see literary history not only as a history of individual careers, important books, and competing discourses but also as a history of writing communities” (121). In order to contribute to such a history, this book offers a new perspective on some of the thorniest questions raised by postwar American poets and their enactment of literary community, their treatment of the social, and their representation of friendship as a multivalent site of inspiration, contestation, struggle, pleasure, and loss.To do so, I tell the story of one particularly vibrant intellectual community where friendship and writing intersect in fascinating ways: the New York avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s. By now it has become a truism of literary and art history that a set of important movements or communities erupted in the decades following World War II. Chronicles of the period portray rival gangs rushing out of the dark alleys of arts and letters like the Sharks and the Jets, wielding manifestos like switchblades: the Abstract Expressionists, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, the New York School poets, the Confessionals, the Deep Image poets, the Pop artists, the Black Arts movement, Minimalism. We are accustomed to hearing about the mutually inspiring camaraderie, the renowned friendships, and the shared aesthetics of various groups of postwar poets—particularly those in the anti-academic and oppositional movements whose work the editor Donald Allen gathered together

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and labeled for his epochal 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry: 1945–1960.2 For example, overviews of post–World War II American poetry almost always adhere to these categories and trot out each group’s commonalities before glossing a few representative figures.3 And surely one could fill a bookshelf with group portraits of the Beats that aim to conjure the intimate society those scruffy outsiders fashioned.4 Similar (if fewer) narratives have been proffered of the so-called New York School, the loose collective of young avant-garde poets who gathered in Manhattan in the early 1950s and developed separately from, but in close proximity to, the noisier, more notorious Beats. At the core of this group were the poets Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest; painters Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, and Fairfield Porter; and numerous others, including, somewhat later and more tangentially, the young Amiri Baraka. What these diverse figures shared was boundless excitement and inspiration in their love for modern painting (especially the School of Paris and the then-reigning Abstract Expressionists of “the New York School of painting”); the European avant-garde (Dada, surrealism, and futurism); a maverick American experimental tradition that revered Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein and that rejected the influence of T. S. Eliot; the campy absurdity and vitality of popular culture and the everyday; and the vibrant, chaotic diversity of New York City itself.5 For writers from Greenwich Village to Black Mountain, North Carolina, all the way to North Beach in San Francisco, the postwar years were undoubtedly a time of intoxicating creative exchange, in which a remarkable number of figures who are still considered significant found within small collectives and friendships a liberating sense of kinship, agreement on political and artistic first principles, and the pleasures and benefits of an audience of like-minded souls. To be sure, there has been an understandable tendency among some of the original members, later poets, and commentators to celebrate this heady moment and to idealize the glory days of collaborative, revolutionary excitement, when a “New American Poetry” seemed not only possible but present. This may be especially true of the many retrospective accounts of the New York School of poets, whether in such acts of memorial as the posthumous reminiscences which fill Bill Berkson and Joseph LeSueur’s Homage to Frank O’Hara, or in Kenneth Koch’s moving poems of unabashed nostalgia for a lost time and vanished cadre (like “Fate” and “A Time Zone”), or in City Poet, Brad Gooch’s entertaining, gossipy biography of O’Hara and his circle.6 The first full-fledged history of the New York School as a group, David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, opens by telling us that “The story of the New York School of poets is a study in friendship, artistic collaboration, and the bliss of being alive and young at a moment of maximum creative ferment” and goes on to vividly portray the poets as a band of brilliant, fun-loving friends, who triumph against all sorts of adversity and critical opprobrium because of

Introduction 7 the support and healthy competition they offer one another (1). For example, Lehman highlights Kenneth Koch’s assessment of the intensity and importance of the friendships that gave rise to the New York School of poetry, which is a typical retrospective account: “It’s wonderful,” Koch said many years later, “to have three good friends that you think are geniuses.”The poets were “like the members of a team, like the Yankees or the Minnesota Vikings,” Koch elaborated. “We inspired each other, we envied each other, we emulated each other, we were very critical of each other, we admired each other, we were almost entirely dependent on each other for support. Each had to be better than the others but if one flopped we all did.” (5)

Lehman does a terrific job of using anecdote and the participants’ personal recollections to chronicle how the poets avidly read each other’s work, thrived on a blend of competition and mutual admiration, defended one another in crowded bars and in the pages of esteemed journals, laughed together, gossiped and bickered, and collaborated on poems, plays, fiction, paintings, and publications such as the journal Locus Solus, which they founded and edited as a forum primarily devoted to their own work. “The whole period,” Lehman concludes, “was, in Koch’s phrase, ‘fizzy with collaboration’” (5). Such narratives about the origins of the New York School are welcome for their attention to the poets as a community, contra Bloom’s take on Ashbery. However, their emphasis on the joys of friendship tends to overlook the more submerged tensions between a group aesthetic and what used to be called “the individual talent.” This study will seek to extend this terrain by examining the very notion of community and friendship in terms of how the poets felt and wrote about such things; the disruptive and contradictory ways friendship is actually figured in their writing; the philosophical, aesthetic, cultural, and political forces that helped shape these alliances and the poets’ attitudes towards them; and the role played by gender, sexuality, race, and other categories in helping to construct and legitimize such unions. Although a stimulating collaborative atmosphere certainly energized this scene, the poetry and prose by the poets involved actually suggests that a much more complex and interesting play of intertextuality and originality, affinity and resistance, was a motivating force. In recent years, a promising trend has emerged as a number of critics and scholars, including Michael Davidson, Alan Golding, Libbie Rifkin, Daniel Kane, Reva Wolf, Beret Strong, Terence Diggory, Lytle Shaw, and Oren Izenberg, have begun to look more closely, analytically, and sociologically at the importance of community to twentieth-century avant-garde poetry and its development. In general, these studies broach the way poets conceive of the “social” and/or rigorously examine the material realities of writing communities, especially how they relate to such things as the construction of community, the strategies of poetic careers, the nature of gender roles, the processes of canonization, or the insti-

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tutions of poetry, both establishment and underground. Quite often, they have effectively exposed the exclusions, hierarchies, and reprehensible (by contemporary standards) politics and ideological blind spots, often with regard to gender and race, that belie the progressive ideals of such communities. In order to probe what Davidson refers to as “poetry as an instrument of community formation,” many of these studies have begun to examine the ramifications—social, cultural, political, and aesthetic—of the various modes of circulation and exchange by which poetry gets written, transmitted, and codified: for example, the impact of alternative institutions (such as Black Mountain College or the Poetry Project at St. Marks); the founding and editing of small presses and journals; the power of anthologies; and the significance of reading series, correspondence, and public performances and quarrels (Guys, 17).8 This surge of attention to the social, material constitution of poetry and its institutions has been refreshing and extremely fruitful, and indeed my hope is that this book will contribute to this recent, still rather inchoate turn in our study of poetry. These critiques, however, rarely discuss with specificity friendship as a psychological, philosophical, or aesthetic category (a subject of tremendous interest to the poets), instead folding it into the related, but not identical, rubrics of community or the social. Nor do they spend a good deal of time investigating how such relationships, and the mixture of angst and inspiration they provide, become intertwined with the subject, form, rhetoric, and imagery of actual poems. Also, they tend to privilege, more than I will here, the poets’ desire for “solidarity,” the way composing poetry and other material practices undertaken by avant-garde poets serve to shore up the insularity of a restricted coterie, or are at least designed to do so.9 Though the critics do frequently draw our eye to the important role of contention, disagreement, and conflict in avant-garde community formation, they often emphasize, as Davidson does in both San Francisco Renaissance and with greater depth in his recently published book Guys Like Us, that the contentiousness and competitive jockeying within these “boy gangs” mostly help solidify group loyalty and cement male dominance through forms of heterosexist and chauvinistic male bonding (Guys, 13). Finally, I will insist that the model of subjectivity, of human selfhood, set forth in this poetry greatly complicates and undermines the kind of rhetoric of community often highlighted in recent criticism. Whereas many of these recent studies emphasize convergence, solidarity, and consensus, my account of postwar poetry foregrounds the tenacious and surprisingly complicated form of American self-reliance, one that I will refer to as “experimental individualism,” which continuously disrupts such gestures of solidarity, union, male bonding, and avant-garde community-building and throws into crisis the ideal of friendship at their foundation. It analyzes the incessant doubleness that characterizes the literary friendships and communities out of which American poetry arises, and investigates how such doubleness frames an internal struggle over whether poetic community is even desirable or possible, whether

Introduction 9 friendship is more boon than curse, and whether the individual must be considered a distinctive, kinetic agent whose needs trump the demands and identity of the collective. The community around which the New York School of poetry crystallized exhibited this doubleness in fascinating ways, perhaps even more so than the San Francisco circle around Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, the Beat coterie of Ginsberg and Kerouac, or the Black Mountain community centered on Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, which are the prime examples of Davidson’s analyses.10 Reading the New York poets, one continually comes upon various permutations of a form of individualism shot through with contradictions and complexities—in the ubiquitous eruptions of a fierce nonconformist impulse, a belief in the multiplicity and mobility of identity, and a conviction nonetheless that the self is an inevitably social creature.This stance renders any vision of community thoroughly problematic and absolutely necessary at the same time. It results in an unusual, quite paradoxical view of friendship that echoes Emerson’s triggering antinomies: as a sustaining yet ephemeral, crucial yet tormenting relationship, something to be resisted and cherished in equal measure. This struggle between individualism and camaraderie not only fuels O’Hara’s, Ashbery’s, and Baraka’s divergent textual experiments but also shapes the complex literary and personal relationships they shared—friendships fraught with a mixture of affiliation and resistance, collaborative frisson and sibling rivalry. Energized by their affiliations with one another, O’Hara and Ashbery, and O’Hara and Baraka, developed close, almost sibling-like bonds. In a 1964 letter, O’Hara reflected on his friendship with Baraka: “We’ve been giving a lot of readings together which is getting to be like the Bobsy [sic] Twins so we’re stopping out of exhaustion” (Gooch, City, 426). In a revealing 1955 letter to which I will return later, O’Hara tries to explain his relationship with Ashbery to the artist Fairfield Porter, by saying, “To give you an idea of what I mean, picture John and me as brothers,” before going on to anxiously compare himself and Ashbery to the rivalrous brothers in the movie East of Eden, a modern version of the Cain and Abel story of fratricide (7 July 1955).11 Similarly, we find Baraka titling a tense poem addressed to his white companions “Joseph to His Brothers.” As these examples attest, the poets are often moved by their similarities and sense of identification to imagine each other as brothers, even twins, going so far as to cast themselves as such pairs in their poems and letters. This tendency can be seen, on some level, as a reflexive response to the culture of the Cold War era, one that so vigorously idealized aggressive heterosexual masculinity and the stable nuclear family. In contrast, these poets deliberately cultivated affectionate male friendships and explicitly replaced biological familial ties with a chosen brotherhood consisting of many fellow homosexuals in order to fly straight in the face of normative constructions of masculinity, acceptable male relationships, and the family.

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As we know from daily speech, it is quite common for close friendships to be figured in the vocabulary of siblinghood, but these poets recognize that such tropes tend to be revealing, unstable, and problematic. In this, they prefigure the way Jacques Derrida, in his interrogation of this most unusual human bond in Politics of Friendship, ponders the tendency throughout Western philosophy for “the figure of the friend” to take on the “features of the brother” (viii). Wondering “why would the friend be like a brother?” Derrida explores this “language of fraternity,” the same rhetoric that resounds through the work of these poets. The central question for him is “what is meant when one says ‘brother,’ when someone is called ‘brother.’ And when the humanity, as much as the alterity of the other, is thus resumed and subsumed” (viii, 305). Again and again these poets weigh what Derrida calls “the infinite price of friendship,” as they confront its intractable paradoxes, not least the Cain-and-Abel “reversal of friendship into enmity,” the aporia where friend and enemy collide and overlap (175).12 My interest is not in writing biographies of these friendships (although such narratives emerge in my discussion), but rather in analyzing the give-and-take of such defining dialogic encounters and their effect on literary production. In this sense, my approach, like some of the approaches mentioned above, considers poetry’s emergence from particular social and material conditions and views poetry itself as a cultural field (to draw on the useful terminology of Pierre Bourdieu), one that functions as a locus of competitive struggle and cooperative collaboration at the very same moment. Rather than relying on the Romantic myth of the poet as solitary genius—a myth that, as we will see, the poets themselves continually deconstruct in their writings—this study foregrounds the importance of the social networks out of which poetry emerges, the way poetic strategies and formal choices can be read as sometimes contentious and competitive, sometimes groupidentified “position-takings” in the literary field (Rules, 231–234). Instead of viewing poetic influence, as Bloom does, as an ahistorical agon between an isolated poet who triumphs only by successfully overcoming the onerous influence of his or her strong predecessors, this book considers influence in synchronic (as well as diachronic) terms, and as a more ambivalent than simply anxious or hostile affair. That is, it should be seen as an equivocal relation between contemporaries who simultaneously resist and depend on one another’s texts, who fear being a mere echo and would prefer to serve as a thorn in the other’s side, and who delight in, and see the enduring necessity of, intertextual conversation and play. I seek to demonstrate that poetry, especially avant-garde poetry, erupts out of the crucible of friendships and competitive communities, where poets thrive on inspiring, provoking, and seeking to outdo one another in their work. Upon closer inspection, it seems that friendship for these poets is always at best a double-edged phenomenon: it serves, for example, as a prod to further creativity and experimentation and as a threat or burdensome limitation simultaneously. Thus, one finds these poets’ lively, witty correspondence filled to the

Introduction 11 brim with moments when the writer praises the overwhelming, almost paralyzing genius of the other’s work while at the same time he exclaims that he desperately needs a steady infusion of such threatening novelty to inspire his own, different adventures in verse. For example, in a 1955 letter to Kenneth Koch, O’Hara points to the direct connection between reading his friend’s work and writing his own, as he does in letter after letter: “I don’t happen to have seen any load of poems from the Koch mill, lately, by the way, and my production is faltering as a result” (23 June 1955). Like Emerson, who observes that “truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul,” these poets constantly attest to their reliance on other poets, especially their close companions, not for a pattern to emulate but for ongoing incitement and challenge (EL, 79). This can be clearly seen in the remarks Koch made when he first read Ashbery’s daringly experimental long piece titled “Europe,” a poem in which his friend seemed to be shattering aesthetic boundaries left and right. In a letter to Ashbery, he wrote: Naturally I haven’t been able to stop writing for three days (period of time the frail sheets of EUROPE have been pressed in my sweaty poet’s hands); well, I can’t seem to do what you do. Huh! All I want to do is imitate you. Naturally, my longterm ambition is to find out how you do it and use it for my own future glorious works (completely of course transmuted by the fires of a new personality). . . . Frank claims to be poetically incapacitated by your poems. He said he feels like John Kennedy trying to get the Democratic nomination. (23 January 1960)13

Part of my goal in what follows is to analyze the link between postwar avant-garde poetry and the frenzied combination of emotions and reactions Koch describes— manic inspiration (nonstop writing sparked by a friend’s new poems), an inability to avoid imitation, the desire to transmute by “the fires of a new personality” the friend’s innovations in order to create one’s “own future glorious works,” and the feeling of being “poetically incapacitated” by the other’s work. In a letter he wrote just after reading Ashbery’s breakthrough masterpiece “The Skaters,” Koch further illustrated this potent mixture of feelings sparked by poetic friendship. Utterly stunned, he told Ashbery that the poem “makes me feel all cheered up and forlorn and filled with envy and despair (an ideal condition for writing poems, I believe)” (28 April 1964). Similarly, in 1959, Koch gushed to Ashbery that “getting your poems was quite an experience.You always make me feel like a hairdresser to your Phidias. . . . Then one has to live with [the] mysterious and troubling fact that they exist. The redeeming feature of their troublesomeness is that they radiate beauty and pleasure through the chilly air and drive me like a thunderstorm to my typewriter” (27 January 1959). Comments in this vein, which appear with striking frequency throughout the correspondence between these poets, demonstrate just how central such interpersonal and intertextual relationships are to the continuing cre-

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ation of art: at the same time that another’s work oppresses, it can give rise to new poems and even push a nervous, envious poet’s writing toward fresh terrain. In the model of poetic creativity these poets construct, then, the tension between the individual and the collective is both a problematic and an indispensable feature. In this, the model closely resembles the rhetoric and performance of jazz (perhaps the musical form that was of greatest importance to the postwar avant-garde), which takes the tense interplay between individual and group to be one of its most crucial components. If, as Nathaniel Mackey has observed, the new, avant-garde jazz of the postwar period “proposed a model social order, an ideal, even utopic balance between personal impulse and group demands,” the poets in this study use their work to probe both the merits and shortcomings of precisely this kind of social order and to ponder whether that utopic balance is possible or desirable as a laboratory for the creation of art (Discrepant Engagement, 34). In my discussion of these poets, I will argue that Ralph Ellison’s famous commentary on the “cruel contradiction” implicit in jazz applies equally well to the dynamics of avant-garde poetic communities: “true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment . . . springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents . . . a definition of his identity” (Shadow, 234). This is one reason why a poet like Baraka deliberately tries to write, as he puts it, “against the speech of friends,” where the goal is to create the highly individual, idiosyncratic self-expression of a soloist whose virtuosity is sparked by needing to play along with, in response to, and in opposition to, his fellow musicians (T, 101). This is why, when Ashbery represents friendship in his poetry, as he does in the poem quoted in my epigraph, he so often imagines the self “pitted against the friend who came at midnight,” furiously resisting the companion’s desire to overpower and “replace” him with a “song” (Wakefulness, 29). So much for “a friend in need is a friend indeed” and other sentimental homilies about friendship—one won’t find many of those in postwar American poetry.14 When one closely observes such friendships and the impact they have on the poetry the writers create, the familiar, tidy groupings and labels—like “New York School,” or “Black Mountain,” or “Beat”—appear to be more distorting than useful, because they tend to paper over the intensity of ambivalence felt by the members toward the idea of the group and to narrow our sense of the complexities of and participants in such communities. They can also obscure the dialogues that went on betwixt and between these supposedly rigid factions of the “New American Poetry.” For example, by focusing on Amiri Baraka in this book, as a figure enmeshed in and central to the postwar avant-garde, I hope to complicate stable, reductive definitions of phenomena like the “New York School” and to suggest that literary history must attend to the messy contours of actual poetic communities and friendships, which often disturb the neat rubrics that have been established and grown entrenched.

Introduction 13 One of the only African-American writers to be closely affiliated with the original members of the New York School of poets, Baraka played an important, if undersung, role around the edges of this community in the 1950s and 1960s. While most discussions of Baraka’s career highlight his association with Beat writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and his debt to Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley before moving on to describe his role in the founding of the Black Arts movement in the late 1960s, it has been less well recognized that he was closely intertwined with the New York School poets during these formative years. In fact, between 1958 and 1965, Baraka shared a particularly close and productive friendship with Frank O’Hara, regularly published work by New York School poets in the journals he coedited, included numerous references to O’Hara in his own works, and wrote poems dedicated to New York School poets (such as “The Rare Birds,” which is dedicated to Ted Berrigan) (Waldman, Nice to See You, 174).15 I am not suggesting that Baraka should be made to don a “New York School” jersey for a literary history team photo. But it is worth noting, for example, that when John Ashbery edited a double issue of the New York School house journal Locus Solus in 1962, he included four poems by LeRoi Jones alongside a roster including such familiar team members as Bill Berkson, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, Kenward Elmslie, Joseph Ceravolo, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and Harry Mathews. If part of the raison d’être behind the existence of Locus Solus was, in David Herd’s words, “to identify and distinguish the New York School” (“within the bounds of an aesthetic that aimed to resist all conventions of style”), surely the presence of Baraka within those pages suggests that his kinship with the New York School community is worth further exploration (John, 52). Though the poems in Baraka’s first two books are elliptical, painful, and personal lyrics that convey the agonized self-consciousness of a soul tormented by self, society, and racial strife, in their use of open form, collage, surreal imagery, and the proper names of friends, their demotic slang and ironic humor, their embrace of comic book heroes and other pop culture materials, and in their attention to the daily (“wives, gardens, jobs, cement yards where cats pee”) and to the complexities of friendship, these works also reveal a sensibility that shares considerable ground with O’Hara and New York School poetics (Allen, New, 424). Although Baraka’s career has notoriously featured dramatic shifts and renunciations of former positions, his early and substantial connection to the poets of the New York School should not be overlooked. However, it has been—in part because our study of postwar American poetry, and of the New York School of poetry in particular, has not been sufficiently attuned to the overlapping spaces of “black” and “white” poetries. I believe we need to be especially sensitive to cross-racial affiliations, influences, and friendships and how they complicate the idea of poetic communities in general.16 To delve into Baraka’s relations with the white avant-garde and his friendship with poets

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like O’Hara, to closely analyze the writing that emerges out of such dialogues, is to confront the failings of our typical maps of twentieth-century poetry—which so often would cordon off O’Hara the “New York School” poet from Baraka the African-American poet. Unfortunately, it is rather predictable that critics have downplayed the complexity of Baraka’s interactions with the white poets with whom he was intimately connected during the formative and perhaps most important decade of his career, since critical discussions of African-American writers have often risked decontextualizing their work by separating them from their white peers. Aldon Lynn Nielsen surveys and seeks to counter this problem in his book Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality (1994), which argues that “rather than segregating our readings of African-American literary creations, we must, as the very name African-American literature implies, read black texts in their fulsome implication in all English writing.” Reading black and white poets side by side, as I do in this study with Baraka and O’Hara, can help us to recognize “that our languages could never be wholly pulled apart and that the radical passage of significations back and forth within language has characterized the most inventive American writings” (23). However, Nielsen acknowledges, such cross-racial readings are rare, as the case of Baraka exhibits: “Though the importance of Baraka’s contributions to black writing is almost universally recognized, few have publicly noted the fact that Baraka is one of the first African-American poets whose works were also enormously and almost immediately influential among white poets” (Writing, 216). If we dismiss Baraka’s earlier days, as he himself did in 1968, as “just whiteness,” we risk overlooking the extent of his influence on white poets and vice versa—an intriguing, fertile conversation across racial boundaries that Nielsen rightly argues is “a turning point in the history of racial politics in American writing” (BM, 1; Nielsen, Writing, 216). “Probably never before Baraka,” Nielsen observes, “had any black poet been so instrumental in the early careers of white poets, so integral a player in the development of the emerging poetics of his time” (216). As poet, companion, publisher, and instigator, with a unique perspective on the problems of friendship and community formation, Baraka plays a pivotal, unheralded role in postwar avant-garde poetry. If literary criticism has too often sequestered African-American writing from the rest of American literature, thereby obscuring the relations between these two intertwined and inseparable traditions, it has also made it hard for us to hear the rich, captivating dialogue carried on between friends who speak, as best they can, across America’s racial divide. Examining cross-racial literary friendships can be particularly enlightening because they reverberate with historical, cultural, and political challenges that complicate the already problematic nature of American literary friendship. Considering Baraka in this light makes visible the vexing inter-

Introduction 15 section where racial identity, politics, and the competing rhetorics of community and nonconformity that underlie postwar avant-garde poetry collide. To view the friendships and communities that are so formative to postwar American poets simply as bits of biographical background, or to see these groupings as happily insular, fixed collectives, or as somehow distinct from their work itself, is to miss a great deal. This is because, for these poets, friendship with other writers becomes not only a social or artistic springboard that leads to their own adventures as solitary poets. In fact, they are utterly fascinated with the terrain where friendship and poetry collide, to the point that the question of friendship itself becomes a gnawing burden, a crucial topos, and a fertile literary problem that sparks countless poems. I have chosen to focus on O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka not only because of their creative and personal alliances but also because each develops an influential brand of poetry consumed with friendship itself. In very different ways, all three poets write what O’Hara half-jokingly terms a poetry of “personism,” in which “the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages”—an art that emerges from, responds to, and inserts itself within the push and pull of the writer’s personal relationships (CP, 499). Scholars do not seem to have adequately confronted how and why American poets so often use their writing in this way: to dramatize their friendships, to stage their relationships with communities, or to concretize the philosophical or intellectual problem of how friendship and community relate to the autonomous self. The lyric, then, should be seen not as an utterance issuing from an isolated subjectivity but as a social text, caught in a web of interpersonal and intertextual relations. With surprising frequency, this poetry functions as a vehicle for externalizing interpersonal relationships and for performing, in Libbie Rifkin’s useful phrase, “tactical dramas of life in the literary field” (Career, 28). Their poems, both formally and thematically, work through, theatricalize, disguise, and attempt to manage the poet’s personal relationships with both individuals and larger literary communities. By turns, these writers will romanticize and glorify their companionship and community, vent anxieties and frustrations, disagree with one another, expose friendship’s proximity to enmity, or attempt to differentiate themselves from their companions while heralding their own individuality and independence. This is why I will argue throughout this book that for postwar avant-garde poets, poetry is the continuation of friendship by other means. One of the central contentions of this book is that we can better understand postwar poetry and its attention to the problematic nature of friendship if we recognize how preoccupied it is with two nettlesome struggles—the tug-of-war tension between motion and stasis and the conflict between the self and its companions. It is striking to see how often these two concerns are entwined within the poetry’s rhetoric and metaphors. But why—what does a preoccupation with

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flux and mobility have to do with friendship? The two are linked because the anti-foundationalism these poets espouse, their fierce commitment to kinetic change and mobility, has extremely important and disturbing social implications: it renders the idea of maintaining intimate, stable relationships with other people profoundly problematic. It is exceedingly difficult to remain (or even feel comfortable being) a member of a group, a “New York School” or “Beat” poet, a faithful lover or loyal companion, if you have to keep moving, or in O’Hara’s patois, “jetting” at all costs, at every moment. Thus, the embrace of contingency and constant change must be seen as more than an aesthetic or philosophical stance: it fosters a particular and complex view of the self, which brings in its wake a particular vision of the possibilities and pitfalls of friendship and community. As we will see, these poets’ desire to resist all resting places, or their belief that none even exists, also shapes their ideas about the human self and its relationships with other selves. When O’Hara declares “my force is in mobility” at one moment, and “That’s why you went away, isn’t it? I could have stayed forever in your arms. / But then I’d have become you” at another, he is suggesting that moving away from repose is necessary for personal autonomy, and that it brings release from stifling intimacy and stasis (CP, 345, 200). O’Hara frequently suggests that being permanently tied to another person amounts to a threat to the self, its distinctiveness and its freedom. And, as we will see, O’Hara’s stance is common and emblematic: whether fairly or not, friendship and fixity are consistently equated in the metaphorical vocabulary of many influential American poets and thinkers. Throughout Beautiful Enemies, I assert that this particular version of the urAmerican conflict between individual and community is deeply ingrained in American culture, literature, and philosophy—both woven into the fabric of its most distinctive philosophical and poetic texts and into the cultural discourses of the post-1945 period. To this end, my discussion is anchored in two defining contexts that I will elaborate on in chapters 1 and 2: on the one hand, the specific cultural dynamics of the Cold War era and, on the other, the American pragmatist tradition in philosophy and poetry that surprisingly reemerges during this period. The first defining context to which I will turn—the distinctive Cold War culture of the 1950s, which envelops these poets as water surrounds a school of fish in an aquarium—allows me to historicize the attitudes about friendship, community, and individualism at the heart of postwar writing. I argue that the New American Poetry of the 1950s should be considered an emanation from, and reaction to, the peculiar cultural milieu of post–World War II America, a culture of “containment” driven by the desire to tamp down unruly energies and commitments, obsessed with consensus and national concord, and consumed with debates about conformity and its effects. My point is that the passionate individualism so characteristic

Introduction 17 of the period’s avant-garde literature, art, and music does not just materialize out of thin air or from the pages of Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”—it is fueled by a dominant culture bent on enforcing “unity” by marginalizing and repressing “deviant,” nonconforming political, racial, sexual, and artistic identities. In an atmosphere of McCarthyist paranoia, surveillance, and Manichean thinking, in which personal identities are pinned down for the purposes of persecution and in the interests of shoring up a unified, secure, monolithic national identity, an American avant-garde emerges that is devoted to the evasion of fixity. What it values most highly are spontaneity, improvisation, and “radical” or “deep nonconformity”—an aversion to fixed identity, habit, received ideas, and groupthink of all sorts, which I would distinguish from the “superficial nonconformity” of fashion and lifestyle that these poets tend to view with impatience and suspicion. At the same time, these oppositional artists bond together in alternative, subterranean communities and artistic and literary movements—most famously, under the banners of Abstract Expressionism, Bebop, the Beats, the New York School, Black Mountain poetry, and the San Francisco Renaissance—that come together to counter the oppressive emphasis on order, conformity, and homogeneity during the postwar years. By fomenting alternative, non-approved alliances, friendships, collaborative ventures, and literary networks and by developing their own publishing presses, journals, modes of certification and approval, marginalized artists could deliberately fashion a “world elsewhere” against the ideology of conformity in Cold War culture at large and against the severe hostility facing homosexuals (like O’Hara and Ashbery), African Americans (like Baraka), and experimental, bohemian writers in general. However, the cultural trends of the Cold War 1950s result in a kind of dissonant contradiction for these progressive intellectuals, musicians, artists, and writers because two of the most pressing imperatives driving such figures in the decades following World War II were diametrically opposed. The first imperative declared that any serious artist or writer must be a free-thinking individual at all costs, independent and idiosyncratic, committed to ceaseless mobility and disdainful of absolutes and ideology. The second urged such innovative outsiders to join together with like-minded iconoclasts, experimenters, and “hipsters” into collective alliances and communities; their shared project would be to oppose hegemonic political, social, and literary forces and to dramatically renovate stale, outdated aesthetic forms. This book as a whole argues that the barely submerged conflict between these dual motives—in a sense, a dialectic oscillating within the dominant discourses of the day—propels some of the most original and important contemporary American poetry, which erupts like a shower of sparks thrown off by that very friction. By mapping the rhetoric of innovative postmodern American poetry onto pervasive postwar cultural obsessions, I seek to explain why, at this particular

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moment, leading American poets adopted a credo of mobility, protean selfhood, and dynamic collaborative friendship. I also demonstrate that they consciously struggled with the drastic implications and contradictions inherent in that belief. Turning to the second defining context for my account of this struggle, I argue that the intertwined dialectics between self and group and motion and repose so prevalent in this poetry can be seen as a powerful iteration of longstanding obsessions and tensions within American pragmatist thought. For my purposes, pragmatism refers to a distinctive, influential, and in some ways quintessentially American mode of thinking and of talking—a way of viewing the universe, human experience, truth, the self, community, and language—that begins in the mid-nineteenth century with Emerson’s essays and comes to a peak with the writings of William James, Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, before going on to directly inspire some of the principal influences on these postwar poets, such as the modernists Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Gertrude Stein. Although intellectual and cultural historians have often argued that pragmatism suffered an eclipse after World War II and ceased to influence American culture, I intend to challenge this received idea by demonstrating that pragmatist attitudes, vocabularies, and preoccupations find dramatic expression within the postwar avant-garde. Thanks to Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Richard Poirier, and other neopragmatists, the last two decades have witnessed a surprising revival of interest in pragmatism, which has led a wide range of critics to, among other things, investigate more closely the connections between pragmatist thought and American literature and culture. But most of these recent studies of pragmatism’s influence on twentieth-century literature screech to a halt with high modernism. In contrast, I explore the persistence of pragmatism in American poetry and suggest that more current postmodern American poetry actually offers a nuanced response to American pragmatist philosophy and poetics and the contradictions they raise. In fact, American avant-garde poetry of the 1950s and 1960s finds inspiration, validation, and subject matter for its project in some of the major elements of pragmatism: its anti-foundationalism, attention to contingency, and repudiation of stasis; its cultivation of provisional, generally affirmative responses to a chaotic and groundless universe; its hostility toward “essentialist” identity logic; its espousal of a deeply felt individualism that nonetheless holds the self to be inherently social; its skepticism of absolutes, dogma, and collective thinking; its experimental spirit and its demand for the continual reimagining of one’s words and aesthetic practices. Not only do the poets write in a noticeably Emersonian and pragmatist idiom, but their work also lays bare some of the trenchant paradoxes and the more disquieting implications churning within this tradition of American thought and

Introduction 19 writing—most centrally, regarding the crucial conflict between individual and community, which remains as imbedded and unresolved within pragmatist discourse as a blood clot. Although I am by no means suggesting that this is the only or even primary influence on these poets, I do feel we have yet to fully understand how important and vexing the cardinal themes and paradoxes of this pivotal American intellectual tradition are for some of the most significant contemporary American poets, who respond to and reconstitute them in a postmodern context. In short, we need to recognize that Emerson’s “philosophy of fluxions and mobility” and William James’s turning away from “fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins” have as much or more to do with the conception of identity and friendship within the experimental poetics of figures like O’Hara, Ashbery, Baraka, and their inheritors than do European surrealism, Dada, or existentialism, high Romanticism, modern painting, or (in Baraka’s case), African-American traditions, to name a few frameworks in which they are typically viewed (EL, 696; James, Writings, 379). Furthermore, the fact that the “social character of the self ” is such a cornerstone feature of pragmatist thought reinforces my own sense that these American poets should be viewed in all their messy relation to one another (Menand, Pragmatism, 387). It is only fitting that poets writing in the pragmatist strain be treated as figures moving and writing through interpersonal universes. If, as Louis Menand has argued, the pragmatists “believed that ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals—that ideas are social,” then it makes sense to “write about these ideas,” and, in the case of the present book, poems, “in their own spirit—that is, to try to see ideas as always soaked through by the personal and social situations in which we find them” (xii). I hope that spirit suffuses the pages that follow. The first two chapters of this study examine these two contexts in order to provide a fuller theoretical and cultural background for understanding these poets and the role of friendship in postwar poetry. The subsequent chapters investigate how three representative poets, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka, mobilize their poetry in quite different ways to dramatize and hash out the problems of individualism, friendship, and the demands and drawbacks of participating in the avantgarde. Although numerous other poets sound variations on these themes, I feel these poets offer some of the most nuanced, influential, and lasting poetic articulations of its problems. Chapters 3 through 6 offer a new perspective on the work of each poet in turn, generally focusing first on their representations of selfhood and then their treatment of friendship. The final chapter closely investigates the relationship between O’Hara and Ashbery; by analyzing biographical and archival material, the poets’ lively correspondence, and numerous poems O’Hara writes to, for, and about Ashbery, we can see how the overarching ideas about the dia-

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lectic between friendship and self already discussed find expression in the texture and evolution of one such friendship.This close-up look is meant to function as a kind of case study, one that I hope will open the door to similar studies of other writers and relationships. Indeed, one of the goals of this book is to propose that the terms, tensions, and practices that I discuss here apply to other poets, groups, and movements, despite the obvious wealth of differences to be encountered in specific contexts and constellations. Further, I hope by the end of this study to at least suggest, if not fully demonstrate, that the difficult negotiations with the idea of community and selfhood undertaken by these poets reverberate in more recent poetry, just as they haunt discussions about the avant-garde, literary movements, and the social ground of poetry. For example, debates about, and within, the movement known as “Language poetry”—regarding its constitution as a group, the role of the individuals within it, its skepticism of stable identity, the social and institutional basis of all poetic activity, and so on—are filled with the ideas and issues I focus on in the work of these earlier writers. It is widely agreed that the group of writers whose work constitutes Language poetry comprise one of the most significant movements—and certainly the most coherent and self-conscious community of poets—to have emerged in American poetry in the last three decades. Deeply influenced by, among other avant-garde sources, the New York School poets and the other various camps of the New American Poetry (and in some cases the philosophical idiom of Emerson and pragmatism), the poets at the center of this community, like Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Bob Perelman, deliberately set out to foment an avant-garde literary community that would make central the idea of the social.17 One of their top priorities was to shatter the myth of individualism and its toxic accessory, the dreaded lyric “I,” which had come to dominate American poetry in the benighted 1970s. As Hejinian has observed: The Language movement is unusual in many respects. Perhaps its most notable departure from other tendencies, whether mainstream or experimental, is its insistence on the social—its insistence on recognizing and/or producing social contexts in and for poetry. This takes place in opposition to the romance of the solitary individualist, the genius, the lone outlaw (the heroes of very American narratives). And while debunking the figure of the poet as a solo egoist, the Language movement has undertaken intellectual rigor within the social; it has produced a challenging, strenuous, and sometimes anxious social milieu. (Language, 171)

Hejinian’s comments usefully point to the persistence in recent American poetry of the very concerns I discuss in this book. However, they also suggest a kind of blind spot not uncommon in current commentary: the earlier poets I focus on

Introduction

21

were certainly obsessed with the social contexts in and for poetry, intentionally cultivated a contentious and stimulating social environment, and were challenging the figure of the poet as a lonely, rugged individualist at least two decades before the Language poets began gathering and writing. That is, in its self-conscious and rigorous meditation on the social, its idea of poetry as situated within writing communities as a material practice, and its insistence on the problematic but necessary nature of the community as ground for poetic innovation, Language poetry is perpetuating and responding to the pioneering work of O’Hara, Ashbery, Baraka, and their contemporaries. It is my hope that uncovering and analyzing these issues in the poetry of the 1950s and 1960s can help us properly understand the origins and the shape of the debates that still roil our literary culture today. The Language writers mirror the postwar poets in their recognition of the absolute practical and philosophical necessity of community and social exchange between creative minds. Following in the steps of Emerson, pragmatism, and O’Hara, Baraka, and Ashbery, Hejinian declares that a community of others is essential in that it provokes and generates creativity, new ideas, and proper material conditions for the invention of fresh works: The community must be there to provide advocacy (or publication, in the broad as well as literal or literary sense—bringing the act into public space), social and professional support, intellectual challenge, aesthetic stimulus, etc. The community creates the context in which the work’s happening happens. It does so by generating ideas and work that might not have come into being otherwise, and, in the best sense, by challenging everyone involved. . . .To be simultaneously permissive and rigorous is the challenging task that a highly functional community must attempt. (35)

Although Language poets frequently sing the praises of the community in these kinds of tones, they at the same time acknowledge the difficulties of balancing self and group in ways that closely echo the poets central to this study. In his provocative book My Way (a title that would probably have made Emerson, Sinatra, and Sid Vicious all smile), Charles Bernstein writes of his defiance of the potential exclusivity and insularity of the Language community: “I am leery of how loyalty to old friends can form a closed circle, and I have tried, no doubt clumsily, fitfully, inadequately, to resist the temptation” (251). Similarly, Hejinian concedes that it is “not easy” to keep “the relationship between oneself and the community viable and productive”: There is an inevitable conflict between community and creativity, and writers very often feel torn between the possibilities of solitude and the requirements of the social. Caught in such conflicts, one might ask why one would want to invent a community in the first place. Do we need community? Do we want one? One quick way to answer this is to say that, want it or not, we have it. (34)

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As we will see, the earlier poets frequently write of being caught in precisely these conflicts, and similarly admit the impossibility of imagining a creative life lived divorced from others. Baraka, for instance, may stress “the uniqueness of private emotional concern” at one point, but at another he will address “the corrupt madness of the individual,” as he points out the impossibility of true solitude: “You cannot live / alone.You are in the world” (H, 124; T, 138). A good deal of the apprehension so many American poets feel about community and friendship stems from the hazard such union—any form of union or “closed circle”—poses to alterity, mobility, and multiplicity. The crucial, irresolvable “problem,” as Bernstein puts it, is figuring out “how to pursue affinities while resisting unities” (My Way, 116). As we will see in more detail in the second chapter, this aversion to closure and unity (both philosophical and social) is a signal feature of America’s most distinctive intellectual heritage, pragmatism, and the poetry inspired by it. As Frank Lentricchia observes, pragmatists are ever wary of the collective, the hegemonic, anything that would “cure the world of diversity” and reduce plurals to singulars, complexity to simplicity, variety to sameness, alterities to identities (Ariel, 112). In Modernist Quartet, his study of modern poetry and the pragmatist legacy, Lentricchia notes that: unities are nothing but attempts . . . to impose artificially and imperiously . . . out of the desire to dominate. Unities, whether of drama or versification; system, whether ecclesiastical or other; and doctrines, whether literary, scholastic, or political, all are expressions of impulses that would control by making uniform the variegated world of autonomous individuals, that would destroy individuality, personal and national, by trimming, fitting, normalizing autonomous individuality, making the world safe for structure (mine, not yours; ours, not theirs). (17)

The poets of the American avant-garde, like Emerson and the pragmatists before them, dread all forms of fixity and conformity, which leaves them forever wary of being trapped, locked into place, stripped of autonomy and distinction, or forced to cease changing. As I indicated earlier, this anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist vision of self and experience is more than just a theory of belief or knowledge: it has serious, even disturbing social implications that the work of these poets forces us to consider. How does one found a community on the basis of a vision of the self and friendship in which competition, contention, and difference are as important as harmony and unity? In which the anxious struggle to be distinctive from one’s peers and from previous incarnations of oneself undermines any simplistic notion of the pleasures of camaraderie and collaboration? What happens to the idealistic endorsement of group solidarity when one is constitutionally unwilling to stand still or view the self as a unified, stable entity? How does one imagine a social collectivity when the very transience of the human self is taken as a given? How

Introduction

23

does one join together with other sympathetic selves, however progressive politically or cutting-edge artistically, when one is profoundly anxious about subsuming individuality and difference within any collective identity? When one refuses to surrender the freedom to change and be inconsistent to the rigidity of dogma, program, or group-think of any sort? In his own effort to explain precisely the sort of resistance to conformity, stagnation, and over-influence I am describing, Emerson often returns to the trope of abandonment, or what I will call in my discussion of Baraka the “poetics of turning away.” In Emersonian thought, abandonment refers to the necessity of sliding out from under the weight of cultural and social encumbrances, of fending off whatever conformities exert their pull on our independence, of relinquishing all one has accumulated, as in the passage in which Emerson writes, “I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge as vacant and vain” (EL, 413). In “Circles,” he points to the liberating potential of such divestiture, explaining that “the way of life is wonderful: it is by abandonment” (EL, 414). Richard Poirier, Stanley Cavell, Jonathan Levin, and others have discussed the importance of this idea, tracing its presence in Emerson’s conception of self-reliance: he frequently describes the need to give up “clutching,” to shun influences, and to spurn other people “lest their dependency drag you down” (Poirier, “Why,” 353). Poirier observes that, in Emerson’s view, “along the way much has to be abandoned—sons and lovers, thoughts one had deemed precious, ideas of oneself more precious still” (Poetry, 69). In the pages to come, I will suggest that the trope of abandonment and its corollary, self-dissolution, appear frequently along the arc of experimental American poetry. It appears in Wallace Stevens’s strange notion that selfhood consists of an ongoing evasion of self—“You yourself were never quite yourself / And did not want nor have to be, / Desiring the exhilarations of changes: / The motive for metaphor, shrinking from / The weight of primary noon, / The A B C of being” (Collected, 288). It gives rise to Robert Frost’s repeated insistence that “freedom is nothing but departure—setting forth—leaving things behind, brave origination of the courage to be new” (Collected, 863).18 It surfaces in both Marianne Moore’s strikingly similar assertion that “the power of relinquishing / what one would keep; that is freedom” (“His Shield,” 144) and in the powerful denouement of O’Hara’s poem “Sleeping on the Wing,” in which he writes, “And, swooping,/ you relinquish all that you have made your own, / the kingdom of your self sailing . . ./ as space is disappearing and your singularity” (CP, 236). We can hear it in Ashbery’s declaration that “the past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future” (TP, 106) and in Baraka’s revelation that “I think / I know now / what a poem / is) A / turning away . . . from what / it was / had moved us” (T, 41). In an eloquent discussion, the philosopher Stanley Cavell views such archetypal moments of relinquishment and abandonment as encompassing a complex,

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and deeply American, mixture of loss and exhilaration: “This departure, such setting out, is, in our poverty, what hope consists in, all there is to hope for; it is the abandoning of despair, which is otherwise our condition . . . but it is our poverty not to be final but always to be leaving (abandoning whatever we have and have known): to be initial, medial, American” (Senses, 137). With its skepticism of all resting places and permanence, both American philosophy and poetry hold that “the achievement of the human requires not inhabitation and settlement but abandonment, leaving” (138). Because of this forward-looking celebration of individuality, pluralism, and innovation, American pragmatism is often considered optimistic and liberating, a useful response to our baffling, thwarting existence, and in many ways, it is. As Morris Dickstein has written, “The pragmatists tend to be exuberant and rather than pessimistic,” an observation that certainly extends to poets like O’Hara and Ashbery (Revival, 4).19 But as Cavell suggests, the embrace of the kinetic, contingent, and pluralistic nature of experience does not simply bring exuberance, freedom from constraint, and a sense of the bounty of limitless possibilities to come but also induces an awareness of constant loss, of our poverty. This book will emphasize that darker, more disturbing side of this intellectual temperament and its confrontation with contingency. It will consider the vertigo, the shadow that so often lends American poetry its great pathos and power. That vertigo, the feeling that “there is a sickness built into this act of moving” which Ashbery mentions in one poem, comes about in part because the call for abandonment has an explicitly social, interpersonal dimension, one that weighs heavily on the poets I focus on in this book (TP, 31). This is because it seems to claim that, in Jonathan Levin’s phrase, “we live most authentically in loosing the grip of our personal attachments” (36). As Emerson explains in “Self-Reliance,” “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me” (EL, 262). But what a terrible, wrenching burden such a vision entails. As George Kateb observes: “The thought of living by the code expressed in [Emerson’s] words is dizzying. One must outgrow the love that has enabled one to grow” (Emerson, 155). Yet little has been said about the heartbreaking concept of human relations enunciated in American philosophy and poetry. What does it mean for a poet like Frank O’Hara, who is often hailed as one of American poetry’s great champions of friendship and its pleasures, to admit in one of his most moving love poems, “I am always tying up / and then deciding to depart” (CP, 217)? Why would he declare that “to move is to love,” or deplore the “thrilling activities which confuse / too many, too loud / too often, crowds of intimacies and no distance” (CP, 256, 296)? What does it mean for a poetics or a philosophy to have at its core the idea that you must be forever leaving, shunning your most intimate relations and even your dearest conceptions of yourself? What kind of view of friendship does this foster? How do you live and love and cohabitate under such a mandate? What becomes of our ethical obligations to others? Can you work toward a collective social good, imagine a community, or enact a politics?

Introduction 25 By helping us think through such questions, the poets at the center of Beautiful Enemies highlight the ramifications, both good and ill, personal and social, of the profoundly American exaltation of process and movement and its seeming incompatibility with bedrock ideals of friendship and democratic community. It may be the case that, as poet Ann Lauterbach has observed, “the American notion of possibility was founded on an ideal of mobility and transition,” but, as we will see, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka confront the blend of exhilaration and crisis built into this unsettling view of the world (101). This book uncovers a strain in American poetry that evokes both the power and the sorrow, the thrilling freedom and the poverty, inherent in this strange American stance: one that demands a perpetual turning away from whatever—and whomever—one has known. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that literature, and poetry in particular, has the special ability to dramatize philosophical, theoretical problems, to expose their ambiguities and contradictions, and to chart their impact on human minds and lives. Many of the poems discussed here map, in ways that perhaps other discourses cannot, the allure and the danger, the magnetic pull and the dismaying limitations, of cornerstone American tropes like self-reliance, continual movement, and egalitarian fellowship. “What is it that attracts one to one? Mystery?” O’Hara wonders, in one of his many poems written to a close friend (CP, 267).Though these postwar American poets do not presume to untangle the irresolvable tensions that are so deeply woven into our national mythology and self-conception, they, and those who continue to build on their pioneering work, never stop asking difficult questions about them, transforming those conundrums into moving, disturbing art. As this book demonstrates, such art forces us to question again and again the nature of friendship, that strangest of contradictions, that “paradox in nature.” It refuses to let us go on taking for granted how we conceive of our selves and of our closest companions, and especially the contingent, binding, transient, stimulating, stifling—the always baffling, always fascinating—connections between the two.

1

SITUATING THE AVANT-GARDE IN POSTWAR AMERICA Community, Individualism, and Cold War Culture

y around 1950, a rather unusual idea was bubbling in the subterranean spaces of American poetry: the notion that friendship is integral to poetics. Given that conceptions of American poetry had long been dominated by the image of the poet as isolato or Adamic namer, it was swimming a bit against the tide to declare that poetry had a social dimension, that poems were the coin of a coterie realm, and that avant-garde writers needed to unite to fend off a hostile world.1 Sure, there had been clusters of American poets who joined together in the 1910s and 1920s to found the innovative movements of modernism, like Imagism and Vorticism (with Ezra Pound usually at the point of the vortex), as well as around important avant-garde little magazines such as Others, Contact, and The Dial. But the rhetoric of those poets, and of the critical commentary that grew up around them, was decidedly in favor of the individual talent, not the community, as the wellspring of verse. But in the years following World War II, one can sense a shift, albeit a complicated and self-divided one. Consider, for example, the ecstatic evocation of male camaraderie at the heart of the books that Jack Kerouac wrote in 1951 (On the Road) and 1952 (Visions of Cody) and the poems that Allen Ginsberg would soon be writing, such as “Howl” or “Sunflower Sutra.” Kerouac and Ginsberg constantly self-mythologize their little band of iconoclasts and lavish attention on how it became for them a fount of boundary-breaking poetry and fiction. Their writing exhaustively testifies to the creative fecundity to be found in lighting on just the right set of crazy, bril-

B

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Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 27 liant friends, in the non-domestic fun and frisson of male bonding. Or consider the group of poets who came to be known as the “Berkeley Renaissance.” In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the circle of writers who gathered around Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser, and Robert Duncan began consciously fusing writing and friendship as they set out to foment an insular camp of initiates who would create a new kind of poetry out of dialogue, disagreement, and insider knowledge and argot, all in opposition to a hostile (and homophobic) outside world. In his study The San Francisco Renaissance, Michael Davidson argues that these poets deliberately “formed a circle of sectarian adepts . . . creating a spiritual and artistic brotherhood out of shared homosexual experience, occultism, and the reading of modern literature.” Self-consciously exclusive, marginal, and eccentric, they saw themselves as a “fraternity of despair” in “a defiled country” and envisioned poetry to be an emanation of a particular, insular constellation of individuals (40). A few years later, now ensconced in the different social nexus of Black Mountain poetry, Robert Duncan would describe his book Letters: Poems 1953–1956 as the outgrowth of a very specific, exalted community of friends, and even cast the book itself as a crystallization of fellowship: “A naming of my peers, and an exclamation of joy: Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, James Broughton, Mike McClure, Helen Adam—it is the presence of companions, named and unnamed, that inspires Letters. A book of primaries, a book of companions. A book of praise” (54).The insistence on this kind of collective appears frequently in poems of the period, as in “One Night Stand,” one of Amiri Baraka’s contributions to the 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, where he depicts a united “we” locked in a struggle against a wider, antagonistic society. Literalizing the military underpinnings of the avant-garde as a concept (a conceit we will see the poets regularly returning to and questioning), Baraka imagines himself as one member of an army, a squadron that is communal, bohemian (complete with beards!), and engaged in an attack on a fortified old city that smacks of l’ancien régime: We roared through the old gates. Iron doors hanging all grey, with bricks mossed over and gone into chips dogs walked through. . . The old houses dusty seeming & old men watching us slyly as we come in: all of us laughing too loud. We are foreign seeming persons. Hats flopped so the sun can’t scald our beards; odd shoes, bags of books & chicken. We have come a long way, & are uncertain which of the masks is cool. (Allen, New, 360–361)

These examples attest to the striking rhetoric of camaraderie underlying the various clusters of the New American Poetry that emerged after World War II. In their poems and prose, these poets deliberately present an image of themselves as

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members of an embattled community and spell out a shared belief in the need to practice what Daniel Kane calls “a poetics of sociability,” or what Robin Blaser refers to as an aesthetic “made out of the dissonant companionship in poetry” (Kane, “Angel Hair,” 333; qtd. Spicer, Collected, 289). In this chapter and the following one, my intention is to provide a theoretical and historical background for my subsequent analysis of how this kind of dissonant companionship plays out in the work of O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka. To do so, I will explore some of the questions and problems such a proclivity raises: what is at stake in this rhetorical linkage of friendship and writing—not a novel connection, to be sure, given the history of the avant-garde, but one certainly given a new prominence and new look in the postwar years? Why do we find a poetics of friendship to be so prevalent at this moment in the development of American poetry, and what intellectual, cultural, and philosophical contexts can help us understand the shape it takes and its main points of contention? Has the tendency by poets and critics alike to view the avant-garde as a collective formation obscured the tension between movement and individual that supplies the poetry with so much of its complexity and force? As I mentioned in my introduction, some critics have recently been more rigorously examining the construction of such communities and their relationship to poetry. Although these studies have been very useful and revealing, they raise many questions that cry out for further exploration and contestation. For example, neither in the recent turn toward the “social” in poetry studies nor in more traditional criticism that tends to bracket and decontextualize the individual poet as a lonely genius has much attention been given to the constant, dark undertow we feel whenever these writers write about friendship and community. Why do these champions of coterie so often express the limitations and contingency of communities, celebrate autonomous individuality, and fear being subsumed into groups and alliances? Why are they so profoundly wary of an avantgarde movement that they are at the same time thrilled to participate in? Instead of idealizing the camaraderie and collaborative ethos of the avant-garde or ignoring poetic community altogether, I suggest that it is necessary, when considering postwar American poetry, to keep constantly in play both the individual and his or her complex negotiations with a larger cultural field of friends, enemies, and competitors, groups and movements. As we will see, poets like O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka constantly do precisely the same thing in their writings. This chapter will first examine the entrenched concept that the avant-garde is a communal enterprise and will draw attention to the enduring individualism that threatens to explode that notion. I will then situate the postwar avant-garde within two crucial contexts that provide us with a vocabulary and a conceptual framework to better understand this strain of nonconforming individualism, the profound ambivalence that postwar avant-garde poets feel toward the avant-garde itself, and the theory of discordant friendship that is so central to their work.

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 29 First, we will look at how poets of the 1950s are affected by distinctive features of 1950s Cold War culture, both its preoccupation with containing disruptive energies and identities and its steady flow of widely read diatribes warning against the pressures of conformity. Second, in the next chapter we will consider how perennial concerns and tensions within American pragmatism—in particular its anti-foundationalism and its unresolved dialectic between the self and the social—shape important elements of postwar poetry. Ultimately, we will be better equipped to analyze how these poets mobilize friendship in their work and to understand their intensely equivocal attitudes toward the concept of a communal avant-garde.

cote rie and collaboration: the avant-garde as “intimate community” In 1951, the 25-year-old Frank O’Hara read an essay by the writer Paul Goodman which he found to be bursting with stimulating ideas about the relationship between community, poetry, and the avant-garde. Eager to contribute to his own generation’s cutting edge, O’Hara hungrily devoured Goodman’s “AdvanceGuard Writing, 1900–1950,” which appeared in Kenyon Review in the summer of 1951. It is not hard to see the seeds of O’Hara’s entire body of work embedded in Goodman’s essay. The piece is both a retrospective assessment of the twentieth-century avant-garde’s first half and a manifesto of sorts that offers strong ideas about the present cultural situation and prescriptions for the future of vanguard literature. After offering his perspective on the avant-garde’s evolution, Goodman argues that in the “aftermath of World War II,” a period marked by alienation and “shell-shock,” which he describes as a terrified “clinging to security” (372), the goal of innovative writing must be the creation of “an intimate community”: The essential present-day advance-guard is the physical reestablishment of community. This is to solve the crisis of alienation in the simple way: the persons are estranged from themselves, from one another, and from their artist; he takes the initiative precisely by putting his arms around them and drawing them together. In literary terms this means: to write for them about them personally. . . . But such personal writing about the audience itself can occur only in a small community of acquaintances, where everybody knows and understands what is at stake; in our estranged society, it is objected, just such intimate community is lacking. Of course it is lacking! The point is that the advance-guard action helps create such community, starting with the artist’s primary friends. The community comes to exist by having its culture; the artist makes this culture. (375–376)

In a single gesture, Goodman provides a theoretical and historical basis for the kind of small coterie of initiates that Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan were cre-

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ating in the Bay Area, that O’Hara would soon galvanize in New York, and that Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the Beats were fostering in both cities as well as on the road in between. In his insistence on the relationship between art and community, his portrayal of the individual artist as deeply implicated in a social network of friends, Goodman reveals that his own intellectual roots lie in pragmatism.2 At the same time, Goodman’s essay certainly demonstrates the impact of Cold War cultural pressures on poetry, insofar as it suggests that the best thing a writer can do, when faced with the hyperconservatism and enforced consensus of an era marked by “a complete inability to bear anxiety of any kind” and a tepid, academic literary culture in which writers are estranged both from society and from each other, is to use literature to create a coterie of fellow outsiders (371). In order to cultivate a general sense of connection between people in an atomized (in more ways than one) society, artists should start with their own friends. Goodman advises them to write personally for and about them and to celebrate everyday social occurrences by writing occasional poems for weddings, funerals, and birthdays; in due course, he hopes, such communion would move outward and heal the estrangement of a wider society. Previewing the communitarian ethos that would flourish in the 1960s, Goodman’s idealistic vision holds that small, intimate communities could be a form of resistance to a vast, homogenous, alienating society and could offer an alternative universe where people are free to create a sustaining sense of kinship. Although it remains unspoken in the essay, an important subtext in the bisexual Goodman’s call for the artist to put his arms around friends and readers is its Whitmanic vision of an “adhesive,” fraternal, subcultural gay community in an age of violent homophobia.3 This grace note would probably not have been lost on O’Hara, who was earning a master’s degree at the University of Michigan in the summer of 1951 and lamenting his distance from a new set of exciting, creative friends in New York. When he came upon Goodman’s essay, the young poet was bowled over and immediately wrote to his friend, the painter Jane Freilicher, who had recently returned to New York after visiting him in Ann Arbor: “The only pleasant thing that’s happened to me since you’ve left gal is that I read Paul Goodman’s current manifesto in Kenyon Review and if you haven’t devoured its delicious message, rush to your nearest newsstand! It is really lucid about what’s bothering us both besides sex, and it is so heartening to know that someone understands these things” (qtd. Gooch, City, 187). As Brad Gooch, Terence Diggory, Michael Magee, and others have suggested, O’Hara’s enthusiastic response to Goodman’s essay offers a tantalizing clue about the origins of O’Hara’s distinctive poetic stance: in particular, his penchant for writing poems to and about his friends, his preference for occasional poetry, and his notorious, controversial practice of nonchalantly citing his friends’ proper names in his poems, leaving some to wonder how the reader is supposed to have any idea who “Jane” or “John” are.4

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 31 Although he had already begun writing about his friends before he came upon the Goodman essay, one can surmise that the piece offered O’Hara a sense of validation, philosophical grounding, and direction in developing a mode of personal writing that could be about the audience itself, even when that audience was a small community of friends. Six months later, in January 1952, O’Hara wrote the poem “Brothers,” a conscious testament to the “silent generosities” of his newfound fraternity of peers that typically both catalogs his friends (Ashbery, Schuyler, and Koch) and notes their differences as poets: “John’s most sophistical, / Jimmy seriousest, Kenneth large, locomotive, / laughing like Midas of the Closed Fist” (CP, 75). It seems fair to say that in the 1950s and 1960s American avant-garde poets took the ideas about fostering community in Goodman’s essay and ran with them.5 Alan Golding notes that the Goodman piece, which Charles Olson “read enthusiastically and recommended,” “helps explain Olson’s faith in the Black Mountain experiment; and it certainly helps explain the thinking behind [the little magazine] Origin, which in the absence of a literal, physical community, established a metaphorical one in its pages” (Outlaw, 122).The first issue of Origin, which truly inaugurated a Black Mountain or projectivist poetic coterie, practically coincided with Goodman’s piece in 1951, as did Olson’s rectorship at Black Mountain College. Soon, building community via upstart little magazines would become a defining gesture of this entire period. When the poets associated with the New York School wished to distinguish themselves from the other factions of the new poetry, they began editing a magazine of their own, Locus Solus, which would showcase their own work and tastes.6 In A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, Stephen Clay and Rodney Phillips chronicle how “the mimeograph revolution,” the explosion of small, avant-garde journals and presses that occurred in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, was a major facet of the collusion between poetry and friendship: poets struggling on the fringe of the literary establishment “invented their own communities and audiences (typically indistinguishable), with a small press or little magazine often serving as the nucleus of both” (13–14). The actual means of production traversed the aesthetic and the social: “collating, stapling, and mailing parties helped speed up production, but, more significantly, they helped galvanize a literary group” (14). In some cases, just to be reading a certain magazine signaled that one was an initiate in an exclusive group, as was the case with the journal The Floating Bear, which was edited by Amiri Baraka and Diane di Prima in the early 1960s; the newsletter-like magazine was “produced for a community of kindred spirits as a literary newsletter” and was available only to a select mailing list (Clay and Phillips, Secret, 14). As Reva Wolf observes, the insider quality of Baraka’s journal meant that it served as “an agent of communication within a circumscribed community” (Andy, 38). This dimension of avant-garde activity leads Daniel Kane to suggest

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that the “little magazine” became “a way to promote actual friendships”: “Like their dada, surrealist, and modernist predecessors, mimeographed and small-circulation magazines coming out of the Lower East Side were documents designed for friends as well as vehicles for making new friends” (All, 63–64). Not only do we see this direct link between concrete literary practices and the formation of literary groups, but the connection Goodman so forcefully draws between the avant-garde and the development of an “intimate community” is a central feature of almost all analytical discussions of the avant-garde in general, as a concept and practice.The avant-garde is, we are told again and again, a communal enterprise by definition. For example, this is how the art critic Harold Rosenberg characterizes it, when he ponders how to define “a true vanguard.” Rosenberg, who, along with Clement Greenberg, was one of the major advocates and interpreters of the Abstract Expressionist avant-garde, writes in 1968 that the key is the ideological community, that is to say, a collective movement based on certain intellectual presuppositions. An individual can be an innovator, but there is no such thing as an avant-garde individual, except as a follower or leader. . . . Those who are looking for avant-gardes are looking for a convinced crowd. An individual who is an innovator spies upon the unknown, but only a phalanx can take up a forward position. Cézanne is not avant-garde, Cubism is. (“Collective,” 83–84)

For Rosenberg, it is the nature of the avant-garde to be forever “subsuming individuals under movements” (88). Similarly, one of the first systematic and “scientific” dissections of the avant-garde as a concept, Renato Poggioli’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1968), defines it as “the psychic state of a group” whose “ideology is a social phenomenon” (3, 4). Poggioli (who, interestingly enough, was one of Frank O’Hara’s professors at Harvard) argues that the avant-garde is “a revolt against society in the largest sense” that also “presupposes solidarity within a society in the restricted sense of that word—solidarity within the community of rebels and libertarians” (31). For Peter Bürger, whose own influential 1984 book, Theory of the AvantGarde, offers a more Marxist, theoretical perspective on the historical European avant-garde, the great bête noire of the vanguard is “the notion of the individual character of artistic production central to art in bourgeois society”: “In its most extreme manifestations, the avant-garde’s reply to this is not the collective as the subject of production but the radical negation of the category of individual creation” (51).When Duchamp signs a mass-produced object like a urinal and exhibits it as an art object, “he negates the category of individual production” since “all claims to individual creativity are to be mocked”; in this way, Duchamp “radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art” (51–52). For Bürger, the avant-garde impulse and the individual self are mortal enemies.

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 33 This powerful identification of the avant-garde with a belief that art must be anti-individual and collective in orientation has persisted in more recent evaluations of the concept. In her 1997 book, The Poetic Avant-Garde: The Groups of Auden, Borges, and Breton, Beret Strong defines her central term in like manner: The historical avant-garde is well described as a tendency among writers to form communities—fellowships of discourse—from which to explore the possibilities of aesthetic innovation and transfiguring social activism open to writers. I propose a broad definition that captures the avant-garde’s unique nature: it is a study in ambivalence and contradictions that inhabits the space between its antibourgeois ideals, its largely traditional roots, and its need to survive. It is useful to see it as an instrumental phenomenon: born of a reaction to a set of frustrations, needs, and fears, it is a problem-solving tool for groups of artists. (4)

For Strong, the creative work produced by an avant-garde movement is first and foremost a discursive body “bound by a group ideology and a collective project. Creating the group involves a process of minimizing differences and focusing on common ground.”7 Not surprisingly, when David Lehman glosses the avant-garde as a concept (in his book that casts the New York School as the last avant-garde), he begins, “If one were to list the necessary conditions for an avant-garde movement, one would begin by postulating the existence of a group” (Last, 284). The same assumptions have marked recent studies of avant-garde poetry, which often foreground the communal ethos, creative energy, and heroic resistance embodied in such marginal arts enclaves. At the same time, they demonstrate that these groups are often marked by fractious, lively disagreement and conflict rather than contented harmony, and by sexism, homophobia, and power politics that are not so different from the dynamics of the mainstream that they oppose. These studies have largely focused on the way avant-garde poetry and the forms its material culture takes, such as institutions, anthologies, journals, and presses, function as tactics for the production of group solidarity—fleshing out the idea of “poetry as a communal effort” that is “used to establish community,” as Daniel Kane puts it in All Poets Welcome, his study of the Lower East Side avant-garde in the 1960s (xiv, 178). In a related essay on the second generation of New York School poets, Kane asserts that by the time the 1960s rolled around, the followers of O’Hara, Ashbery, and Koch had developed a full-blown “poetics of sociability,” an aesthetic that called for poets to “perform such sociability in their poetry” and share “a conception of the poem as communal gesture” (“Angel,” 333). In his books The San Francisco Renaissance and Guys Like Us, critic and poet Michael Davidson offers an incisive analysis of the strengths and the limitations of these kinds of poetic communities in postwar American poetry. In both studies he critiques such “homosocial” groups—focusing largely on the Spicer circle, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets—on the grounds that their insularity and hierarchy (in the San Francisco book) and their homophobia, male chauvinism, and

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misogyny (in Guys Like Us), threaten to undermine their otherwise progressive aesthetic and political attitudes.8 Nevertheless, Davidson’s critical eye remains very much trained on issues of “group formation” and art’s role in building a sense of accord among disparate participants: By looking at the collective milieu in which poetry is produced, we might see poetic composition as a collaborative rather than an individual function, a conversation among writers alienated from each other or from the dominant versions of community in the United States. As a form of collaboration, poetry displays the porous borders between the work of art and the work that art performs in shoring up consensus. (Guys, 18)

As we have seen, theoretical discussions of the avant-garde in general rely heavily on notions of its status as a group and communal enterprise, as does the recent turn to “the social” in studies specifically about postmodernist American poetry. But I believe they have done so at the expense of locating and analyzing the residual, disruptive individualism that always runs counter to the fostering of poetic community. For example, we might consider how critics and practitioners have treated the phenomenon of collaboration: both have tended to privilege and valorize this practice as the ultimate manifestation of the collective ethos of the avant-garde, and to hail it for the challenge it offers to conventional notions of individuality and authorship. Although it has a long history stretching from ancient China and Japan to the Provençal troubadours and the Romantics, the practice of literary and literary-visual collaboration reached a peak with the activities of the Dadaists, the surrealists, and other members of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century. In part because of the heroic, sexy aura surrounding the “exquisite corpse” antics of Andre Breton, Louis Aragon, and Paul Eluard, the young poets of the New York School were immediately attracted to the idea of creating collaborative works with other writers and with painters. The idea of collaboration and a celebration of its virtues has been at the very heart of the mythology of the New York School ever since. In David Lehman’s evocation of the New York School milieu, he portrays the mood of Manhattan in the 1950s as ebullient with the possibilities of collaborative work (Last, 5): To collaborate on a work of art or a “happening”—a word coming into use in the early 1960s—was the height of avant-garde glamour. “One of the most wonderful ways in the world to be with someone’s sweetness and brilliance is to collaborate with that person,” Koch reminisced. “I liked collaborating the way people like drinking. Collaborating was making a game out of social life.” (79)

Even more so than their peers in other factions of the New American Poetry, the New York poets found collaboration to be not only inspiring and quintessentially

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 35 vanguard, but fun, an exercise in what we might today call “bonding,” as well as a pleasurable, exhilarating way of erasing the line between everyday friendship and the creation of art. As David Herd explains, the idea that collaboration “had a social function” was of course not born with the New York poets, but “rarely . . . has writing been a more sociable activity than it was for the New York School. Put simply, when they met they wrote poetry together” (John, 56).9 For poets of the New York School, collaboration was not only a social event, but an important and exciting cornerstone of all avant-garde creativity. As critics like Herd and David Shapiro have noted, it is highly telling that the second issue of Locus Solus, edited by Kenneth Koch in 1961, was devoted to collaborative writing across the ages; Koch gathered examples of collaborations by pairs of writers from Kakei and Basho in ancient Japan to Fletcher and Shakespeare, Rene Char and Paul Eluard, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, and, of course, Koch and Ashbery, Ashbery and Schuyler, and so on. As an anthology, as a demonstration of taste and aesthetics, and as a justification of their own experiments, it can now be seen as a kind of quiet statement of purpose issued by a group loath to express any sort of program. For Shapiro, this anthology of collaborations was “a not-tooveiled manifesto for a new pragmatic, kinetic, pluralist aesthetic” (“Art,” 50). Herd argues that the New York poets were self-consciously asserting, and playing a part, in the “deep historical connection between collaboration and the avant-garde” (“Collaboration,” 36). In his “Note on This Issue,” Koch offers a brief history of collaboration and argues that “the strangeness of the collaborating situation, many have felt, might lead them to the unknown, or at the least to some dazzling insights at which they could never have arrived consciously or alone” (193). These poets seem to value collaboration most because it can push an individual writer in new, unpredictable directions through a mixture of competition and mutual inspiration, and because it can create a work which is polyvocal, unstable, and mobile. As Wayne Koestenbaum has argued, texts carrying a double signature “are specimens of a relation, and show writing to be a quality of motion and exchange, not a fixed thing” (Double, 2).10 It is precisely collaboration’s capacity to resist and work against fixity (in the sense of unitary identity, of a text as singular artifact, of a consistent writing style) that draws these writers both to strictly collaborative work with one another and, more generally, to relationships of mutual support and challenge. Many rather idealistic depictions of avant-garde collaboration insist that the collaborative act successfully militates against the dreaded, unfashionable notion of the artist as an individual. In a typical gesture, Hazel Smith argues in her study of O’Hara that artistic collaboration erodes the romantic concept of the work of art as the unique expression of a particular individual. Since the input of one collaborator is not necessarily distinguishable from another. . . . In collaboration two or more

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This sounds all well and good in theory. But for the poets of the New York School, who, I will assert, remain as much seduced as they are troubled by the American idea (if not the cult) of individuality, collaboration is considerably more complicated than it may at first appear. Critics like David Herd typically stress the idea of collaboration as a tool for building solidarity; Herd suggests that for the New York School poets, collaborations were “the means by which this small, unknown, secretive group held itself together,” the medium “by which a group of marginalized poets must necessarily strengthen their identity” (John, 67). But closer inspection suggests that even in the midst of collaborative creation, these poets find they cannot so easily dispense with the tension between the communal and the individual, and even seem quite unable to give themselves over fully to that idealized loss of selfhood. 11 To help illustrate this point, I turn to a little-known example of a collaboration which suggests that the much-vaunted collaborative spirit of the New York School actually points to a deep-seated schism within the avant-garde’s own rhetoric that is the subject of this chapter: an unpublished collaboration between O’Hara and Ashbery that can be found among Kenneth Koch’s papers in the archives of the New York Public Library’s Berg Collection. Although O’Hara and Ashbery were extremely close friends, readers of each other’s work, and participants in various collaborations with other poets and artists, including O’Hara’s collaborative writings with Kenneth Koch and Bill Berkson, and Ashbery’s with Koch and Schuyler (which resulted in the collaborative novel A Nest of Ninnies), the two poets do not appear to have collaborated much with one another. One exception is a poem-letter that O’Hara and Ashbery wrote together and sent to Koch and his wife, Janice, in 1954. For the critic, such a document reveals—in its rhetoric, figurative language, and ambiguities—a great deal about the mixture of pleasure and anxiety at work in literary friendships. This O’Hara-Ashbery collaboration is undeniably lighthearted and quite silly on its surface, filled with insider coterie jokes and surreal, off-the-cuff absurdities, but it illuminates something important about the collaborative impulse as well. Here is the entire jointly written poem, which features rhyming (ABAB) quatrains: Dear Kenneth: and we have the Janice too: If you are the Kenneth of whom I have heard and I too may imagine a Janice of toffee why is the persimmon armchair not heard? There is a rainy wool Frankie and Johnny.

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 37 The plaza beseeches you to return its tars. The armchair beseeches you to get off its ear. When did you decide to ignore Mars? We went to Sophie and Jack’s for Thanksgiving beer The Five Towns mention you with admiration. Do you ever exchange the hotel for the bibliotheque? Your poems scandalize your friends and relation as a cheque will bounce, each bounce will find its cheque. This is the 9th Anniversary of the founding of the Yugoslav Republic, a dessert framed in mountainous honies on which, like your poems, I never get sick, like the lorgnettes that Janice invented for bunnies. Remember me to the barnacles on the Eiffel Tower and ask the frames in the Louvre to lend a few words. The yellow pages in the phone book ask for you every hour on the hour. In France are there any tapdancers, or are they all birds? Kenneth, I John am drunk but Frank is not drunk. Janice, explain to us all the differences between us. Janice, did you call Gloria Branfman a skunk? Kenneth, there’s an artificial flower shop on my street run by William Fuss! Kenneth, please return Mike Goldberg’s ceramic harp, for if you do he’ll decorate your front with noodles. I like you both better than a food Arp. Is Janice wearing her hair-pie in burnt meringue or perfumed noodles? I (JA) have read your epic, you’ll be interested to hear. I (F O’H) am reviewing my past in reference to Tante Janice’s cooking. And I like the way it resembles a polliwog chair. Is there an Isabel in France? Is there a pig looking? Oh, Kenneth you are the rubber pad under my typewriter; for my part, I think of you each time I see a YMCA towel. If Janice says “Marteau,” ignite her, for, like Jane, she too often stirs her shrimp curry with a trowel. That is all I am going to write to you, you sweet hunk. And I too, both mouths at all four ears am shutting up. If the cockroach sighs, remember me to Edvard Munch. Is it warm in there? get hence like a Hazan skirt, or get thee up.12

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Though at the start one cannot tell who composed each line, by the middle of the poem the writers reveal that the first and third line of each stanza are being written by Ashbery, and the second and fourth by O’Hara. However, for a while the question of individuality seems to have been tamped down in the unity of the joint effort, a doubly created speaking where no distinction between voices is evident or possible. But the act of taking turns at the typewriter, perhaps, encourages the poets to consider, at least subtextually, the nagging question of what happens to their individual identities (poetic and otherwise) once they are blended together in the collaborative creation. If collaboration, as Hazel Smith suggests, “pivots on difference and likeness, separation and merging, and demonstrates their interdependence,” then it is rather surprising to see how decisively these poets pull back from sameness and merging in favor of difference and separation (Hyperscapes, 191, italics added). In the first stanza, the poem refers to “Frankie and Johnny,” thus bringing the two poets together in one fell swoop—casting this particular Frank and John in the roles of the doomed romantic pair of folk song, blues, and jazz fame. In the old ballad, Frankie discovers that her lover, Johnny, is being unfaithful and murders him, and she is ultimately punished with execution.13 Perhaps merely an offhand pun on their names, the reference (apparently written by O’Hara) depicts the pair as tragic lovers soon to be torn apart by infidelity and violence rather than a happy, harmonious fraternal duo. One could argue that the allusion suggests the tendency for male literary collaboration to feature what Koestenbaum calls a “sublimation of erotic entanglement” (Double, 4). Even more important for my concerns, however, it points to what Jacques Derrida calls “the reversal of friendship into enmity” in his Politics of Friendship: the submerged, even dangerous, mixture of affection, tension and jealousy underlying the overt amicability of the pair (175).This gesture will be echoed when O’Hara refers, in a letter written within a year of this poem (which I will discuss in chapter 7), to the resemblance between him and Ashbery and the two brothers in East of Eden, whose relationship is, of course, a reincarnation of the fratricidal bond between Cain and Abel. At the very center of the one-page letter, the poets write: Kenneth, I John am drunk but Frank is not drunk. Janice, explain to us all the differences between us. (italics added)

These lines reveal Ashbery’s midpoem desire to identify himself as the author of his lines—indeed, several lines later, he again inserts his signature when he writes “I (JA) have read your epic . . .” which O’Hara follows by writing his own into his next line: “I (F O’H) am reviewing my past.. . .” O’Hara’s remark to Koch’s wife is particularly telling—it offers a playful challenge to Janice (who stands as a figure for a reader or audience here) to determine how the two (or perhaps three,

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 39 including Kenneth) close friends differ, poetically and otherwise. Can she, or anyone else, distinguish these allied poets from one another? O’Hara asks. Perpetually driven by a nonconformist spirit, O’Hara is often more concerned with knowing “all the differences between” himself and Ashbery (and other close friends) than he is in relishing their similarities. If an “inside” outside observer, like Janice Koch, cannot explain the difference between each writer, or worse, cannot even tell the difference, will their literary audience ever be able to? The plaintive question reveals the serious threat such a blurring constitutes to a developing artist and his or her singularity. The poets’ fear of being indistinguishable to readers of their work turned out to be prophetic, as hostile reviewers would use precisely such a charge as grounds for critique. In a 1962 Hudson Review piece, John Simon lumps Ashbery, Koch, and Barbara Guest together as “New York School” poets: they are, according to Simon, “abstract expressionists in words ... every bit as undistinguished and indistinguishable as their confreres of the drip, dribble, and squirt” (qtd. in Lehman, Beyond, 21).14 The collaborative poem-letter, which is written about, and under the aegis of, warm friendship, by two close friends for another, reveals a whimsical yet complicated play of singular and plural identity, self and other. This jointly written poem seems to pull back defensively from identification—via the insertion of authorial signature, the question about defining their differences, the repeated recourse to asserting one’s own opinion and actions (“for my part, I think. . .” “And I too . . . am shutting up”)—at the same time that it thrives on mutual inspiration and the generation of words and tropes that occurs when one writing intersects another. Instead of merely “shoring up consensus” or reveling in the destruction of individual authorship, the collaboration reveals the division, the aporia, lurking within the avant-garde’s own logic. In other words, just beneath the surface of the Ashbery-O’Hara collaboration lies one of the central paradoxes built into the avant-garde itself. Instead of merely opposing individuality and thriving on cohesion and collaboration, as we are so often told is the raison d’être of vanguard movements, the avant-garde actually features an ongoing tug-of-war between its demand for group solidarity against a hostile larger society and its simultaneous commandment that its participants must be anarchic rebels who resist conformity and convention. These two impulses cannot easily coexist, a fact especially glaring to American avant-garde artists, steeped by birthright in a powerfully individualistic mind-set, which leaves them particularly torn between the compulsion to be an idiosyncratic nonconformist and the desire to be an avant-garde team player. For all their vaunted excitement about collaborative ventures, the poets in and around the New York School always seem markedly ambivalent about working as a group, or, in fact, about any joint purpose. Rather than “zealously undertaking some crucial avant-garde mission,”

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as O’Hara’s biographer claims he was, these poets point out its contradictions and limitations at every turn, and seem perpetually caught on, and fascinated by, the horns of the avant-garde’s central dilemma (Gooch, City, 188).

chatte ring about containme nt and conformity during the cold war At this point, I would like to explore more fully why, at this historical moment, poets express such pointed self-division and ambivalence toward the avant-garde and the ideal of friendship that serves as its theoretical basis, and what is at stake in such a stance. To do so, it will be useful to historicize this proclivity by pulling back the lens a bit, to assess some of the effects of the Cold War cultural ethos of “containment” and its near-hysteria about conformity. The repressive sensibility of American culture in the years following World War II has been well chronicled in recent decades. Scholars working in history, American studies, and cultural and literary studies have amply demonstrated the period’s smothering of idiosyncratic expression, “deviant” behavior, and dissenting political opinions in the name of a prosperous, unified, and victorious United States.15 More specifically, recent scholarship has argued that the United States’ all-consuming foreign policy efforts to arrest and contain the growth of communism greatly affected cultural expression and the personal lives of average U.S. citizens. I hope to extend and to challenge this line of inquiry by proposing that this cultural dynamic—marked by tense debates about conformity, homogeneity, consensus, domesticity, masculinity, stability, and mobility—influenced the way American writers thought about both individual identity and the nature of friendship. As Alan Nadel argues in his book Containment Culture, containment “was a privileged American narrative during the cold war,” which “derived its logic from the rigid major premise that the world was divided into two monolithic camps” and that the containment of communism at all costs was paramount (2). This wide-ranging doctrine can of course be traced to the State Department’s influential George Kennan, one of the principle architects of the Manichean Cold War worldview (good vs. evil, capitalism vs. communism), whose famous “long telegram” of 1946 and follow-up 1947 essay in Foreign Policy insisted that the United States would be unable to contain the spread of international communism unless it successfully guarded against subversion and disorder within its own borders. Deploying an influential set of metaphors, Kennan conveyed the idea that an insidious and deadly virus was attacking the American “body” from within. As scholars have shown, the rhetoric of containment was even more useful in stirring up fear of domestic deviance than battling the Soviets, as Kennan helped spark the paranoid conviction that communism and its corollary subversive forces, which

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 41 were thought to include homosexuality and Jewishness, were infiltrating the fabric of “the American way.”16 In this manner, the containment narrative served as far more than a foreign policy initiative: as Nadel argues, “Containment equated containment of communism with containment of atomic secrets, of sexual license, of gender roles, of nuclear energy, and of artistic expression” (5). The effect on the lives and minds of individuals was severe. For Nadel and other recent critics, the culture of the Cold War illustrates “the power of large cultural narratives to unify, codify, and contain—perhaps intimidate is the best word—the personal narratives of its population” (4).17 Nadel and many other scholars of Cold War culture speculate that the politics of containment and anticommunism in the immediate postwar era created a culture of surveillance, control, and cowed, repressed artistic expression—resulting in an age of “nerves, blandness, and retreat,” as Thomas Pynchon describes the 1950s in The Crying of Lot 49,“this having been a national reflex to certain pathologies in high places” (83).There is no question that in many ways American culture during the years Robert Lowell famously termed the “tranquillized Fifties” can be seen as anesthetized and bullied by the rhetoric and practices of the Cold War. However, this approach seems to underestimate the oppositional energies that sizzle and pop within so much of the culture of the 1950s. As some critics, such as W. T. Lhamon Jr., Daniel Belgrad, and Morris Dickstein, have argued, it is a mistake to see every cultural phenomena of the period as a “national reflex” to Cold War policy; their work usefully illustrates how the radical developments we associate with the 1960s truly have their genesis in the previous decade.18 I agree with their critique and would argue that the doctrine of containment is forever shadowed by a dark twin, a set of opposing values that materializes in, and as, the avant-garde of the postwar years. To counter the tremendous emphasis placed on stabilizing and containing unruly energies, participants in the avant-garde devoted themselves to values diametrically opposed to containment: motion, disorder, flux, speed, change, and action. This helps explain why, in the seminal 1950s novel On the Road, Jack Kerouac sums up the bohemians’ endless zooming along the open road by pointing to movement as the supreme value of his historical moment: “We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. And we moved!” (134). Hence Norman Mailer’s comment in “The White Negro,” his controversial 1957 diagnosis of what was really happening beneath the seemingly placid surface of postwar American life: “Movement is always preferred to inaction. In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis comes, whether of love or violence, he can make it, he can win, he can . . . make it a little more possible to go again, to go faster next time and so make more and

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thus find more people with whom he can swing” (596). These remarks stand as good examples of the “culture of spontaneity” (Belgrad) and “deliberate speed” (Lhamon) that erupted across the arts in the decade following World War II, as the new fascination with improvisation and spontaneous expression flourished in diverse areas of artistic activity: poetry and fiction, painting, jazz, avant-garde classical music, dance, and film.19 “In opposition to the imperatives of bureaucratic control,” Belgrad argues, “‘spontaneity’ was the strategy and the rallying cry of this avant-garde cultural project” (5). As we will see, the poets discussed here not only privilege motion and spontaneity along the lines Belgrad suggests, but also question the implications and contradictions of entertaining such a bias. One way the period’s “large cultural narrative” of containment and its opposing narrative of movement affected individuals living under its sway was to influence how they felt about their own identity and how to express it, and about the nature of selfhood itself (Nadel, Containment, 4). The effort by various authorities and experts to codify, unify, and contain personal identities and activities provoked, for some writers and artists, an opposing effort to evade, disperse, multiply, and explode such codifications. For O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka, for example, the policing of sexual and racial boundaries in postwar culture became a major factor in how they posited identity. Because of the revisionist scholarship of critics like John D’Emilio and Robert Corber, it is now clear just how closely anticommunism and virulent homophobia were fused in not only the rhetoric but also the shameful practices of the Cold War era. The dangerous blurring of the lines between political, sexual, racial, social, and artistic “deviance” found in many arenas of public discourse is one of the most curious and disturbing aspects of the culture of the postwar years. D’Emilio’s study Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970, demonstrates how “the Cold War and its attendant domestic anticommunism provided the setting in which a sustained attack upon homosexuals and lesbians took place” (40). As the McCarthy witch-hunt hysteria grew, “gay men and women became the targets of verbal assault that quickly escalated into policy and practice” as “the danger posed by ‘sexual perverts’ became a staple of partisan rhetoric” (41). The move from rhetoric to reality is often only a short step in times of fear: soon, the prevailing belief, inflamed by the press, that homosexuals had “infiltrated” the State Department led to a wave of virulent antihomosexual persecutions and terminations in government, the military, and private industries (41). “Widespread labeling of lesbians and homosexuals as moral perverts and national security risks gave local police forces across the country free rein in harassment,” D’Emilio observes. “Throughout the 1950s gays suffered from unpredictable, brutal crackdowns” (49). This reign of repression, surveillance, homophobia and racism had a tangible impact on the poets in this study and their conception of identity. In this climate, being homosexual or black or even just an experimenter in the arts was automati-

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 43 cally grounds for suspicion and harassment. John Ashbery has frequently looked back in interviews at this terrifying cultural moment with a palpable shudder: I went through a period of intense depression and doubt. I couldn’t write for a couple of years. I don’t know why. It did coincide with the beginnings of the Korean War, the Rosenberg case and McCarthyism. Though I was not an intensely political person, it was impossible to be happy in that kind of climate. It was a nadir. (Kostelanetz, “John,” 20)

Ashbery had been called up for the draft during the Korean War, but he was exempted from service because he went on government record as a homosexual, an act that made him terribly afraid of the “anti-homosexual campaigns” of the Cold War era: “Of course this was recorded and I was afraid we’d all be sent to concentration camps if McCarthy had his own way. It was a very dangerous and scary period” (Gooch, City, 190; see also Shoptaw, On the Outside, 5). Baraka was also at odds with the status quo because of his skin color and his aesthetic and political activities, which led to—and continue to lead to—brushes with the powers of the state. While he was in the Air Force, he ran into trouble not only because of his defiance of the authoritarian military regimen, but also because of his decidedly left-wing reading habits. “Given the political climate of the midfifties,” William J. Harris writes, “the sight of a colored man reading the Partisan Review in his barracks may have been offensive. Baraka’s intellectual vacation was ended when an anonymous letter accused him of being a communist” (5; see A, 173–178). “Among the artifacts the air force was amassing as to my offense,” Baraka recalls, “were copies of the Partisan Review!” (A, 176). In 1957, Baraka was dishonorably discharged from what he later called the “Error Farce” (A, 137). In October 1961, a group of “treasury agents, FBI, and police” descended on Baraka’s New York City apartment in the middle of the night and arrested him on charges of sending obscenity through the mails (A, 251). The ninth issue of the newsletter he was editing with Diane di Prima, The Floating Bear, contained sections from Baraka’s own novel The System of Dante’s Hell and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch that were deemed obscene by the authorities; particularly objectionable was the depiction of homosexual activity in Baraka’s “The Eighth Ditch.” Baraka would later marvel at how foreign this hyper-repressive cultural environment now seems: “So you can see that certainly was another day, just a little over thirty years ago. The words used in those two pieces can probably be found in most films released now” (A, 251). As the editors explained in a subsequent issue of The Floating Bear: “At the obscenity trial, things looked very grim, Mr. Jones having had to sit still under such questions as ‘What percentage of the Bear’s mailing list is homosexual?’ Mr. Jones asked the federal attorney what percentage of the d.a.’s office was homosexual, and pointed out that the last big queer bust took place in the state department” (Floating Bear 20, 1962).20 In her memoir, Baraka’s ex-wife, Hettie Jones, quotes from a letter she wrote at the time that sug-

44 Beautiful Enemies gests the paranoia caused by the intrusion of the powers-that-be into their lives. She reports that during the raid, “the bastards grabbed our water pipe and took it to be analyzed, Roi told them a friend had sent it from Tangiers. They still have it and I half expect them to raid us and search, though if they haven’t by now I guess they’ve got better things to do than hang us for possession. Anyway we haven’t got anything, it’s just not safe these days, not in this house” (144). But rather than being silenced by the repressive conservatism of the period, as many studies of Cold War culture attest was the case throughout American society, these postwar avant-garde poets demurred. Instead, they developed various methods of resistance.The “containment culture” theory so pronounced in recent Cold War studies cannot explain the force with which these figures responded to such bigoted persecution, intimidation, conservatism, and absolutism. Nor can it account for why these writers imagine the self in the rather unusual way that they do. Under this regime of surveillance and imposed homogeneity, facing what Baraka calls in The System of Dante’s Hell “the torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject” (153), the poets developed an aesthetic of experimental individualism that is particularly antagonistic to any kind of pigeonholing used in the name of conformity and repression. They are dedicated to the evasion of resolute identity and stable sense of self, and obsessed with the idea that mobility is essential to freedom. As marginalized agents in a time of enforced containment, poets like O’Hara or Ashbery know that they cannot afford to rest with someone else’s proscriptive definition of their identity. In other words, one could easily link the way the poets in this study represent identity to issues of gender and sexual identity—that is, their presentation of the self could be (and has been) seen as the enactment of a gay poetics. For example, critics like David Bergman have argued that a, if not the, central feature of the gay poetic tradition has been “the egolessness of the gay male poet” (“Choosing,” 385). Ian Gregson, citing Bergman’s work, argues that “the expression of egolessness has been one of the most important contributions gay poets have made to contemporary poetry, especially because it has important links with the interrogation of notions of the unitary self which has been so central in postmodernist literature and theory” (166). For Bergman, the origins of this “weak sense of selfhood” can be traced to childhood, to “the sociohistorical constellation from which the child develops his object world” (the child’s sense of his own otherness leads to development of what Erik Erikson calls a “negative identity”). In this reading,“egolessness” is “both one of the results of the homosexual’s relationship to society and one of his tools to deal with it” (386). The anti-essentialist, evasive presentation of identity in homosexual poetics, where no “real” self resides beneath a variety of performances and disguises, then, is both a trait particular to homosexual identity formation and a survival tactic necessary in a homophobic culture. As such, it can also been seen as an important component of a camp aesthetic, which David T. Evans has defined

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 45 as a “defensive manoeuver by a group so oppressed that it has no other socio-cultural or political alternative” (qtd. Gregson, Male, 168). Camp, of course, became a potent idiom and weapon for gay writers during the 1950s and 1960s. From this perspective, O’Hara’s preoccupation with change and the protean nature of the self can be seen as a strategy he uses in order to endure in a culture of violent homophobia and homogeneity—as Mutlu Konuk Blasing observes, O’Hara’s “imperative to change is less an essential or a historical value than a defensive response to a state of emergency; indeed, it signifies less a freedom than a necessity . . . To resist a reified identity is necessary for survival—as a gay man, for example” (Politics, 56).21 Similarly, one could argue (as studies by John Shoptaw and Catherine Imbriglio have done) that Ashbery’s notoriously evasive, disjunctive, and polyphonic style was shaped by the pressures of McCarthyism and homophobia. His “early poetry of the 1950s,” Imbriglio asserts, “reflects, in part, some of the difficulties of articulating sexual difference in the face of repressive social and cultural prohibitions” (“Our,” 257).22 What troubles me about this general approach is that it seems to imply, or even explicitly argues, that the “interrogation of unitary selfhood” is the unique province of homosexual writers, when it seems a much more widespread phenomenon, with roots in modernism, American pragmatism, and surrealism, and with tentacles in every corner of postmodernism. Though I agree with (and will make a similar case as) Gregson that O’Hara projects “a self in process” and “opposes any ideas of the self as at all rigidly identifiable and presents it . . . being invented moment by moment,” I am quite wary about attributing this tendency entirely to the poet’s sexual orientation (Male, 176). (The pluralist O’Hara would surely have balked at this kind of reductive move and its reliance on identity logic.) To argue, as Gregson does, that “the collapsing of ego boundaries, which this poetic requires, also suggests how much this is a gay achievement, how much it opposes straight male concepts of the self ” seems to run the risk of needlessly essentializing both gay and straight identity and aesthetic practices (176). That said, it does seem quite valuable to recognize that the homophobia and repression of Cold War culture conditions these postwar American poets’ conception of identity as unfixed, multiple, performative, theatrical, and elusive, and I plan to keep the volatile issue of sexual identity close to the surface throughout my discussion. What particularly interests me is how the lineaments of the homosexual poetics sketched by Bergman, and by queer theory more generally, are mediated by a philosophical and poetic rhetoric shaped by quite similar ideas about identity in Emerson and pragmatism. A recurring theme in the chapters that follow will be how each of these poets struggles to articulate nonconventional sexual identities and desires without recourse to an essentialist vocabulary to talk about selfhood. Something similar occurs when the poetic discourse of identity has to contend with issues of race. For example, the early Baraka’s unwillingness to equate

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identity with race, his reluctance to be viewed as a “Negro poet,” should be seen as part of his aversion to conformity and resolute definition in an age of widespread racism, battles over segregation and civil rights, and quite narrowly defined ideas about African-American identity. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Baraka resembles Ralph Ellison and other African-American writers, from Du Bois and Alain Locke through Albert Murray, Nathaniel Mackey, and Percival Everett, in his refusal to accept the idea of an essential, racial identity. Wary of viewing African-American identity and culture in simplistic, absolute terms, as a predisposition that, based on one’s skin and parentage, determines one’s severely circumscribed fate, these writers choose to plunge into the messy complications of selfhood and culture as they believe they are actually experienced. Choosing to view identity as a dynamic process rather than a stable category linked to biology, they oppose what Mackey refers to as “resolute identity and demarcation, resolute boundary lines, resolute definition” (Discrepant, 20). “To see being as verb rather than noun,” Mackey suggests, “is to be at odds with hypostasis, the reification of fixed identities that has been the bane of socially marginalized groups” (20). In other words, African-American, homosexual, or women writers have a powerful motive to challenge and subvert the imposition of rigid definitions of identity based on race, gender or culture, and to contest the subsuming of individuality within group identity—especially in a repressive, intolerant culture fixated on the notion of a uniform “American” identity. Even beyond these enforced, standardized racial and gender roles, homogenizing forces were afoot in the wider culture. By the early 1950s, everyone seemed to agree that a specter was haunting America—the specter of conformity. A host of factors seemed to breed this widespread sensation and concomitant fear of homogeneity and conformity, including the postwar economic boom and the rapid expansion of an affluent, comfortable middle class; the rush of material and technological changes; the explosion of consumerism; the national insistence on vanquishing international communism and squashing domestic subversion; the collapse of the Left in the face of Stalinism; the Truman loyalty oaths and the McCarthyist silencing of dissent; and the widespread belief that American culture had arrived at consensus and what Daniel Bell famously called “the end of ideology.” Michael Davidson goes so far as to suggest that “perhaps the most enduring legacy of the cold war” was the creation of “a collective subject forged by the politics of consensus and finished on Madison Avenue . . . .The ideal of homogeneity was not merely something advocated by civic leaders and politicians; it could be purchased in the new Levittowns and postwar tract developments that sprang up to accommodate the baby boom” (Guys, 56). American intellectuals and writers grew so anxious about the corrosive effects of American society’s excessively conformist ethos during the early Cold War years and what it portended for the fate of the individual that, as Barbara Ehrenreich points out, “conformity quickly became a national concern” (Hearts,

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 47 30). “In June of 1957,” she explains, “conformity was the most popular topic for major speakers at college commencements. . . . Life covered it, Look covered it. Brown tweed sociologists analyzed it, and their gray flannel cousins read about it on commuter trains or joked uneasily about it over their standardized screwdrivers and 4-to-one martinis” (30). “Across the political spectrum,” Jackson Lears observes in an essay on Cold War culture, “celebrants and doubters alike accepted the basic assumption that postwar America was a homogenous mass-consumption society,” which led Cold War intellectuals and social critics to engage in “endless chatter about conformity” (“Matter,” 47). In his informative chapter “Conformity and Alienation: Social Criticism in the 1950s,” Richard H. Pells distinguishes these concerns of liberal postwar intellectuals from those that preoccupied their counterparts during the 1930s: No longer awaiting the inevitable collapse of capitalism or the revolutionary fury of the working class, they began to assess the moral impact of mass consumption and material success. . . . Where the search for community had captured the imagination of the Left of the 1930s, the search for identity inspired the writers and artists of the 1950s. Where social critics had once insisted on the need for collective action, they now urged the individual to resist the pressures of conformity (Liberal Mind, 187).

Given how plentiful such critiques became in the 1950s, it is reasonable to assume that poets—“antennae of the race,” in Pound’s estimation—were picking up frequencies emitted by a cultural atmosphere swirling with talk of conformity versus nonconformity, groupism versus individualism. This “chatter about conformity” was nearly ubiquitous in the early postwar years. From 1945 to 1947, the journal Commentary published a series of essays devoted to “the crisis of the individual” in an age of totalitarianism; in 1950, the sociologist David Riesman published his groundbreaking, best-selling study The Lonely Crowd (1950); in 1951, C. Wright Mills’s White Collar appeared; in 1952, Bernard Iddings Bell published Crowd Culture: An Examination of the American Way of Life, another critique of “crowd-thinking” and the herd-like tendencies of American society; in 1952, psychiatrist Robert Lindner’s Prescription for Rebellion appeared, and in 1955, his Must You Conform? was published. The year 1954 saw the publication of Riesman’s study Individualism Reconsidered and Irving Howe’s Partisan Review essay “This Age of Conformity”; both C.Wright Mills’s The Power Elite and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man appeared in 1956, John Kenneth Gailbraith’s The Affluent Society in 1958,Winston White’s Beyond Conformity in 1961, and Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man in 1964. Expressions of alarm about the dire threat posed by conformity became the mantra of the day, as in Linder’s Prescription for Rebellion: “in our own United States, especially, we are confronted with a demand for conformity that not a single agency or institution opposes . . . the making of Mass Man is in process” (qtd. Schaub, American Fiction, 141).

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But as Richard Pells observes, “two writers, William Whyte and David Riesman, were especially alert to the tension between the American desire to fit in and his occasional impulse to rebel.” Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and Whyte’s The Organization Man “emerged as the decade’s classic critiques of American society” (Liberal, 232). Whyte’s book, which Jackson Lears calls “the locus classicus of the 1950s critique of conformity,” takes aim at the increasing bureaucratization of American life, at the disturbing willingness of American citizens to liquidate their autonomy by belonging to the large, impersonal corporate organizations of big business and government bureaucracies (44). Whyte’s main goal is to assess “the personal impact that organization life has had on the individuals within it” (qtd. Pells, Liberal, 233). Noting with alarm this system’s guiding “belief in the group as the source of creativity,” Whyte warns that the corporate organization rewards muzzled team-playing and towing the line rather than individual initiative and creativity. The beleaguered “organization man” “soon discovered that it was his ‘moral duty’ to participate in joint activities, however much he might feel ‘imprisoned in brotherhood’” (Liberal, 235). Similarly, Pells says, Riesman’s national sensation The Lonely Crowd is driven by a “special antipathy for the communitarian ideal” (Liberal, 240). It diagnoses the dangerously “other-directed” nature of the American character, the compulsion leading individuals to take direction from their contemporaries in all things and to seek, above all, approval from others (240). To combat the damaging effects of this conformist impulse, Riesman urges people to “‘develop their private selves,’ to flee from ‘groupism,’ to ‘find their own way,’ if necessary to ‘go it alone’”—in short, he calls for the cultivation of individual expression, thought, and “autonomy” (qtd. Pells, Liberal, 244). Rather than advocating allout rebellion, however (which he saw as merely the dangerous inverse of the status quo’s lockstep thinking), Riesman suggests that autonomy can be found in simply thinking for oneself “instead of instinctively adopting the opinions of others” (qtd. 245). At the close of The Lonely Crowd, Riesman sums up his case by deploying a conflict between sameness and difference, likeness and alterity, that resonates throughout the poetry of the 1950s. “The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading,” Riesman writes. “Men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other” (307). Although in the last couple decades, intellectual and cultural historians have focused on the importance of such 1950s critiques of conformity and calls for individualism, criticism on postwar American poetry has not yet explicitly connected the pervasive work of “brown-tweed” Cold War intellectuals like David Riesman, William Whyte, C. Wright Mills, Dwight Macdonald, or Daniel Bell to the nonconformist, individualistic tenor of 1950s avant-garde poetry, or more broadly, to the famed turn inward toward the self and subjective experience that occurs in the poetry of the 1950s and 1960s. Bearing in mind the prevalence of

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 49 this discourse helps explain why individualism became such an important watchword of the day for the various postwar avant-gardes—from the Action Painting of the New York School to the bebop of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, from the music of John Cage and dance of Merce Cunningham to the poetry and fiction of the Beats and the New American poetry. But the fierce and widely read attacks on the “organization man,” “other-directedness,” and “groupism” in Riesman and Whyte and other contemporaneous thinkers—the fear of being “imprisoned in brotherhood” that they articulate—also offers a useful context in which to evaluate the profound resistance and ambivalence that many postwar avant-gardists feel about submitting their individuality to any group, even one that is marginalized, progressive, and subversive. The postwar American avant-garde not only mirrors the omnipresence of these tropes and categories in the postwar cultural ethos, but also contests, weighs, and questions them.23 There is no question that the insistence on individualism and dread of conformity was widespread and deeply felt across the avant-garde. For example, as Dore Ashton notes in her study of the New York School of painters, the Abstract Expressionists were convinced that “the sole historical distinguishing mark of the American artist” was “his isolation and loneliness”: “Individualism as an institution acquired in artistic circles a kind of hallowed legend, fed by both writers and painters” (32). When Frank O’Hara was at Harvard in 1948, just as the Cold War rhetoric of consensus and hostility toward “deviance” was beginning its shrill and perilous crescendo, he was already beginning to be swept up by that “hallowed legend” of individualism. In his journal, O’Hara observed that “the impulse, the, at times, compulsion towards normalcy must be avoided, when its fulfillment is known to be unsatisfactory, and when the endeavor is, as it is by definition, inferior to that possible through idiosyncratic behavior” (EW, 101). O’Hara declares that in order to navigate a world that so quickly hardens into conformity and dead conventions you must rely on your own eccentric, dynamic movement—in the process, linking mobility and self-reliance as he would so often throughout his oeuvre: “one must avoid the impediments, snares, detours; one must not be stifled in a closed social or artistic railway station waiting for the train; I’ve a long long way to go, and I’m late already” (101). Writing of his dread upon returning from a solitary walk (away from school and all those decorous “people who are embarrassed by enthusiasm”) to the dining hall at Harvard, O’Hara castigates the insidious conformity (or what Riesman would call “other-directedness” in The Lonely Crowd two years later) that he finds there, a timid homogeneity from which he longs to be separate: “That hall full of people worrying about what anyone else is saying or thinking about them! Why should anyone stifle an impulse to be uniform? Je ne suis pas comme les autres, if I remember Rousseau, and if I am not better, at least I am different” (108). “If I am not better, at least I am different”—the concept, so dear to O’Hara early and late, could stand as a kind of motto for the postwar avant-garde.24 If the true villain today, as Riesman suggests, lies in our

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constant “seeking to become like each other,” then the artist must strive not for priority or superiority, but for a crucial, saving difference from other people, other artists (307). Like O’Hara, Baraka felt from the first that nonconformity was the cardinal virtue. “How You Sound??” was the statement he contributed to Donald Allen’s landmark 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry, and one of his most important early prose pieces. In it, Baraka offers a vigorous declaration of poetic independence, a bohemian riff on Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”: I must be completely free to do just what I want, in the poem. . . . The only ‘recognizable tradition’ a poet need follow is himself . . . & with that, say, all those things out of tradition he can use, adapt, work over, into something for himself. To broaden his own voice with. (You have to start and finish there . . . your own voice . . . how you sound). (424–425)

Above all, Baraka insists, an artist must remain independent from the herd and free from any imposed conventions or restrictions; what matters most is the writer’s own distinctive, idiosyncratic “sound” or signature. The widespread eruption of such concerns across the period’s poetry is apparent when one simply leafs through the pages of The New American Poetry. At the rhapsodic conclusion to “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births),” Frank O’Hara imagines an individualistic poet as liberating hero: “One alone will speak of being / born in pain / and he will be the wings of an extraordinary liberty” (264); earlier in the poem he refers disparagingly to “thrilling activities which confuse / too many, too loud / too often, crowds of intimacies and no distance” (262). In “Songs of Maximus,” Charles Olson warns: “In the land of plenty, have / nothing to do with it / take the way of / the lowest, / including your legs, go / contrary, go // sing” (13). The thrice-repeated refrain of Barbara Guest’s “Santa Fe Trail” is the nonconformist chant “I go separately” (217). In “Howl,” Allen Ginsberg famously chronicles the annihilation of a whole generation’s “best minds,” who, unable or unwilling to succumb to conformity, are either “destroyed by madness” or “burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue” (182, 186). Amiri Baraka half-mocks, half-admires the nonconformity so dear to his wife’s (and his own) bohemianism: My wife is left-handed. Which implies a fierce determination. A complete other worldliness. IT’S WEIRD BABY The way some folks are always trying to be different. A sin & a shame. But then, she’s been a bohemian

Situating the Avant-Garde in Postwar America 51 all her life . . . black stockings, refusing to take orders. (358)

Gregory Corso both derides and wrestles with the pressures to conform to the American ideal of marriage and domestic bliss (perhaps at its all-time peak in these baby-boom years)—“Should I get married? Should I be good? / Astound the girl next door / with my velvet suit and faustus hood?”—knowing how sharply his own eccentricities diverge from that “pleasant prison dream,” imagining that on his wedding night he would go “Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon! / running rampant into those almost climactic suites / yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!” (209–210). What I am suggesting is that the discursive registers of poetry and cultural critique became intertwined in the 1950s. When the poets write about friendship, community, and selfhood, one can sense that they have internalized and are wrestling with larger debates about the nature of individualism and the scourge of conformity. Frank O’Hara’s 1957 poem “John Button Birthday” might be useful as a brief example, though the poems I discuss throughout the rest of this book should amplify this point as well.This occasional poem written for a painter friend’s birthday begins: Sentiments are nice, “The Lonely Crowd,” a rift in the clouds appears above the purple, you find a birthday greeting card with violets which says “a perfect friend” and means “I love you” but the customer is forced to be shy. It says less, as all things must . . . What is it that attracts one to one? Mystery? (CP, 267)

Rather than simply paying tribute to his friend, O’Hara uses the opportunity to examine the contradictions and enigmas of friendship, the “mystery” at the root of one friend’s attraction to another. Written during the very year in which, as Ehrenreich notes, the urgent epidemic of conformity became the most popular topic for college commencements, O’Hara’s poem alludes, albeit rather cryptically, to Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd. Perhaps this is his way of hinting at the “rift” or clash between individual and group captured in both that book’s oxymoronic title and his own friendship. What is friendship after all, O’Hara wonders: what draws two people together, what happens to each individual’s selfhood when he or she becomes part of a crowd? The poem ends with a moving portrait of discordant friendship at its contentious best: And in 1984 I trust we’ll still be high together. I’ll say “Let’s go to a bar”

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O’Hara’s poem evokes friendship’s delicate balance between the nonconformist spirit of its participants and a sense of camaraderie and union. And, as the poem’s allusion to David Riesman suggests, its representations of individualism and friendship are entangled with the terminologies and obsessions of Cold War culture. When we consider the excessive attention given to the problem of conformity during the 1950s, the prevailing concern that “the problem for people in America today,” as Riesman claimed, is “other people,” we can see why poets like Ashbery and O’Hara might recoil from being fused as one in their collaborative poem, why they might ask a reader to “explain to us all the differences between us,” why Ashbery might refer to “the corrosive friends whose breath is so close / It whistles” (MSO, 279). However, there is also a deeper, more philosophical context to consider, and that is what I would like to turn our attention to now.

2

EMERSON, PRAGMATISM, AND THE “NEW AMERICAN POETRY”

A

s we have seen, the strained yet dynamic relationship between community and nonconformity consumed the avant-garde poetry of the 1950s and 1960s in ways that clearly reveal the impress of the Cold War era’s intellectual preoccupations and discursive formations. However, the poets’ fascination with this issue should also be seen as part of a sophisticated response to long-standing American intellectual debates to be found within the tradition associated with Emerson,William James, and the modernist poetry they influence. For a rekindled American avant-garde, the prevalent discourses and pressures of Cold War culture seem to have sparked a renewed interest in Emersonian pragmatism. By considering certain aspects of American pragmatist thought and poetics, we can arrive at a more supple framework by which to understand the role of friendship and the fate of individualism in postwar American poetry. Pragmatist poetics offers a conceptual vocabulary for analyzing the rhetoric, the obsessions, the tactics, and the ambivalences that operate in experimental American poetry, especially with regard to the three major themes I have been discussing: community, individualism, and an obsession with flux and mobility. By invoking Emersonian pragmatism, I mean to refer to the broad, influential tradition of thought and writing that encompasses the works of Emerson, William and Henry James, Charles S. Peirce, John Dewey, and a series of modern American authors such as Kenneth Burke, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ralph Ellison.1 53

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Granted, there is hardly consensus on whether Emerson can be viewed as a pragmatist or an originator of this tradition, and controversies still surround this notion. Emerson has of course been read and appropriated in a dizzying variety of ways, as has pragmatism itself.2 But by now so many capable studies have demonstrated the significant connections between Emerson’s thought and James’s pragmatist philosophy on the one hand, and between Emersonian pragmatism and literary modernism on the other, that it is presumably not necessary to belabor these issues here.3 However, unlike most other recent accounts of the influence of Emerson and pragmatism on American poetry, my own will explore how this lineage extends beyond the modernist generation of Stevens, Williams, Stein, Pound, and Frost to major poets who come to prominence after World War II. In fact, the guiding rhetoric, tropes, and beliefs of post-1945 experimental poetry echo (both implicitly and explicitly) central pragmatist motifs in tantalizing ways, while reconfiguring them in the context of Cold War cultural dynamics.4 My intention here is not to attempt to define or explain the enormous wealth and complexity of pragmatism itself, but rather to explore a set of farreaching tropes, concepts, and paradoxes embedded in American philosophy that the poets perpetuate and challenge. Because, as Richard Poirier concedes, “there are as many pragmatisms as there are pragmatist philosophers, just as surely as there are many different kinds of Emersonians, often at odds with one another,” I will not presume to define something so diverse, so resistant, and so temperamentally opposed to reduction to essences and categories (Poetry, 4). But suffice it to say that I am interested here in pragmatism as a philosophical mode that, most broadly, challenges foundationalism and absolutism, emphasizes contingency, pluralism, and action, and espouses a version of individualism that is both anti-essentialist and highly attuned to the social dimensions of selfhood. In general, classical American pragmatism is closely linked to the dissolution of absolute foundations that arrives hand in hand with the transition to modernity, a response to a moment in which “all that is solid melts into air,” in Marx’s memorable phrase. As Morris Dickstein explains it: Pragmatism, like modernism, reflects the break-up of cultural and religious authority, the turn away from any simple or stable definition of truth, the shift from totalizing systems and unified narratives to a more fragmented plurality of experiences. . . . But where many modernists, especially after World War I—the Waste Land generation—would portray the fragmentation of the modern world with an acrid nostalgia for earlier hierarchies, the pragmatists tend to be exuberant and constructive rather than pessimistic. The dark and apocalyptic strain of modernism held little appeal for them; the rupture with past certainties opened up new horizons. They saw “the quest for certainty” as the futile and misguided remnant of an outworn metaphysics, and they take the new, contingent, humancentered world as a source of opportunity and possibility. (4–5)

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 55 Pragmatism’s questioning of traditional authority and absolute truth, its rejection of closure and certainty, and its orientation toward the future and possibility profoundly influence modernist American literature and continue to surface in later twentieth-century writing. In terms of its influence on poetry, pragmatism can perhaps best be thought of as an American idiom—a certain accent, temperament, and way of approaching the world. This idiom is one overflowing with tropes of motion, transition, change, action, and flux set against images that highlight the hazards of immobility. It frequently depicts the dangers of surrendering personal autonomy to conformity, institutions, or other forms of imposed structure. This battery of images and metaphors, founded on what Giles Gunn calls the pragmatist’s “delight in process, mutability, activity,” becomes a potent tool in the rhetoric of modern and postmodern American poets, who ring infinite variations on these concepts and figures of speech (Thinking, 149). The philosopher Richard J. Bernstein has usefully located “five interrelated substantive themes that enable us to characterize the pragmatist ethos,” in order to give a sense of “the dominant interrelated motifs characteristic of this style of thinking” (“Pragmatism,” 383). These are (1) “anti-foundationalism,” an outlook that opposes “the idea that knowledge rests on fixed foundations” (285); (2) “fallibilism,” the notion that in the face of anti-foundationalism, “there is no belief or thesis—no matter how fundamental—that is not open to further interpretation and criticism” (387); (3) “the social character of the self,” which is “played out in many variations by pragmatist thinkers. The very idea of an individual consciousness that is independent of shared social practices is criticized” (387); (4) “the awareness and sensitivity to radical contingency and chance that mark the universe, our inquiries, our lives” (388); and (5) the “theme of plurality”: “There can be no escape from plurality—a plurality of traditions, perspectives, philosophic orientations” (389). All of these themes seem to find corollaries in post–World War II American poetry and can help provide a way of thinking about the unusual representation of self and community that is so important to that work. As Bernstein suggests, pragmatism could be said to begin with a deeply antifoundational vision of the universe as unfinished, dynamic, and constantly changing—with Emerson’s belief that “nothing solid is secure; every thing tilts and rocks,” that “there are no fixtures in nature.The universe is fluid and volatile” (EL, 116, 403). William James, in turn, advises us to recognize “this life as something always off its balance, something in transition,” and to accept that “we live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest” and our experience “lives in these transitions more than in the journey’s end” (Writings, 294, 206). Unlike monism, “with its absolutely closed-in world,” James’s philosophy of pluralism means “accepting a universe unfinished, with doors and windows open to possibilities uncontrollable in advance” (269). As Louis Menand observes, the Jamesian universe, then, “is better thought of as a ‘multi-verse,’ as something that is never completed, never synthesized into a stable whole” (Menand, Pragmatism, xxvii).

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If the world is radically open, unfinished, and plural, it means that our responses to it, our interpretations of it, need to be thought of as “fallibilistic”—as being constantly in need of revision and adaptation to meet shifting circumstances and realities. Every explanation, statement, or action must be regarded as temporary, provisional, revisable. In Emerson’s view, to imagine that any explanation or action is absolute, permanent, or static in such a mutable world is akin to self-deluding madness. “If anything could stand still,” he writes in “The Method of Nature,” “it would be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane persons are those who hold fast to one thought, and do not flow with the course of nature” (EL, 119).5 This leads the pragmatists to believe that, in James’s terms, “the truth of an idea is not a stagnant property within it.Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events” (Writings, 430). Pragmatism posits that truth is created in the course of experience and not found, and is a process more than an entity; it views truths or meanings as partial, plural, contingent, and changing. Privileging flexibility and mobility and upholding the willingness to change one’s mind as a supreme virtue, James insists that “we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood” (438). What matters to a pragmatist are the practical consequences of holding a certain belief, whether it “leads us into more useful relations with the world,” not whether that belief matches some ideal version of reality “as it is” (Menand, Pragmatism, xiv). Furthermore, the inability to change one’s thinking, the unwillingness to call today’s truth a falsehood tomorrow, is the root of that “foolish consistency” Emerson famously castigates as the “hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines” (EL, 265). “Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then?” Emerson asks, previewing Whitman’s more renowned celebration of inconsistency, “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then. . . . I contradict myself;/ I am large. . . . I contain multitudes” (EL, 265; Leaves, ed. Cowley, 85, ellipses in original). It is a flexible philosophy of fluidity and change that Emerson calls for and that William James develops; as Emerson describes it in the essay “Montaigne”: The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. . . . We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as the first, limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and splinters, in this storm of many elements. . . .We are golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, houses founded on the sea. (EL, 679)

Given what James calls the “booming, buzzing confusion” of experience, Emerson urges us to avoid dwelling within “angular, dogmatic houses” and beliefs, and advises us to give up the quest for certainty and fixity, which have a perilous tendency to harden into rigid doctrine (qtd. John Smith, Spirit, 47).With such tropes, Emerson metaphorically connects certainty and dogma with stasis (a house-like inflexibility unable to cope with the swirl rushing around it). In contrast he fig-

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 57 ures the nimble, skeptical philosophy he desires as a kind of mobility, an ability to remain as unmoored and fluid as a house floating on water. As James argues, a pragmatist, then, is one who is willing to live in a world without guarantees, absolute grounding, or telos, who “turns away from abstractions and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power. . . . It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth” (Writings, 379). Oriented toward doing, action, practice, and immediate experience rather than abstraction and theory, pragmatism represents “a principle of endless assault on every tendency to erect contingent knowledge into a formal system” (McDermott, “Introduction,” xxxi). The pragmatist’s turning away from “closed systems” finds its counterpart in a similar refusal articulated by American avant-garde poets after World War II, who are equally skeptical of any such attempts at closure. For example, in his “Notes On Second Avenue,” Frank O’Hara offers this strikingly Jamesian warning: “The philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with system so distorts life that one’s ‘reward’ for this endeavor (a minor one, at that) is illness both from inside and outside” (CP, 495). Similarly, in the poem “Green Lantern’s Solo,” Baraka lambastes the rigid, monistic vision of those who “can not but yearn / for the One Mind, or Right, or call it some God, a thing beyond / themselves, some thing toward which all life is fixed, some static, / irreducible, constantly correcting, dogmatic economy / of the soul” (T, 104–105). Despite this similarity of tone and philosophy between postwar poetry and pragmatism, some might wonder: aren’t other factors more important to post-1945 American poetry, like the reaction to different strains of modernism, the resuscitation of the European avant-garde, the return to Romanticism, the rise of Abstract Expressionism, the emergence of bebop, the cult of psychoanalysis, or the vogue of existentialism? I should emphasize that by drawing attention to Emerson and pragmatism, I am in no way seeking to discount the great significance of these other cultural forces and artistic influences on postwar poetry, connections that many previous studies have revealed and explored in depth. Pragmatism is of course but one influence on American poetry among many, but my contention is that it is an extremely important and thus far undervalued one. More specifically, if one hopes to understand the complex play of self and friendship in postmodernist American poetry, the dialectic between individualism and the social that is one of pragmatism’s most salient, contradictory features is an important key. Some might also point out that the philosophical mode that dominated literary culture in the aftermath of World War II was not pragmatism but existentialism, the Continental philosophy associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and the writings of Kierkegaard. Beginning in about 1945, existentialism became the most fashionable, controversial, and talked-about

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intellectual topic in American culture and letters. At the start of Existential America (2003), an excellent history of the reception of existentialism in the United States, George Cotkin observes that “nearly everyone, it seemed, coming of age in 1950s and 1960s America danced to the song of French existentialism” (1). From Camus-carrying college students aping the “existential style of dress” (“black jeans, a black turtleneck,” etc.) to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, from Abstract Expressionists to Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” and the absurdist theater of Edward Albee and Amiri Baraka, existentialism made vast inroads into American literature and art (1).6 The ubiquity of existentialism can be sensed in an interesting passage in Baraka’s novel The System of Dante’s Hell, which he wrote around 1960–1961; by this point, it seems, existentialism has become little more than a tired fad, as Baraka composes a litany in which a character laments: “Blues. I Got. Abstract Expressionism blues. Existentialism blues. I Got. More blues, than you can shake your hiney at. (Tugs harder at trousers). Kierkegaard blues, boy are they here, a wringing and twisting” (85–86). “Existentialism is the philosophy of the atomic age,” the New York intellectual William Barrett declared in 1958, and many seemed to agree (qtd. in Cotkin, Existential, 145). With its emphasis on alienation, evil, dread, and anxiety, on the bewildering moral choices and responsibilities confronting lonely individuals as they wander through a hostile, bleak universe, existentialism seemed to speak to the temper of the times, to capture “the reality of an existence lived under the shadow of totalitarian butcheries and potential atomic annihilation” (Cotkin, Existential, 7). As a philosophy, existentialism begins with the notion that “existence precedes essence,” a privileging of immediate, individual experience, concrete situations, and contexts over against abstractions and absolutes.7 With this orientation, existentialism actually closely parallels major themes of pragmatist thought. Indeed, some of the early and important American interpreters of existentialism, most famously Hazel Barnes, saw significant parallels between Sartre and James—for example, the two philosophers share a focus on experience as the touchstone for philosophic inquiry, a belief in a radically open, contingent universe, an attention to the problem of ethical choice in a world stripped of absolutes, “an intense interest in how individuals constructed their world though meaning and values,” and an “energetic opposition to any philosophical system building” (Fulton, Apostles, 3–4). “Pragmatism,” Hazel Barnes proclaimed, “prepared the American reading public for Existentialism,” and, as Cotkin explains, Barnes’s goal was to spell out “the affinities between a pragmatic and existentialist view of consciousness, of moral responsibility, of the nature and meaning of truth” (154).8 However, as many have noted, a pragmatist outlook differs sharply from an existentialist one in several important respects, most broadly in that it is, as Ann Fulton observes, “simply more optimistic,” a distinction I think will be borne out in the work of the poets’ discussed in this book (123). Even Hazel Barnes stressed the contrasts between the two, as she observed that the pragmatist “always seems

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 59 to be just coming out of his cold shower, full of exuberance,” “while the existentialist is more likely to be hovering at the bridge wondering whether or not to jump” (qtd. Fulton, Apostles, 123). The disparity between these two philosophies, William Barrett claimed rather starkly, “is the difference between America and Europe,” with American optimism set against European disillusionment (qtd. Fulton, Apostles, 124). Although I will seek to qualify this emphasis on pragmatism as a relentlessly cheerful philosophy and point out the undercurrent of loss and crisis tugging at its rhetoric, it seems safe to say that the pragmatist perspective offers a more hopeful, positive alternative to contingency than existentialism does. It has been widely argued that, as Morris Dickstein puts it, “pragmatism has come to be seen as an American alternative” to postmodernist quandaries,“an escape from the abstraction of theory and the abyss of nihilism.We might describe it as a constructive skepticism” (Revival, 16). To borrow an apt image of the sun from one of O’Hara’s poems, pragmatism, unlike the bleak creed of existentialism, seems to be “hang[ing] always promising some nebulous / healthy reaction to our native dark” (CP, 352).9 This difference of attitude is crucial for understanding the philosophical underpinnings of the new poetry of the 1950s. Although existentialism is so often cited for its influence on postwar literature (and surely its influence can be felt throughout the writing of the 1950s and 1960s), the distinctive tone, philosophy, and outlook of postwar avant-garde poetry—not least its frequent recourse to an affirmative skepticism as a nebulous response to our native dark—is much more closely aligned with the dominant mood and concepts of pragmatism. In fact, I think the conventional wisdom about existentialism’s ascendancy has made it harder to see this, harder to recognize the extent to which postwar poets find Emerson and American pragmatism to be more amenable models for their own brand of experimental writing and anti-ideological politics. But how could pragmatism have been so important for postwar American poetry if it was all but dead by the mid-twentieth century, pushed off stage by logical positivism, the dominance of analytic philosophy, and the Cold War, as we so often hear? Though it is certainly true that pragmatism was marginalized at midcentury, particularly in the realm of professional philosophy, I maintain that pragmatist tendencies did not fall dormant during the postwar years, as the familiar argument has it. In fact, at the same moment they seemed to be enjoying a resurgence elsewhere, within the postwar avant-garde. However, this resurgence has gone all but unnoticed in many accounts of the history of American ideas and literature, as influential commentators on pragmatism, like Morris Dickstein and Louis Menand, have claimed that pragmatism essentially vanished during the postwar years because of the hyper-ideological atmosphere of Cold War culture.10 For example, in his recent, celebrated intellectual history of pragmatism, The Metaphysical Club (2001), Menand claims that pragmatism essentially van-

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ished during the postwar years because of the absolutist vision of the Cold War. Arguing that the Cold War was “a war over principles,” Menand contends that a skeptical, tolerant, pluralistic style of thought like pragmatism “did not hold much appeal”—“the notion that the values of the free society for which the Cold War was waged were contingent, relative, fallible constructions, good for some purposes and not so good for others, was not a notion compatible with the moral imperatives of the age” (441). But Menand’s tidy scenario overlooks the strenuous objections of all those adventurous postwar poets, writers, and thinkers—across a surprisingly wide spectrum—who rejected the dogmatism, rigid ideologies, and “moral imperatives” of the Cold War era, who embraced pragmatism’s emphasis on “the tentative, provisional, and experimental” (Jumonville, Critical, 106).11 In The Revival of Pragmatism (1998), Morris Dickstein makes a very similar case to Menand’s, observing that “the reaction against pragmatism became even more marked after World War II, abetted by a variety of new influences including existentialism, crisis theology, the cold war, psychoanalysis, European modernism, and a cultural conservatism bred of growing prosperity and the fear of Communism” (9). This idea that pragmatism was eclipsed during the Cold War is belied not only, as I will argue, by developments within the oppositional avant-garde, but also by trends within the dominant intellectual currents of the time, those surrounding The Partisan Review and its circle of New York intellectuals (to whom the avant-garde was often opposed). In his book Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, Neil Jumonville argues that in reaction to the pressures of the Cold War, leading New York intellectuals (Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Harold Rosenberg, among others) adopted a pragmatist outlook. Having renounced their leftist ideological commitments of the 1930s, they “became rationalists and pluralists who opposed absolutism, moral crusades, ideology, and intuition” and “led the defense of liberal anti-ideology and pragmatism at mid-century” (xii, xiv). “Over the course of the 1940s, the ideal of the New York group was increasingly articulated in terms of values such as pluralism, moderation, tolerance, pragmatism, diversity, democracy and freedom. Increasingly, New York intellectuals began to celebrate the tentative, provisional, and experimental” (106). As Jumonville has demonstrated (along with scholars including Cornel West and Nancy Jachec), even the leading intellectuals of the postwar era can be viewed as Cold War converts from the ideological certainties of the 1930s to a pragmatist sensibility, one that stressed pluralism, provisionality, and ambiguity and attacked rigid ideological positions, dogmatic certainty, and unreflective partisanship.12 Thus to argue, as Dickstein does, that “after the chill of the postwar years, which put progressive ideas into cold storage, the 1960s provided a new impetus to radical thinking,” or as Menand does, that “once the Cold War ended, the ideas of Holmes, James, Peirce, and Dewey reemerged as suddenly as they had been

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 61 eclipsed” is, I think, a mistake (Revival, 10; Metaphysical, 441).To accept this received view is to overlook not only the turn to pragmatist pluralism by members of the premier intellectual formation of the moment (the “New York intellectuals”), but, more important for our purposes, it is to ignore the radical, pragmatist-tinged undercurrents that erupted as the New American Poetry of the 1950s.13 The notion that pragmatist ideas and motifs had enormous influence during the first half of the twentieth century on American literature and culture has been well established by critics like Frank Lentricchia, Richard Poirier, Jonathan Levin, Giles Gunn, Paul Jay, and Elisa New. Louis Menand makes an even broader case that modern American culture as a whole has been profoundly shaped by the core pragmatists (with Emerson behind them),William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey: They were more responsible than any other group for moving American thought into the modern world. They not only had an unparalleled influence on other writers and thinkers; they had an enormous influence on American life. Their ideas changed the way Americans thought—and continue to think—about education, democracy, liberty, justice, and tolerance. And as a consequence, they changed the way Americans live—the way they learn, the way they express their views, the way they understand themselves, and the way they treat people who are different from themselves. We are still living, to a great extent, in a country these thinkers helped to make. (Metaphysical, xi)

Taking that expansive legacy into consideration, it is not far-fetched to assume that post–World War II American poets absorbed this central stream of American thinking even if we do not find them directly referring to “the will to believe” or “radical empiricism.” And they have left us some telling hints. In the middle of the aptly titled recent poem “My Philosophy of Life,” John Ashbery writes But then you remember something William James wrote in some book of his you never read—it was fine, it had the fineness, the powder of life dusted over it, by chance of course, yet still looking for evidence of fingerprints. Someone had handled it even before he formulated it, though the thought was his and his alone. (Can, 73–74)

Although it is rather rare to find this sort of direct allusion to William James or Emerson or pragmatist philosophy in postwar American poetry, I am less interested in unearthing moments of explicit mention than in tracking the dispersal of pragmatist ideas across a wide range of innovative twentieth-century literature and culture. Indeed, Ashbery ironically suggests precisely this process when he hints that James’s ideas are absorbed osmotically—even though they appeared “in some book of his you never read,” and even though someone else had handled his thought “before he formulated it.” Ashbery may be riffing on the subtitle of

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James’s famous book, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.Thus, the poem implies, James’s ideas are simultaneously “his and his alone” (and, thus, individualistic) while still circulating freely before and beyond him, socially constituted and transmitted. In any event, in characteristically slippery, half-mocking fashion, this late Ashbery poem offers an intriguing hint at the proximity of William James’s “philosophy of life” to his own.14 Far from being offstage during the 1950s, the distinctive language and attitudes of Emerson, James, Dewey, and their inheritors were buzzing in the cultural atmosphere in which these poets first began writing. Paul Goodman, central figure in the postwar avant-garde, teacher at Black Mountain College, and, as we have seen, a kind of early hero to the young Frank O’Hara, reminisced in Speaking and Language: “I grew up breathing the air of Jamesian pragmatism, which has seemed to me to be politically right and, if I may say so, in the American grain” (qtd. Magee, Emancipating, 135). The same could probably be said for O’Hara and Ashbery, who read and absorbed Emerson and Whitman early in their development.15 They studied American literature at Harvard with F. O. Matthiessen, at that time perhaps the greatest living authority on Emerson and the Jameses.16 And they also immersed themselves in the work of modernist predecessors whose pragmatist affinities are powerful and now well-known, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens (both students of William James) and William Carlos Williams (whose debt to John Dewey is large and obvious).17 Then, when Ashbery and O’Hara arrived in New York in the early 1950s, they were swept up in the distinctive intellectual culture of the Abstract Expressionist painters, which featured a heady mix of influences, including surrealism, existentialism, Emersonian self-reliance, the American pragmatism of James and Dewey, and the related “process” philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.18 In The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, Nancy Jachec observes that “the most vociferous spokespersons for the movement, namely Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko, were university educated in pragmatist and existentialist philosophy” (10). O’Hara, Ashbery, and their circle were of course deeply embedded within the universe of New York painting and cognizant of its aesthetic and philosophical debates, and even participated in them—at the famous aesthetic discussions-cum-drinkingbouts that the painters organized at “The Club” on East Eighth Street, for example.19 Among his many close contacts with this generation of brilliant painters, O’Hara enjoyed a long-standing friendship with Newman (“who was educated in pragmatist and also empiricist philosophy”) and was particularly close to Motherwell (who “was trained in philosophy, particularly pragmatism, as a university student,” having “studied the work of Dewey while at Stanford, and that of Alfred North Whitehead while at Harvard”) (Jachec, Philosophy, 39, 37).20 It seems clear that the young writers who would cultivate the New American Poetry inhaled this diffuse but potent “air of Jamesian pragmatism” as they formulated their own poetics and philosophies of life.This is why we find the avant-garde

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 63 poets of the 1950s expressing sympathy (sometimes overtly, more often tacitly) with many pragmatist motifs and tropes. For example, Robert Duncan, influential elder statesman of the innovative poetries of the 1950s, declares in his essay “The Self in Postmodern Poetry” “how Emersonian my spirit is” (226). For Duncan, Emerson serves as a crucial precursor not for an idealist, transcendentalist spiritualism, but of what we now call “postmodern poetry” and its embrace of the contingent and experimental: Emerson “seems to speak directly for the poetic practice of open form, for the importance of whatever happens in the course of writing as revelation” (227). He then reflects on his own work and asks “In this am I ‘modern’? Am I ‘postmodern’? I am, in any event, Emersonian” (227). Michael Magee has provocatively argued that “as both critic and practitioner of ‘the New American Poetry,’ Duncan provides a more explicit map of its sources in pragmatism than any of his contemporaries” (Emancipating, 138).21 Indeed, in 1956, in his “Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus,” Duncan attempts to explain the bold new poetry of his ally Charles Olson, with its “aesthetic based on energies,” by recourse to John Dewey’s Art as Experience, asserting: “I point to Emerson and to Dewey to show that in American philosophy there are foreshadowings or forelightings of Maximus. In this aesthetic, conception cannot be abstracted from doing” (188). Though little has been said about this connection and genealogy, mid-1950s commentary like Duncan’s from within the scene itself suggests that a good deal of the impetus for the postwar poetic avant-garde was found in the American philosophical vision associated with Emerson, James, Peirce, and Dewey, both directly and as filtered through other sources, including the modernist poetry of Stevens, Stein, and Williams and the rhetoric and philosophy of Abstract Expressionism. That is precisely why a young writer like Baraka would deliberately invoke the Emersonian lineage of American nonconformity in order to introduce a selection of recent experimental writing. In 1963, Baraka argued that such work was part of a “continuing tradition”: a “stance . . . of self-reliance, Puddn’head Wilson style” (Moderns, xvi). As young poets, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka imbibed the heritage of Emerson and pragmatism, and, in accordance with the tenets of pragmatism itself, they quickly adapted it to make it thoroughly their own. One might wonder why Emerson and pragmatism seem to exert more influence on experimental writers of the period than on, say, the more traditionminded writers of the 1950s, such as the young Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Randall Jarrell, or Sylvia Plath. This is a complex issue, and it is beyond the scope of this argument to fully elaborate on it, but it seems to safe to say that American writers of an avant-garde orientation in the 1950s were more susceptible than their more “establishment” or “academic” counterparts to the pragmatist ethos, more willing to adopt, to adapt, and to interrogate some of its central attitudes. I see this susceptibility as a function of the avant-garde poets’ distinctive interests and attitudes, which contrast sharply with those of their rivals on the other side of the “raw” versus “cooked” “poetry wars” of the 1950s: their embrace of change and

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motion and skepticism of fixity and rigid form; their commitment to experimentation, improvisation, and spontaneity as artistic and philosophical principles; their deep-seated hostility toward conformity or any undue reverence for tradition; and their different choice of artistic models (Whitman, Williams, Pound, Stein, the more experimental side of Stevens and Auden, the European avant-garde and modern painting, rather than T. S. Eliot, the more conservative side of Stevens and Auden, the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century, and the precepts of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and the New Criticism). As I plan to demonstrate through my discussion of pragmatist themes and by my analysis of the poets in subsequent chapters, there are good reasons, in other words, why pragmatism and an avant-garde orientation go hand in hand. And it is worth mentioning here that this congruence between Emerson, pragmatism, and experimental poetry has continued to the present moment. For example, one of the most prominent contemporary avant-garde poets, Lyn Hejinian, recently published The Language of Inquiry, an important collection spanning twenty-five years of her writings on poetics, and throughout the book, her abiding fascination with James and pragmatism runs like a leitmotif. At the opening of the collection’s introduction, Hejinian observes that “poetry, to use William James’s phrase, ‘is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected’” (2). Elsewhere, she refers to “the radical empiricism William James elaborated and for which I have an ineradicable interest,” explains that her own attraction to introspection is “indebted to William James’s philosophy of consciousness and thereby of language,” and alludes repeatedly to Emerson’s essays (135, 143, 167). At the same time, Hejinian’s confederate in Language poetry, Charles Bernstein, who is perhaps the most well-known theoretician of the Language school, has frequently expressed his own commitment to the radical aversion to conformity he locates in Emerson and Thoreau, as well as his debt to the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, one of the most important interpreters of Emerson, with whom Bernstein studied at Harvard. Another leading poet affiliated with Language writing, Susan Howe, recently published Pierce-Arrow, an unusual book of poetry dedicated to the life and works of one of the founders of pragmatism, Charles S. Peirce. However, despite this persistent strain within Language poetry, studies of the movement or of contemporary experimental poetry more generally have rarely, if ever, explored its dialogue with an Emersonian pragmatist tradition, a neglect that extends from the blind spot that has marred our reading of earlier postmodernist poetry of the 1950s and 1960s.

individualism and frie ndship in the ame rican grain When one is approaching post-1945 avant-garde poetry, pragmatist thought can be an especially useful lens in that it offers a way of understanding the contradictions and tensions at work whenever poets treat the uneasy balance between self

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 65 and community. At the center of Emerson’s supposedly individualistic philosophy is a powerful theory of social exchange and friendship, one that lingers and evolves in the work of postwar American poets. But first, it is necessary to dispel, or at least complicate, two interlocking myths about the idea of “individualism” that is central to this tradition. Thankfully these myths have recently come under siege in studies of Emerson. These are first, the notion that the self in Emerson’s self-reliance is a monolithic, stable, and essential entity, and second, the idea that Emerson rejects the importance of social bonds in favor of an excessive and dangerously selfish sanctification of the individual. The word “individualism” tends to conjure the image of a rugged American self, who sheds societal encumbrances and lights out for the Territory like Huck Finn to achieve a liberated, autonomous selfhood. As a doctrine based on the primacy of the individual self, individualism has sometimes seemed to suggest that self-interest is the highest priority, and that personal freedom depends upon the discovery or creation of one’s inalienable, essential, unique identity and the refusal to be reined in by suffocating ties to any normative community. This notion constitutes the official, mythic version of American or Emersonian individualism. Due to the influence of this commonplace usage, “individualism” has been linked with such negative qualities as acquisitive materialism or crypto-capitalist greed, an indifference to others, reactionary conservatism or quietism, elitism, and an anti-democratic selfishness. Indeed, some recent critics, like Christopher Newfield and Cyrus Patell, have argued that Emerson’s individualism has had precisely these deleterious effects on American culture.22 However, read with attention to its subtleties and rampant contradictions, Emerson’s philosophy of individualism, which so greatly influences pragmatist conceptions of the self, looks dramatically different from the conventional idea that individualism calls for a slavish devotion to the sanctity of the individual and a dismissal of the interpersonal and social. It is true, of course, that Emerson is one of the most eloquent and influential champions of individualism, self-reliance, and nonconformity. “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members,” Emerson famously declares in “Self-Reliance.” “The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. . . . Whoso would be a man must be a conformist” (EL, 261). Throughout his essays, he admonishes us to trust our own instincts and responses to the world, to fend off convention, conformity, and over-influence, to be wary of institutions, to think for ourselves, and to never stop changing. Following in Emerson’s footsteps, William James formulated a pragmatist philosophy that can be seen as an expression of American individualism, especially in its belief in the irreducible importance of individual experience; its dedication to the distinctive, the irregular, and the small; and its wariness of the general, the collective, the systematic, or any uniformity imposed on experience or thought. Like Emerson, James was suspicious of institutions, domineering authority, and large organizations that liquidate personal autonomy. Fearing the numbing power

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of collectives, he forcefully stated, “I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms . . . all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost . . . and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way” (qtd. McDermott, Streams, 44). The philosopher John J. McDermott observes that “James was an unabashed and indefatigable champion of sheer individuality. Many have interpreted him as the paragon of a philosophical version of the mythic American claim to rugged individualism” and notes that “the basic cast of his thought runs not only against social conglomerates but against simple aggregates as well” (45). Similarly, Charlene Haddock Seigfried argues that “The relative worth of the individual person and the social group is never in doubt in William James’s philosophy. Like his philosophical godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was first last, and always the great celebrator of individuals in all their splendid and multifaceted individuality and of individualism as an ultimate value” (“James,” 85). But as I have suggested, the unusual mode of individualism to be found in both Emerson and pragmatism actually diverges quite sharply from the official version of American individualism. As Richard Poirier and other scholars have persuasively demonstrated, “Emerson is actually opposed to individualism in the customary or social sense in which the term is most often used” (Poetry, 29).23 In Poirier’s reading, individualism is actually in conflict with what Emerson himself calls “mean egotism” (EL, 10). Far from suggesting the deification of a monumental individual identity, Emerson feels that the self must resist any firm or settled identity for fear of being immobilized, trapped into conforming to its own false, limiting ideas of itself. “Every spirit makes its house,” Emerson warns in “Fate,” “but afterwards the house confines the spirit” (EL, 946). Thus, in Emerson and pragmatism, the self is not monolithic, centered, or essential at all. It is, in Ross Posnock’s words, “not the solid rock of self-reliance that [the] rhetoric of radical individualism advertises” but is instead “startlingly precarious, transitional” (“Reading,” 165). Rather than offering an exaltation of what Quentin Anderson called the “imperial self,” Emerson and the pragmatists conceive of human identity as thoroughly mutable and contingent, and as lacking a fixed center. It is more verb than noun: as Stanley Cavell explains, Emerson never claims “that there is one unattained/attainable self we repetitively never arrive at, but rather that ‘having’ ‘a’ self is a process of moving to, and from, nexts’” (qtd. Wolfe, “Alone,” 148). Thus the self in Emerson’s philosophy, as Cornel West observes, “can be seen to be a rather contingent, arbitrary, and instrumental affair, a mobile, performative, and protean entity perennially in process, always on an adventurous pilgrimage” (26). This means that “self-reliance” has to be seen as a much more paradoxical notion than it initially appears, since its belief in the self ’s radical freedom is bound up with a rejection of any fixed sense of what a self actually is. As Cary Wolfe says of Emersonian selfhood, its “promise lies in its emptiness” (“Alone,” 148).24 In his

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 67 chapter “Writing Off the Self ” in The Renewal of Literature, and again in Poetry and Pragmatism, Poirier does a terrific job of highlighting Emerson’s strange, selfcontradictory way of defending the sanctity of the self: “Self-reliance in Emerson, insofar as it is insufficiently understood to refer to the assertion of one’s unique personality, gives way recurrently to its opposite, to self-dissolution or the abandonment of any already defined Self ”—a process of abandonment which I earlier suggested is central to postwar avant-garde poetry (Poetry, 20). Pragmatist philosophy, like Emerson, also views the individual self and human consciousness as utterly fluid, contingent, and pluralistic. Poirier observes that “William James, like Emerson, forgoes any supports for the self that are extrinsic to its own works,” which leads to “his emphasis on the mobility and impermanence of self-definition” (196–197). On one level, this embrace of change and motion is temperamental, as James himself explained, in a remark that one could imagine coming almost as easily from Frank O’Hara: “My flux philosophy may well have to do with my extremely impatient temperament. I am a motor, need change, and get very quickly bored” (qtd. Posnock, Trial, 28). One hears a similar, strangely O’Hara-esque note in John Dewey’s own self-definition: “I seem to be unstable, chameleon-like, yielding one after another to many diverse and even incompatible influences, struggling to assimilate something from each” (qtd. Jarraway, Going, 121).25 Ross Posnock further teases out the philosophical subtleties of pragmatism’s anti-essentialist theory that holds identity to be unfixed and transitory: Although James is famous for revering the individual, his is not a philosophy of the sovereign subject. His pluralism imagines experience unanchored to an a priori self. Rather than already in place, authentic and originary, the self is an “affair of relations,” or a “mere echo” as he once called consciousness. Like all pragmatists, James distrusts the appeal to identity as a grounding category, for it violates the “inextricable interfusion” of “our immediately-felt life.” (Color, 23)

In other words, although James is so often cast as the philosophical embodiment of rugged individualism, he actually articulates a powerful critique of any logic that views identity as a fixed category, dependent upon biology or race. Instead, his interest is piqued by those moments when we realize our identity is groundless, ever in flux, as in the passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience in which he describes “An immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining selfhood melt down” (220).26 As we will see, O’Hara, Baraka, and other postwar poets express precisely this sense of the elation and liberation, as well as the vertigo and terror, that accompany such moments of self-dissolution. The poets I discuss here espouse a vision of selfhood quite close to that imagined by Emerson and pragmatism, a stance that I call experimental individualism to distinguish it from the conventional, distorted understanding of the term. Experimental individualism is founded—if such an anti-foundational outlook can

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be said to be “founded” at all—on an aversion to fixity, a belief in the self as less an entity than an ongoing process. As we will see, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka view the self as unstable and uncertain, pluralistic, variable, relational, inconsistent, and mobile. Theirs is not a retrogressive valorization of an essential, bourgeois self, so easy to dismiss or condemn in today’s critical climate. Instead, the brand of nonconforming individualism that erupts in postwar American avant-garde poetry is much more complex and slippery; it calls for a continual unraveling of any coherent identity at the same moment that the self is asserted and relied upon, an incessant dismantling and rebuilding of structures of identity, thought, language, and community. Thus we find postwar American poets constantly attempting to relinquish or slide free of ossified positions and entanglements—including their own previous incarnations and identities, as well as any affiliations with others that might pin them down. Just as the idea that individualism calls for a monolithic, imperial self has given way to a much more nuanced understanding of American identity and its instability, critics have also begun to dispute the notion that Emerson’s individualistic philosophy is oblivious to the social dimension of experience. This may seem surprising, since he is so often viewed as the prophet of egotism and a rugged American go-it-alone spirit who bridles under the heavy chains of human sociality, but in fact Emerson actually reflects extensively on friendship and the influence of other people. In his biography of Emerson, Robert D. Richardson Jr. observes that in his essays “we see Emerson working through a remarkably complete critique of romantic individualism”—especially in his insistence on the fundamentally social character of the individual and on the profound importance of community, his conviction that “every being in nature has its existence so connected with other beings that if set apart from them it would instantly perish” (258). As James M. Albrecht observes, “though Emerson has complex and conflicting attitudes towards community, he views the influence of others as essential to the self. This belief is evident in his intense preoccupation with friendship and with the inspiration geniuses offer” (52). Rather than being a prophet of egocentrism and selfish greed, Emerson is actually, as Eric Murphy Selinger has argued, “an important and unrecognized theorist of human affections” (“Too,” 141). By interrogating the seesaw relations of self and other, Emerson taps into something basic and unresolved in America’s national conversation about itself, which leads Charles Mitchell to conclude that “more eloquently than any other figure, Emerson articulated the paradoxes at the heart of American intellectual and cultural life,” including “a commitment to cooperative democratic community that is built on faith in the inherent worth of each individual soul” (10). As Mitchell intimates, Emerson’s beliefs on this issue are nothing if not contradictory, as he pits self and other, independence and community, in irresolvable dialectical tension—providing a set of fertile paradoxes that we will see get played out repeatedly in later poetry. While at one moment, Emerson will endorse the self ’s

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 69 extreme isolation—“man is insular and cannot be touched”—at another he will recognize the crucial importance of interpersonal relations to the self ’s development: “Insulate a man and you annihilate him. He cannot unfold, he cannot live without a world” (S, 61; qtd. Richardson, Emerson, 258). This belief in the symbiosis of self and other is clearly laid out in many places in Emerson’s writing, as in this passage from “The Uses of Great Men”: We must not contend against love, or deny the substantial existence of other people. I know not what would happen to us. We have social strengths. Our affection towards others creates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing will supply. I can do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself. Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds. (EL, 616)

Here Emerson offers full-throated endorsement of the irreducible importance of our relations with others, even to the point of believing that we know ourselves and accomplish our best only through our interactions with other people.27 The theory of friendship outlined in Emerson’s essays insists, paradoxically, on both the tremendous value and the difficulties of our relations with other people, the stimulating thrill of true conversation, and the discord, competition, and transience of any such encounter. The essay “Circles” offers a vivid parable about the way two people interact, antagonize, and inspire each other that neatly epitomizes the dialogic tension between self and other, and particularly between fellow writers, that is played out in American poetry more than a hundred years later: There is no outside, no inclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story,—how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man, and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. (EL, 405)

In this view, human creativity, intellect, and discovery (represented by Emerson’s trope of the “circle”) are conceived of as fields of continuous, contentious dialogue rather than solitary activities that are accomplished in a vacuum and then considered complete. Absent the ongoing conversation between the two people in this scenario, there is a danger: the first person would rest easy, content that his or her story—explanation of the world, or belief, or poem—was good and final. And given Emerson’s anti-foundationalist vision of a world of flux (in which there is “no inclosing wall,” where “every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series”), to view such a gesture as absolute or permanent is akin to what he calls “incipient insanity” (EL, 424). In Emerson’s allegory of human friendship and creativity, it is unmistakable that the inevitable presence of another person is what forces the original individual to re-invent, to change, and to go beyond.28 Since

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ongoing provocation and competition are so important to individual growth, Emerson explains, “the continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. . . . A man’s growth is seen in the successive choirs of his friends” (EL, 406). Emerson’s treatment of friendship and the influence of other people, as expressed in such major essays as “Circles,” “Experience,” and “Friendship,” is always filled with paradox and subtlety, heady exuberance and wary skepticism, pleasure and loss. For example, at the start of his extended meditation on the subject in his essay “Friendship,” Emerson offers “devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new” and exults that within “a just and firm encounter of two . . . all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish” (EL, 342). However, he moves quickly from glowing praise for friendship’s idealized wonders to the more chastened admission that “friendship, like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed” (343). In reality, all friendships are characterized by “compromise,” and “almost all people must descend to meet”: “What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!” (345). For Emerson, no friend can be inexhaustible, permanent, or perfect. Pointing to the gap between idealized camaraderie and the practical manifestations of it, he stresses that ultimately “we walk alone in the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables” (352). In “Circles” he offers one of his harshest statements about why “our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions”: “Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. As soon as you once come up with a man’s limitations, it is all over with him” (406). For Emerson, friendship should never be thought of as a “natural” or immutable relationship. It must never be seen as final or static: “Conversation is an evanescent relation—no more” (350). What this means is that our bonds with others are always radically contingent, fleeting, striated with a pervasive sense of letdown and loss. Given the dramatically unstable, ephemeral universe he envisions, it is not surprising that Emerson, as Richardson’s biography puts it, “rejects permanently fixed relationships”: “All lives, all friendships are momentary,” he writes (Emerson, 330). In some moods, Emerson even rejects the possibility of intimacy: “We never touch but at points,” one journal entry reads. “More we shall not be to each other. . . . No, the Sea, vocation, poverty, are seeming fences, but man is insular and cannot be touched. Every man is an infinitely repellent orb, and holds his individual being on that condition” (S, 61). In the dark tones of “Experience,” Emerson says that “our relations to each other are oblique and casual.” “Souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with” (EL, 473). As we will see, contemporary American poetry frequently probes the contingency and impossibility that Emerson finds in human relationships, setting sail on that “innavigable sea” between self and other and sending back poignant postcards about what one critic calls “the lack inherent in the moment of encounter”

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 71 (Ward, Statutes, 162). For instance, Frank O’Hara seems to echo Emerson’s plaintive assessment in one of his most moving love poems, “To the Harbormaster”: “I wanted to be sure to reach you,” the poem begins, “though my ship was on the way it got caught / in some moorings.” In the end, admitting that unbridgeable gulf separating any two people, O’Hara laments “the waves which have kept me from reaching you” (CP, 217). However, we do touch—if only briefly, obliquely, and at points, and when we do, the best we should hope for is friendship as a discordant, stimulating dialogue. Rather than being a matter of sameness, uniformity, and identification,“friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party.” Each friend must retain his individuality, even though intimacy threatens to undermine it at every turn: “Let [my friend] not cease an instant to be himself.” Friendship in Emerson’s universe is a tense yet rewarding standoff between two distinct entities, where admiration and amity teeter perilously close to fear and enmity: “Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these disparities unites them,” Emerson writes (EL, 350).We must always keep a close eye on our most inspiring, powerful companions, as Emerson explains in the passage from which I gleaned my title: “Guard him as they counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside” (EL, 351). This ambivalent attitude toward friendship is inextricable from Emerson’s fear that we too often lose our selves in the influence of books, previous authors, or any source. “Insist on yourself; never imitate,” Emerson urges in “Self-Reliance,” since “imitation is suicide” (278, 259). In “The American Scholar,” he declares “I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit and made a satellite instead of a system” (57). But if “genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence,” then the texts and ideas produced by creative, smart others become active problems within the realm of friendship (58): I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my friend. . .. Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. (353)

This understanding of the proper “uses” of one’s friends rests on Emerson’s belief (stated in “The Divinity School Address”) that “truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul” (79). Any friendship—especially between fellow writers—must remain, like a past work of genius, merely a starting point, a spur, for one’s own incessant transformations. A friend

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can, and should, come along and draw a circle around the very “story” we had thought good and final, but then our only redress is to draw another outside of theirs. “Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo,” Emerson advises (350). It is a difficult balancing act between self and friend, individual and group that Emerson calls for in his essays, one he crystallizes in an epigram: “Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal.We must keep our head in the one, and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy” (qtd. in Alkana, Social, 9). Classical American pragmatism inherits Emerson’s self-divided and ambivalent theory of social exchange and friendship and proceeds to quarrel over it for decades. In the process, it creates a body of thought that never comes any closer to resolving the tension between self and community than did Emerson. In essence, this heated debate about the blurry terrain where the social and the self collide constitutes one of the great, animating tensions within American philosophy itself. The struggle over how to envision the competing demands of individual and community, “the one and the many,” becomes the basis for an invigorating dialogue throughout the history of pragmatist thought that has broad implications for American poetics. The tension, the split, rests at the very foundation of American philosophy itself, in the contrasting positions taken by William James, Peirce, and Dewey, with the latter two often being set up as foils to James’s hearty individualism, just as Henry James Sr. can be seen as being opposed to Emerson’s self-reliance earlier in the nineteenth century.29 For example, Louis Menand observes that William James’s “belief in the power of individual agency was so pronounced that even his philosophical allies Charles Peirce and John Dewey criticized him for it” (Metaphysical, 88). Along the same lines, Cornel West observes that Peirce (who saw truth as the product of a “community of inquirers” working to arrive at consensus) felt that the “good” “lies in convergence and coalescence, corporateness and oneness; for James it is in diversity and individuality, concreteness and plurality”(56). But for all these tensions and disputes, it is still widely agreed that one of pragmatism’s common themes is “the social character of the self,” the notion that the human self is socially constituted and is possible only in relation to other selves. This is as much a part of James’s thought (and Emerson’s) as it is Dewey’s (R. Bernstein, “Pragmatism,” 387). Indeed, the concept of “the social self ” is central to James’s own thought, and he discusses it at length in The Principles of Psychology. He argues that “a man’s Social Self is the recognition which he gets from his mates. . . . Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” (qtd. McDermott, Streams, 52). Carved on the wall of William James Hall at Harvard University is James’s pithy formula for this symbiotic relationship: “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual.The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community” (qtd. Seigfried, “James,” 95). The contemporary German

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 73 philosopher Jürgen Habermas (whose connections to American pragmatism have been much discussed) has hailed this remark by James as “the essential intuition of pragmatism,” since “the maxim asserts the reciprocal dependence of socialization and individualization, the interrelation between personal autonomy and social solidarity” (qtd. Seigfried, “James,” 98 n. 15). But it is a tricky balancing act, achieving that kind of “interrelation” and “reciprocal dependence.” The persistent strain of individualism within classical American pragmatism has often led commentators to critique it (like Emerson) for failing to offer an adequate, humane vision of community. In Criticism and Social Change, Frank Lentricchia argues that pragmatism’s “feeling for the individual is so strong . . . that it stretches the concept to the breaking point to say that pragmatism has a ‘social position’” (4). Although Lentricchia praises pragmatism for taking the side of the lone individual against “the Big Organization” and distrusting authority and “repressive structures,” he wonders: “Is pragmatism also the authorization of a ruthless individualism? A rationalization of the robber barons and the business ethic? Do these embarrassing questions point to an abuse of pragmatism or to one of its inherent tendencies?” (3). But in answer to comments like Lentricchia’s, many have persuasively argued that pragmatism—even William James’s—is predicated on the belief that the human self is thoroughly, crucially imbedded in a matrix of interrelationships with other selves. If anything, pragmatism is even more convinced than Emerson of the importance of the social to the construction of identity. As Charlene Haddock Seigfried contends: “Pragmatist individualism itself can be understood only within the social relationships that constitute individuality, and James was no exception to this insight. . . . [I]ndividuals come to be only in relation to their physical and social environments, and the emphasis on these dynamic interactions also characterizes James’s understanding of persons” (85).30 John Dewey, of course, tilts even further toward the community and away from the individual, as his entire philosophy of democracy and community rests on the notion that “man is essentially a social being,” since “the non-social individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away” (“Ethics,” 187). As Giles Gunn explains, Dewey’s work urges a shift from an “old individualism” that focused exclusively on personal needs to a “new individualism” that “must be restructured around the principle that the moral development of each separate self in a democracy is in a profound and specifiable sense dependent upon the collective contribution of all other selves” (Thinking, 75). In turn, George Herbert Mead picks up on James’s notion of a “social self ” and Dewey’s concern with community and collectivism. He proposes in the essay “A Contrast of Individualistic and Social Theories of the Self ” that “mind can never find expression, and could never have come into existence at all, except in terms of a social environment” (“Contrast,” 297). Mead insists that “self-con-

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sciousness involves the individual’s becoming an object to himself by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within an organized setting of social relationships, and that unless the individual had thus become an object to himself he would not be self-conscious or have a self at all” (298). (It is not hard to see the germ of Mead’s entire philosophy contained in Emerson’s sense that “other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”) As we will see, the poets in this study espouse the same notion, as do pragmatists from Emerson to James and Dewey: the self exists only relationally and dialogically, and arrives at consciousness of its own identity only through the attitudes and perceptions of other selves. Ashbery phrases a version of this idea in “The New Spirit” when he writes: “But we must learn to live in others, no matter how abortive or unfriendly their cold, piecemeal renderings of us: they create us” (TP, 13). And just as Emerson insists that an insulated, isolated person “cannot unfold, he cannot live without a world,” Baraka will suggest that “You cannot live / alone.You are in the world” (T, 138). As this thumbnail sketch suggests, the seesaw movement between individual and group has recurred throughout the history of American philosophy, and may best be thought of as an unresolved dialectic.31 In Lentricchia’s view, individualism stalks the pragmatic vision of community like an unquiet ghost: the “expression of a deeply ingrained tradition of antinomian American individualism” continues “to haunt pragmatism’s nascent social theory” (Criticism, 4). What I am particularly interested in is how that haunting troubles later American poets and their own cultivation and depiction of friendships and communities. A creed so riddled with contradiction could not but lead to ambivalence and debate. Given how they conceive of friendship, the self, and the promise of an avant-garde community, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka seem to be both energized and troubled by these vital tensions and contradictions that fill the air of the American intellectual tradition that they grew up breathing. The daring new poetry of the postwar period becomes a site where this irresolvable debate is played out in new and ever-shifting ways.

“schools are for fools”: whe re conformity collide s with the avant-garde The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. —Emerson, “American Scholar”

It is rather remarkable that American avant-garde poets of the 1950s such as O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka remain so deeply ambivalent, even skeptical, about the avant-garde itself and that they write about that ambivalence so often, given

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 75 our sense of their enthusiastic participation in overturning the stale conventions and conservative decorum of mid-century verse. Armed now with a fuller sense of the fear of conformity coursing through Cold War culture and of the tense struggle between individual and group in pragmatism, I want to consider briefly how these poets express that ambivalence when they talk about the avant-garde and community in their prose. For all their excitement about collaboration (which, as we have seen, is tinged with anxiety about the loss of autonomy and individuality collaboration involves), these poets are never fully devoted to any group effort to reject and overturn rigid literary orthodoxies.They tend to find the very notion of aesthetic “schools” repellent—like the idea of political partisanship or the dogma that often underlies it—even when a given school’s raison d’être is a joint resistance to conformity, or when a political movement’s cause is just. They are supremely aware of the contradictions of experimental art and of any oppositional movement, aesthetic or social—especially, the idea that even the freshest innovations can quickly become confining, another habit, set of conventions, a commodified entity or rigid ideology. Emerson may have exulted that “I approve every action of the wild experimenters,” but he too worried that such liberating gestures become dangerously influential and routinized: Act, if you like, but you do it at your own peril. Men’s actions are too strong for them. Show me a man who has acted, and who has not been the victim and slave of his action. What they have done commits and enforces them to do the same again. The first act, which was to be an experiment, becomes a sacrament. (“Goethe,” EL, 749)

Even the resistant acts of experimental literature that militate against conformity can or will imprison us and become stale, as they become institutionalized as sacraments. This, of course, becomes the major problem plaguing the twentiethcentury avant-garde: its impossible project of continual upheaval and novelty in the face of constant absorption and reification.32 Thus, the postwar poets often question the notion that a destructive, liberating, collective force could heroically stand outside and against middle-class society and entrenched aesthetic precepts, perpetually dismantling old pieties and creating shocking new forms. Instead they seem well aware of how fast once-rebellious art can become accepted, as well as how easily a group of nonconformists can become a pack of identical dissenters, the distinctive energy of each artist sapped. The intense uneasiness toward the collective inherent in the American avant-garde can sometimes sound a lot like Emerson, who was himself distinctly uncomfortable with any group movement, no matter how attractive its ideas or how nonconformist its actions. The problem, whether in 1850 or 1950, arises with the very idea of a band of nonconformists. Once such dissenters and iconoclasts become organized under a name, they become a society, a group, which

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undermines their ability to “repel influences” and stifles individual thinking (EL, 200). When he was asked by George Ripley in 1840 to join the Transcendentalists in their experimental commune at Brook Farm, Emerson declined, writing in his journal: I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons, I have not yet conquered my own house. . . . It seems that to do so were to dodge the problem I am set to solve, and to hide my impotency in the thick of a crowd. I can see too, afar,—that I should not find myself more than now,—no, not so much, in that select, but not by me selected, fraternity. Moreover, to join this body would be to traverse all my long trumpeted theory, and the instinct which spoke from it, that one man is a counterpoise to a city,—that a man is stronger than a city, that his solitude is more prevalent and beneficent than the concert of crowds. (17 October 1840, S, 145)33

This is why, as he explained to Margaret Fuller in 1840, “at the name of a society . . . all my repulsions play, all my quills rise and sharpen.” A similar antipathy to ideology and group thought helps explain why the young O’Hara might write, “I have resisted my comrades and their parties,” in the 1952 poem “Hatred” (CP, 119). Given the context in which O’Hara wrote this line, the words “comrades” and “parties” hint at his revulsion toward the contemporary dictates of the Left, as well as his resistance to the very idea of hard-line partisanship itself. In O’Hara’s case, his fear of being absorbed into a coterie society explicitly parallels his rejection of the polarized party politics so rife within the intellectual and literary world of the 1940s and 1950s. Anti-Stalinist Cold War liberal intellectuals, as we have seen, were noisily attacking the remnants of the old Left and the Popular Front, as well as the conformity and threat of the totalitarian inherent in any party-line position, any mass movement, whether of the Left or the Right, and opting instead for the tentative, the anti-dogmatic, the individual, and the autonomous. In the midst of such a discursive environment, O’Hara’s line seems to echo that postwar liberal critique of the “Party,” of any party. He also typically conflates the resistance to being imprisoned within the social and artistic community with his resistance to political partisanship and rigidity. Pragmatists rather than die-hard partisans, the New York School poets prefer to stay “aloof from all moorings and afloat,” independent and non-committed (Emerson, “Intellect,” EL, 425–426). Again and again, these poets announce their reverence for a maverick independent spirit and their distrust of collectives and institutions both large and small, “mainstream” or “avant-garde.” For example, in “Rare Modern,” a 1957 review of several current books of poetry, including Ashbery’s Some Trees, O’Hara explains that a poet longs for, and needs, solitude in order to create: “For inside each poet, I suspect, lurks a Garboesque desire. In the midst of this active isolation, the interests of other poets, of the University, of suburbia, of the Zeitgeist, become appropriately pale” (SS, 73). With this characteristically breezy, pop-culture image of the

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 77 poet as a Greta Garbo figure turning her back on the attentive gaze of the public, O’Hara makes clear how important this “active isolation” is to the act of creation. The fact that all else, including “the interests of others poets,” grows pale when the poet is in the throes of this aggressive self-reliant creativity, reveals the poet’s skepticism of giving literary alliances and communities top priority. In his 1966 obituary essay on O’Hara, Ashbery portrays his friend as a sui generis artist “caught between opposing power blocs”: “‘Too hip for the squares and too square for the hips,’ is a category of oblivion which increasingly threatens any artist who dares to take his own way, regardless of mass public or journalistic approval” (“Frank O’Hara’s Question”). Always extremely sensitive to the strictures of conformity, Ashbery uses the somber occasion of his friend’s death to condemn our “supremely tribal civilization” “where even artists feel compelled to band together in marauding packs, where the loyalty oath mentality has pervaded outer Bohemia.” Here Ashbery explicitly praises O’Hara for practicing what Lionel Trilling called “dissent from the orthodoxies of dissent”; what Ashbery and Trilling suggest is that oppositional orthodoxies can squelch independent thought as surely as can any “mainstream” hegemony (qtd. Jumonville, Critical, 124). Ashbery suggests that the Cold War’s conformist pressures (Truman’s “loyalty oaths” and so on) have found their mirror image in the counterculture that, ironically, arose to fight those very pressures (just as O’Hara feared those dissenting “comrades” and their “parties”). In contrast, he lauds his friend’s poetry for its courageous unwillingness to commit to any partisan agenda—for, in effect, its intellectual and artistic independence. “Frank O’Hara’s poetry has no program and therefore cannot be joined,” Ashbery writes. “It does not advocate sex or dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society,” which can be read as a salvo directed at the programmatic nature of the Beats’ counter-cultural aesthetic and the hippie movement it spawned. “It does not speak out against the war in Viet Nam or in favor of civil rights; it does not paint gothic vignettes of the post-Atomic Age; in a word, it does not attack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance for partisans of every stripe.” Some critics have taken Ashbery’s encomium as proof of the New York School’s allegedly apolitical and aestheticist nature. But it actually suggests his profound approval of O’Hara’s nonprogrammatic resistance to dogma, partisanship, and assimilation of any kind, rather than a retreat (irresponsible or laudable, depending on your viewpoint) from political causes, historical realities, or oppositionality.34 Louis Menand’s verdict regarding “Emerson’s suspicion of social activism” sounds a whole lot like Ashbery’s take on O’Hara’s: Emerson’s reluctance to join protest movements “had nothing to do with a respect for the status quo,” Menand claims, challenging those detractors who have condemned Emerson’s quietism. “On the contrary: it was precisely his distrust of established institutions that led him to avoid reform movements, and to regard them as crampers and perverters of individual integrity” (Metaphysical, 20).

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The kind of sensibility Ashbery attributes to O’Hara underlies his own sometimes noisy misgivings about the “New York School” as a term and concept. Because of his own aversion to “schools” as a crampers of individual integrity, Ashbery has frequently, sometimes defensively, argued that the name is an ill-fitting label that was “foisted upon us,” one that critics have used to explain and distort the almost entirely incidental friendships he had with O’Hara, Koch, Schuyler, and the others in the 1950s (“Art of Poetry,” 39).35 For example, Ashbery explained to Piotr Sommer that: we were not a school; we were people who happened to know each other through the circumstances that I’ve told you about. And there were enormous similarities and dissimilarities in our work. . . . [T]his label eventually caught on, and it’s really been a kind of, as the French say, un bouquet empoisonné; I mean it has helped us to become well known, but it also has pejorative connotations for many people . . .. and so it’s been as much of a hindrance as a help. (“An Interview in Warsaw,” 298)

In comments he made at a 1968 National Book Awards symposium called “Poetry Now,” Ashbery further explained his view:36 I think on the whole I dislike the name [“New York School”] because it seems to me to be trying to pin me down to something. That’s the trouble with all these labels like Beat, San Francisco School, Deep Image, Objectivist, Concrete, and so on. Their implication seems to be that poetry ought to be just one thing and stick to it. If you start out writing haikus, man, then it’s haikus from here on in sort of thing. One thing that I am certain of as regards poetry is that I feel it should be anything it wants to be; that the poet should be free to sit down at his desk and write as he pleases without feeling that someone is standing behind him telling him to brush up on his objective correlatives or that he’s just dropped an iambic foot. If the poem is no good when he’s finished, he will then have no one to blame but himself, and can go on to the next poem in a cheerful frame of mind. This might be one of the definable characteristics of the New York School—its avoidance of anything like a program. (Selected Prose, 113)

Clearly Ashbery’s quills rise and sharpen much like Emerson’s at the name of a literary school. If the writers of O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s circle can be said to have anything in common, it is, he believes, a commitment to remaining uncommitted: “Our program is the absence of any program. I guess it amounts to not planning the poem in advance but letting it take its own way; of living in a state of alert and being ready to change your mind if the occasion seems to require it.” Ashbery has isolated the primary features of his own and O’Hara’s poetics (which are also key features of pragmatism): an openness to chance and contingency, an unwillingness to see any position as final or to settle into fixed patterns and responses, and an independence from programs and systems. In the celebrated poem “Soonest

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 79 Mended,” written at almost the exact same time as this essay, Ashbery memorably terms this pluralist refusal to adopt resolutely one creed or another, this devotion to the tentative and non-doctrinaire, “a kind of fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal” (SP, 88). Understanding such a refusal can give us a sharper sense of why O’Hara’s famous “Personism: A Manifesto” is so biting and ironic about the idea of dogmatic avant-garde partisanship. Temperamentally opposed to protocol, aesthetic doctrine, and “-isms,” O’Hara composes a mock manifesto that pokes fun at the groupism that propels such artistic movements into existence. In the essay, he describes an aesthetic movement of his own, but it is one that he just invented and that thus far has no adherents. Unlike other movements with fancy names and ambitious goals that were springing up in the 1950s, “Personism” is “too new, too vital a movement to promise anything” (CP, 499). For O’Hara, an artistic movement can remain vital only so long as it is fluid, undefined, and without clear fixed principles (or adherents!), so the piece deliberately mocks pretentious manifestos that lay out goals and promise a revolution in art or literature as we know it. (O’Hara would surely have shuddered had he known that his “manifesto” would one day be taken by some as a rallying cry for a group called “the New York School of poets.”) As is often noted, O’Hara’s most important target is Charles Olson’s influential 1950 essay, the didactic, hectoring “Projective Verse.” The polemical ending of O’Hara’s own “manifesto” refuses to allow poetry to be subordinated to any system, ideology, or formal requirements: “the recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out” (499). In this, O’Hara implicitly turns away from the two modes of the New American Poetry most in competition with the poetry he and his closest friends were writing: that of the “projectivist” Olson, a propagandist for technical innovation regarding the line and breath of the poet, and of the Beats, propagandists for the inclusion of specific types of content into poetry, such as mystical visions, illicit drug and sex experiences, and madness. In contrast, “Personism” ironically announces a program that is merely “the absence of any program.” Furthermore, O’Hara seems to know all too well that heady artistic revolutions proposed by manifestos are quickly transformed into exactly what any underground movement challenges in the first place—accepted art. As he puts it in a passage dripping with irony, his own “movement” may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. (499)

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Anti-art, as exemplified by Dadaism, surrealism, and the radical edge of the postwar avant-garde, will never overthrow or do away with art, because if it is successful, it will merely become a new convention, a new orthodoxy—what Emerson calls “a sacrament.” In their poems and their prose, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka are frequently troubled by the fact that even the once-liberating, marginal, and provocative creations of the avant-garde can quickly become constraining, especially in our speeded-up consumerist society, in which Dada is enshrined at MoMA and the radical energy of the avant-garde has been co-opted by mass culture. How can an individual come up with a style that does not become another mere habit or a group language? “How to Proceed in the Arts,” a hilarious and mordant piece that O’Hara and Larry Rivers wrote in 1952, is, like the later, more well known essay “Personism,” a mock manifesto that again demonstrates that these figures were a good deal more skeptical about the avant-garde and its communal underpinnings than we have been led to believe by literary history. Like “Personism,” it too deflates the pretensions of avant-garde proclamations with irony and humor, while at the same time conveying significant (albeit tentative and contradictory) aesthetic ideas (AC, 92–98).37 The piece takes the form of an instruction manual for the ephebe experimental artist, but in every particular these pointers are both critical of the 1950s avant-garde at large and self-deprecating, as they skewer the authors’ own pretensions. With such tips as “Act as if there is continuity in your work, but if there isn’t, it is because that position is truly greater,” the collaboration pokes fun at the pomposity and hypocrisy of progressive art movements and their manifestos—and, at the same time, exposes some of the contradictions inherent in the American tradition of experiment and individualism (AC, 97). For example, the piece advocates Emersonian solitude for the artist, albeit irreverently: “If anyone is in bed with you, they should be told to leave. You cannot work with someone there” (92). But in almost the same breath, O’Hara and Rivers ironically point to a central paradox in such thinking, one lurking at the heart of the rhetoric of American democratic individualism: that is, the hypocrisy of believing in the importance of communal bonds and the primacy of the self at the same time: “Publicly admit democracy. Privately steal everyone’s robes” (98). The send-up also directly satirizes the very concept of artistic “schools” and movements: If you are interested in schools, choose a school that is interested in you. Piero Della Francesca agrees with us when he says “Schools are for fools.” We are too embarrassed to decide on the proper approach. However, this much we have observed: good or bad schools are insurance companies. Enter their offices and you are certain of a position. No matter how we despise them, the Pre-Raphaelites are here to stay. (93)

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 81 O’Hara and Rivers reject the idea of belonging to a “school” of art—ironic, to be sure, given how their own work would soon become inextricable from an entity known as “the New York School”—and embrace a tentative, pluralistic attitude, “embarrassed” about declaring didactically that one approach is more “proper” than another. But they also sarcastically recognize the practical value in becoming a member of such a group—as a way of ensuring that you are included, noticed, remembered. Implicit in this is an anxious message: the danger of being an isolated, independent figure is that you can never be as “certain of a position” as you can be if you are a member of “the surrealists” or “the Pre-Raphaelites.” But such careerist strategizing—perhaps the artistic counterpart to the bureaucratic striving of William Whyte’s “Organization Man”—is viewed here through cynical eyes. Like O’Hara and Ashbery, Baraka grew increasingly uncomfortable in the late 1950s with the idea of an avant-garde community and the kind of group thinking it tends to encourage. Although energized by the movement’s spirit, Baraka soon became suspicious of the contradictory idea of a collective of nonconformists, especially as the group grew less inchoate and more codified. For example, in a revealing, little-known piece he published in Kulchur in 1961 called “Milneburg Joys (or, Against ‘Hipness’ as Such),” Baraka harshly critiques his own New York bohemian scene. This caustic essay refers ironically to Greenwich Village as “Milneburg,” in a nod to A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, a book that also inspired the title of Baraka’s journal, The Floating Bear (Sollors, Amiri, 276 n. 26).38 For Baraka, the world of Pooh seems to have epitomized the youthful energy, the innocence and sense of adventure in the Village poetry milieu. But, increasingly, it also suggested that world’s unreality and naïve detachment from political exigencies, and the essay positions Baraka as the scourge of that insulated, complacent community. In the essay, Baraka writes: “What do we do now? New York, March 1961. The world here, almost as we have made it” (41). By 1961, the Beats have been ensconced in Time magazine, “‘hipness’ as such” has become fashionable, the rebels have been anthologized in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, the beatnik has become caricatured as the ridiculous Maynard G. Krebs on the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, and the avant-garde, inching toward “success,” has reached a crossroads. Now that the young iconoclasts have established themselves as a force of dissent, and of considerable marketability, Baraka wonders, what next? What about forcing real change—political, social, aesthetic? Is this all there is? Baraka’s angry piece deliberately punctures the aura of the avant-garde collective, exposing the enforced homogeneity and “party-line” aesthetics at its heart. He implies that all the clamor about the bold new forms, strategies, and influences at the heart of the postwar avant-garde—the open-field poetics of Olson’s “Projective Verse,” the “spontaneous bop prosody” of the Beats, the obsession with process and spontaneity in Action Painting and the New York School, the critique

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of the establishment and of bourgeois values—all threaten to turn into so much cant as they are adopted by more and more followers and become solidified into a program. He laments the emergence of derivative hangers-on, “cheaters, imitators, weaklings” who had begun to appear on the scene (42). (Baraka later recalled that he wrote the essay to attack those who thought “talking the prevailing talk, or walking the prevailing walk” was “all there was to it”) (A, 261–262). “All one need do is learn code words,” he complains. It is this shared, insider language that Baraka rejects: “I repudiate the cult of Opinion” (42).39 Perfectly happy deciding as a group who is to be deemed sufficiently “hip,” this mutual admiration society lacks any sense of critical self-regard. But Baraka sarcastically objects, unwilling to equate companionship with identification or unity: “But I refuse to come to terms with ‘my friends’ is this cold manner. We have gotten drunk together and cursed the same evils. . . . [D]oes this not mean then that our minds are of like valence? Bullshit.” “Why did we leave that other world in the first place,” he wonders at the essay’s close, “if the same undifferentiated vagueness is to be cannonized [sic] once again” (43). At a moment when a sense of a collective avant-garde enterprise seemed to be solidifying—when The New American Poetry had turned a slew of diverse poets into an umbrella organization of like-minded writers, gathered under what Baraka called in his Autobiography “the broad banner of our objective and subjective ‘united front’ of poetry,” when the Beats had successfully created the impression that they were a band of unified outsiders, when journals like Baraka’s Floating Bear were circulated only to a small circle of cognoscenti familiar with its “code words,” when the new journal Locus Solus had begun to shore up the identity of the nascent New York School—Baraka seems to wonder: Have he and his friends succeeded in knocking off one orthodoxy only to install another? (232). This fear leads him to recoil from that federation of poets and artists who constitute the “Milneburg” of the postwar avant-garde—and from the friendships and social alliances that underlie it—because it threatens to absorb the distinctive identities of its members, to breed undifferentiated mediocrity and unoriginality. The virulent strain of individualism and nonconformity that haunts these avant-garde exemplars clearly determines which artists and writers they champion in their critical writings, and which figures they turn to as aesthetic models. In the abundant and wonderful art criticism O’Hara and Ashbery write, the artists who win their approval and emulation are always those who display a stubborn independence, who resist assimilation, and who fend off both the forces of mainstream critical acceptance and the orthodoxy of the avant-garde. Thus, in a piece on Cubism, O’Hara singles out Juan Gris for praise, claiming that “he was the great individualist of the movement and it seems that he would have painted the way he did whether there had been a movement or not” (What’s, 10). When he memorializes the recently deceased Franz Kline, one of the older Abstract Expressionist painters he cherished most, O’Hara writes:

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 83 Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kline was never consciously avant-garde. He had none of the polemical quality which must establish itself for a movement or style and against any or all others. His great admiration for de Kooning did not preclude an intense admiration for Pollock, even in a close-knit artistic society full of partisanship and either/or decisions, which gathered frequently at The Club, an artists-sponsored meeting place, or at a nearby bar, to engage in heated discussions of esthetic right and wrong. His combats were with himself in his art, and were so personal as to defy intellectualization. (AC, 45)

It is Kline’s independence and his inclusive aesthetic that appeal most to O’Hara, who was himself known for his own unusual devotion to both de Kooning and Pollock at a time when, as David Lehman says, “everyone else had chosen sides as if at a stickball game in the street” (which Lehman takes as a sign that O’Hara “preferred inclusiveness to hierarchy”) (Last, 178). Kline’s pluralism, like O’Hara’s, staves off the stark definitiveness of “either/or decisions” (the choice of one belief, style, or mode over another) in favor of a more flexible, tentative outlook. Similarly, the “other tradition” that Ashbery has consistently chosen to write about and promote consists of conspicuous eccentrics and individualists, like Giorgio de Chirico, Joseph Cornell, Fairfield Porter, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, R. B. Kitaj, Henry Darger, Ferruccio Benvenuto Busoni, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Raymond Roussel, Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, John Wheelwright, Elizabeth Bishop, Laura Riding, Frank O’Hara—all artists who defiantly go their own way and whose work actively eludes assimilation and categorization (SP, 208).40 For example, in one essay, he notes with evident approval that Jasper Johns “has never cared much about pleasing or disconcerting his admirers. He has gone his rather leisurely way” (RS, 253). In another piece, he gives his friend Fairfield Porter the highest praise by noting that “in a time when art has become pathetically dependent on dictums, dogmas and manifestoes, he was a fierce defender of his right not to entertain them” (RS, 313).41 In “American Sanctuary in Paris,” he defends the decision by artists like himself to stay in Paris in the postwar period when all the action in the art world was in New York by citing the “fruitful independence” (RS, 88) they can achieve by remaining free from the dictates of fashion and “professional pulse-takers” (89): these artists, and presumably Ashbery himself, “frequently prefer France for reasons of privacy and isolation” (87). Privacy and isolation: just as O’Hara believes in the importance of the poet’s “Garboesque desire” to be alone, Ashbery views this “active isolation” as a crucial ingredient of creativity (SS, 73). One of Ashbery’s most pointed assessments of the problems individualism poses for the avant-garde appears in his best-known essay, “The Invisible AvantGarde,” a lecture he delivered at the Yale Art School in May 1968. Perhaps the poet’s most Emerson-like statement about self-reliance, the essay explains his ambivalence toward the avant-garde and its tendency to swallow up individuals, to deaden personal expression and vision, and to become dangerously reified.

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Ashbery argues that the interval between what Gertrude Stein calls “outlaw” and “classic” has greatly accelerated in his own time, at a moment in which a onceunderground artistic counterculture was becoming thoroughly mainstream, now that “Andy Warhol and Viva and the rest of the avant-garde [are] on the Tonight Show” (“Composition,” 514; RS, 392).42 Because of the canonization and acceptance of the avant-garde, because “it is no longer possible, or it seems no longer possible, for an important avant-garde artist to go unrecognized” (himself included), Ashbery argues that it has become harder and harder for an innovative artist to remain safely insulated and autonomous. “For it has by now become a question of survival both of the artist and of the individual. In both art and life today we are in danger of substituting one conformity for another.” (393). Writing at the zenith of the high ’60s, Ashbery again casts doubt on the orthodoxies of dissent. He rather uncannily echoes the position of David Riesman, who, as Richard Pells notes, worried that “mindless rebellions” were as dangerous for individuals as was the conformity they railed against. Riesman “did not believe one had to make a stark choice between fitting in and dropping out, between a gray flannel suit or a black leather jacket. A person could avoid both extremes by seeking what Riesman (following the ideas of Erich Fromm) called ‘autonomy’” (Liberal, 245). Similarly, Ashbery says the trouble with the hippie movement is that it, like the artistic avant-garde, urges people to drop out of a repressive dominant culture and join a parallel society that turns out to be equally conformist in its “stereotyped manners, language, speech, and dress” and is thus simply the reverse of the culture that is being rejected.The problem lies in our passion for joinership, which Ashbery attributes to a propensity within the American character itself: We feel in America that we have to join something, that our lives are directionless unless we are a part of a group, a clan—an idea very different from the European one, where even friendships are considered not very important and life centers around oneself and one’s partner, an extension of oneself. Is there nothing then between the extremes of Levittown and Haight-Ashbury, between an avant-garde which has become a tradition and a tradition which is no longer one? In other words has tradition finally managed to absorb the individual talent? (393)

The American longing for community and conformity that Ashbery isolates is surely the ever-present flip side of our native passion for individualism. His remark dovetails with Riesman’s critique of “groupism,” a tendency which Riesman suggests “is probably strongest in America, where people appear to be most vocally concerned about the problems of group participation and belongingness” (Individualism, 31). A century earlier, Emerson had also warned about Americans’ particular vulnerability to the comforts of joining a group. “I am ashamed to think of how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions,” he wrote (EL, 262).

Emerson, Pragmatism, and the “New American Poetry” 85 Caught in the vise of the avant-garde paradox, Ashbery’s solution is, like Emerson’s, like Riesman’s, to insist on recalcitrant solitude and autonomy. The only solution is to turn away from the voices of the public, the “professional pulsetakers,” the critics who would pin us down, the communities that would have us join them (RS, 89). Like Riesman’s “autonomous man,” who is “‘free to choose’ whether or not to conform, whether or not to rebel,” Ashbery advocates a position of continuous disaffiliation, in which one “neither accepts nor rejects acceptance but is independent of it” (RS, 394). As I have been suggesting, the New York School poets are, simultaneously, quintessential exemplars of the avant-garde impulse and incisive critics of its very nature, its shortcomings and blind spots. Despite being (self) identified as members of the avant-garde, these poets remain deeply conflicted about the entire ideology of avant-gardism—especially its narratives of military advancement and heroic overthrow, its blurring of politics and art, its insistence on group identity. They constantly puncture the easy assurances of avant-garde community, lay bare the paradoxes of a movement predicated at once on individual rebellion and group aesthetic, and articulate (in Vernon Shetley’s phrase) “a renunciation of the appetite for heroic self-conceptions implicit in most models of avant-gardism” (135). As Shetley rightly points out, “the New York School may have been our last authentic avant-garde, but its authenticity was achieved only by a substantial revision of the definition of what it means to be avant-garde” (135).43 Having internalized, as we have seen, both the Cold War cultural obsession with the dangers of conformity and the American pragmatist philosophical and poetic tradition, these writers are ever fearful of being “imprisoned in brotherhood,” to use William Whyte’s apt phrase for the danger that groups pose to the individual. Highly sensitive to the spaces where individualism crashes into the communal movement ethos of the avant-garde, these poets often resist the alluring security of the communities and alliances they believe quite strongly in, for fear of being trapped. They cling to the notion, difficult as it may be in practice, that the strongest writers and thinkers manage to fend off all forms of assimilation and to take flight from pressures that would have us conform, blend in, or, worst of all, stop moving. As we will see in the following chapters, this mandate not only demands a skepticism toward literary movements and avant-garde cant, but it also leads these writers to use their poetry as a powerful vehicle to investigate the problems and paradoxes of friendship itself.

3

“MY FORCE IS IN MOBILITY” Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry

W

hen Frank O’Hara, one of the great American poets of friendship, was killed in the summer of 1966 in a bizarre accident at the age of 40—struck down in the middle of the night by a dune buggy on a beach in Fire Island, New York—countless poets, artists, novelists, composers, and musicians were left reeling as they tried in vain to make sense of the loss of a figure who was so central to a large, diffuse set of overlapping communities. During his moving eulogy at O’Hara’s funeral, Larry Rivers said famously: “Frank O’Hara was my best friend. There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend” (Berkson and LeSueur, Homage, 138). In the myth that has accrued around O’Hara, he is the quintessential coterie poet, champion of collaboration, friendship, and a poetics of “sociability,” freely (and notoriously) loading his poems with friends’ proper names and forging the bonds of an intimate community in verse (Kane, All, 178).1 It is not surprising that critics have often noted the tremendous importance of friendship to O’Hara’s poetry as well as to his life. Joan Acocella writes: For O’Hara, the magic formula, the thing that liberated his personality and his poetry, was the mixing of art with friendship. When he finally came into his own, all his friends were artists, and their friendships were about art. Conversely, his poetry was full of his friends, and about their friendships. Until he found these like-minded souls, he couldn’t become himself. (“Perfectly,” 72)

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Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 87 Similarly, in her pioneering study of O’Hara, Marjorie Perloff states categorically that “all his best poems grow out of personal relationships” (Frank, 117). I certainly agree with these assessments. However, the precise connections between the poems and friendship—as subject matter, biographical factor, philosophical riddle, or textual consideration—have yet to be examined closely enough. How exactly does art mix with friendship in O’Hara, and with what results? How does one become oneself in the process of finding like-minded others? And how does this “magic formula” of mixing art and friendship actually relate to the poems—that is, O’Hara’s decision to use particular words on the page, his ideas about poetry, his poetics—or to the cultural moment they emerge from? Furthermore, if friendship is so important to his work, why are O’Hara’s poems so conflicted, so dark about the possibilities of lasting connection to others, so anxious about the need to stand out from any crowd, so torn between self-reliance and community, independence and camaraderie? If he is so devoted to camaraderie and friendship, why does he return again and again to the idea that the human self must be seen as forever in motion, dissolving any such bonds? That O’Hara’s work is driven by a ravenous passion for friendship and intimacy has become a virtual truism. But only at the cost of obscuring the powerful ambivalence toward friendship itself that not only fills O’Hara’s writing, but gives it much of its dramatic force, tension, and complexity.To some extent, David Lehman is right when he says that O’Hara’s “celebration of friendship in poetry represented an ideal” for later writers (Last, 73). But does O’Hara’s work really amount to a “celebration” of friendship at all? In his work, friendship becomes a source of both joy and angst, a stimulating exchange and an anchor from which he must continuously cut loose. As I will demonstrate throughout this chapter, O’Hara’s oft-noted obsession with constant movement (what he calls in one poem “my own ceaseless going”) and his antipathy to stasis have profound implications not only for the formal and stylistic qualities of his poetry, but also for how he conceives of friendship and his own identity—perhaps the two most salient concerns of O’Hara’s writing. In O’Hara’s poems, a fiercely independent self is “always tying up / and then deciding to depart,” darting and weaving toward and away from other people and momentary havens of repose (CP, 217). The nearly five hundred pages of Frank O’Hara’s Collected Poems truly amount to “an anthology of transit,” to borrow the evocative phrase William Carlos Williams used to describe Marianne Moore’s poem “Marriage” (Selected, 123). As readers of O’Hara quickly notice, rapid, chaotic motion and evanescent perceptions, feelings, and events fill his poetry to the brim. He frequently refers to his desire “to jet,” to be “tough and quick”, complains that “I am so tired of the limitations of immobility / all of America pretending to be a statue,” and expresses hatred for “all things that don’t change” (CP, 194, 17, 49; 396; 275, 360). If he perhaps briefly considers what would happen “if I rest for a moment,” such pauses pass quickly because his “nerves [are] humming,”

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and eventually he always acknowledges “but I kept on traveling” (210, 402). For O’Hara, there is no emergency or catastrophe of living that cannot be assuaged by getting a move on: “I don’t care how dark it gets,” he says in one poem, “as long as we can still move!” (396). And there are few things more dangerous than assuming one has found a place to stop, that one has arrived at “a rest for the mind” because for O’Hara “no such things [are] available” (394). Bursting with this rhetoric that prizes motion and vivacity, restlessness and innovation, O’Hara’s poetry consistently wards off any kind of dullness or torpor.2 As such, it is in many ways the apotheosis of the anti-foundationalist poetics of motion and experimental individualism I have located at the center of postwar avant-garde writing. Indeed, O’Hara’s poetry—which he hoped would be “the inexorable / product of my own time”—is an exemplary specimen of what Daniel Belgrad refers to as “the culture of spontaneity” that erupted in the postwar era (CP, 49). It hums along to the double-time tempo of what W. T. Lhamon Jr. calls the “deliberately speeding” culture of the 1950s, where “speed, style, slapdash improvisation, and rushing instability in poems, songs, films, and fiction offended keepers of maturing traditions” (Deliberate, 16). But although O’Hara’s writing zooms at a breakneck pace, celebrating the same “cult of energy” and motion that the Beats were busy snapping their fingers about, he doesn’t dodge the contradictions and problems beneath the surface of a mind-set predicated on movement’s heady rush (Davidson, San Francisco, 63). Though Norman Mailer may have caught the zeitgeist of the rising avantgarde tide in 1957 by claiming (rather unreflectively) that for the bohemian, “movement is always to be preferred to inaction,” O’Hara was unafraid to admit “I wish I weren’t reeling at all” (“White,” 596; CP, 328). He never unequivocally worships the myth of the open road: he doesn’t buy into (intellectually or physically) the romantic idea of escape via speeding cars down lonely highways of the vast American night, à la Jack Kerouac. Too skeptical to embrace uncritically the hipster’s mystical deification of speed, spontaneity, and immediacy, he instead seriously contemplates the logical conclusions and paradoxes, the absurdities, the euphorias and the aporias of such an ethos. Always extremely self-aware and selfcritical, O’Hara both relies on tropes of mobility and questions them: for example, one image O’Hara frequently uses to celebrate the liberating potential of movement is wind, as in “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!),” in which a “hard wind” whipping through the city creates an exhilarating sense that “everything is tossing, hurrying on up” (CP, 340). However, just after O’Hara declares in the penultimate line that “joy seems to be inexorable,” he undercuts that assertion with the closer: “I am foolish enough always to find it in wind.” Almost ready to equate ecstasy with the animating powers of wind, O’Hara catches himself and punctures that romantic belief with a shot of skepticism. Rather than unequivocally glorifying speed and movement, O’Hara’s embrace is nuanced, qualified, tinged with his suspicion that the idea of personal freedom being found in move-

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 89 ment is illusory, or naïve, or overly idealistic (or, as he puts it in another poem, “I think that it would be nice to go away / but that’s reserved for TV and who wants to end up in Paradise / it’s not our milieu,” 385). Like Emerson and James before him, O’Hara is at once turned on and deeply troubled by movement, flux, and the mutability of the self and consciousness. In the pages that follow, I argue that O’Hara’s work amounts to a full-scale confrontation with the manifold poetic, intellectual, and, perhaps most distinctively, social ramifications of the kinetic aesthetic (and the American tropes of mobility, transition, and nonconformity that underlie it) so dear to the postwar avant-garde. I hope to provide a corrective here to the usual sense that Frank O’Hara is a poet of “sociability” whose work simply “celebrates” his friends and his coterie. Instead, I will argue that O’Hara’s work contains a philosophically complex, deeply ambivalent, and much darker conception of friendship that is shadowed by what he sees as its destructive impact on personal autonomy. And I will suggest the utility of viewing this aspect of O’Hara’s work in the context of a specific American philosophical literary tradition (that of Emerson and pragmatism) and a particular cultural discursive backdrop—a Cold War culture obsessed with conformity, and a counterculture obsessed with both alternative communities and a nonconformist ethic at the same moment. It may seem surprising to argue that Frank O’Hara, of all poets, was ambivalent about friendship, if only because we are so accustomed to hearing about what one friend calls “Frank’s legendary capacity for friendship” (Berkson and LeSueur, Homage, 144). The O’Hara myth, like so many, has its basis in fact: he somehow managed to exist at the heart of several overlapping circles of exciting, talented, iconoclastic people, serving as a supporter and catalyst to many of them. Tales abound of O’Hara’s extraordinary charisma, generosity, and compassion, his quick-as-a-whip conversation, and his unstinting support of creative endeavors by a very diverse set of friends and allies. Barbara Guest recalls that O’Hara “had this wonderful gift of love which so many of us withheld. . . . Frank was more generous than we were,” and John Gruen remembers that “when Frank talked to you he made you feel everything you did was of vital importance and interest—at least for the moment” (qtd. Lehman, Last, 176; Gruen, Party’s Over, 143). It is hard to imagine any other person in American cultural history who was able to associate with, and even be quite close to, exemplars from the worlds of poetry, fiction, drama, music (classical, avant-garde, and jazz), dance, painting, sculpture—figures as renowned, varied, and racially mixed as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Fairfield Porter, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, George Balanchine, Ned Rorem, Morton Feldman, Virgil Thomson, Edwin Denby, Ornette Coleman, Amiri Baraka, A. B. Spellman, Terry Southern, Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg.3 And to judge from the many affectionate reminiscences of O’Hara by these

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and other associates, he served as both glue and spark plug for the criss-crossing networks around him. As Bill Berkson recalls: “The thing about Frank was that he was a centripetal force that held everybody against the drum. He held them together. And it wasn’t just the poets. He had a way with a slightly older generation of painters—you know, people like Bill de Kooning, Franz Kline, or Barney Newman” (qtd. Gruen, Party’s, 152). Similarly, in Edwin Denby’s eyes, O’Hara was more than just an important player in a creative community: by perfecting his own distinctive art of friendship, O’Hara became the sun at the center of a unique solar system, which scattered when he vanished. “So the New York School was a cluster of poets and it was through Frank O’Hara that the uptown poets and the downtown poets got together and eventually the West Coast too, plus the painters and Frank was at the center and joined them all together. After his death there was no center for that group” (qtd. Berkson and LeSueur, Homage, 32). The composer Morton Feldman employs a suitable trope of movement to describe O’Hara’s role as the kinetic core of these social and artistic universes: “To us he seemed to dance from canvas to canvas, from party to party, from poem to poem—a Fred Astaire with the whole art community as his Ginger Rogers” (qtd. Berkson and LeSueur, Homage, 13). As he tried to fulfill this impossibly demanding role, O’Hara’s life (“the little of it I can get ahold of ”) sometimes threatened to fly out of control (CP, 331): it often took the form of a hectic, draining swirl—chatting and drinking with artists and writers at the Cedar Tavern, the San Remo, and the Five Spot, continuing the festivities for long weekends in the Hamptons, going on dizzying rounds of parties and gallery openings, mounting exhibitions as a curator at Museum of Modern Art, writing art criticism under deadline, having multicocktail lunches with fellow writers and artists, collaborating with painters, filmmakers, and other poets, visiting artists’ studios, dashing off the occasional poem on his clattering typewriter, all the while maintaining passionate, turbulent friendships and love affairs. O’Hara was always ready, indeed eager, to blur the lines between friendship and art by diving into collaborative ventures with his companions. Collaboration was of course a crucial ingredient in the postwar avant-garde mix, as we have seen. For O’Hara, collaboration was the perfectly natural, beloved offspring of the dalliance between the two most potent forces in his life, art and friendship. Joe LeSueur recently recalled how much these categories blurred for O’Hara: “Frank exulted in all of these forms of collaboration (a term loosely applied here), partly because his collaborators were in most instances friends of his, people he enjoyed spending time with” (Digressions, 172). As Peter Schjeldahl aptly put it, in terms that echo Emerson’s concept of creative, competitive friendship: “Collaboration, a direct extension of O’Hara’s mode of living, is a good metaphor for the manner of his relationships—an intimate competition in which each participant goads the other toward being his best” (qtd. Berkson and LeSueur, Homage, 141). Such

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 91 ventures took the form of both literary and inter-artistic dialogues—from his famous lithograph collaboration with Larry Rivers (titled Stones) to the “poempaintings” he composed with Norman Bluhm, the musical comedy he worked on with John Gruen and Arnold Weinstein, the poems he wrote with Kenneth Koch or Bill Berkson, the film he wrote with Alfred Leslie, the comic book collages he did with Joe Brainard. Whether in these strictly collaborative works or in the poems he authored alone, O’Hara’s work depends upon the idea that poetry is a colloquy between people, voices, languages, and texts, a dialogic entity issuing forth from, reinforcing, and testing intimate bonds of friendship and community. In fact, community and dialogue become the very ground of O’Hara’s poetics. Michael Davidson has highlighted quite similar concerns in the work of O’Hara’s contemporary and acquaintance, fellow “New American” poet Jack Spicer, who in many ways was to the San Francisco Renaissance what O’Hara was to the New York School. For Spicer, “poetry is created in dialogue and argumentation, whether it takes place between poet and friend or between poet and God. If that dialogue is contentious (and it almost always is in Spicer’s world) so much the better, since it means that language is being tested (to adapt a line from Frank O’Hara) between persons instead of between pages” (San Francisco, 154). Although rarely considered in the same breath, O’Hara and Spicer (whose own relationship was strained and contentious) both had an interest in poetry’s role in the “creation of community,” and both write poems charged with what Davidson calls a “spirit of verbal sparring and contention” (155). Like Spicer, O’Hara frequently addresses poems to specific persons (most often fellow poets and artists), and uses his writing to “cajole, argue, and criticize,” as well as to praise, friends and colleagues (170).4 For these poets, then, the poetic text exists in a web of affiliations and disputes—it functions within a specific social context. For O’Hara in New York, as for Spicer in San Francisco, poetry serves to found and energize an insular community of writers and artists. As such, this sort of poetry is an important ingredient in that process by which small avant-garde collectives were busily establishing alternative communities of marginalized individuals in the face of a dominant Cold War culture consumed with consensus and homogeneity. These conglomerations were sociopoetic sites of creative exchange where a feeling of solidarity between fellow outsiders jostled alongside “internecine conflicts,” contentious dialogue, dissensus, and disagreement—resulting in what Robin Blaser calls a poetics “made out of the dissonant companionship in poetry” (Davidson, San Francisco, 153; qtd. Spicer, Collected, 289). Although O’Hara does not indulge in the macho power politics and “forms of exclusion and homophobia” practiced in Spicer’s circle of homosexual writers, he resembles Spicer in that both see poems as being continually born out of dialogue, and often disagreement, with friends and companions (Davidson, Guys, 41).5 O’Hara, like Spicer, often uses his writing to manage his relationships, to vent frustrations and give form to anxieties, to dra-

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matize conflicts and tensions. With its roots planted deeply in the intersubjective, the dialogic, and the social, with its self-consciousness about the poet’s position in a field of cultural producers, O’Hara’s poetry of discordant friendship is much more complex than a simple paean to fraternity. A preoccupation with friendship even underlies the half-joking, half-serious “theory of poetry” that O’Hara lays out in the famous essay “Personism: A Manifesto.” Although “Personism” is often taken too seriously as a true statement of poetics rather than as a virtuoso performance of O’Hara’s anti-dogmatic, pluralistic philosophy of writing, it is important to notice the close connection between the origin of the new poetic “movement” O’Hara claims to have just invented and his fascination with the interpersonal dynamics of friendship and love (CP, 499).6 Founded one late August day in 1959 after lunch with his friend LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) (a convivial meal immortalized soon afterward in “Personal Poem”), the movement took shape when O’Hara began writing a poem for his new love interest only to realize (with tongue partly in cheek) “that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem” (CP, 499). The innovation of his brand-new movement, he claims, lies in its placement of the poem in the matrix of the poet’s relationships, in the poem’s vital link to a friendship or love affair: “It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person. . . . The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages” (499). Though often overlooked by those who take “Personism” at face value— who seem to feel that O’Hara really means for his poems to substitute for phone calls, and that his poetry is therefore all about the self-expressive ego and insider jests meant for his pals within a small coterie—he is quick to add that this idea of “Personism” “does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!” He even recoils from the idea that this kind of social poem is concerned with closeness. In fact, as Terence Diggory puts it in his enlightening discussion of “Personism” and community, “the poem becomes the space in which persons are mutually exposed in their separateness” (“Community,” 25). This is because, for O’Hara, a saving distance between people is necessary to ensure the self ’s vitality and liberty. Throughout his work, O’Hara suggests the importance of the advice that the sun dispenses in his poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island”: “And / always embrace things, people earth / sky stars, as I do, freely and with / the appropriate sense of space” (CP, 307). Insofar as we can glean a poetics from the mock manifesto, for O’Hara a poem is not equal to a phone call or letter, nor is it a validation of permanence or even closeness in friendship or love. It is a provisional, living response (rather than a well-wrought artifact between two pages) to the writer’s life and feelings at that moment—a meditation in an emergency, as one of his famous titles has it. And as such, it has a duty to reflect on the meaning, the effect—the pain, pleasure, and fleetingness—of friends and lovers, the oxygen any vital self needs to thrive. Furthermore, in O’Hara’s vision of “Personism,” the poem is not a merging of two

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 93 people but rather a relational entity, something betwixt and between two fleeting selves: rather than meeting in a choking embrace, poet and addressee remain separated by “the appropriate sense of space.” It is crucial that when O’Hara talks about putting “the poem squarely between the poet and the person,” the “poem is correspondingly gratified,” not the poet or the person addressed (CP, 499, italics added). Thus the poem serves as both a communicating bridge and a wedge between two people at the same time. A closer inspection of O’Hara’s work and life reveals ubiquitous signs of a restless desire to move onward—to dance from party to party, poem to poem— in order to stave off stability in his relations and the ennui and stagnation such fixity would bring. In part because of his pragmatist sensibility, this most sociable of poets vigorously refuses to surrender his individuality to any group that might dampen or narrow his personal and creative responses to the world. He is supremely uncomfortable with belonging to any movement, no matter how cutting edge or avant-garde (“schools are for fools,” he and Larry Rivers quip in their mock avant-garde manifesto), no matter how politically or ideologically progressive (AC, 93). O’Hara’s rejection of the ethos of conformity in Cold War culture at large is mirrored by his wariness of orthodoxy rearing its ugly head within small countercommunities of dissenters predicated on nonconformity. This sensibility can help explain why this legendary poet of literary coterie and friendship can also be one who so frequently makes comments (however overlooked they have been) which are seemingly opposed to friendship, community, and togetherness. As O’Hara declares in one essay: “Inside each poet, I suspect, lurks a Garboesque desire”—that is, an inner whisper saying, like Greta Garbo, I want to be alone, an impulse O’Hara terms the “active isolation” of the poet (SS, 73). At one moment, O’Hara will long “to be . . . a simple and elegant province all by myself ”; at another, he will write movingly about his “wilderness wish / of wanting to be everything to everybody everywhere” (CP, 35, 331). Because O’Hara’s poetry continually walks the tightrope between these conflicting impulses, it speaks volumes about the strange, liminal terrain where our selves and our friendships collide.

o’hara’s protean se lf Before we can understand a poet’s treatment of interpersonal relations, we must have a clear sense of what that poet believes a person to be. As we have seen, both pragmatist philosophy and postwar American poetry are committed to experimental individualism, which imagines the human self to be radically contingent, mobile, and transitional. Emersonian philosophy sees the self, in Stanley Cavell’s words, as “not a state of being but a moment of change, say of becoming—a transience of being, a being of transience” (In Quest, 111). O’Hara’s poems are

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absolutely saturated with the idea that the self is a “being of transience,” as they contemplate its ephemerality and resist fixed incarnations of the self at every turn. He rejects anything that would confine the inherently fluid self into limited categories, definitions, or identities—a survival tactic that is linked to O’Hara’s navigation of the homophobic, repressive cultural environment of the 1950s, as we saw earlier. As I discussed in chapter 1, the aversion to fixity and reified identity endemic to O’Hara and the postwar avant-garde is, in part, a reaction to the discourses and practices of Cold War containment culture. Although less concerned with historicizing this aspect of O’Hara’s work, James Breslin’s watershed discussion of O’Hara convincingly demonstrates the omnipresence of this kind of protean, paradoxical self in the poet’s writing. Breslin’s exemplary readings detail how O’Hara consistently projects a self that is “mobile, shifting, multiple, contradictory, elusive, and incomplete” (“O’Hara,” 268).7 Though Breslin and other critics have ably explored the instability of O’Hara’s poetic self, the proximity of his conception of the human subject to the philosophy of self found in Emerson, James, and their descendants has gone largely unexamined.8 In fact the congruence between O’Hara’s insistence on the flux and motility of the self and Emersonian thought is not incidental or negligible. Breslin does come close to connecting O’Hara’s conception of self to this intellectual heritage when he links this element of O’Hara’s writing to Emerson’s star pupil: “His protean movement reminds us of Whitman. . . . But Whitman’s fluidity has the assurance of both an origin and an end in his transcendent ‘Me myself,’ an identity that persists outside time and change. O’Hara has no such permanent center to start from or return to” (268). However, as we have seen, the notion of a wholly contingent, impermanent self without coherent center is an important feature of Emersonian pragmatism and its creed of experimental individualism. O’Hara’s poems present just such a protean self, as they enact incessant movements away from any and all resting places in the act of self-definition or in the stream of experience and language. In “Poem (Now it is the 27th),” O’Hara offers a sly self-portrait that suggests as much, when he half-playfully contrasts the characteristics of those born under the zodiac sign of Scorpio with those associated with his own sign, Cancer: Now it is the 27th of this month which would have been my birthday if I’d been born in it but I wasn’t would have made me a Scorpion which symbolizes silver, money, riches firm in aim, coldblooded in action . . .

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 95 instead of Cancer which symbolizes instability, suggestibility, sensibility all the ilities like a clavichord only an interior firmness favoring good and evil alike loving Capricorn with its solitudinous research . . . my force is in mobility it’s said (CP, 345)

The poem juxtaposes what the speaker is not—firm in aim, successful, wealthy, resolute in action—with what he is, unstable, artistic, open to impressions, morally relativistic, and mobile. O’Hara indicates an ambivalence about both sets of qualities: though he may long to be more determined and resolved, he also fears rigidity and immutability. (It is probably safe to assume that O’Hara would find the Scorpion he describes to be terrifically boring and repugnant.) And though he regrets his own flightiness, suggested by its association with “Cancer” and the “ill” sounds of his various “ilities,” he also cherishes his mercurial nature (as suggested by the bravado of the line about it serving as the source of his strength) and his passion for those associated with independent, “solitudinous research.” Adding to the ambivalence is O’Hara’s admission that “it’s said” that his strength is in his mobility, which suggests that this quality is something he is known for and thus is something he must live up to, whether he wants to or not. Free from firm absolutism, this self simultaneously revels in its liberty and reels from disorientation and its (literal and figurative) poverty. To find vitality or strength in mobility, in one’s capacity for movement, is a distinctly American, Emersonian idea, famously stated in the essay that made such a strong impression on O’Hara as a young man, “Self-Reliance”: “Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim” (EL, 271). Here O’Hara directly follows Emerson in equating power with movement, with the self ’s ability to move as a way of avoiding the paralyzing strictures of habit and conformity. In the prose poem “Meditations in an Emergency” (1954), O’Hara offers another flickering portrait of the self as chameleon: My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I’m curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. (CP, 197)

96 Beautiful Enemies O’Hara’s persona here is admittedly, self-consciously slippery. Breslin points out that instead of defining what the self is, the poet prefers to fashion comparisons, resemblances, rather than identities: “O’Hara is never fully identical with any of those guises that he so quickly adopts and sheds” (“O’Hara,” 287). To accept an identity would mean to be protean no longer, and thus, to be stagnant. But again we can sense O’Hara’s ambivalence about his own volatility: “It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still.” Even if he should want to rest, to be a settled self for a moment—a state that he often longs for temporarily—he cannot. If only he were more stable, more conventional, he “would stay at home and do something” (such as write poems, accomplish things, acquire “silver, money, riches” like the Scorpion in the poem discussed above). In a later piece also about the tension between leaving and staying, “Poem En Forme de Saw,” he ironically suggests the literary benefits of staying put rather than giving in to the desire to “scamper off ”: “If I stay right here I will eventually get into the newspapers / like Robert Frost” (CP, 429). But O’Hara knows that true creativity occurs when the self is alternating between repose and renewed movement, not when it is at rest. As terrified of being consumed by friends or lovers as he is of being static, O’Hara also worries that any prolonged union with another would erase his individuality: “I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another, and I am always springing forth from it like a lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth!” (197). At the end of the poem, O’Hara turns away from the “other,” from paralysis and despair (since a broken heart has sparked this emergency), and opts for continued solitary motion, as he bursts forth again without the now-vanished lover. The last lines echo Emerson’s characteristic statements of perseverance in the face of life’s mishaps, emergencies, and losses, such as when he says “never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!” at the end of “Experience” or “I am Defeated all the time; yet to Victory I am born” in his journal (EL, 492; April 1842, S, 209). O’Hara declares “I’ll be back, I’ll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley. . . . It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead” (CP, 198). This passage about weathering a crisis through agile mobility also dovetails with Norman Mailer’s contemporaneous commentary on the importance of movement for the postwar hipster: “In motion a man has a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis comes, whether of love or violence, he can make it, he can win” (“White,” 596). But for all its ebullience, “Meditations in an Emergency” exposes the troubling underside of O’Hara’s constant celebration of mutability. It is apparent in the way this self walks such a thin line between variousness and incoherence, between an inspiring freedom to change constantly and a disturbing lack of integrity—so extreme that “no one trusts me.” Picking up on O’Hara’s anxiety about his own “elusiveness,” Breslin observes that “at times in ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ centerlessness is experienced as emptiness, mobility as treachery” (“O’Hara,” 285).

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 97 As Blasing points out, “being a quick-change artist,” even for reasons of survival in a homophobic culture, “exacts a cost” (Politics, 56). I believe this cost is an even more important and complex aspect of O’Hara’s work than critics have suggested; in poem after poem, he tackles the thrill and the pain, the rewards and the limitations, of contingent and shifting selfhood. Though O’Hara’s pragmatist sense of a chameleonic and independent self certainly leads him to celebrate dynamic mobility, his work everywhere conveys the crises sparked by such a belief in constant movement, isolation, and an unstable, pluralistic universe and sense of self.9 For one thing, O’Hara often worries about the difficulty of maintaining one’s integrity and trustworthiness—of holding any coherent or consistent aesthetic, political, or ethical position—once mobility has been canonized as a supreme value. In one early poem, the sight of an autumn leaf prompts O’Hara to awaken to the troubling significance of the mutability of things and the chameleonic self: “Leaf! you are so big! / How can you change your / color, then just fall! // As if there were / no such thing as integrity!” (“Les Etiquettes Jaunes,” CP, 21). This suspicion always nags at O’Hara: a fear that his own exciting changeability, like the leaf ’s, throws the notion of integrity—as in principled honesty and stable wholeness—into doubt. This is a perennial problem of pragmatist thinking: How do you remain nonideological without appearing unprincipled? How do you constantly change positions without sacrificing integrity and succumbing to thoroughgoing relativism? “Leaf!” he implores, “don’t be neurotic / like the small chameleon.” In this sense, O’Hara’s work illuminates the paradoxes and limitations of the kind of fluid, antidogmatic, relativistic intellectual orientation ascribed to pragmatism and to postmodernism more generally. Despite such doubts, O’Hara remains committed to ceaseless change, especially given the alternative: he fears the human tendency to settle into familiar patterns that are inherently limiting. Just as Emerson frequently warns that “the truest state of mind rested in becomes false” and “every thought is a prison,” O’Hara asserts: “but you get stuck in a habit / of thinking about things / and realize they are all you” (from journal, qtd. Poirier, Renewal, 90; EL, 424; CP, 418). O’Hara often worries that the self can quickly become identified, even merged, with its limited range of thoughts, and thereby be immobilized, as in the poem “Wind,” in which the poet equates the artificial snow trapped in a child’s globe—even though it “seemed beautiful,” and orderly, secure, contained—with “bad thoughts / imprisoned in crystal.” In contrast, the free, wind-driven snow outside (like both “good” thinking and the mobile self) “always loathed containment” (269). O’Hara explicitly pits liberating motion against “containment,” that buzzword and guiding metaphor of Cold War foreign and domestic policy, suggesting the extent to which this O’Hara poem has “internalized the political and sexual discourses of its day,” as Marjorie Perloff remarks in discussing another of his poems in light of 1950s culture (O’Hara, xxvii).

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In this project, O’Hara is not only reacting against those contemporaneous discourses insisting on containment and consensus, but is also building on the work of his pragmatist poetic predecessors, such as Wallace Stevens, who are similarly elusive and fearful of the definitive, of “bad thoughts / imprisoned in crystal” (CP, 269). In Stevens, as in O’Hara, that which hovers just beyond definition, just beyond final expression, is best, is most vital, especially in terms of the self. In “A Motive for Metaphor,” Stevens affirms the pleasures and thrills of a self that can go on changing continually, never settling into a rut or a permanent mold: The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were never quite yourself And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being . . . (Collected, 288)

Stevens believes that through imagination and poetry, the self can avoid entrapment in any rigid, outmoded incarnation. He shrinks from the burden of a well-lighted, unitary self, from the routine or easily interpreted alphabet that spells conventional, contained selfhood.To live in such a place of “primary noon” would be to reside where you would have to be quite yourself forever. This is a terrifying prospect for poets like O’Hara. In Stevens and those who follow him, the desire for exhilarating changes rather than sameness leads directly to metaphor, to the potential for novelty and difference imbedded in our creative use of words.10 Poets like Stevens prefer a self and a world that “would never be quite expressed,” because only in this way can they remain dynamic and protean, and thus, alive. Stevens’s influential, pragmatist-inflected view holds that the imagination lets you bound past limitations, redraw maps of being and selfhood; it lets us view “reality” as a work-in-progress, provisional and unfinished, open to reimagining. It is poetry, for Stevens and for O’Hara, that allows one to evade “things as they are” by keeping self, world, and language fluid; thus, it allows one to elude what Richard Rorty calls “somebody else’s description of oneself ” and one’s world (Stevens, Collected, 165; Contingency, 28).11 For O’Hara, as for others in this tradition, any “circle” or form that attempts to capture an aspect of experience—an event, a lost loved one, a fluctuation of one’s own feelings or emotions—has the unfortunate tendency to “solidify and hem in the life.” “But if the soul is quick and strong,” Emerson writes, “it bursts over that boundary on all sides” (“Circles,” EL, 404). What, however, is on the other side of that boundary? This process of abandonment, which calls for a per-

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 99 petual emerging into uncharted territory, can lead to a frightening, disorienting free fall, which can be both intoxicating and profoundly destabilizing. The work in which O’Hara most vigorously puts into action his belief in the self as protean and incessantly changing is his 1956 poem “In Memory of My Feelings.” This long and deliberately ambitious work (which I can only briefly consider here) stands—or perhaps flickers or dances would be more appropriate metaphors—at the center of his poetry. It is one of the richest examples of O’Hara’s pragmatist conception of the self; it is also one of the most important and influential postwar American poems, in part because its rigorous dismantling of coherent human identity anticipates the obsession in postmodernist thought with the decentering and unmasking of the “essential” human self.12 Shuttling between presence and loss, the poem presents a self and recognizes its necessary erasure at the same time. In this, it closely resembles what O’Hara sees at work in the treatment of identity in his friend Larry Rivers’s painting: “In his work Rivers is playing out, at whatever cost to himself, the drama of our lack” (SS, 96). Like Rivers, O’Hara stages this “drama of our lack,” the absence of a fixed self at one’s core, at whatever cost to himself. As such, “In Memory of My Feelings” represents one of the most eloquent demonstrations in American poetry of the experimental individualism that I have been describing in this study, a stance that paradoxically liquidates the self at the same moment it asserts its importance. The poem opens with a momentary gesture toward a unitary self (“my quietness”), but O’Hara immediately asserts that this apparently singular, tranquil entity is actually plural and on the move: My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. (CP, 252)

Quickly, that self begins to blossom wildly: He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves. (252–253)

In O’Hara’s view, a person’s “selves” shift as time passes, as situations change, as the imagination wills, shedding transparent guises like a serpent sheds its skin, only to be repeatedly reborn and rearranged. Off and running, the poem’s kaleidoscopic swirl finds the poet whipping through a never-ending series of costume changes: One of me rushes to window #13 and one of me raises his whip and one of me flutters up from the center of the track amidst the pink flamingoes. . . . (253) .... Grace to be born and live as variously as possible. The conception

100

Beautiful Enemies of the masque barely suggests the sordid identifications. I am a Hittite in love with a horse. I don’t know what blood’s in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist in which a face appears. (256)

The speaker tries on multiple “transparencies,” self-consciously theatrical guises that he later calls “ruses,” all the while delighting in his comic, “sordid” transformation of Whitmanic identifications, across race, gender, time, and space (253, 257). The famous aphorism “Grace to be born and live as variously as possible,” inscribed in the immutable granite of O’Hara’s gravestone, captures his exuberant celebration of possibility, of the endless permutations of the shape-shifting self. While projecting this panoply of possible beings that the self briefly inhabits, the poem also chronicles an ongoing “hunt” for a “serpent” that could be (and has been) seen as a quest for the essential core of selfhood beneath all the disguises (253). But O’Hara, like other pragmatists, does not believe a unified, hidden, or true self exists outside of the contingent contexts and unfolding relations that temporarily define it. Contrary to how some have read the poem, I argue that “In Memory of My Feelings” does not chart a search for a coherent inner “serpentself ” beneath the many masks it wears. Rather, it recognizes, with a queasy sense of vertigo and free fall, that no “true” or “real” self exists, that there is no “inner self ” to be “reintegrated” in the end (Perloff, O’Hara, 141).13 There is no one stable entity, or “host,” that can contain all “the sordid identifications,” the proliferating guises, fictions, metaphors, and selves which the poet creates or inhabits (256). Therefore, the poem ends on a note of profound paradox and ambiguity: and I have lost what is always and everywhere present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses, which I myself and singly must now kill and save the serpent in their midst.

This “scene of my selves” is shot through with contradiction, as it is both present and absent, always here yet always “lost” already, real and fictive. With this conclusion, O’Hara recognizes that to capture the theatrical performance of his selves, as he has done throughout the piece, would mean his identity had been “converted into statuary,” as the poem puts it earlier (254). To do so would be to reify the self, to make it all present, which is to destroy its vital motion and to deny its incurable slipperiness. To do so would be to turn the protean into a poem. What is human identity, then? For O’Hara, it appears to be that (primarily verbal, metaphor-making) force or energy we use to move away from any settled definitions of self that can so quickly come to imprison us. Self in this poem equals the very will to change, to move onward, which, for pragmatists, is the best

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 101 definition of self possible. Richard Poirier’s general description of the Emersonian self mirrors, in spirit and concept, the ending of “In Memory of My Feelings”: “The self in Emerson is not an entity, not even a function; it is an intimation of presence, and it comes upon us out of the very act by which the self tries to elude definition” (Renewal, 87; see also Poetry, 11).14 Surely “In Memory of My Feelings” is an exemplary poem in this intellectual and poetic tradition: in explicit and eloquent terms, it equates freedom with “the abandonment of any already defined Self ” (Poetry, 20).Written against a backdrop of hyper-conformity at a time when authoritative eyes were keen on pigeonholing and labeling “deviants” and marginalizing those confirmed as “different” from the status quo, “In Memory of My Feelings” deliberately sheds all forms that would contain the self and reaches after formlessness at whatever cost to the poet.

“i don’t pre fe r one ‘strain’ to anothe r”: o’hara and artistic inde pe nde nce Though O’Hara’s brand of individualism envisions a self that is dramatically unstable and multiple, a premium is also placed on that individual’s “active isolation”—a combination that has profound effects on O’Hara’s attitudes toward friendship and avant-garde community (SS, 73). For O’Hara, a person, especially an artist, has to steer clear of any type of conformity and containment that could endanger his or her singularity and mobility. Thus, part of the ambivalence we see in O’Hara toward his friends, toward any avant-garde community, stems from an unwillingness to be confined to a particular mode or method and to a discomfort with being identified too closely with the writing of his companions. O’Hara, perhaps more than other poets with similar concerns, allows such problems to enter and even produce his poems. As I discussed earlier, for O’Hara there is little distinction between poetry and lively, contentious dialogue. To a greater degree than is generally acknowledged, many of his poems can be read acts of verbal and thematic resistance to other writing, either his own or his friends’. O’Hara frequently stages such tensions in his poems, as in “My Heart” (1955): I’m not going to cry all the time nor shall I laugh all the time, I don’t prefer one “strain” to another. I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie, not just a sleeper, but also the big, overproduced first-run kind. I want to be at least as alive as the vulgar. And if some aficionado of my mess says “That’s

102 Beautiful Enemies not like Frank!”, all to the good! I don’t wear brown and grey suits all the time, do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera, often. I want my feet to be bare, I want my face to be shaven, and my heart— you can’t plan on the heart, but the better part of it, my poetry, is open. (CP, 231)

The poem opens as if in midconversation, as the poet responds to an accusation: a charge that his recent works have both strayed from a mode he had already established and become too vulgar and base. Characteristically, O’Hara retorts that he refuses to write programmatically, claiming that there is no reason why one should produce only sad poems or only exuberant ones. Defending his decision to focus on plain, demotic, or “low art” materials (such as James Dean’s death, the movies, and so on), he asks his interlocutor: Why should my poetry be highfalutin and lofty when I wear regular clothes to the opera? On the one hand, this poem conveys O’Hara’s interest in writing openly, candidly, and even vulgarly about his feelings and his life, wherever that effort may take him (and in this, it is opposed to the more reticent poetics of Ashbery, a contrast I will have more to say about later). The last lines are most typically understood as a celebration of the poet’s honesty and directness about his emotional life. On the other hand, the poem also reveals the importance of unpredictability to O’Hara’s contingent, mobile poetics—that is, openness in the sense of both inconclusiveness and inclusiveness rather than frankness.15 Though Breslin is correct that the poem expresses O’Hara’s “elusive contradictoriness,” this casting of the self as slippery and mutable is, at the same time, an ardent declaration of poetic independence. Following Emerson’s definition of heroism, which equates strength with the willingness to change—“Heroes do not fix, but flow, bend forward ever and invent a resource for every moment”— “My Heart” is an act of resistance toward closed notions about what a poet should write and toward any and all demands upon the artist to continue in an already-mined vein (S, 146). In “My Heart,” O’Hara echoes Whitman’s famous Emersonian defense of his own inconsistency—“very well then, I contradict myself. . . . I am large, I contain multitudes”—but in a softer, more ironic tone; to those aficionados of his messy oeuvre whose expectations he has shattered with his variability, he says one doesn’t wear the same shirts all the time, so why should one write the same way in poem after poem? Write as variously as possible, O’Hara says to his critics and to himself; keep moving forward. Try not to write “like Frank,” because to do so would mean one had settled into a fixed artistic identity, or, at best, had rested with what Emerson refers to as “some past utterance of genius”; in fact, in another poem, O’Hara suggests that “beauty”—ostensibly the goal of making art, however radically one redefines the concept—needs to be “a thing you keep

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 103 moving” (EL, 57; CP, 276). Of course, O’Hara knows that this is much more easily said than done, but the struggle becomes part of the fabric and force of his poems. The effort leads to what Poirier calls O’Hara’s “spontaneous lurches away from the direction just laid down by his own phrases”; however, it also plagues him at the same time that it stimulates new directions and new poems (“Scenes,” 36). In any case, it results in a supreme self-reflexivity about his own writing and its development. Throughout the poems, the poet engages in a subtle, ongoing self-critique, a kind of self-monitoring wariness about his own rhetoric, style, and subject matter. When he gets too obscure or self-indulgent, he pokes fun at his own excess; when he finds himself poeticizing or veering toward the sentimental, he checks his progress and undercuts himself: “I am lyrical to a fault,” he warns himself at one point, and “I’m dropping my pastoral pretensions!” at another (CP, 351, 198). Because O’Hara shares the pragmatist conception of art as a process meant to stimulate further creations, as an incentive to further movement and action, his poems are often sparked by considerations of, and movements away from, previous writings of his own and by his friends. This is in keeping with the conception of friendship that O’Hara shares with Emerson and pragmatism, one founded on contentious dialogue and disagreement rather than harmony and consensus; and as I mentioned earlier, O’Hara’s poems emerge out of a dense web of interpersonal and intertextual dialogues and quarrels. Take, for example, the 1954 poem titled “To a Poet,” which grows out of exactly this kind of discordant friendship. Like “My Heart,” the poem seems to capture O’Hara himself on the cusp of a stylistic shift, self-consciously defending his own aesthetic choices while bristling at a friend’s criticism: I am sober and industrious and would be plain and plainer for a little while until my rococo self is more assured of its distinction. So you do not like my new verses, written in the pages of Russian novels while I do not brood over an orderly childhood? You are angry because I see the white-haired genius of the painter more beautiful than the stammering vivacity of your temperament. And yes,

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Beautiful Enemies it becomes more and more a matter of black and white between us and when the doctor comes to me he says “No things but in ideas” or it is overheard in the public square, now that I am off my couch. (CP, 185)

The unnamed critical friend (the “you”) addressed in this poem is Kenneth Koch, who in an interview with me recalled the poem as being “part of the sometimes sharp and ongoing conversation between Frank and myself.”16 O’Hara’s representation of his own identity in this poem is typical of his work in that he declares the self to be a protean, variable, ever-changing process rather than an essential or fixed entity. The poem, like others by O’Hara, insists that “I don’t prefer one ‘strain’ to another”—he asserts his right to shift poetic style and allegiances as time and circumstance demand. Here he announces that lately he’s been playing the role of a sober, hardworking, plain-talking poet; he’s deliberately cast aside an earlier, zanier self, at least for the time being. In referring to this previous, “rococo” persona, O’Hara points to the brash, loud, and radically experimental poetic self one finds in his works of the early 1950s, like the long poems “Hatred,” “Easter,” and “Second Avenue,” works filled with exotic, irrational imagery and disjunctive syntax. To fully understand this poem, it is worth noting that Koch was always an ardent admirer of O’Hara’s early works in this vein (more so than many readers), perhaps because at the very same moment that O’Hara was writing in this mode, Koch himself was devoted to a very similar experiment in style. In fact, in the early 1950s the two poets inspired each other to write very long, surreal, extremely fragmented poems, in a kind of ongoing, head-to-head competition—a contest that resulted in the composition of Koch’s “When the Sun Tries to Go On,” and O’Hara’s “Second Avenue.” This poem, then, catches the poet in 1954 as he self-consciously turns away from such over-the-top poems (“rococo” in the sense of something excessively elaborate) he had been writing alongside his friend in 1952 and 1953. Koch’s sense of the two friends’ shared project could well have led to his displeasure when his friend began to turn away from that giddy mode toward, for example, poems that are more “plain,” “sober,” or “brood[ing].” (Also, in the same month this poem was written, April 1954, O’Hara wrote to Jane Freilicher about a heated and upsetting argument with Koch.They quarreled because Koch complained that O’Hara seemed fonder of the painter Michael Goldberg than of him. This personal conflict seems to have given rise to the poem, which relates that the friend is angry because the speaker prefers a painter’s brilliance over the friend’s.)17 O’Hara suggests that he may come back to this rococo “self ” or style, but only if he feels more certain of its “distinction.” O’Hara’s word choice here con-

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 105 tains a revealing double meaning: it suggests that he will wait until he is more assured of this style’s excellence, on the one hand, and of its singularity, distinguishability, and individuality on the other. As I have suggested, at this moment, Koch, the friend who has censured him for leaving it behind, was knee-deep in a very similar rococo style, a fact that would inevitably render O’Hara’s own artistic attempts less original. Unsure of whether he has found an independent, distinctive voice in the zany, disjunctive surrealist mode he and Koch were exploring together, he declares that he is moving on to something “plain and plainer.” It is worth mentioning, too, that many readers agree that this move by O’Hara, away from sometimes fanciful and derivative surrealism toward an original fusion of the wildly imaginative with the vernacular and “plain,” is one that results, ultimately, in O’Hara’s “distinction” as a poet.18 Thus, these mid-1950s poems that defend the poet’s variability and independence, such as “To a Poet” and “My Heart,” are crucial works that are both generated by and are about that particular movement into poetic maturity. This new direction has apparently not pleased Koch, the interlocutor of “To a Poet,” who has criticized the speaker’s “new verses, written in the / pages of Russian novels.” The allusion to these new verses offers an intriguing instance of selfreference; turning back several pages from this April 1954 poem, one finds “Lines Written in A Raw Youth,” dated February 1954, a poem whose title indicates that it was apparently “written in the / pages of ” Dostoyevsky’s “Russian novel,” A Raw Youth. The poem, whose pivotal line is “so brood I on my brutal cold black home,” is composed in that most traditional of forms, the sonnet, and is quite a departure, stylistically, from the chaotic sprawl of “Second Avenue”; apparently, one of O’Hara’s closest poet friends and supporters disliked it (CP, 177). As so often in O’Hara’s poems, friendship becomes the ground for tension, rivalry, and a kind of generative resistance that provokes new ideas and new poems (like this one). Furthermore, the poem—as a kind of social and dialogic text—externalizes the interpersonal drama and disagreement and, on one level, airs “private” issues in the “public square” as it attempts to manage the friendship in the realm of the text rather than “real” life (thus illustrating my argument that for the postwar avant-garde, poetry becomes the continuation of friendship by other means).19 “[I]t becomes more and more a matter / of black and white between us,” he admits, alluding to aesthetic and personal differences that could drive friends apart; at the same time, O’Hara often views such disagreements as a blessing in disguise, as they offer just enough distance to enable one to remain independent. In “To a Poet,” O’Hara insists on reversing expectations about his writing: while one might expect that in growing “plain and plainer,” O’Hara is taking up the vernacular idiom of one of his chief models, William Carlos Williams, he intentionally revises or tropes Williams’s famous dictum. “When the doctor comes to / me he says ‘No things but in ideas,’” O’Hara writes, rather than “no ideas but in things.” The poet, sick on his couch, idle and uncertain of his

106 Beautiful Enemies distinction, has apparently been visited and cured by Dr. Williams and his mode. However, O’Hara subverts this authority figure’s own rather dogmatic precept— or prescription, if you will—perhaps to indicate his independence from it. With this twist, O’Hara refuses to be confined by either his friend’s or his mentor’s dictates about his poetic development. Always wary of the fact that to stay forever in the arms of another could mean that you simply become them, O’Hara’s conclusion announces that he’s done resting on his couch: he’s off and running as a poet, alone and industrious, actively changing. The poem seems to enact the sentiment that O’Hara expressed in a college journal several years earlier: “One must not be stifled in a closed social or artistic railway station waiting for the train; I’ve a long, long way to go, and I’m late already” (EW, 101). In other moods, O’Hara is less sanguine about his ability to fend off this sort of merging with his friends and their writing, and he instead registers the potent pressure exerted by his friends’ writings on his own creativity. In the playfully intertextual piece titled “Poem (So many echoes in my head),” O’Hara begins by recording his agonized effort to arrive at his own distinctive poetic statement at a moment when he feels swamped with his friends’ words and tropes: So many echoes in my head that when I am frantic to do something about anything, out comes “you were wearing . . .” or I knock my head against a wall of my own appetite for despair and come up with “you once ran naked toward me / Knee deep in cold March surf ” or I blame it on Blake, on Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me, Deadly, on the “latitude” of the stars.

Rather desperate to create a poem, the speaker finds himself caught in a kind of Emersonian nightmare: he can only utter words someone else has already said—and in this case, the words are those of his friends and contemporaries. The speaker seems to want to write something, anything, about love or his feelings, but is so saturated with the echoes of other people’s phrases, that when he tries, he helplessly begins “you were wearing,” which is to say, he repeats the first line and title of a contemporaneous poem by Kenneth Koch. Or, if he tries to write something celebratory, he inadvertently begins “you once ran naked . . .,” thus repeating some lines from a recently published Gary Snyder poem.20 In acknowledging the onerous force of his peers’ inspiring texts, O’Hara’s poem actually plays out Emerson’s recognition that “genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence” (EL, 58). Unable to find an original thought—a scary moment indeed for an individualist like O’Hara—he considers whether his poetic echolalia (the involuntary repetition of words or phrases just spoken by others) is ascribable to the

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 107 poetry of his friends, or to the weight of literary tradition (Blake), or to the base, dangerous pleasures of recent movies (with their “deadly kiss”). It might even be a matter of fate, as determined by the “‘latitude’ of the stars,” though his poet friends, from Ashbery and Koch to Ginsberg and Snyder, are also rising “stars” whose force he must steer away from. In short, this is O’Hara’s version of the Emersonian fear of being “warped by [the] attraction” of a book or another person’s ideas “clean out of my own orbit and made a satellite instead of a system” (“American Scholar,” EL, 68): but where in all this noise am I waiting for the clouds to be blown away away away away away into the sun (burp), I wouldn’t want the clouds to be burped back by that hot optimistic cliché, it hangs always promising some nebulous healthy reaction to our native dark

The lack of punctuation in this second stanza means that the first lines can be read “where . . . am I waiting for the clouds to be blown away?” but also “where in all this noise am I?” The latter is the more pressing question: O’Hara searches for a poetic identity of his own in the midst of the teeming literary and cultural influences that threaten to overwhelm him. As he often does, O’Hara depicts this craving for poetic creativity by using one of his favorite metaphors for mobility, wind (while updating its usage as a Romantic trope for inspiration)—as he waits for the wind to blow the obstructing clouds away, symbolically, allowing the “sun” of his own genius to shine. (O’Hara similarly links the sun with his individual talent in “A True Account of Talking with the Sun at Fire Island”). However, in one of those abrupt turns against the current his own words have initiated, O’Hara is immediately uncomfortable with the image and undercuts it with a “burp,” calling it a “hot optimistic cliché” that might force the clouds to return, once again blocking his creativity. Since the reference to wind recalls the Shelleyan trope of the inspiring wind, it is no less an echo than the earlier lines by Koch and Snyder.21 O’Hara self-critically catches himself in the process of using and shedding such inheritances, bequeathed both by others and by himself: the poem, interestingly enough, records the struggle as it unfolds, which means that it is as much a commentary on friendship’s impact on poetry as anything else. Though O’Hara always deflects what he calls in his early journal “the definitive negative,” his pragmatist sensibility leads him to believe that the affirmative must remain always potential, undefined (EW, 109). Here, poetic inspiration, along with unfolding possibilities to come, are depicted in Jamesian terms, as I mentioned in chapter 2. The sun “hangs always promising some nebulous / healthy reaction to our native dark.” Indeed, what better definition of the pragmatist ethos than a “nebulous healthy reaction to our native dark”? For now, however, in the

108 Beautiful Enemies winter mood of this January poem, O’Hara seems content to forgo sunny exuberance and self-reliant originality: I will let the sun wait till summer now that our love has moved into the dark area symbolizing depth and secrecy and mystery it’s not bad, we shall find out when the light returns what the new season means / when others’ interpretations have gotten back up onto the pedestals we gave them so long as we are still wearing each other when alone (CP, 352)

Later, he suggests, there will be clarity, light, and uncomplicated happiness, and he and his lover will understand more about this love affair and the changes buzzing around them. At that point, the poems of his friends (“others’ interpretations”) will recede, become less of an active burden on his creativity and more statuesque and inert on their pedestals. “[I]t’s not bad,” he tries to convince himself about this wintry, blocked situation, as long as he and his lover are still together, in love, and free from “all this noise” when alone. The striking, erotic image of the last line is, fittingly, an intertextual revision of the friend’s line alluded to at the start: he tropes Kenneth Koch’s “You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse,” refashioning it for his own personal and romantic purposes (Great, 79). Two poems in one, this work is both a love poem that ponders the moment when a bright new love deepens into something darker and more mysterious, and a piece about influence, originality, and poetic independence, about the clouds of other poets—one’s peers and friends—blocking the sun of the writer’s own style. In its serious play, the poem exemplifies O’Hara’s “linguistic skepticism,” the stance Richard Poirier locates in pragmatist poetry—the continuous turning or troping of words already uttered that allows the poet to wriggle free from entrapment, to resist language’s tendency to ossify and imprison us (Poetry, 4).

“crowds of intimacie s and no distance”: o’hara’s social poems The poets who have lived in cities have been hermits still. Inspiration makes solitude anywhere. —Emerson, “Literary Ethics”

As have seen, if we approach O’Hara’s work with an eye toward his ambivalence and resistance to certain aspects of friendship and community, we may be better equipped to understand how and why he uses his writing to dramatize conflicts

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 109 and tensions with other people, to vent frustrations and give form to anxieties about friendship, and to pay tribute to friendship’s pleasures. His poems are filled with a strange, agitated mixture of optimism and sadness, a thirst for togetherness and a yearning for solitude. Like Emerson, O’Hara views relationships with friends and lovers as tentative, temporary arrangements. Leave-takings, however painful, seem not only inevitable but necessary in O’Hara’s world, if only so that one can remain distinct and free. This is why he despises the way love tends to hide us in “the bosom of another” and chooses to spring forth ecstatically, “like a lotus,” from any and all such bonds (CP, 197); this is also why he paradoxically yokes together intimacy and the simultaneous movement away from people rather than viewing them as antithetical, as one might conventionally assume. We are told that “to move is to love” in “In Memory of My Feelings,” and in “Let’s Get Out,” he says, “The only way not to leave is to go” (CP, 256, 432). One critic, David Shapiro, has stressed the dismay underlying O’Hara’s most cheerfully sociable poetry, which takes friendship as “a topic and a style,” but is nevertheless filled with a sense of desperate solitariness. O’Hara, in Shapiro’s apt phrasing, “reveal[s] the true insomnia and pathos of those whose friendships are necessary because of the terror of isolation. Therefore, I do not find [his] social poems, so-called, any more or less heart breaking than poems of a more obvious isolation” (“Poet,” 226). Nowhere is O’Hara more self-conscious of his role as a social poet, a distinct voice speaking in and to a community of like-minded friends, than in his occasional poems, pieces that were written for specific events such as birthdays and weddings. Perhaps the best example is “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s,” an epithalamion written to celebrate the marriage of O’Hara’s close yet increasingly distant friend and former muse, Jane Freilicher (CP, 265). (It was apparently written on 16 February 1957, the day before Freilicher’s marriage to Joe Hazan, and read that night at a party held at the painter Joan Mitchell’s loft.) With its brightly affirmative yet skeptical mood, the poem confronts the paradoxes of self and union inherent in marriage and friendship. It brings together O’Hara’s ambivalence toward the avant-garde and its coteries, his love and fear of creative companionship, and his awareness of the contingency of friendship and happiness. The specific occasion sparks complicated emotions and reflections: coloring the whole poem is an undercurrent of loss brought on by O’Hara’s mixed feelings about the prospect of his friend Jane’s impending marriage, as well as his discomfort, as an avant-garde homosexual, with the very idea of marriage as a sanctioned, institutionalized, and heterosexual union. John Lowney is correct when he points out that this poem “dramatizes a moment of emotional urgency: the fear of losing his close friendship with Jane Freilicher informs his subtle satire of the institution of marriage” (101). Like so many of O’Hara’s best poems, this work grows out of his personal relationships, yet the specific dynamics of that process are more complex and suggestive than they may at first appear.

110 Beautiful Enemies “Poem Read At Joan Mitchell’s” puts into practice the lesson about the avantgarde O’Hara learned from the essay by Paul Goodman which had made such a strong impression on him six years earlier. Goodman’s “Advance Guard Writing, 1900–1950” argues that the avant-garde artist must aim to build an “intimate community” among his friends through his works by writing occasional poetry “for them about them personally” (375–376). “As soon as the intimate community does exist—whether geographically or not is relevant but not essential—and the artist writes for it about its members,” Goodman goes on, “the advance-guard at once becomes a genre of the highest integrated art, namely Occasional Poetry— the poetry celebrating weddings, festivals, and so forth. ‘Occasional poetry,’ said Goethe, ‘is the highest kind’” (376). As we saw in chapter 1, Goodman’s prescription for the postwar avant-garde deeply inspired O’Hara: he began to write poetry for and about his friends, to write occasional poems for their birthdays and weddings, to fill his verse with their names, and to generally adopt Goodman’s belief that “advance guard action helps create such community, starting with the artist’s primary friends” (376). In a 1957 letter to Ashbery, in which he enclosed “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” and another occasional poem about friendship, “John Button Birthday,” O’Hara explicitly connected these poems to the Goodman essay he had first read in 1951, although he dismissed the two poems—which are notably different from Ashbery’s work in their personal address and use of real people’s names—with typical self-deprecation and self-criticism: “I would also like to write some new poems and I mean NEW, but can’t do that either. In order to show you what I’ve been up against (sand in the brain) I’ll enclose my two latest efforts and perhaps you can tell me where I went off onto the dirt road. It may be that remark of Goodman-Goethe: ‘Occasional poetry is the best kind’” (27 March 1957). Although Goodman’s essay certainly serves as fuel for his poetry, O’Hara also seems to find that the act of creating the kind of community Goodman calls for by writing about and for one’s friends is dogged by irksome, if artistically rich, questions, problems, and misgivings, some of which surface in this directly Goodman-inspired poem. That is, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” self-consciously builds on, and in effect, interrogates Goodman’s arguments about the avant-garde and community building. It is also modeled on Guillaume Apollinaire’s poetry, as the first lines echo his famous “Zone,” and the whole poem, from its title onward, directly recalls the French poet’s own epithalamion for a friend, “Poem Read at the Marriage of Andre Salmon.” By overtly invoking Apollinaire and his own poem of friendship and marriage, O’Hara also pointedly comments on the communal emphasis so dear to the historical European avant-garde. O’Hara begins: At last you are tired of being single the effort to be new does not upset you nor the effort to be other you are not tired of life together

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 111 city noises are louder because you are together being together you are louder than calling separately across a telephone one to the other. (CP, 265)

O’Hara has echoed and revised the first line of “Zone,” which reads “At last you are tired of this ancient world” (“A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien”); he has substituted “being single” as the place to be abandoned in lieu of Apollinaire’s leftbehind old world (117). O’Hara immediately introduces a tension between singleness and “being together” (largely absent in Apollinaire’s wedding poem), thereby installing the dialectic between isolation and communion that recurs throughout his poetry and enabling him to critique the avant-garde’s contradictions. So quick to feel relationships grow stagnant or stifling, to feel with Emerson that other people “cease to interest us once we find their limitations,” O’Hara seems almost amazed that the two lovers “are not tired of life together” (“Circles,” EL, 406). Willing to tie up permanently while forgoing the urge to depart, Jane, the painter friend to whom he was so close during his youthful adventurous days of the early 1950s, seems ready to relinquish the difficult, avant-garde “effort to be new” and “effort to be other.” Can one go on being “new,” go on striving to be “other” than what one is, if one is bound up in marriage? In his skepticism, O’Hara mirrors the Emerson who “rejects the idea of permanently fixed relationships” and whose attitude toward marriage is deeply ambivalent (Richardson, Emerson, 330). In certain moods, Emerson goes so far as to say that “it is not in the plan or prospect of the soul, this fast union of one to one” and argues that “plainly marriage should be a temporary relation, it should have its natural birth, climax, and decay, without violence of any kind,—violence to bind or violence to rend” (qtd. Richardson, Emerson, 331).22 O’Hara’s own feelings about marriage are of course complicated by his own sexual orientation, by his sense that, in his own case, marriage, like procreation, is off the table as a prospect. An epithalamion automatically carries a different charge when written by a homosexual man for whom marriage, with all of its material and psychological benefits and problems, is neither desirable nor possible.23 In the poem’s first lines, O’Hara sets the tone of mixed feelings toward various forms of union that carries through the poem: he sounds half-envious, half-disappointed about the impending event. Envious, at least in part, because the effort to be new, other, and single that he himself is engaged in, is “upset[ting],” tiring and, at times, appears fruitless. Furthermore, O’Hara recognizes the enormous human comforts in “being together” (such as happiness, stability, companionship, and the possibility of having children) that he himself finds consistently elusive. It is also suggested that there is strength in being a duo, contrasted with the weakness and distance in being separate: “Being together,” he says in a preview (and reversal) of the poem-as-phone-call trope of “Personism,” “you are louder than calling separately across a telephone one to the other.” (In a sense, marriage is the inverse of

112 Beautiful Enemies “Personism,” since its model of closeness or merging eliminates all intermediary form of communication—actually a sign of danger in O’Hara’s semiotics). O’Hara also sounds disappointed about Jane’s marriage because, first, a onceclose friend is being taken away; second, she will be happy in her healthy, “normative” relationship while he himself will continue to be alone and lonely, unable, as a gay man, to get married even if he wanted to; and third, an artist he admires and looks to for provocation is no longer stirred by the desire to be individual (“single”), “to be new,” and “to be other,” which means she may have given up the artist’s prime objective: to go on changing. As so often in O’Hara’s poems, he writes against what he refers to in “Joe’s Jacket” as “the fear of boredom, the mounting panic of it”: “Only you in New York are not boring tonight / . . . you were surprising us by getting married and going away / so I am here reading poetry anyway / and no one will be bored tonight by me because you’re here” (CP, 330, 265).The languorous ennui of recent days (“Yesterday I felt very tired . . . and today I felt very tired”) gives way in the face of this strange event, this surprising departure of a close friend into marriage: “but tonight I feel energetic because I’m sort of the bugle, / like waking people up, of your peculiar desire to get married.” To refer in an epithalamion to a friend’s desire to be wed as “peculiar” is strange indeed. However, O’Hara goes on to define what he views as an unusual desire for matrimony with a list that is quite cutting and sarcastic: It’s so original, hydrogenic, anthropomorphic, fiscal, post-anti-esthetic, bland, unpicturesque and WilliamCarlosWilliamsian! it’s definitely not 19th century, it’s not even Partisan Review, it’s new, it must be vanguard!

The barbs fly in several directions here. On the one hand, it seems O’Hara is poking fun at the bourgeois, conformist (“fiscal . . . bland, unpicturesque”) aspects of marriage, which seem so at odds with the edgy nonconformity of his coterie. In this, his critique is a characteristic 1950s bohemian rejection of conventional behavior; in particular, its opposition to marriage must be read in light of the hysterical fetishization of the illusion of domestic, heterosexual, familial bliss at the very center of the Cold War’s containment culture.24 Within the New American Poetry, this sort of gesture reaches full flower in the hilarious 1959 Beat poem “Marriage” by O’Hara’s friend Gregory Corso: “Should I get married? Should I be good? / Astound the girl next door / with my velvet suit and faustus hood?” (Allen, New, 209). But at the same time O’Hara also mocks the avant-garde’s own pretenses and excesses (“it’s new, it must be vanguard!”), and even, in self-deprecating fashion, skewers its own Corso-like rejection of things like stability and the intimacy of marriage. At the very least, the celebration of permanent union and the progressive, iconoclastic mandate of the avant-garde are seen as strange bedfellows.

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 113 At the poem’s center is the figure of the poet acting as a bugle, alerting listeners to the lovers’ act of union; radiating out from the central figures is the network of relations that make up the community, the coterie, to which they all belong. In its Goodman-inspired effort to appeal to and create an intimate community via an occasional poem, the piece is certainly a powerful example of O’Hara’s poetics of coterie and sociability (traced by critics like Shaw, Kane, Ward, and Hazel Smith), as can be seen in its deliberate insistence on a “we” that jointly holds certain memories, references, and even opinions (“we don’t really love ideas, do we?”). In O’Hara’s piece, poetry itself is “used to establish community,” as he weaves in a litany of insider allusions to theaters, bars, and diners where their shared personal experiences have occurred (Kane, All, 178). At the same time, the presence of an independent, isolated self in the midst of friendship and communion tears at the poem. The “we” remains in tension with the trumpeting “I” of the poem’s speaker—as Geoff Ward notes, the poem features an “assertion of group-spirit” and an “assertion of self-presence under cover of that camaraderie” (Statutes, 63). Always quick to consider how his poetry differs or relates to that written by others in this community of friends, O’Hara alludes to two friends who are not at the party—John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Built into the poem is a consideration of how they might have written this piece that includes a touch of critique: I think of our friends who are not here, of John and the nuptial quality of his verses (he is always marrying the whole world) . . .. if Kenneth were writing this he would point out how art has changed women and women have changed art and men, but men haven’t changed women much but ideas are obscure and nothing should be obscure tonight

While two of his closest friends and competitors are off doing exciting things in Europe, O’Hara is here in what he portrays as the city of ennui, proud at least to be writing this poem his way. Alan Feldman points out that “while both of his friends would have written in more general terms about the whole world or about men and women, O’Hara’s more modest approach is to write about the particular occasion, and his own personal situation: for him ‘ideas are obscure and nothing should be obscure tonight’” (Frank, 125). As we will see, the tension that Feldman alludes to here in passing—between Ashbery’s more philosophical and generalizing poetry (“marrying the whole world”) and O’Hara’s brand of more personal, more particularized poetics—is a major factor that helps shape the friendship between the two poets and the individual aesthetics they each develop. As he often does, here O’Hara typically defines himself and his poem against the mode and content of his friends’ poetry. In effect, the poem becomes less a celebration or shoring up of coterie, and more of what Bourdieu would see as a posi-

114 Beautiful Enemies tion-taking act, a gesture of demarcation by a competitive poet concerned with asserting his difference, within a crowded literary field, as well as within a crowded loft full of literary and artistic peers for whom he performs the poem. That is, the poem does a good deal of social, as well as literary, work. O’Hara also explicitly addresses the connection between poetry, even poetic form, and friendship itself: “This poem goes on too long because our friendship has been long, long / for this life and these times, long as art is long and un- / interruptable, / and I would make it as long as I hope our friendship lasts if I could / make poems that long.” Beneath the affection in this statement is the lurking recognition that to carry on a poem, or a friendship, indefinitely is impossible—a fear exacerbated when we glance and see this poem comes to an end at the top of the next page. This fact reinforces the sense that this marriage, and time, may hasten the chill already settling over his friendship with Freilicher. “I hope there will be more / more drives to Bear Mountain and searches for hamburgers,” O’Hara writes as he recounts their shared adventures, but the fact that he must hope signals doubt that this will indeed be so.25 Still clinging to the desire of the pragmatist or avant-garde artist to go on changing but fearing its results, he says, “Let’s advance and change everything, but leave these little oases in case the heart gets thirsty en route.” This poem itself, he hopes against hope, will become a small haven or stable point, like friendship itself, in the rush of events and changes to come. As much as the poem expresses the gains involved in such a joyous event, it counts the losses at the same time, a balance neatly conveyed in the line “you will live half the year in a house by the sea and half the year in a house in our arms” (266). How one reads this statement depends on whether the glass is seen as half-full or half-empty; either way, as Feldman notes, “this image of compromise . . . has to be accepted, as one must always accept the inevitabilities time brings” (Frank, 125). Bubbling up through all the contentment and cheerfulness, then, is a sense of the contingency of camaraderie, togetherness, and happiness that one must confront and accept: we peer into the future and see you happy and hope it is a sign that we will be happy too, something to cling to, happiness the least and best of human attainments (CP, 267)

This ending looks forward to an uncertain, contingent future with a characteristically Jamesian, affirmative skepticism. Envious of his friend’s potential happiness and anxious about his own melancholy, troubled by her commitment to something as stable as marriage while he continues to drift, O’Hara still is willing to affirm the possibility that, as he wrote in his college journal, “something wonderful may happen” (EW, 109). He sees this potential fulfillment as a kind of rescue line “to cling to” even though it remains indefinitely deferred.

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 115 “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” exhibits the combination of geniality and solitariness, the “heart breaking” quality that David Shapiro finds in O’Hara’s poems about friendship (“Poet,” 226). This mixture surely drives the remarkable string of “social poems” that O’Hara wrote in 1959–1960, the period Bill Berkson has called the “annus mirabilis of his poetry.” (From the summer of 1959 through 1960, O’Hara enjoyed a frenzied, creative stretch in which he composed such major works as “Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” “The Day Lady Died,” “Rhapsody,” “Joe’s Jacket,” “Personal Poem,” “Naphtha,” “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun),” “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!),” “In Favor of One’s Time” and “Les Luths,” and some of his most important pieces of prose: “Personism: A Manifesto,” “About Zhivago and His Poems,” and “Statement for The New American Poetry” (Gooch, City, 337). During this period, O’Hara’s crowded personal life reached a fever pitch as he fell in love, struggled with old, complex friendships, delighted in companionship, watched the avantgarde poetry world gelling into something called “The New American Poetry,” longed for independence, and fought off crises of belief, anxiety, and desperation. The intoxicating brew of poetry and friendship, art, individualism, love, and avantgarde community so crucial to O’Hara’s creativity came to a frothy head and led to this particularly fruitful moment in his career. As O’Hara describes it in one poem that August, he found himself in the midst of an unusually unstable time of change and transition, “with the stream of events / going so fast and the movingly / alternating with the amusingly” (“Post the Lake Poets Ballad,” CP, 336–337). The intersection of his relationships with his poetry itself—the idea of an interpersonal poetics of friendship that would allow the poet to write about, into, between, and off of his closest relationships—was very much on O’Hara’s mind during these days, as we saw earlier in examining the prominent role O’Hara gave to friendship and love in “Personism,” which he composed on September 3, 1959. One intriguing but little-known dialogic poem can actually be seen as a kind of seed, or dress rehearsal, for the essay that O’Hara would soon write. “Poem (The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobbie-soxer’s ankles),” written just two weeks earlier on August 13, centers on a phone call between friends, previewing the poetry-as-phone-call trope of the mock manifesto (CP, 331–332). The poem finds O’Hara making a desperate call to his friend Kenneth Koch at a moment of crisis. He begins by sketching the confines of an antiseptic office, presumably his own workspace at the Museum of Modern Art, as if he were looking up, down, and around at his environment, which becomes a figure for containment: The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles the white paint the green leaves in an old champagne bottle and the formica shelves going up in the office and the formica desk-tops over the white floor what kind of an office is this anyway

116 Beautiful Enemies He seems unhappily stuck in this space of buzzing artificial lights, with the repetition of “white” and “formica” emphasizing the sterility and unnatural chill of the place. Instead of feeling exuberant and energized, O’Hara appears overwhelmed by events, by a desperate sense of being out of control and overextended, a mood reinforced by the punctuation-less rush. Reeling, he turns to this particular friendship for support: I am so nervous about my life the little of it I can get ahold of so I call up Kenneth in Southampton and presto he is leaning on the shelf in the kitchen three hours away. . . Kenneth you are really the backbone of a tremendous poetry nervous system which keeps sending messages along the wireless luxuriance of distraught experiences and hysterical desires so to keep things humming and have nothing go off the trackless tracks

The poem is driven by the possibilities of connection between self and other— underscored by the parallel images of shelves, first in the office on Fifty-Third Street, second in Kenneth’s Southampton kitchen, as if one continuous shelf joined the two friends. The speaker seems pleasantly amazed at how the instantaneous nature of modern communication affects our relationships, affects intimacy itself—that one can pick up a phone and, “presto,” hear a dear friend’s voice in one’s ear. He also seems to find sustenance in the fact that the poem is “between two persons instead of two pages,” that it can be part of a “tremendous poetry nervous system” that relays messages back and forth (CP, 499, 331). Whether this system, of which Koch is the backbone, is a metaphor for their intimate community of poets or for O’Hara’s own poetry, Koch’s friendship acts as a soothing and even inspiring force. Indeed, it literally inspires the poem itself. At the same time, this is a friendship kept vital—and “nervous”—because of the gap, because of the healthy distance that the phone call, and the poem, are motivated by and compensate for. In an early poem that reflects directly on his group of friends, “Day and Night in 1952,” O’Hara had explicitly linked this idea of distance (or, as we saw earlier, embracing people with “the appropriate sense of space”) to his friendship with Koch: “Kenneth continually goes away and by this device is able to remain intensely friendly if not actually intimate” (CP, 94).26 In “Poem (The fluorescent tubing . . .),” O’Hara again seems burdened by the very flexibility and mutability that readers so often say he celebrates. In order to be the tireless supporter and deeply concerned friend so many have testified he was, O’Hara runs the risk of sacrificing the coherence, or at least the comforting illusion of coherence, in his own sense of self. Reflecting more broadly on the problem of friendship and its discontents, the poem records this crisis and its potential resolution:

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 117 and once more you have balanced me precariously on the wilderness wish of wanting to be everything to everybody everywhere

Trying to be available to his legions of friends and companions, to be all things to all people, leads O’Hara to the brink of an utter dissolution of self. Because of his friend’s steadying hand (which “precariously” balances him, ironically, upon multiplicity again), he feels reinvigorated. He is willing once again to attempt this impossible, “wilderness” goal—of being multiple, changeable, and available to sociality’s extreme demands while trying somehow to remain sane. The poem ends with a sign of connection and strained acceptance; O’Hara offers a touching detail that aptly evokes the small gestures which define a friendship, as he recognizes the sound of Koch’s glasses scraping the phone and senses his friend’s presence despite the physical distance: “and the phone clicks as your glasses bump the receiver / to say we are in America and it is all right not to be elsewhere.” There is a willful effort to accept, for the moment, one’s lot and one’s place, to leave off dreaming of dramatic changes and foreign places, such as the Paris where Ashbery lives, or the Africa mentioned a couple of lines above. In contrast to a poem written six days earlier, “Adieu to Norman,” where the speaker wistfully thinks of Rue Frémicourt and the Seine, here O’Hara tries to convince himself that “it is all right not to be elsewhere,” that he can be content with his provinciality here in America. There is also a suggestion that America, implicitly, is a site of interconnection and democratic fellowship, manifested in the bond he maintains with Kenneth. Whether he succeeds in this effort of acceptance is left as open as the period-less poem itself. But it is clear that friendship and the poetry messages that flow along its “wireless luxuriance” are able to assuage the poet’s desperation. It can also inspire more poetry to be written, can “keep things humming.”27 Without such interconnection, everything might rush off the “trackless tracks” into chaos. In this way, this short poem both asserts and acts out a poetics of friendship, founded on the interplay between the alienated self and companionship. Three days before he wrote “Poem (The fluorescent tubing . . .),” O’Hara composed one of his richest poems, “Joe’s Jacket,” which also delves into the possibilities of stability and friendship in a contingent world. Written 10 August 1959, right in the middle of this hectic period of O’Hara’s life, “Joe’s Jacket” is a dense, whirling poem that chronicles a dramatic journey to the brink and back that is no less powerful for the plain everydayness of its “story”: a train ride to the Hamptons with a friend (“Jap,” aka Jasper Johns) and a date (Vincent Warren), the arrival at the station where he is greeted by another friend (Koch) who hosts a dinner at his home, followed by a large drunken party, the desperate depression of the follow-

118 Beautiful Enemies ing morning, the return to New York, a late-night conversation with his roommate Joe, and then the departure for work on Monday morning.28 Packed with detail and spun out in long overflowing lines devoid of any periods, and thus lacking in moments of rest, the poem feels, as Perloff has noted, like “the whole story is told as if in one long breath”; surely in this sense, it is an archetypal document of the 1950s culture of “deliberate speed” and frenetic movement (O’Hara, 148; Lhamon, Deliberate). Along with excitement, the poem also conveys an experience of disorienting emotional or experiential enjambment, if you will, mirrored by the non-end-stopped, enjambed lines: typically, O’Hara weighs the psychic fallout from all that restless motion. Perloff is right that as readers “we cannot really stop until the whirlwind weekend is over,” although I would add that in the end, the poem never really does stop, as it pushes off into an uncertain future (O’Hara, 148). While “Entraining” to the Hamptons, the speaker sees “life as a penetrable landscape lit from above / like it was in my Barbizonian kiddy days when automobiles / were owned by the same people for years” (CP, 329). Feeling as if there is a single source of light coming from above (with intended overtones of divinity), he senses a coherence and order that reminds him of both prelapsarian childhood simplicity and the nineteenth-century realist paintings of the Barbizon school. However, this rather narrow, monistic vision, with its false, if comforting, realism is shattered by the fall into the modern world of contingency and multiplicity (“no central figure me”). In the second stanza, O’Hara refers to “the disgathering light” of the large party he attends, which counters the “lit from above” landscape of the opening. The nonce word “disgathering” also suggests the centrifugal force that works against communion, that pushes individuals away from each other, from centers and gatherings. The combination of party and “disgathering” neatly emphasizes the central O’Hara tension between group and self.The third stanza is the poem’s crux—the morning after the alcohol- and anxiety-filled party, O’Hara wakes up alone and in despair: an enormous window morning and the wind, the beautiful desperation of a tree fighting off strangulation, and my bed has an ugly calm I reach to the D. H. Lawrence on the floor and read “The Ship of Death” I lie back again and slowly begin to drift and then to sink a somnolent envy of inertia makes me rise naked and go to the window (330)

Looking out, O’Hara uncharacteristically notices a metaphor for his condition in the natural world, as he sees “the beautiful desperation of a tree / fighting off strangulation.” Though he is not the type of poet to belabor the symbolism or to fashion a whole poem from such an objective correlative, O’Hara alludes to it in passing, and with this suggestion of a battle for survival against containment (“strangulation”), O’Hara raises the stakes of his weekend-in-the-Hamp-

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 119 tons poem. Trying to remain free and mobile, the self fights against forces, such as the jacket of the final stanza, or the orderly light of “Barbizonian kiddy days,” that would stabilize and, ultimately, strangle it. It is no offhand detail that O’Hara next reads this particular D. H. Lawrence poem; as an important intertextual allusion, it deserves a closer look than it has been given, since it forces us to see “Joe’s Jacket” as a poem that, like “The Ship of Death,” unflinchingly faces the possibility of extinction, despair, and oblivion. O’Hara’s poem is actually a complex and ironic revision of the earlier poem, and it substitutes uncertainty and dynamism—in a word, pragmatism—for the predecessor’s certitude, mysticism, and romanticism. In “The Ship of Death,” written just months before he died, Lawrence bids adieu to life, and to his own sense of “self,” in order to accept death’s inevitable approach: And it is time to go, to bid farewell to one’s self, and find an exit from the fallen self . . . Have you built your ship of death, O have you? O build your ship of death, for you will need it. . . . you must take the longest journey, to oblivion. And die the death, the long and painful death that lies between the old self and the new. (Ellman and O’Clair, Norton, 372)

In his own moment of angst, O’Hara literally reaches for and picks up Lawrence’s poem, a soothing valediction to life and an expression of faith in some kind of rebirth. It is worth noting that three years earlier, in 1956, O’Hara had referred to this poem’s palliative qualities in a letter to his friend John Wieners: “I took your tip on Lawrence and read Aaron’s Rod and am now in Kangaroo.Yes, he is marvellous. I used to have a lot of his poems but I can’t find them now in this pig-sty and am dying to read The Ship of Death and get cheered up” (qtd. Berkson and LeSueur, Homage, 65). Lawrence’s fear of and victory over death and his evocation of an “old self ” giving way to the “new” clearly underlie “Joe’s Jacket,” but O’Hara responds to and critiques, rather than follows, Lawrence. Instead of acquiescing to a journey to oblivion, O’Hara stubbornly resists it. Although after reading “The Ship of Death” he does “begin slowly to drift and then to sink,” the momentum toward extinction is halted. “[A] somnolent envy of inertia makes me rise,” he explains. The phrase is intriguingly ambiguous. Since the very word “inertia,” in its two contradictory meanings, yokes together stasis and motion, it dovetails with O’Hara’s intellectual obsessions. Is this sleepy, “somnolent envy” a longing for stasis, an envy of the tendency for objects at

120 Beautiful Enemies rest to stay at rest? Does he long for the peace of Lawrence’s oblivion, like Keats envying the nightingale’s inhuman serenity? Or is he jealous of the tendency for objects in motion to stay in motion, yearning for renewed movement and vitality to counter the “ugly calm” of his melancholy? Presumably the latter, since it does make him rise and go to the window, though the other possibility lurks here, buried within the doubleness of the word “inertia”: a paradox perhaps Emerson or Derrida would enjoy. In any event, he does “not drift away” and does “not die,” for as he says later, his bed “declined to become a ship.” He overtly rejects Lawrence’s transcendent boat, which carries the soul into death and back to life in a mystical resurrection. (In a later poem, O’Hara impatiently lashes out against the use of such nautical imagery—his own included (see “To the Harbormaster): “I’m so damned literary. . . . what is all this vessel shit anyway”) (CP, 429). Instead, O’Hara remains firmly tied to the recalcitrant here and now, where a bed continues to be a mere bed, a place where one wakes up in the morning with a hangover, and not a poetic carrier to another world. He stays enmeshed in the nitty-gritty specifics of friendship and human creativity. Rising, he encounters a quirky moment of mystery and friendship that resuscitates him: a somnolent envy of inertia makes me rise naked and go to the window where the car horn mysteriously starts to honk, no one is there and Kenneth comes out and stops it in the soft green lightless stare and we are soon in the Paris of Kenneth’s libretto, I did not drift away I did not die I am there with Haussmann and the rue de Rivoli and the spirits of beauty, art and progress, pertinent and mobile in their worldly way, and musical and strange the sun comes out

This scene of rebirth and dawn is ironically nonmystical and anti-transcendent. Rather than awakening to an angelic voice reaching out of the clouds, speaking of redemption, he hears a horn beeping in an empty car (Feldman, Frank, 110). There is literally no ghost in the machine—“no one is there.” Then, upon hearing his friend Kenneth’s exciting new work, O’Hara feels a jolt of inspiration and fortitude from the two sources most important to him: friendship and art. Listening to Kenneth read from his libretto, the earlier despair is (at least temporarily) averted (“I did not drift / away I did not die I am there”), and through his friend’s writing, he is transported to a place where he can believe again in “beauty, art, and progress, pertinent and mobile.” It is no accident that the place arrived at is Paris, as this city, where O’Hara had visited Ashbery the year before, recurs in so many poems of this period as a symbol for creativity and possibility, for where the despairing self most decidedly is not. It is also no accident that in the poem, it is a friend’s writing that reignites O’Hara’s will to live and to create. As we have seen, O’Hara’s creativity is absolutely dependent on the provocation of his friends’ work, the give-and-take

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 121 dynamic between the art of his friends and contemporaries and his own. Here, in the wake of, or perhaps because of, Koch’s “musical and strange” words, a new day breaks. But the poem does not rest with this dawning; Perloff rightly observes that “the beauty of ‘Joe’s Jacket’ is that the poem refuses to end on this high Romantic note” of sunrise and dispelled anxiety, but instead goes on to include the less celebratory details of the weekend’s ending and aftermath (O’Hara, 151).29 O’Hara’s journey to the brink is followed by a return. Although the trajectories of the poems are parallel, O’Hara’s return is quite unlike this heavily spiritualized homecoming in Lawrence: Ah, wait, wait, for there’s the dawn, the cruel dawn of coming back to life out of oblivion. . . . And the little ship wings home, faltering and lapsing on the pink flood, and the frail soul steps out, into her house again filling the heart with peace. (Ellman and O’Clair, Norton, 374)

In contrast, O’Hara writes of his parallel car ride back to Manhattan, stepping into his apartment again, in language much more empirically grounded, more concerned with the self in the grip of temporality: returning by car the forceful histories of myself and Vincent loom like the city hour after hour closer and closer to the future I am here and the night is heavy though not warm, Joe is still up and we talk only of the immediate present and its indiscriminately hitched-to past the feeling of life and incident pouring over the sleeping city which seems to be bathed in an unobtrusive light which lends things coherence and an absolute, for just that time as four o’clock goes by (CP, 330)

While returning to New York, O’Hara feels caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of temporal existence—the past’s forceful pressure (including the long shadow of the self ’s “histories,” his friendships and former loves) and the contingent future’s tug. Earlier, he said, “I am there” to evoke the feeling of transport and magic brought on by friendship and poetry, but now, since he knows one can never stay “there” for long, he says, “I am here,” in the thick of life’s dynamic, unfolding happening. Back in his apartment, he speaks with his roommate and close friend Joe LeSueur “only of the immediate present and its indiscriminately hitched-to past” and finds such a focus temporarily relieving. This reference to “the immediate present,” and further, the poem’s effort to plunge into the ongoing moment, are signs that O’Hara is again drawing on Lawrence, who uses this exact phrase in his well-known preface to the American edition of New Poems, which was embraced as a foundational essay for the New American Poetry of the 1950s.30 In it, Lawrence rejects a poetry of “complete-

122 Beautiful Enemies ness,” “finality,” and “perfection,” which features “exquisite form” and “perfect symmetry” in favor of another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. . . . There is no plasmic finality, nothing crystal, or permanent. Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallization. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. Herein lies its transcendent loveliness. . . . Give me nothing fixed, set, static. Don’t give me the infinite or the eternal: nothing of infinity, nothing of eternity. Give me the still, white seething, the incandescence and the coldness of the incarnate moment: the moment, the quick of all change and hate and opposition: the moment, the immediate present, the Now. (Allen and Tallman, Poetics, 70–71)

This celebration of the present moment’s shapeless energy so resembles O’Hara’s lifelong embrace of dynamism and his skepticism of fixity, eternity, and finished products that it could stand as an epigraph to his Collected Poems. However, while the phrasing and the tenor of the passage are extremely Emersonian, Lawrence’s particular stance was probably more indebted to the visionary yawps of Whitman than the more pragmatist side of Emerson. Indeed, O’Hara invokes this Lawrence passage in order to respond to it in more grounded, pragmatist form. Presumably uncomfortable with the overtones of mysticism and ecstasy (such as finding “transcendent loveliness” in the rose’s flux) in Lawrence’s work, O’Hara responds to his predecessor by finding in the immediate present a mixture of terror and release, loss and hope, rather than cause to exult over the spiritual incandescence of the Now. Talking with his friend Joe deep into the night, O’Hara is at least momentarily liberated from the weight of the past and the unknowable future. He again feels a fleeting sense that things have been lent a “coherence and an absolute,” as at the poem’s start, but the fleeting “Now” only lasts “for just that time as four o’clock goes by.” Any sense of rest, finality, or order swiftly gives way to yet another day’s beginning, to the simple effort to move forward, since “the only thing to do is simply continue” (CP, 329). O’Hara, like William James, turns away from closed equations or a false sense of security and toward action, fluidity, and mutability. The cyclical nature of O’Hara’s poem mirrors the structure of Lawrence’s “Ship of Death,” with its voyage out and back, and its confident assertion that “the whole thing starts again” filling a heart with peace (Ellman and O’Clair, Norton, 374). But here the events are much more mundane and concrete, more active, and more ambivalent, less spiritual and transcendent: “and soon I am rising for the less than average day, I have coffee / I prepare calmly to face almost everything that will come up.”With a renewed commitment to improvisation and flexibility, O’Hara will go out into the world, ready, in pragmatist fashion, to adjust

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 123 to new situations, confront calamity, and keep moving (as Emerson says, to “bend forward, and to invent a new resource for every moment”) (S, 146). At the same time, an ironic sense of limitation, of diminished hopes and hard-nosed practicality marks these lines, as they refer to the “less than average” day (where one expects to hear “less than perfect day”) and to being able to cope with “almost everything that will come up,” where the helplessness inherent in that “almost” has a poignant kick. Heading back out into the world’s flux, O’Hara reaches for his friend’s jacket, just as he earlier found comfort and guidance in reaching for both Lawrence’s poem and Kenneth’s libretto: I borrow Joe’s seersucker jacket though he is still asleep I start out when I last borrowed it I was leaving there it was on my Spanish plaza back and hid my shoulders from San Marco’s pigeons was jostled on the Kurfürstendamm and sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental it is all enormity and life it has protected me and kept me here on many occasions as a symbol does when the heart is full and risks no speech a precaution I loathe as the pheasant loathes the season and is preserved it will not be need, it will be just what it is and just what happens

Setting out for a fresh day, O’Hara dons this special garment, which immediately reminds him of “the forceful histories of myself,” the old self that must now give way (in the Lawrence scheme) to a new self. As some commentators have pointed out, the jacket that O’Hara borrows from his friend is a metaphor for his friend’s love, and it acts simultaneously as a sign of protection he treasures and “a precaution” he hates (Perloff, O’Hara, 152). As long as O’Hara wears this coat, he is both preserved from harm and dangerously stifled. But O’Hara is not only ambivalent about the jacket’s role as a self-protecting shield; he is also uncomfortable because it is borrowed from a friend. Given the complex, paradoxical role of friendship in O’Hara’s work, this should not be overlooked. Not simply linked to Joe’s friendship, the jacket itself is also associated with the comforting intimacy of sitting “opposite Ashes” (Ashbery) in a European bar the previous year, and (less directly) to Kenneth Koch and his libretto which staved off misery earlier in the poem. Thus, Joe’s jacket stands, most broadly, for close friendship and its possible continuity, to the self ’s ongoing social connections, and to the mixed effects of borrowing warmth, protection, and creative inspiration from others. A more specific, perhaps less interesting case could be made that “Joe’s Jacket” simply captures a moment of transition in O’Hara’s personal life. The weekend that the poem chronicles marks O’Hara’s initial falling in love with Vincent Warren, who would quickly become the most important romantic partner of his lifetime. The appearance of this new boyfriend presumably caused tension with his roommate, Joe LeSueur, with whom he shared a long-term, very close, and occasionally ambiguous, less-than-Platonic friendship. The poem hints at the conflict

124 Beautiful Enemies between O’Hara’s bond with Joe and his newfound passion for Vincent, and the reaction of friends like Patsy Southgate who felt that “Frank was dumping Joe” and who had actually accosted O’Hara at the Hamptons party alluded to in stanza 2 (Gooch, City, 334). In that sense, the paradoxical nature of Joe’s coat should also be seen in the context of O’Hara’s embarkation into the exciting uncertainty of a new relationship and his deeply ambivalent feelings about the comforting yet stifling protection of Joe LeSueur’s friendship and love.31 But the poem takes off from these personal concerns and raises some sophisticated, even philosophical, questions: in a world of such flux and uncertainty, how does one reconcile the need for stability, for friendship and continuity with the demand for independence and continued movement? Can friendship protect us and inspire us to go on if it is as suffocating as it is steadying? What happens if my inspiration and preservation are borrowed from others rather than self-derived (as in “Poem [So many echoes in my head]”)? In many of the poems I have been discussing, O’Hara both longs for the fluidity and mobile freedom outside intimacy, and fears the drifting, the gut-wrenching free fall that would ensue. Friendship, like the jacket and Kenneth’s libretto, “has protected me and kept me here on / many occasions,” but it also limits the self ’s multiplicity. It has the frightening ability to cut one off from contact with the immediate present like a coat insulating the skin, and it threatens to become a habit, a routine. Thus his struggle to ward it off resembles the “beautiful desperation of a tree / fighting off strangulation.” The whole poem strains between order and flux, friendship and freedom, a tension that O’Hara finds wrenching. The jacket, then, as Perloff notes, can be considered “an ordering principle which the poet alternately needs and resents” (O’Hara, 152). In the end, O’Hara seems to embrace contingency, the incarnate, passing Now, turning aside from confinement and stability; he will not turn to friendship as a crutch (“it will not be need”), but will instead accept its vagaries, its ebbing and flowing. “It”—either friendship, or his poetry, or life itself—“will be just what it is and just what happens.” With its emphasis on the adjustment to new realities and on persevering despite limitation, isolation, and uncertainty, “Joe’s Jacket” is a poem squarely in the American pragmatist tradition. In Ward’s phrase, it is “one of the great poems of facing up to things” (173). One of the most important things the poet actually faces up to is the painful recognition that vital selfhood (and poetry) depends on abandonment, on what Cavell refers to as the imperative at the core of American thinking: “a walking away, as the new world is a leaving of an old, as following your genius is leaving or shunning something” (This New, 115). The difficult lesson is that one has to continue walking away, has to keep on traveling into the ephemeral immediate present, and this movement inevitably entails leaving things behind, casting things off, like Joe’s jacket and the friendship it symbolizes, or even one’s former selves.

Selfhood and Friendship in Frank O’Hara’s Poetry 125 However, this effort to keep turning away is deeply problematic on a variety of levels, ranging from the personal to the poetic, the psychological to the philosophical. As we have seen, O’Hara’s poems set out to dramatize his mixed feelings about friendship, poetic influence, and individualism. Erupting from the tug-of-war between the comforting yet stifling hold of friendship and the freeing, yet awful, solitude of independence, O’Hara’s poems will sing the praises of his friendships at one moment (celebrating “the lift of our experiences / together, which seem to me legendary”) and then, at another, forcefully turn away from the suffocation of what he calls “crowds of intimacies and no distance” (CP, 268, 296). So often he seems torn between what Emerson calls the “girding belt” of society and the terrifying loneliness of being “dissolved in liberty” (S, 89). For example, in “Poem en Forme de Saw,” O’Hara tries to escape the strangling clutches of such crowds by turning to a vision of a kind of pure self-reliance and autonomy—only to find it unsatisfying, and even an impossibility: I ducked out of sight behind the sawmill nobody saw me. . .. I wanted to be alone which is why I went to the mill in the first place now I am alone and hate it (CP, 428–429)

It is important to note that O’Hara does not exult in an idealized version of rugged self-reliance, that cliché so familiar from the ideology of American individualism. But nor does he revel in the blessed inspiration he’s found in a clique of likeminded friends (as the Beats often do). Instead, what O’Hara does is continually confront the contradictions, the loss and loneliness, that are inextricably bound up with radical American individualism, on the one hand, and the suffocation and loss of autonomy inherent in an ideal of democratic fellowship, on the other. In Agon, Harold Bloom argues that “no American feels free when she or he is not alone, and it may be the eloquent sorrow of American poetry that it must continue, in its best poems, to equate freedom with solitude” (272). O’Hara’s poems, his incessant probings of the problems of self and friendship, assess our contradictory condition: we are all rushing down the River Happy Times ducking poling bumping sinking and swimming and we arrive at the beach the chaff is sand alone as a tree bumping another tree in a storm that’s not really being alone, is it . . . (429)

Although the self may crave independence, it can’t help colliding with other selves, like two trees banging their limbs together in a fierce storm. As O’Hara

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admits, “that’s not really being alone, is it”—a situation that leaves true solitude looking pretty illusory. Which in some ways is just fine by O’Hara. “If,” as Peter Schjeldahl remarks, “other people, Sartre’s Hell, were O’Hara’s element and atmosphere” and “if other people’s art was his constant source of inspiration and delight,” the idea of absolute independence and isolation would have been particularly unfeasible for O’Hara (142). Is it ever even possible, he seems to wonder, to be truly alone, truly autonomous? O’Hara may have actually answered this question—and at the same time demolished both the myth of rugged American individualism and the dream of a nurturing, democratic union of friends—when he wrote in one of his plays: “To be independent—how ironic and how lovely! As if anyone could be! And if one were, immediately the others would arrive and tear you down, exploit you, rape you, and murder you. ‘Self-determination!’ What an odd slogan. One might as well have a slogan reading: ‘Impossible!’” (AN, 198–199). So much for the notion of the American poet as solitary genius; for O’Hara, a poet is only as alone as a tree bumping another tree in a storm. Conversely, one would be hard-pressed to find a darker vision of the communion of self and other than this one. Instead of being the hearty celebration of friendship and fostering of coterie many have made it out to be, O’Hara’s work is riven by conflict, doubt, and contradiction. As we have seen, his universe bundles together solitude and sociability, motion and stasis, in uneasy, unending tension. “Jetting” through an unstable world, he yearns for repose and certainty; presented with stability or rest, he worries about freezing and killing life’s vitality. Restless with friendship or wary of its effects, he longs to be alone; alone at last, he desperately craves companionship and its stimulation. In this way, O’Hara’s body of poetry stands as one of the best and most influential examples of how a poetics that uncomfortably yokes friendship and experimental individualism drives postwar American writing. By filling his moving poems with the philosophical and personal strains inherent in such a commitment to unsettling movement over stability, mutability over fixed identity, doubt over conviction, independence over communion, O’Hara’s poetry unforgettably articulates the thrilling, difficult, and even tragic dimensions of living and writing in the American grain.

4

GROWING UP WITH OUR BROTHERS ALL AROUND John Ashbery and the Interpersonal

L

ife is divided up / Between you and me, and among all the others out there,” John Ashbery writes in “Summer” (SP, 90). Even though his poems are filled with acute observations about how much “We need the tether / Of entering each other’s lives, eyes wide apart, crying,” critics have been reluctant to see Ashbery—unlike his friend Frank O’Hara—as a poet who actually contemplates the nature of human relationships (107). In the last chapter of his book Stevens and the Interpersonal, the critic and poet Mark Halliday has leveled perhaps the sharpest critique of what he deems “Ashbery’s lack of interest in relationships” (187 n. 71). Halliday’s study, which primarily accuses Wallace Stevens of deliberately evading any consideration of actual human relationships in his poetry, does concede that there are frequent glimpses of “interpersonal experience” in Ashbery’s work. However, “since nothing [to Ashbery] is really interesting except the flow of one’s consciousness,” Halliday argues, “other persons are valuable only as a rather bland stimulation” (155). Convinced that Ashbery is little more than a channeler of undifferentiated flux and randomness, Halliday contends that “interpersonal relations are not omitted from his omnivorous poetry; they are instead sterilized or reduced to harmlessness in the endless stew of inconsequentiality—no need to omit them, since they don’t finally matter” (163). So much for the claim Ashbery repeatedly makes across his oeuvre that we depend on connections with other people in order to exist at all. So much for the fact that one of his very earliest poems is titled “My Friends” and reflects on prob127

128 Beautiful Enemies lems of identity and conformity (“Release your identities, my friends, / Whiners, nosepickers, standers in queues”) or that his work, like O’Hara’s, frequently pits mobility against friendship, as in the poem “Litany,” where he writes “I have / No friends because I move too rapidly / From place to place” (As We Know, 23).1 In contrast to Halliday’s not atypical view, I will argue that Ashbery is actually a profound poet of friendship and intimacy who, like O’Hara (albeit in self-consciously divergent ways), is intensely preoccupied with the pathos and pleasures of human relationships from first to last. This chapter will suggest that Ashbery’s work offers a memorable response to inveterate, distinctly American questions surrounding individualism, ceaseless movement, and democratic fellowship.2 A reading such as Halliday’s fails to acknowledge Ashbery’s frequent insistence that human selves, however atomized, independent, and isolated, are inextricably bound to one another, wound within one another. In his most famous poem, nominally a “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery acknowledges that the influence of other people—particularly one’s friends and fellow writers, whose “light or dark speech” we absorb—is so powerful that it is impossible to locate an autonomous self apart from those with whom we interact: How many people came and stayed a certain time, Uttered light or dark speech that became part of you Like light behind windblown fog and sand, Filtered and influenced by it, until no part Remains that is surely you. (SP, 191)

It would be difficult to find a more succinct and apt statement in American poetry of the problem of influence and friendship for the self-reliant individual, of what pragmatists call the “social character of the self ” (R. Bernstein, “Pragmatism,” 387). Despite much commentary to the contrary, the self in Ashbery does not exist alone in the universe, is not blithely unconcerned about his relations to others, and does not reside on a plane of purely abstract, depersonalized, metaphysical speculation.3 Though Ashbery may not refer to other people in conventional autobiographical fashion or mention them by name (à la O’Hara), the self in his poems is thoroughly enmeshed with other people: lovers, friends, fellow artists, even countrymen. On the one hand, Ashbery is a quintessential Emersonian writer, who prides himself on eccentricity, freedom from the crowd, and aversion to conformity of any kind—whether it be conforming with his own prior works, great poets of the past, or his own coterie of New York School poets. On the other, he, like Emerson and the pragmatists, attests to the importance and inescapability of intersubjective, dialogic communication, and of our affiliations with various communities, friendships, and identities from which we draw power and inspiration. Ashbery, like O’Hara and Baraka, like Emerson and James before them, knows that, for better or worse, “all real individualism is social”

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 129 (Newfield, Emerson, 7). His poetry suggests, as the theoretical writings of Pierre Bourdieu have shown us, that literature should not be viewed simply as an affair of fetishized, isolated texts and authors, but as the product of complicated “social universes,” the issuance from a “field of competitive struggles” (Rules, xx, 232). But although he often stresses the tremendous value of friendship, love, and poetic community, Ashbery shares O’Hara’s fear of stagnation, his penchant for unimpeded mobility, and his wariness of how the collective imperils individual autonomy. Given these predilections, we should not be surprised to find that Ashbery’s poems, like O’Hara’s and Baraka’s, are born out of the thick of his personal relationships and take up friendship as a recurring topos, however obliquely. Indeed, in interviews, Ashbery acknowledges that “I write off of particular individuals,” “not about but off my feelings about various people who’d been very important to me in my life,” which certainly suggests that his relationships are of crucial importance to his writing—more so than for many poets (“An Interview,” 180; “An Interview in Warsaw,” 303). In this chapter, we will see that Ashbery’s poetry, like that of other postwar avant-garde American poets, is written “off of ” other people, in particular his comrades in poetry. Thus, his work, like O’Hara’s and Baraka’s, is thoroughly dialogic in conception and practice, ever aware of the dynamic fields—personal, institutional, cultural, literary—in which the self is situated. As we saw in looking at Ashbery’s critical writings in chapter 2, he is equally self-conscious about the problematic nature of the avant-garde, with its paradoxical elevation of both individual novelty and group solidarity. In fact, in his poems Ashbery repeatedly creates allegories (however slippery) of self, friendship, and community as a way of probing the problems of avant-garde community and the fate of the independent artist (himself) within them. His poems again and again play out generic narratives of career, self-consciously chronicling his own navigation of the literary field alongside and against his poetic contemporaries, looking back continually to the moment of early ferment when he and a sect of likeminded others (the then inchoate New York School) were united in experiment and marginality.4 Like Emerson, and like O’Hara, Ashbery is obsessed with kinetic motion and its paradoxical dance with stasis. In a quieter, more philosophically profound way Ashbery is as much a product of the 1950s avant-garde cult of movement as was Jack Kerouac. These writers are invigorated by the oscillation between motion and repose, and are particularly drawn toward paradoxes and oxymorons that impossibly yoke together movement and stasis, like Emerson’s reference to “volitant stabilities” or Ashbery’s fondness for the image of the “houseboat” (EL, 696). (When asked about the peculiar vessel named in the title of his 1977 collection, Houseboat Days, John Ashbery replied that he was attracted to “the idea of being on the move and being stationary in one’s home—which is sort of what life is like” (“John Ashbery, An Interview by Ross Labrie,” 33).5 On the one hand, Ashbery

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feels that “standing still means death,” as he puts it at the end of the poem “The Bungalows”—a notion extended in his metaphoric vocabulary to the idea that interpersonal communion (friendship, for one thing) always runs the risk of ossifying, freezing into fixity, and therefore is incompatible with the self ’s baleful lifeblood: incessant motion. However, paradoxically enough, Ashbery immediately adds: “But sometimes standing still is also life” (SP, 116).6 Ashbery consistently relies on such tropes of motion and stasis to imagine the problem of the protean self and its inevitable entanglement in webs of friendship and community. In her own comparison of Ashbery and Wallace Stevens, Lynn Keller comes to a conclusion different from Mark Halliday’s, one rather rare in Ashbery criticism: For Ashbery, far more than for Stevens, human love and sexuality, the tremendous value and the terrible difficulty of human contact, are recurrent themes. His own love affairs and friendships can frequently be glimpsed in his poetry, but the glimpses are brief, the situations immediately generalized into larger abstractions. (40)

Keller is right that moments in Ashbery’s poetry, such as the passage in “Fragment” where “two people could / Collide in this dusk,” suggest “that human contact, though rare and fleeting, is nonetheless possible” (MSO, 305; Keller, ReMaking, 40). As Geoff Ward has noted in a discussion of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery is very much concerned with “the fated nature of encounter” (Statutes, 160). But “any moment of encounter half-swerves away from what it meets,”Ward observes. “It is the almost musical pathos, the self-renewing dance of this meeting only to miss, that the poem charts” (160). As we will see, such half-thwarted interpersonal encounters drive Ashbery’s poetry forward: the engine behind his poems runs on the dialectical movement back and forth between the insularity of the self and its interconnections with others. For instance, take the end of “A Wave,” where he writes:“And so each of us has to remain alone, conscious of each other / Until the day when war absolves us of our differences” (SP, 343). Or the moment in “Lithuanian Dance Band,” where Ashbery poignantly explores the balancing act of solitude and fraternity so central to Emersonian thought: “Yet we are alone too and that’s sad isn’t it / Yet you are meant to be alone at least part of the time / You must be in order to work and yet it always seems so unnatural / As though seeing people were intrinsic to life which it just might be” (SPT, 53). Neither the meaning and import of Ashbery’s dedication to this balancing act nor its connection to the important philosophical and cultural contexts from which it derives have been taken up by Ashbery criticism. Since Ashbery’s poems so frequently chronicle nearly impossible, always transient collisions between the ever-moving self and various others, his reflections on the pleasures and pains of the interpersonal deserve to be considered as more than

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 131 mere stepping-stones to “larger abstractions.” What do such gestures reveal about Ashbery’s conception of friendship and its role in poetry, his attitudes toward the influence of his fellow poets, and his response to American individualism? How do they relate to his actual relationships with people in his life, to the community of poets he emerged from? Instead of assuming dismissively, as does Halliday, that “interpersonal relations are like all other ‘circumstance’ for Ashbery, more colorful shiftings of the kaleidoscope,” since “all subjects wash away from him in a jiffy,” we should recognize and analyze how often and how insistently Ashbery probes these issues (Stevens, 155). Indeed, one of the strengths of Ashbery’s poetry is the way it illuminates the difficult paradoxes of the interpersonal, hard truths about the possibilities of human contact.

facing the pragmatic and kinetic future: “the system” To fully understand how Ashbery represents the self and the interpersonal in his poetry, it will be helpful to examine his cultivation of a poetics that, like pragmatism, focuses on flux and contingency and their effects on identity and consciousness. As Ashbery once explained to an interviewer, in his view human beings are “never allowed to relax or rest. We’re constantly coping with a situation that’s in a state of flux.” For Ashbery, experience is characterized by “a looking ahead to what the next situation is going to be, a process, a flux” (“Imminence,” 71). When asked to account for his notoriously slippery, ambiguous poetry, Ashbery has repeatedly stressed this distinctive way of looking at things, an outlook that is implicit in nearly everything he has written over the past 45 years. “Things are in a continual state of motion and evolution,” he has explained, “and if we come to a point where we say, with certitude, right here, this is the end of the universe, then of course we must deal with everything that goes on after that, whereas ambiguity seems to take further developments into account” (“Art of Poetry,” 46). Ashbery’s work has of course been discussed from a variety of illuminating angles. He has frequently been viewed as a curious American twist on French avant-garde poetry from Rimbaud to the surrealists, as a verbal counterpart to Abstract Expressionist painting, or, in Harold Bloom’s estimation, an inheritor of the visionary tradition of Romantic poetry from Wordsworth and Whitman to Stevens. He has also been read as a poetic embodiment of post-structuralist theory, or as perhaps the contemporary poet of indeterminacy, flux, and randomness—an exemplary poet of our postmodernist age of proliferating media and pop culture white noise, for better or worse. While these are all valuable frameworks in which to consider his work, Ashbery’s worldview—his belief in the world’s dynamic instability and his emphasis on looking forward to constantly changing, uncertain situations with which one must cope, his embrace of motion and

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skepticism—closely, even uncannily, resembles ideas at the core of the Emersonian pragmatist tradition. A century earlier, Emerson’s writings everywhere evoke the state of flux that Ashbery claims we are immersed in, using very similar images and rhetoric: “Nothing solid is secure; every thing tilts and rocks,” he writes in “The Method of Nature”; in his journal, he notes that “Nature ever flows; stands never still. Motion or change is her mode of existence” (EL, 116; S, 146). The wariness that Ashbery articulates in the interview above of stating with certitude that any definite end or conclusion has been reached also distinctly recalls Emerson: “We can point nowhere to anything final,” Emerson writes, “but tendency appears on all hands: planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming somewhat else; is in rapid metamorphosis” (EL, 121). To view the universe as unfinished and unfinishable, as Ashbery does in the statement quoted above, is also to echo William James and his characteristic stance. James stresses that “only ‘reason’ deals with closed equations; nature is but a name for excess; every point in her opens out and runs into the more” (Writings, 295). Like O’Hara’s work, Ashbery’s poetry exhibits the kind of “American restlessness” and “energy” that he himself refers to in an essay about American painting (RS, 88). This outlook has led one early critic, David Shapiro, to hail him as “the great pluralist” (Ashbery, 11). However, despite his poetry being saturated with this rhetoric of mobility that is so distinctly Emersonian and pragmatist in tenor, and despite his own oblique hints about his pragmatist sensibility, virtually no attention has been paid to the significant and revealing connections between Ashbery’s poetry and the influential homegrown philosophy of pluralism and skepticism.7 One of the critical commonplaces about Ashbery is that his poetry is first and foremost an ongoing meditation on temporal existence, on our experience of a fleeting world of perpetual change. Helen Vendler’s comments in this regard are typical and useful: Life for Ashbery, as everyone has noticed, is motion. We are on boats, on rivers, on trains. Each instant is seen “for the first and last time”; each moment is precious and vanishing, and consequently every poem is unique, recording a unique interval of consciousness.This is a consoling aesthetic, since by its standards every utterance is privileged as a nonce affair; it is also mournful, since it considers art as fleeting as life. (“Understanding,” 184–185)

This is certainly an accurate estimation of the poetry. However, as was the case with O’Hara, the pervasive concern with movement and transience in Ashbery’s work that Vendler says “everyone has noticed” has not yet been considered in its most relevant and illuminating philosophical, intellectual, historical, or literary contexts, nor has its influence on his conceptions of subjectivity and community been assessed.

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 133 Ashbery should be seen as a vigorous pluralist in the American grain, who wards off the pull of monism and absolutism at every step. He is a pragmatist, tolerant of infinitely multiple perspectives, who sees life as an often baffling struggle with randomness and contingency, where human experience consists of limited and always provisional attempts to cope with and adjust to changing circumstances. Ashbery is also what James would call a radical empiricist, who believes that our art and our language must attempt to invent a more inclusive way of attending to what he himself calls (in an extremely James-like phrase) “the experience of experience” (“Experience of Experience,” 245). He continually calls for a greater adherence to all of what goes on in living from moment to moment, to the often-overlooked relations between things and “the gaps between ideas,” rather than the dangerously exclusive attention to privileged moments, events, or concepts—what James calls the “substantives”—found in much traditional art and thought (Ashbery, “My Philosophy of Life,” Can You, 75; James, Writings, 38). Ashbery’s reliance on the elusive and inconclusive urges us to see what James calls the “fringe” that exceeds our conventional means of recording or understanding our lives, and his work attempts “the re-instatement of the vague to its proper place in our mental life” that James wished to “press on the attention” (James, Writings, 45). At the same time, Ashbery is a philosophical skeptic who refuses to accept overarching abstractions and explanations that would reduce the teeming, bewildering complexity of the world into fixed principles or easy solutions. He embraces doubt and, with seemingly infinite resources of Keatsian “negative capability,” stoically accepts the bewildering nature of experience with very little “irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats, Letters, 43). For Ashbery, it is doubt, rather than certainty or firmly held belief, that keeps things alive, unfixed, and in motion, whereas certainty leads only to boredom. Ashbery’s reliance on a battery of metaphors and images related to motion and fixity—variously deployed over many decades of writing—subtly reinforces and conveys these convictions. Because the apogee of Ashbery’s pragmatist poetics is Three Poems (1972), I want to jump ahead at this point to discuss a few key aspects of this very important work. A remarkable sequence, written mostly in prose, it stands as one of Ashbery’s major achievements and is the book he has repeatedly called his own favorite.8 Open-ended, rigorously indeterminate, and dense with ideas and allusions, the poems in this volume have been interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Ashbery’s labyrinthine poetic prose has been considered in relation to a number of precursors (some of which he himself has mentioned as being influential on this style), such as Raymond Roussel’s wildly protracted parenthetical sentences, Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomedros (the painter’s obscure experimental novel is one of Ashbery’s favorites), Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror, the seventeenth-century religious writer Thomas Traherne’s prose, and the endlessly qualified sentences found in later, Golden Bowl-era Henry James. But one of the closest analogues to, and influences on, the substance of Three Poems has not been considered, even

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though clues abound suggesting that this is an important context in which to view the sequence’s innovative form and content. Ashbery makes a number of references that seem to locate the book—intentionally, perhaps, and coyly—in a philosophical tradition of pluralism, pragmatism, and skepticism. For example, near the end of “The System,” Ashbery self-reflexively summarizes the turns his poem has taken by declaring that he had “begun by rejecting the idea of oneness in favor a plurality of experiences, in fact a plurality of different lives” (TP, 101).Thus, Ashbery, like William James, overtly rejects monism in favor of pluralism.9 Even the poem’s title recalls James’s famous definition of the pragmatist as one who “turns away from . . . fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.” Similarly, Ashbery’s decidedly anti-systematic poem “The System” declares in its first sentence, “The system was breaking down,” and seems most concerned with how you go on living once you have done what James suggests and turned your back on all closed systems (Writings, 379; TP, 53). At other moments, Ashbery refers to the importance of philosophical doubt or skepticism: at one point he admits that nothing—neither this poem, nor thinking, nor life—can ever stop moving because “you haven’t fully exorcised the demon of doubt that sets you in motion like a rocking horse that cannot stop rocking” (TP, 96). Here Ashbery explicitly connects two motifs—doubt and motion—that are two of the governing motifs of pragmatist poetics. And, as we will see, the dramatic last line of “The System,” refers directly to the “pragmatic and kinetic future,” as if Ashbery were deliberately hinting at the intellectual tradition behind this poem’s meditations (TP, 106). True to its pluralistic philosophical outlook and insistence on movement, virtually every statement in Three Poems is qualified, contradicted, reinforced, and altered by every other statement, creating a fluid, shifting panorama. Opening to any page in this book reveals the work’s oscillations. For example, in a single paragraph of “The System” on page 88 we find seven phrases that begin with a “but” or a “yet,” each comment turning against the previous, slipping away from any definitive remark (88–89). To read these poems is thus to be set afloat in an onrushing flood of words and revolving positions, a sea of prose that is everexpanding, ever-qualifying, never-resting—like Stevens’s undulating long poems, they offer the reader the “pleasures of merely circulating” (Collected, 149). This quality of course resembles other Ashbery poems, but without the boundaries of poetic form—breaks between stanzas, lines, and so on—to hem in the flow, Three Poems becomes a radical, innovative apex of pragmatist poetics.The book is a tour de force of ambiguity and equivocation, leaving utterly unresolved key paradoxes such as the relationship between individual parts and the whole, motion and stasis, self and other.This should not surprise us, because, as Ashbery told an interviewer, that was the point: “The work [Three Poems] is a series of contradictions, one after the other” (“An Interview in Warsaw,” 304).

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 135 “The New Spirit,” the first poem in Three Poems, takes up the problem of interpersonal relations in a world without foundations and resting places. Again and again, the poem depicts the churning movement that leads two people “toward and away from each other, farther than we expected” (TP, 23). In a passage that sums up the whole poem, Ashbery declares that it is part of growing up to accept this new projection forward, and therefore we are to travel abreast, twin riders dazzled and disintegrating under the kaleidoscopic performance of the night sky this time, we too projected sideways in advancing like waves pushed away from the keel of a ship, rejoining in this way the secret of the movement forward that made possible this full-circle absorption of the voyage and its brilliant phenomena. (TP, 24)

The vibrant notes sounded here—about what is gained and lost in the process of maturing, about the momentary closeness between two people and its constant disintegration, inevitably followed by another rejoining—are the leitmotifs of “The New Spirit” and much of Ashbery’s work generally. Each moment of interpersonal coalescence in Ashbery’s poem is necessarily followed by a reaffirmation of individuality. The poem’s rhythm of what it terms “fulfillment” and “dislocation” actually enacts the dialectical tension at the heart of this friendship and, perhaps, of any avant-garde community (TP, 25). Throughout the poem, it is the nature of “these things between people” (that is, relationships in general) that bothers the speaker (TP, 10). Echoing O’Hara’s question, “What is it that attracts one to one? Mystery?” Ashbery writes that “we never knew, never knew what joined us together. Perhaps only a congealing of closeness, deserving of no special notice” (CP, 267; TP, 10). Written “off of ” the most significant people in his life, Ashbery’s prose pieces in Three Poems portray a self journeying across an undulating world where friendship and solitude mysteriously meet and diverge.10 At the center of Three Poems is the book’s longest poem, “The System,” which the poet chose to place in full across forty pages at the heart of his 1985 Selected Poems. Here Ashbery’s focus is more narrowly trained on the self, rather than the interpersonal, as he experiments in evoking at length the “ebbing and flowing motion” of an individual consciousness, as it flows on and is swamped by the stream of life and time (TP, 112). Nearly every single page of “The System” is replete with images of movement, especially references to the act of moving forward contrasted with standing still—everything from the poem’s language and structure to its themes and its subject matter revolve around these intertwining tropes that Emerson calls the “the first and second secrets of nature: Motion and Rest” (EL, 547).11 Weighing the alternatives one faces when living in “the onrushing tide of time,” Ashbery’s poem is a vertiginous meditation on the queasiness that comes along with our recognition “of the moving world that is around us” (TP, 90, 109).

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As I suggested earlier, Ashbery, like O’Hara, celebrates the freedom and vitality inherent in movement but weighs its rather severe costs at the same time: “But there is a sickness built into this act of moving: it can never take place, only approach a buffer area where negotiations may be undertaken; in this way it prepares its own downfall while never quite beginning” (“The New Spirit,” TP, 31). This passage points to a central paradox in Ashbery’s treatment of motion and its “sickness”: we cannot help but move on at the exact same moment we can never really get anywhere. David Lehman gets at this conundrum when he observes that Ashbery’s work paradoxically chronicles an “unbegun journey to the unattainable place”; he points out that “the theme of travel coupled with the ironic afterthought that true motion is an impossibility, recurs with a haunting frequency throughout Ashbery’s career. . . . [W]e cannot stop, yet we never arrive” (“Shield,” 120–121). This key Ashberyan paradox underscores my larger point that Ashbery, along with O’Hara, considers the contradictions inherent in the postwar veneration of movement, rather than unequivocally embracing the exultant “go!” of the bohemian hipster. Like scientists examining the many ramifications of a certain postulate, these writers investigate all the philosophical and literary implications of taking kinetic movement as the basic principle of existence. Three Poems as a whole enacts just the sort of impossible pilgrimage Lehman describes: the poem positions itself at a time of change and renewal, a midlife crisis for an unidentified speaker who finds himself in “The middle of the journey, before the sands are reversed,” very much like Dante at the start of the Inferno, “in the middle of life’s journey in a dark wood” (TP, 4). At the same time, it takes place at a moment of cultural as well as personal upheaval, a turning point in which “the system was breaking down” (53). A poem very much of the late 1960s, “The System” was composed at a moment of radical change and instability, so the idea of revolution itself—in its many meanings, including the process of revolving, overturning existing orders, turning, radical change, and so on—makes up much of the terrain it covers. Awaking to an unstable world, the poet dwells on the indefinable fluctuations of the present (that blurry state that is always immediately becoming the past), as well as the present’s relationship to what has already and is about to occur. At the start of “The System,” Ashbery introduces the figure of a self-reliant poet, “one who has wandered alone past so many happenings and events” who “began to feel . . . the beginning of a hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life” (53). The present period of great uncertainty and imminent change, he tells us, follows an era in which a particular way of looking at the world had hardened or calcified—perhaps an allusion to the period Robert Lowell called the “tranquillized Fifties”—in which “things had endured this way for some time, so that it began to seem as though some permanent way of life had installed itself, a stability immune to the fluctuations of other eras” (60). Ashbery turns to those “enterprising but deluded young people”

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 137 who, in the 1960s, had suddenly begun to question the status quo, to see that the values and beliefs considered immutable were actually contingent, relative, and in need of being continually revised (61). While his half-mocking portrayal of these rebellious youths serves, in part, as a critique of the hippie movement thriving at the time and its excesses of naïve mysticism and idealism, it also celebrates the pragmatist and pluralistic attitude underlying such aggression against engrained conventions and habits—an attitude typical of the avant-garde milieu from which he emerged: They were correct in assuming that the whole question of behavior in life has to be rethought each second; that not a breath can be drawn nor a footstep taken without our being forced in some way to reassess the age-old problem of what we are to do here and how did we get here, taking into account our relations with those about us and with ourselves, and the ever-present issue of our eternal salvation, which looms larger at every moment—even when forgotten it seems to grow like the outline of a mountain as one approaches it. To be always conscious of these multiple facets is to incarnate a dimensionless organism like the wind’s, a living concern that can know no rest, by definition: it is restlessness. (61)

What an apt, if slightly windy, description of the pragmatist method. It is captured in the belief that we must reexamine our concepts, our understanding of our purpose and our past, our “relations with those about us,” at each turn, in each new situation, rather than settling into fixed propositions about life. No interpretation, answer, or relationship can be viewed as binding or permanent; to attempt to exist in the fluctuations of the present, a continual process of reimagining must occur. The passage resembles Ashbery’s Jamesian comment in a 1974 essay on the painter Esteban Vincente, in which he refers to “the moment-by-moment awareness that is life—testing, questioning but persisting” (RS, 206). “To be always conscious of these multiple facets” of our experience is to be a pluralist who refuses to see things from only one angle. Again equating skeptical pluralism with movement, Ashbery asserts that to live this way is to “know no rest,” since by definition, such a way of life “is restlessness.” Ashbery goes on to juxtapose those who had accepted such an unsettled state of being and saw the need for this kind of “eternal vigilance” with “those who chose to remain all day on the dung-heap, rending their hair and clothing and speaking of sackcloth and ashes” (TP, 61–62). Stuck on the trash pile of the past like Stevens’s “Man on the Dump,” these people are wildly grieving some loss; to depict them, Ashbery appropriates familiar biblical language: they tear their hair and clothes in sorrow, and speak of “sackcloth and ashes,” a phrase from Scripture that has also become a common saying (to refer to an act of mourning or penitence).12 To call on biblical allusion and cliché at this juncture is clever and fitting because it neatly underscores Ashbery’s point about those who dwell on yester-

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day’s dump and mourn the dead. In order to personalize this moment of grieving, and his critique of those who stand still and look backwards, Ashbery also puns on the affectionate nickname that Frank O’Hara, who had died less than five years before, had always called him: “Ashes.” (This particular echo, as well as the scene of mourning, take on even greater meaning at the poem’s climax.) Although he rejects this kind of clinging to the unrecoverable, the alternative is to move relentlessly onward, an option also seen as problematic if not futile: There was, again, no place to go, that is, no place that would not make a mockery of the place already left, casting all progress forward into the confusion of an eternally misapplied present. This was the stage to which reason and intuition working so well together had brought us, but it was scarcely their fault if now fear at the longest shadows of approaching darkness began to prompt thoughts of stopping somewhere for the night, as well as a serious doubt that any such place existed on the face of the earth. (64)

Here Ashbery admits that reason and intuition may have led us to realize the need for continual restlessness and the impossibility of absolute, final answers. However, such a recognition does not alleviate the fear of time and mortality, signified here by the clichéd yet still inevitable approach of darkness. Our fear of death forces us to think of resting, of “stopping somewhere for the night,” but like the speaker in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Ashbery realizes that he inevitably has “miles to go” before he sleeps. Despite the brief reverie about places to rest, we are left doubting that such a place can even exist (and indeed, there is no “rest for the mind,” O’Hara had warned in “Essay on Style”: “no such / things available”) (CP, 394). Once again Ashbery equates doubt with continued motion. Later in the poem, Ashbery argues that traditional philosophy, with its broad claims, metaphysical concerns, and categories, fails to aid us in living our lives. It cannot help us cope with the ever-changing circumstances of “the business of day-to-day living with all the tiresome mechanical problems that this implies”: “And it was just here that philosophy broke down completely and was of no use. How to deal with the new situations that arise each day in bunches or clusters, and which resist categorization to the point where any rational attempt to deal with them is doomed from the start?” (87). It is interesting that it is also “just here” that pragmatism enters; conventional philosophy’s failure to accommodate the irreducible variety and confusion of our lives leads William James to develop his experimental brand of philosophy with its emphasis on facts, action, perpetual uncertainty, and provisional results that can help us live our lives. Many have seen pragmatism as an attempt to do “philosophy without philosophy.” As Morris Dickstein has pointed out, James presents his pragmatism “in an inflammatory way as a foil to idealism, metaphysics, and popular notions about what philosophy is and what philosophers do”: “What made pragmatism so embattled in its origi-

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 139 nal form was also what made it strikingly American: its practical, situational, problem-solving emphasis” (Revival, 7). In critiquing philosophy’s inadequate response to the contingent nature of our real lives, Ashbery’s poem expresses an alternative vision, quite close to James’s pragmatism: one that is opposed to formulaic or programmatic proposals about existence. In interviews and in poems, Ashbery frequently seems amazed by the mixture of easiness and difficulty involved in simply surviving from one moment to the next in our chaotic, temporal world. Not only do we live with relentlessly passing time, contingency, and uncertainty, but it is extremely easy and effortless to move forward in life at the same time that it is so arduous and painful: “Just to live this way is impossibly difficult,” he writes in the “The System,” “but the strange thing is that no one seems to notice it; people sail along quite comfortably and actually seem to enjoy the way the year progresses, and they manage to fill its widening space with multiple activities which apparently mean a lot to them” (65). Because he has made extremely similar remarks in numerous interviews at different points in his career, I take this mixed attitude to be central to his outlook. For example, Ashbery tells Peter Stitt, “I am always impressed by how difficult and yet how easy it is to get from one moment to the next of one’s life” (“The Art of Poetry,” 48).13 With this general outlook, Ashbery takes up the challenge of pragmatism, or what Stanley Cavell calls the challenge of skepticism, with its reverent appreciation for the world’s unknowability. As the poem repeatedly points out, not everyone can accept the notion that experience is marked only by mutability and indeterminacy: “The few who want order in their lives and a sense of growing and progression toward a fixed end suffer terribly” (TP, 65). This chimes with William James’s explanation of the kind of temperament one needs to survive in a contingent world: “The pragmatism or pluralism which I defend has to fall back on a certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without assurances or guarantees,” and so it “is bound to disappoint many sick souls whom absolutism can console” (qtd. Rosenthal et al., Classical, vii, 42–43). In both James’s prose and Ashbery’s poem, it is those who crave a sense of order, a sense of direction—in a word, teleology—within the random swirl of time that are particularly doomed. Ashbery reserves his full attack for those people who trick themselves into believing that they have arrived at some secure haven through religious belief. Ashbery skewers their pretensions, their misguided faith: they believe “they have attained that plane of final realization which we were all striving for, that they have achieved a state of permanent grace. Hence the air of joyful resignation, the beatific upturned eyelids, the paralyzed stance of these castaways of the eternal voyage, who imagine they have reached the promised land when in reality the ship is sinking under them” (TP, 73–74). These faithful, perhaps fanatic believers fail to realize what Emerson tells us to recognize: that “this surface on which we now stand is not fixed, but sliding” (EL, 409). (Ashbery also levels a submerged dig at the mystification and hyperspiritual-

140 Beautiful Enemies ity of “Beat” aesthetics, hinted at in the reference to “beatific,” the word Kerouac associated with “beat”). Not least among the errors of these naifs is their willingness to join together in a collective movement and shared belief system that shields them from the difficult work of independent thinking and questioning. Drawing on the pragmatist idiom established in Emerson’s writings in “Circles,” “Experience,” and “Montaigne, or, The Skeptic,” Ashbery again links skepticism with ceaseless motion, and idealism (or absolutism, monism, or dogmatism) with stasis. If we keep “an open mind, we have all our mobility,” he claims, and he notes that we “are not in any danger, or so it seems, of freezing into the pious attitudes of those true spiritual bigots whose faces are turned toward eternity and who therefore can see nothing” (74–75). Ashbery’s linkage of having an open mind with mobility echoes Emerson’s conviction in his journals that “value of the skeptic is the resistance to premature conclusions” (Autumn 1845, S, 281). Even the believers Ashbery depicts have an uncomfortable, albeit repressed sense that their conclusions may be flawed or premature (75): Yet in their innermost minds they know too that all is not well; that if it were there would not be this rigidity, with the eye and mind focused on a nonexistent center, a fixed point, when the common sense of even an idiot would be enough to make him realize that nothing has stopped, that we and everything around us are moving forward continually, and that we are being modified constantly by the speed at which we travel and the regions through which we pass, so that merely to think of ourselves as having arrived at some final resting place is a contradiction of fundamental logic, since even the dullest of us knows enough to realize that he is ignorant of everything, including the basic issue of whether we are really moving at all or whether the concept of motion is something that can even be spoken of in connection with such ignorant beings as we, for whom the term ignorant is indeed perhaps an overstatement, implying as it does that something is known somewhere, whereas in reality we are not even sure of this: we in fact cannot aver with any degree of certainty that we are ignorant. (74)

Ashbery’s gargantuan sentence insists that there is no possibility of reaching a “final resting place” because “nothing has stopped, that we and everything around us are moving forward continually.” This closely resembles William James’s typical stance, such as when he claims that “there is no conclusion. What has concluded, that we might conclude in regard to it?” (“Suggestions of Mysticism,” qtd. Gavin, William, vi). Ashbery also cleverly enacts this recognition with the sentence’s own rolling, serpentine syntax. The fact that no “center” or “fixed point” can actually exist is, paradoxically enough, at the center of this sequence of poems; when asked “What is at the core of your Three Poems?” Ashbery responded “That’s a very hard question. Does anybody know what’s at the core of their work? I think probably looking for a core is the core” (“Experience of Experience,” 254). In his willingness to accept the universe’s chaotic jumble, he resembles Emerson’s skeptic, who

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 141 says, “Why pretend that life is so simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is?” (“Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” EL, 694). The passage just quoted above takes this fundamental pragmatist insight to its logical, if absurd, conclusion, claiming that we are so incapable of knowing anything with certainty that we cannot even say with any certitude that we are indeed ignorant. But to realize that all is uncertain and therefore in flux—recall that it is the unexorcised “demon of doubt” that sparks our incessant moving—does not mean that one ceases to yearn for periods of stillness: “The one thing you want is to pause so as to puzzle all this out, but that is impossible; you are moving much too quickly for your momentum to be halted” (86). Realizing that “life is motion,” in Stevens’s phrase, allows one to see a world freed from constraining or illusory foundations, but it also carries a sense of sadness, even illness. Ashbery hints at this predicament when he mentions that “the touching melancholy of your stare is the product not of self-pity but of a lucid attempt to find out just where you stand in the fast-moving stream of traffic that flows endlessly from horizon to horizon like a dark river” (92). At another point, he echoes the earlier remark that “there is a sickness built into this act of moving,” by observing that “the jolting and loss of gravity” that we experience in “the sickness of the present” “produce a permanent condition of nausea, always buzzing faintly at the blurred edge where life is hinged to the future and to the past” (31, 102–103). In such passages, Ashbery, like O’Hara, emphasizes the disorientation, the “sickness” or strain, that comes along with a vision of the ever-changing world’s plunging contingency and instability. This poem’s “unbegun journey” is inevitably circular, a quality expertly mirrored in the hypnotic and circuitous nature of Ashbery’s poetic prose and its persistent ambiguities. (The philosophical problem of motion’s ubiquity, the interplay of motion of rest, is treated as a disorientating situation of Alice in Wonderland proportions: “One must move very fast in order to stay in the same place, as the Red Queen said” [90]). A new journey is of course inevitable, and the final, affirmative paragraph of “The System” situates itself exactly in the kind of elusive “moment of transition from a past to a new state” that Emerson associated with power itself. Ashbery tells of a decisive departure from the old and turning toward the new: The allegory is ended, its coils absorbed into the past, and this afternoon is as wide as an ocean. It is the time we have now, and all our wasted time sinks into the sea and is swallowed up without a trace. The past is dust and ashes, and this incommensurably wide way leads to the pragmatic and kinetic future. (106)

This conclusion is as redolent with American motifs as Huck Finn’s lighting out for the territory ahead of the rest or Ishmael alone on the wide open sea after the Pequod has vanished into the water. In its refusal to be dominated by the past’s shadow, its brave embrace of an unknowable and thrillingly uncharted present

142 Beautiful Enemies moment (“this afternoon is as wide as an ocean”) and the open future, shimmering with unfolding possibilities and perpetual motion, its plunging forward into “the time we have now,” it resounds with the rhetoric of American pragmatism and experimentation, mobility and freedom.While remaining thoroughly his own, Ashbery’s finale echoes Emerson’s exuberant acceptance of the approaching future in “Circles,” and draws directly on that essay’s reference to the past being “swallowed”: “the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit” (EL, 413). “Pragmatism,” as William James explained,“faces forward to the future” (Writings, 440). In this conclusion, with its portrayal of the future as “pragmatic and kinetic,” Ashbery’s poem directly summons the intellectual tradition the entire poem has been responding to and self-consciously takes its place in the lineage of American philosophy and poetics.Those two final adjectives suggest that this new effort will call for a moment-by-moment process of pragmatic “testing, questioning, and persisting,” in which one must constantly invent, dismantle, and abandon new resources to suit constantly changing experiences (RS, 206).14 It is also important that at this climactic moment, Ashbery again plays on the biblical and deeply personal connotations of the word “ashes,” his own nickname, the name his now-lost friend O’Hara had called him. With the dark pun on his own name summoning up O’Hara and his loss, Ashbery’s conclusion is at once an abstract and an intensely personal truth: to leave behind the past—the “ashes” of his own former self and of one of his closest friends—is a sharply painful, yet unavoidable and even hopeful, step forward into an uncertain, wideopen future.

se lf and othe r in ashbe ry As we have seen in “The System,” Ashbery’s poetry depends on a philosophical rejection of closure, a turning away from finality toward unfolding possibilities and ongoing movement. As I have suggested, this habit of mind, this devotion to kinetic motion, colors Ashbery’s sense of the human self and its relationships with others. At every turn, Ashbery resists arriving at any centered or final version of himself, erasing in the process whatever self he has just been inhabiting. As Charles Berger has noted in his discussion of Ashbery’s long poem “Fragment,” “the process of centering and decentering the self . . . the quest to fix the place of the poetic self ” either within itself or in another person is endlessly problematic for Ashbery. First there is “the harsh recognition that the self is necessarily alone” (although I differ with Berger on this point), and second, “there is a related peril . . . in regarding any one achieved stance, at any one moment, as central: this is the danger of self-limitation or resistance to motion or change” (“Vision,” 202).

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 143 The central subject or consciousness of Ashbery’s poems constantly fluctuates, moving further toward and then away from closure and a stable sense of self, just as it moves closer and further from other people. It is this ebbing and flowing, dialectical movement that actually creates the undulating, teasing feel of so many of his poems. As Berger argues, the relationship in Ashbery’s poetry between these two drives is paradoxical: “To feel centered is, of course, to feel powerful, to be all one thing. To remain in this feeling is to become a monument to oneself, and this is spiritual death. One must open out new passages of being while recognizing that the passage begins from the center and moves outward to another center, there to begin again. This kind of movement brings freedom as well as power” (202–203).15 As we will see, this means that Ashbery (like O’Hara in the previous chapter) dramatizes his need to be continually different from previous conceptions of himself, as well as different from his friends and lovers. It is precisely in these metaphoric terms that his poems reflect on his relations with the avant-garde community of the New York School and the wider New American Poetry movement. In a poem with a particularly relevant, oxymoronic title, “Plainness in Diversity,” Ashbery asserts the inescapable multiplicity of the self: “Not on our planet is the destiny / That can make you one” (SP, 86). “Remain mysterious; / Rather than be pure, accept yourself as numerous”—this statement, which Ashbery adapted from the French of Arthur Cravan in his poem “Some Words,” seems to encapsulate Ashbery’s view of the pluralistic self and its benefits (SP, 111).16 To be a “pure” self would be to stand still, to exist as one coherent thing—understandable, consumable, and no longer mysterious. “The Skaters,” one of Ashbery’s most important early poems, takes up the tensions between this changing, “numerous” self and other people, between individual and mass, in a variety of ways. Written in 1964 during Ashbery’s decadelong stay in Paris, this long poem, often regarded as a breakthrough into his mature mode, can be seen as a kind of allegory about the poet’s “self-chosen exile,” his decision to live and write far from his original community of friends and fellow poets. As such, the poem dovetails with the frequent references in his art criticism (which were discussed in chapter 2) to the need for artistic independence, the importance of remaining in relative isolation, outside the ken of hostile or fawning critics and other talented artists and groups. However, the exuberant playfulness and parodic impulse of “The Skaters” at times makes this individualistic urge to be alone look like an excessive, romantic, and clichéd gesture, exemplifying once more the way American poets both adhere to and critique the ideology of individualism. The mock narratives featuring the speaker as a castaway on an island (where “the gray wastes of water surround / My puny little shoal”) and experiencing other forms of exile (“In reality of course the middle-class apartment I live in is nothing like a desert island. / Cozy as it is, with a good library

144 Beautiful Enemies and record collection. / Yet I feel cut off from the life in the streets”) are poignant and silly at the same time (MSO, 214, 216). Endlessly inventive, ambiguous, selfcritical and self-mocking, “The Skaters” draws on and parodies motifs of the poet as voyager and as exile in order to take on, critically at times, such themes as the role of the solitary artist and the tension between self and group. The poem stages an ongoing dialogue between particulars and wholes, between the individual “parts of a world” (to use Stevens’s phrase for the pluralistic universe) that we perceive and “the world” in its totality. Complex ideas that will dominate Ashbery’s mature work—ideas about the nature of perception and consciousness, language and its selectivity, art’s ability to encompass the world— move to the fore. This expansive poem, in which Ashbery has said he was “trying to see how many opinions [he] had about everything,” is a wonderful example of a pluralist poetics, a poetry of the mind swimming in a kinetic world of daily life, attempting to sort out its experiences, sliding through various voices, stories, and perspectives (qtd. Perkins, History, 617). “So much has passed through my mind this morning / That I can give you but a dim account of it,” one of the poem’s shifting speakers admits about his baffling attempts to cope with, and write about, his “experience of experience,” previewing the general concerns of “The System” (MSO, 196). What matters to Ashbery is not to arrive at a coherent summation, or an answer about whether parts or wholes, selves or groups, have priority, or to chart a synthesis of these opposites, but rather to follow the movement back and forth between such poles. In a well-known passage of meta-poetic commentary, Ashbery puts the matter rather directly: This, thus, is a portion of the subject of this poem Which is in the form of falling snow: That is, the individual flakes are not essential to the importance of the whole’s becoming so much of a truism That their importance is again called in question, to be denied further out, and again and again like this. Hence, neither the importance of the individual flake, Nor the importance of the whole impression of the storm, if it has any, is what it is, But the rhythm of the series of repeated jumps, from abstract into positive and back to a slightly less diluted abstract. (MSO, 199)

The falling snow becomes a metaphor for the poem itself, as well as a way of pondering human experience and perception. Which is more important, the one in all its distinctiveness or the many in its fullness? Each snowflake (unique as it is) or the totality of “snow” they form? Each line or impression in a poem or the aggregate we view as the complete work? Each individual person or the group they belong to? And is it even possible to separate one of these terms from the other? Again, Ashbery does not resolve these tensions in the fluid self-unraveling

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 145 of these lines, but is rather fascinated by what he calls at one point “this continual changing back and forth” (204). Ashbery uses the central image of people skating on a frozen pond or outdoor rink to evoke this tension between the one and the many—indeed, to pit solitude against togetherness. As Alan Williamson has shown, the nearly abstract opening scene finds the poet contrasting “‘masses of inertia’” with “heartbreakingly sudden assertions of individuality, of the particular.” It is “only the alternating pattern [that] remains in the mind” (126). Later, Ashbery makes this movement of individuals away from and back toward the group explicit: Lengthening arches. The intensity of minor acts. As skaters elaborate their distances, Taking a separate line to its end. Returning to the mass, they join each other Blotted in an incredible mess of dark colors, and again reappearing to take the theme Some little distance, like fishing boats developing from the land different parabolas, Taking the exquisite theme far, into farness, to Land’s End, to the ends of the earth! (197–198)

This little tableau of skaters repeatedly emerging from the blurred mass to follow their separate arc, and then returning to the collective is quite important: in a sense, it encapsulates how Ashbery views the self, communities, and friendship. Replete with references to “lines” and “themes,” skating in this poem serves as a trope for the act of writing poetry as Ashbery conceives it. For example, skating is an individualistic activity (each skater traces his or her own marks, following a distinctive parabola far away from the others). It is a process and a movement rather than a finished product. On skates, one always moves into new territory like an innovating artist (“The answer is that it is novelty / That guides these swift blades o’er the ice” [194]). And the traces left by the action are both graceful and ephemeral, here and gone with the weather (as Ashbery says of both writing and skating, “The carnivorous / Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving / Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still”) (199). And like the poet, the skater creates figures, images carved in the recalcitrant icy matter of the world like words on the page. Ashbery’s penchant for surfaces, and his extensive use of the skating metaphor to represent the act of living and writing in a transitory world, may have been inspired by, and certainly call to mind, Emerson’s aphoristic remark in “Experience”: “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well upon them” (EL, 478).17 If skating represents the creative act, then the passage about skaters leaving and returning to the mass proposes a model for how poets and their communities function—in effect, Ashbery narrates the primal story of the avant-garde. Each writer, perpetually in motion, departs from and then is subsumed back into the collective. However, what Ashbery celebrates are those solitary voyages away from the rest, in which an “exquisite theme” is traced independently from the

146 Beautiful Enemies mass. If we recall Ashbery’s ideas about the need for artistic independence in such essays as “American Sanctuary in Paris” and “The Invisible Avant-Garde” (which I discussed in chapter 2), these passages of “The Skaters” take on deeper meaning.18 Living in France, cut off from the familiar world of his own language, and from his poet friends like O’Hara and Koch, Ashbery contemplates his native credo of individualism. What are the benefits of isolation for “professional exiles like me,” and what is the nature of the poet’s relations to the poetic community from which he emerged? Though being an “island-dweller” can leave one feeling “cut off from the life in the streets,” to be separate from “the masses”—those who “continue to tread the water / Of backward opinion”—is probably for the best (MSO, 217, 216). The idea of people surrendering their distinctiveness to collective thinking always makes Ashbery noticeably uneasy. Indeed, solitude brings happiness. The speaker notes at one point that “it is with a feeling of delight I realize I am / All alone in the skittish darkness” (221). And intimacy between people carries with it danger: The lines that draw nearer together are said to “vanish.” The point where they meet is their vanishing point. Spaces, as they recede, become smaller. (208)

Although overtly about the nature of perspective lines, such as those marks created by skates moving over the ice into the distance, the passage highlights the problems of the nonconformist—the downside of being so dangerously close to other people, especially to other poets (whose “lines” a poet would not want to draw too near to).19 Focusing on the point at which line A and line B become identical and lose their distinctiveness, Ashbery’s terms echo the remark by Wallace Stevens in his essay “Three Academic Pieces” that “both in nature and in metaphor identity is the vanishing-point of resemblance” (Necessary, 72). When two separate people merge, autonomy and alterity disappear.

the corrosive frie nds whose breath is so close: the double dream of spring The tension between individual and mass so central to “The Skaters” becomes even tauter in Ashbery’s next book, The Double Dream of Spring.With this volume, Ashbery’s concerns with aging and mutability, conflicts between past and present, self and others, old and new forms, and a deep fascination with the trajectory of a person’s and artist’s life, the shape of a career, take center stage. These concerns seem to have been accentuated by the unexpected calamities that Ashbery weathered in the mid-1960s, namely the death of his father and the tragic and sudden

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 147 loss of Frank O’Hara, which leave the poems resounding with a sense that “death is here and knowable” (“Clouds,” MSO, 281).These changes are coupled with the dramatic cultural transformations of the late 1960s that linger in the recesses of these poems. The general tone and outlook of the volume is suggested by one of the most important poems in the book—and the first poem Ashbery published after O’Hara’s death—which was tentatively titled both “Turning to Loss” and “Turning to Less,” before being named “The Bungalows” (where the syllable “loss” is perhaps buried in bungalows).20 At the center of poem after poem is a preoccupation with the process of “growing up” and the solitude that comes with maturation (“a growing up, / As beautiful as a new history book / With uncut pages,” “when he grew up to be a man,” “The surge upward through the gradeschool positioning and bursting into soft gray blooms,” “youth had grown old, chanting and singing,” we are “fated to live in / Intimidated solitude and isolation” (SP, 100, 86, 119, 114; MSO, 292). These poems seem to have been written very much in the shadow of O’Hara’s death, a moment when it felt as if “A page [had] turned,” leaving the poet “floundering in the wind of its colossal death” (“Spring Day,” SP, 85).21 What should his own role now be in the absence of that figure who held their group together, who, as Ashbery once said in essay, was able “to cobble everything together and tell us what we and they were doing”? (RS, 241). The loss of O’Hara prompts Ashbery, in his poems of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to reflect on the course his career has taken and on the nature of friendship, its contingencies and complications. But to treat questions of solitude and community, Ashbery takes an intentionally different tack than O’Hara. Rather than referring to friends by name and allowing the swirl of daily life in all its particularity into his poems, Ashbery begins to perfect what we witnessed in “The Skaters” and what would become one of his most characteristic gestures: the creation of what I call “vague allegories” of his own life. Ashbery is perpetually self-chronicling in his poems, despite the critical consensus about his radical impersonality, as he tells skewed and vague narratives about his poetic career and his development both with and away from his companions.22 Read in this light, The Double Dream of Spring can actually be interpreted, like many poems to follow, as an ambivalent, painful valedictory to the past—to the avant-garde, to the New American Poetry scene that Ashbery was never so comfortable with, and to Frank O’Hara himself. From the perspective of the late 1960s, these poems bid farewell to the postwar ideal, outlined by Paul Goodman, of the avant-garde—as an “intimate community” of experimental writers, and as a force of continual, communal, destructive innovation (376). Many of the poems seem to cast the poet’s confederates in poetry in a notably ambivalent light. In “Young Man with Letter,” Ashbery speaks of his “brothers not ancestors,” making very clear his concern is peers, not predecessors. He writes:

148 Beautiful Enemies But a new question poses itself: Is it we who are being transformed? The light in the hallway seems to indicate it And the corrosive friends whose breath is so close It whistles, are changed to tattered pretexts As a sign, perhaps, that all’s well with us. Yet the quiet bickering on the edge of morning That advances to a steady drone by noon And to hollow rumblings by night: is there so much good then Blushing beyond the sense of it, standing straight up for others to view? (MSO, 279)

Here the friction and tension between the self and his “corrosive friends” become the thematic focus. Intimacy is again troped as problematic because it threatens and even corrodes or eats away at our independence. This pattern of imagery occurs throughout the volume. In “The Task,” Ashbery refers to the “corrosive mass” (perhaps a community) in which “he first discovered how to breathe” and in a passage from “Song,” the closeness between two people is nearly killing: “Meanwhile we sit, scarcely daring to speak, / To breathe, as though this closeness cost us life” (SP, 83, 100). In this poem, friendship is viewed as a matter of rivalry and competition, of discord and struggle—“quiet bickering” that ominously builds and builds to a constant, portentous noise as time goes on. Given the frequency with which such images appear in his work, it is hard to imagine making the argument that Ashbery fails to attend to the dynamics of human relationships. Ashbery’s effort to remain aloof from the collective, from his New York School cohort in particular, appears in numerous poems that employ vague allegories of poetic development to foreground even more deliberately the problems of the avant-garde and Ashbery’s role within it. For example, the poem “Clouds” opens with an indirectly autobiographical narrative that seems to reflect on the poet’s own artistic progress thus far: All this time he had only been waiting, Not even thinking, as many had supposed. Now sleep wound down to him its promise of dazzling peace And he stood up to assume that imagination. There were others in the forest as close as he To caring about the silent outcome, but they had gotten lost In the shadows of dreams so that the external look Of the nearby world had become confused with the cobwebs inside. (MSO, 280)

The poem’s central figure seems at last ready to take up some challenge, one he has been putting off but is destined to attempt. As in Stevens’s “Asides on the Oboe,”

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 149 “the prologues are over,” and the poet now belatedly responds to his calling (Collected, 250). Charles Berger has usefully suggested reading “Clouds” as a meditation on Ashbery’s own career and his departure from his earlier companions.23 Berger argues that this opening stanza “might stand as epigraph to The Double Dream of Spring, the volume in which Ashbery first truly stands up to assume the task of poethood” (“Vision,” 186). For Berger, “Clouds” differs from similar poems in the book because here Ashbery “broods more penetratingly on the character of these others—the poets, let us say, with whom Ashbery started out. The names of this generation are well known.” Although Berger for some reason skirts the issue of who these “others” might be, he does note that Ashbery gives us “a strong, if intentionally vague, impression only of an avant-garde enclave worrying problems of continuity and rupture” (186). The poem suggests that the “he” figure now ventures forward, apart from that enclave, those “others in the forest” who “had gotten lost.” Perhaps these others include the no longer living O’Hara, and the very much alive and writing Koch, Schuyler, Guest, Ginsberg, and Creeley and other poets of his generation. Ashbery contrasts the self with those comrades who have fallen away, imagining what it means to be, as he puts it in “The Bungalows,” “above the tide of others” (SP, 115). Several lines from an omitted third stanza suggest that Ashbery is reflecting uneasily on the importance of competition in the field of cultural production, on the individual’s conflicted ambition to be “the best,” the “leading voice of his generation,” as the cliché would have it: “He wished to rule this kingdom peacefully, / No show of power was to mar / The perfect shape of its development. / There was to be no room for stragglers” (Ashbery archives). Ashbery’s meditations on his role within the New York School circle of poets and friends are often playful, clever, and teasing. In an obscure yet suggestive passage in “The Bungalows,” Ashbery seems to opt for individualistic notions of “genius” and “inspiration” rather than a communal “school” devoted to novelty (SP, 115). He refers to his desire to put first upon record a final protest: Rather decaying art, genius, inspiration to hold to An impossible “calque” of reality, than “The new school of the trivial, rising up on the field of battle, A thing of sludge and leaf-mold,” and life Goes trickling out through the holes, like water through a sieve, All in one direction. (115)

This war-waging “new school of the trivial” seems to be a sly reference to (or even mock critical dig at) “the New York School” of poets: that group known, and criticized, for their aggressive avant-gardist stance, as well as their embrace of the quotidian and trivial at the expense of the profound and weighty.24 Perhaps by omitting the term “York” from the middle of the expected phrase, Ashbery not

150 Beautiful Enemies only disguises his own autobiography, but also hints that the center has dropped out of this gang now that O’Hara has died. He echoes the kinds of critiques leveled against himself, his group of friends, and the disciples of their “new school” (such as Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett). At the same time, he also parodies the original military connotations of the avant-garde—which implied a vanguard engaged in violent battle against the status quo. Instead of belonging to or believing in this “school,” Ashbery chooses a perhaps outdated, but Emersonian, notion of art as the realm of self-reliant genius and inspiration. He advocates turning to the onrushing flow of life (as “the river pursues its lonely course,” he says several lines later), rather than any communal effort or fixed grouping. Another important poem that explores such issues is the strange collage titled “Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox” (1969). In it, Ashbery uses a quatrain by the nearly forgotten, once popular American poet Wilcox for purposes both playful and serious. A pastiche of various verse forms and prose, the poem is obviously a patchwork of styles that intends to parody Wilcox’s bathetic poetry and other hackneyed writing, and has been treated as an example of Ashbery’s antic humor and embrace of the “low.” However, the poem also contains an intriguing, and quite serious, meditation on innocence and maturing, skepticism and loss, community and solitude that speaks to problems central to Ashbery’s work.25 The passage from Wilcox’s poem “Wishing,” which Ashbery uses to open his poem, reflects on the importance of the individual (the “one”) to the group (the “many”): “For the pleasures of the many May be ofttimes traced to one As the hand that plants an acorn Shelters armies from the sun.” (SP, 94)

only to be immediately undercut by Ashbery’s ironic variation: And in places where the annual rainfall is .0071 inches What a pleasure to lie under the tree, to sit, stand, and get up under the tree! Im wunderschönen Monat Mai The feeling is of never wanting to leave the tree, Of predominantly peace and relaxation. Do you step out from under the shade a moment, It is only to return with renewed expectation, of expectation fulfilled. Insecurity be damned!

Ashbery’s speaker, with his clumsy, odd syntax (“The feeling is of . . .,” “Do you step out . . . It is only to return”) and his literal-minded response (pondering this protective tree in the context of “the annual rainfall”) makes Wilcox’s poetic metaphor seem absurd and himself appear quite silly. As Mark Silverberg observes, Ashbery’s campy riffing on poor Wilcox can be read “as a kind of low-key drag

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 151 performance in which the poet fondly performs and exaggerates the gestures of the original—its excess and cliché, its enchantment with emotion, sentiment, and ‘personal growth’” (301). But what can we surmise about this speaker and his perspective? He seems to be a member of the army sheltered by Wilcox’s tree, planted by that single hand. He is lazing about complacently in a comfortable world he did not create himself, occasionally venturing out only to return more self-satisfied, his every expectation met. Wilcox’s reference to the “armies” allows Ashbery to bring out, ironically, the original definition of the avant-garde, a vanguard collective with military overtones, a trope he returns to critically in a number of poems. In order to depict, and then undercut, a prior moment of brotherhood, when he took part in an Arcadian community of young, perhaps homosexual poets, Ashbery often draws on the conventions of pastoral poetry: images of shady trees, pastures, and young men lazing about together.26 In “Variations,” Ashbery suggests that this idyllic shady spot, as in Theocritus and Virgil, equals security, a tenuous if artificial peace in some imaginary Golden Age. In Virgil’s Eclogues, the fictions of pastoral art frequently offer “shade” as a place of refuge from the ravages of the sun-beaten world, although such havens are often exposed as illusory and temporary.27 Though Ashbery’s passage is mock pastoral and clearly comic, even the speaker knows it is more than just a joke.28 He alerts us that There is something to all this, that will not elude us: Growing up under the shade of friendly trees, with our brothers all around. And truly, young adulthood was never like this: Such delight, such consideration, such affirmation in the way the day goes round together.

This image of relaxing en masse under the peaceful tree encapsulates an ideal that Ashbery is both ironic about and nostalgic for; it seems to summon up not only a lost childhood but also the early 1950s moment of creative ferment when he and his avant-garde companions coalesced.29 In a memoir titled “A Reminiscence,” Ashbery reflects on the early days of his relationship with Frank O’Hara in similar terms: it was a moment when he “had discovered a wonderful new friend and we gave each other attention and encouragement. . . . I look back on that remote period as an almost idyllic one” (21). In poems like this, Ashbery represents—but also ironically undermines—the emphasis on “homosocial bonding” that Michael Davidson sees as constitutive of literary communities (Guys). The moment when Ashbery found himself in New York in the early 1950s near the center of a literary underground buoyant with collaborative energy and coterie frisson, exchanging poems with other ambitious young poets, carousing with painters at the all-important Cedar Tavern (a name perhaps encrypted in the metaphor of the “tree” as central gathering place in this poem), socializing with other homosexuals more openly than he ever had before, seeing Frank O’Hara,

152 Beautiful Enemies Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers, and James Schuyler on a daily basis—certainly this was a time of nearly utopian growing up “with our brothers all around.”30 In portraying this time of communion as a moment under the “friendly trees,” Ashbery also summons up a self-reflexive image which, in this vaguely allegorical portrait of the artist as a young man, recalls the central trope of his early triumph “Some Trees” (1948). In that poem, Ashbery portrays an idyllic romantic encounter beneath some trees (implicitly between two men), far from the harsh, judgmental world. As the title also served as the name of his first volume, Ashbery’s arboreal imagery here conjures up the earlier stages of his own career as well as memories of an earlier poem about “Joining a neighbor” (SP, 19). This evocation of a youthful moment of togetherness, fraternity, and homoerotic union, followed by its almost immediate evaporation, sounds a signal note of loss in The Double Dream of Spring and many later Ashbery poems, a note that appears even in his most recent poems, including the “The History of My Life,” which begins “Once upon a time there were two brothers. / Then there was only one: myself ” (Your, 31). Just after Ashbery introduces the pastoral image, he pulls the rug out from under it, admitting that youth was never so rosy to begin with nor were we ever so cozy with our mates: all that talk about “delight,” “consideration,” and “affirmation” in being “together” was just so much talk, idealism, and nostalgia. And as we have seen, Ashbery perennially refuses to linger in the chambers of the past: But all good things must come to an end, and so one must move forward Into the space left by one’s conclusions. Is this growing old? Well, it is a good experience, to divest oneself of some tested ideals, some old standbys, And even finding nothing to put in their place is a good experience, Preparing one, as it does, for the consternation that is to come. (SP, 94)

For a pragmatist like Ashbery, to come to a conclusion, any conclusion, is to leave out, to exclude all the truth and dynamic experience that escape its parameters. In this extremely Jamesian passage (that undoubtedly looks forward to the philosophical concerns we have seen in “The System”), Ashbery suggests that one must continually move beyond what one has held to be true and certain—beyond nostalgic memories of intimacy and commonality, beyond conventions like pastoral—into what James calls the fringe, the vague, that which resides outside our prior interpretations of the world. As Ashbery says in one of his essays, “Art, like the universe, . . . continues on its creepy way after we have stopped imagining its limits” (RS, 10). In effect, the poet calls for a pragmatist acceptance of whatever falls outside our conclusions about experience and our lives, and runs, as James would say, “into the more.” In this context, Ashbery also suggests that we must shed golden, artificial memories of brotherhood and peace, and that to do so—to

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 153 divest ourselves of such “tested ideals”—is part of the difficult, but necessary, process of maturing. This remarkable passage explicitly connects two central, overlapping concerns of Ashbery’s, as well as of the present study: the strained relations between the autonomous individual and his companions and the philosophical skepticism toward received ideals and “old standbys.” Ashbery suggests that we must abandon that comforting vision of life under the trees, and, in the process, learn the hard way that in the space where our ideals once lay there may be nothing solid. This amounts to a call for Emersonian abandonment, for a shedding of prior fixities of both friendship and belief, and an acceptance of anti-foundationalism. And to strip ourselves of former ideals, we are told, is “a good experience” for us—which is to say, it has pragmatic value in how we live our lives. Even if we find nothing but chaos, doubt, and solitude, this troubling experience also has practical value, because it prepares us for what is inevitably to come: more chaos and groundlessness. Just as traditional pastoral poetry features a city poet longing for some Edenic, rural peace that may never have existed outside of art and its idealistic fictions, Ashbery looks back now from “the vast gloom of cities” (95). Having shed his illusions, Ashbery wonders whether he ever really experienced that closeness and harmony in the first place: But—and this is the gist of it—what if I dreamed it all, The branches, the late afternoon sun, The trusting camaraderie, the love that watered all, Disappearing promptly down into the roots as it should? For later in the vast gloom of cities, only there you learn How the ideas were good only because they had to die, Leaving you alone and skinless, a drawing by Vesalius. This is what was meant, and toward which everything directs: That the tree should shrivel in 120-degree heat, the acorns Lie around on the worn earth like eyeballs, and the lead soldiers shrug and slink off.

This poignant, stirring passage suggests how far “Variations” is from sheer parody and camp. Perhaps “the trusting camaraderie” he has been nostalgically rendering was all a dream; perhaps there never was a moment when he and his poet friends coalesced in perfect concord. The reference to the speaker’s learning later, in the city, that “ideas were good only because they had to die, / Leaving you alone and skinless” fuses death (possibly O’Hara’s recent death) with the skepticism toward “tested ideals” delineated in the previous passage. The moment is highly suggestive, as it marks a turning point in Ashbery’s growth as a poet: throughout Ashbery’s poems of the late 1960s and 1970s, loss and death are intertwined with a more profound understanding of the contin-

154 Beautiful Enemies gency and groundlessness of our lives and concepts, and a deepening awareness of isolation. The vivid image of being transformed into a lonely, raw skeleton by the loss of once-held ideas and friends—so stripped of his protective covering as to resemble an anatomical drawing—allows Ashbery to drive home the pathos of our plight. By the end of the passage, Ashbery has fully exploded Wilcox’s original symbol of the towering oak, the protective tree now withered by the beating sun, the acorns strewn along the ground as useless as eyeballs ripped out of a body now turned skeleton. And those soldiers, once at home in their communal idyll, now disband, moving off alone. Whether these avant-garde warriors are made out of “lead,” like playthings, or whether Ashbery is referring to those “leading” the others as a kind of advance guard—the more ambitious soldiers who head the pack—is left semantically unresolved, but the dispersal of the group into individuals seems complete. The optimistic opening trope has come undone in a bleak unraveling. As a whole,“Variations” moves from the somewhat sardonic imagery of communal, fraternal life under the trees to proud, somewhat ridiculous isolation: it ends with a strange anecdote about the necessary independence, even withdrawal, of a creator from the crowd. Ashbery concludes the poem with a passage appropriated from an old science-fiction book he had found on the street: the scientist Professor Gustavus Hertz refuses to answer an “apparently harmless” question: “‘I will tell you nothing! Nothing, do you hear?’ he shrieked. ‘Go away! Go away!’” (SP, 99). Hertz is a model artist for Ashbery, in a way, in his insistence on withholding information and evading those who would pin him down.31 If the poem probes the complex give-and-take of individual and community, it ends with a resounding statement of privacy. At the same time, the absurdity and triteness of the paranoid experimenter’s response, plucked out of context and placed at the end of this strangely hybrid poem, undercuts the affirmation of independence, making the artist look insane and as hackneyed as a B-movie mad scientist at the same time. As so often, Ashbery seems to recognize that proclaiming the artist’s need to be an outsider is to mouth a truism, a cliché, however laudable the idea is in theory. Just as Emerson warns us that “solitude is impracticable, society fatal,” Ashbery observes that however desirable it may be to be free of the strictures of society, it can also leave one “alone and skinless,” even crazed (qtd. Alkana, Social, 9; SP, 95). Such sensitivity to the troubling contradictions in the rhetoric of selfreliance not only marks Ashbery as a principle respondent to the tradition of Emersonian experimental individualism, but also lends the poems some of their strangely unsettling power and emotional charge. Self-conscious about his own position within the literary field, as innovator, individual, and founding member of the New York School and the New American Poetry, Ashbery sometimes questions even more directly the notion of the communal avant-garde itself and his own role within it. This becomes a central

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 155 issue in “Sortes Vergilianae,” which mocks and challenges the aggressive military underpinnings inherent in the idea of the artistic vanguard. In it, Ashbery fashions another indeterminate yet revealing allegory of his own growth as an artist. With its extremely long, languid lines, the poem is spoken by a weary voice that states how long he has been alive. Again, the piece captures the poet as he attempts to adjust to the loss of his youth and all it represents and to this new, middle period of experience, with increasingly limited expectations and ambitions. The jaded speaker begins: “You have been living now for a long time and there is nothing you do not know. / Perhaps something you read in the newspaper influenced you and that was very frequently” (SP, 118). Although the stretched-out sentences and unnatural, stilted syntax create a feeling of lassitude, this self-proclaimed sage has apparently achieved a sort of omniscient wisdom from his long experience. But since Ashbery usually warns against feeling we have arrived at final knowledge of anything, we are invited to take this voice as an ironic example of smug complacency. (This quality is reinforced later, when the poem uses the word “satisfied” three times in rapid succession [119]). This figure now seems to be alone, having passed through a time when he was part of a fellowship of sorts. Now that “they have left you to think along these lines and you have gone your own way,” the speaker is left writing “these” long “lines”—that is, this poem. He has grown up, and all has changed (“It is a strange thing how fast the growth is. . . . When you know where it is heading / You have to follow it”), and now the speaker ponders the group: “It is the nature of these people to embrace each other, they know no other kind but themselves.” Here Ashbery levels a critique at the insularity of any coterie’s group mentality; like the inhabitants of Baraka’s “Milneburg,” these people are content to just puff each other up, embrace only those that are already like themselves. This kind of closed circuit of like-minded friends, true to the nature of so many avant-garde communities, leaves no room for difference, for change, and for individuality. And, as a result, there is a sense of thorough ennui for this speaker, now that “newness or importance has worn away.” Although the group disperses, “leaving the millpond bare,” we see the dialectical, cyclical character of the avant-garde: the place where they had previously congregated becomes “a site for new picnics, / As they came, naked, to explore all the possible grounds on which exchanges could be set up” (119).32 A new generation of artists will come along to share ideas and poems and form new communities, but they will encounter the same problem: groups have the nasty little tendency to instill order and stifle creativity. The speaker notes a “‘No Fishing’” sign at this campground “in modest capital letters,” a detail suggesting that authoritative rules have been imposed, dictating what acts can be performed at this picnic site, not unlike André Breton’s surrealist manifestoes and other avant-garde proclamations that mandate what should and should not be created. Though the language of this passage is dense and elusive, what takes on importance is “getting

156 Beautiful Enemies out from under the major weight of the thing / As it was being indoctrinated and dropped, heavy as a branch with apples” rather than being “satisfied with the entourage” (119). The poem’s meditation on the avant-garde and its shortcomings is driven home in the poem’s final movement, in which Ashbery turns to a mock narrative that chronicles a kind of campaign or group march. For all his undying commitment to aesthetic innovation, Ashbery (the pragmatist, antidogmatic evader of fixed positions) has always found the avant-garde’s heroic, martial rhetoric discomforting, even slightly silly. In an essay, he notes that “the swashbuckling energy, wide-open spaces and ‘O Pioneers!’ stance of much American Abstract Expressionism often ring a trifle hollow. Even the best of us tire of heroics” (RS, 136). The concluding section of “Sortes Vergilianae” resonates with this critique, as we again see Ashbery cleverly literalizing the avant-garde’s military connotations in order to challenge and parody them: So the journey grew ever slower; the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar But meanwhile the water was giving out and malaria had decimated their ranks and undermined their morale, You know the story, so that if turning back was unthinkable, so was victorious conquest of the great brazen gates. (SP, 120)

The attenuated lines and languorous pace, combined with the author’s insistence that “you know the story,” signal that Ashbery is intentionally manipulating a cliché, an overly familiar trope (and, in fact, the etymological root) for art’s daring advance guard. But the avant-garde’s intractable plight, which Ashbery himself shares, is tangible: this army finds itself stuck, unable to win or retreat, nor even able to “fold up right here” and remain where it is. After noting that “this is just a footnote, though a microcosmic one perhaps, to the greater curve / Of the elaboration,” as if inviting us to read the poem an allegorical microcosm of larger movements in our lives or culture, he explains to us what part in it all the “I” had, the insatiable researcher of learned trivia, bookworm, And one who marched along with, “made common cause,” yet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening, Only long patience, as the star climbs and sinks, leaving illumination to the setting sun. (120)

The “I” we have been listening to reveals something of itself in this conclusion, and in the process displays Ashbery’s attitude toward his own role within the avant-garde or “New York School.” This reticent “bookworm” and “researcher of learned trivia,” a kind of self-parody of the poet himself, admits to having been

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 157 one who conformed with the group, who fell into step with the military crusade of the avant-garde—he “marched along with, ‘made common cause.’” But ultimately this “I” seems to have pulled back from identifying with the group effort of his friends, and he retreats from the aggressive heroism of avantgarde rhetoric that calls for violent overthrow of the existing order and the continuous destruction of inherited forms. In his own case, after several years of dismantling the materials of poetry that resulted in his most daringly avant-garde book, The Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery has turned back, self-consciously attempting to find some sort of middle ground. The speaker admits that he had “neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening”—that perhaps he lacked the drive, the ideological fervor, or the willingness to surrender his individuality needed to foment a communal aesthetic revolution. This admission of retreat chimes with other references in Double Dream to the speaker’s ultimate “timidity,” his “not being sure” (MSO, 253; SP, 89). Instead, this “I” seems to have discovered a kind of wise passivity, a “long patience.” This should not be too surprising, since Ashbery’s temperament and poetic sensibility has always been more withdrawn, hesitant, patient, even meandering or lazy, than aggressive and dominating.33 Further, like Emerson and the pragmatists, Ashbery has always believed (as he says in an essay on Jane Freilicher’s painting) that “most good things are tentative, or should be if they aren’t”; given the choice, he opts again and again for the provisional, the inconclusive gesture in lieu of the deadly certainty of the absolutist or ideologue (RS, 240). This illuminates why, throughout his career, Ashbery has eschewed romantic heroics and avant-garde theatrics of forceful overthrow in favor of a more bemused, humble attitude toward the artist’s antiheroic role. With this ending, Ashbery seems to comment critically on an image of the artist as hero in one of O’Hara’s most soaring conclusions, which, as we will see in chapter 7, is an entirely typical gesture in the give-and-take of this friendship. “Sortes Vergilianae” echoes, and even rewrites, the dramatic ending of O’Hara’s 1957 masterpiece “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births).” Both poems close with images of journey, group struggle, and possible conquest. O’Hara’s poem climaxes at the pivotal moment when a “barque of slaves” is seen sailing toward a new land, redolent of promise and the idea of America as a new, shining “city upon a hill.” The ode’s ending is rich with connotations of American and artistic revolution, and concludes on a high note of heroic individualism of the sort Ashbery had in mind in critiquing “the swashbuckling energy, wide-open spaces and ‘O Pioneers!’ stance of much American Abstract Expressionism.” Usually O’Hara’s irony wards off or undercuts the seriousness of this kind of oracular voice and its vision of heroism, although it surfaces wonderfully here and in poems like “Ode to Willem de Kooning” and “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets.” But it is precisely this stance that Ashbery’s poem responds to with his own irony. In O’Hara’s poem, this group of oppressed slaves

158 Beautiful Enemies soon will turn upon their captors lower anchor, found a city riding there of poverty and sweetness paralleled among the races without time, and one alone will speak of being born in pain and he will be the wings of an extraordinary liberty (CP, 298)

Both poems seem to end with allegories of the avant-garde and the poet’s place within it. But the two scenes are sharply different: while “the battlements of the city could now be discerned from afar” in Ashbery’s poem, malaria had “undermined their morale,” with retreat being as “unthinkable” as “victorious conquest of the great brazen gates.” The ironically incapable army that suffers defeat in Ashbery’s poem stands in stark contrast to O’Hara’s victorious rebellion against oppression and the slaves’ founding of a new city. Furthermore, the differences become sharper if we consider the central figure in each parable—the “one alone” in O’Hara’s poem who will stand up as a leader, to speak of life and pain, and who will serve as the vehicle to freedom, versus the bookworm “I” in Ashbery’s poem who “marched along with” but had “neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening . . . leaving illumination to the setting sun.” Both are parables of the avant-garde, both offer visions of individualism, but they are markedly divergent in kind. Although in each case the artist stands apart from the crowd, Ashbery’s antiheroic stance deflates the drama and triumph of O’Hara’s poem. His reluctant and bookish figure is more like Hart Crane’s poor little tramp in “Chaplinesque” who makes his “meek adjustments” than Stevens’s “central man, the human globe, responsive / As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass, / Who in a million diamonds sums us up” or O’Hara’s hero boldly addressing a new world (Crane, Poems, 11; Stevens, Collected, 250). Rather than being there on the ramparts with O’Hara—who worshipped those, like Willem de Kooning, whom he saw as “hewing a clearing / in the crowded abyss of the West” (“Ode to Willem de Kooning,” CP, 284), those who could “found a city riding there / of poverty and sweetness”—Ashbery admits he marched along with the rest, but did not seek to tear down the walls himself. Instead, he remains forever willing to wait, to watch, to weather ceaseless change, to see the best responses to the world as tentative, provisional ones. He accepts rather than forces change, leaving heroic action to O’Hara’s star that climbs and sinks, and illumination to his own setting sun. Instead of offering a burst of “extraordinary liberty,” Ashbery’s poem recommends freedom through patience and through the refusal to commit to any single limiting cause or group. Another of Ashbery most highly regarded pieces, “Soonest Mended” (1969), memorably explores the power inherent in remaining self-reliant, noncommitted, and evasive. The poem again centers on the process and the costs of growing up,

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 159 both with and away from the group of people with whom one began. Ashbery has called it “my one-size-fits-all confessional poem, which is about my youth and maturing but also about anybody else’s” (“John Ashbery,” interview by John Murphy, 25). In this sense, the poem is yet another, perhaps the quintessential, Ashberyan vague allegory of his own artistic development, a narrative of poetic career generalized and depersonalized so as to have the widest possible application. At least this is how he has repeatedly explained his procedure, and to some extent, the “narrative” is universalized and indeterminate. However, a closer inspection of the poem’s details should lead us to question Ashbery’s statement, and to wonder just how “one-size-fits-all” this poem actually is, given that the poem chronicles the coming-of-age of a group of people (or pair) who appear rather familiar and specific in the context of Ashbery’s personal history.34 “Soonest Mended” begins by introducing a “we” that exists at a rather particular and precarious cultural position: Barely tolerated, living on the margin In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso Before it was time to start all over again. (SP, 87)

Who are these eccentric people on the margin that our society refuses to accept and barely tolerates, who are dramatically rescued from annihilation continually, only to begin again? There are several possibilities at work within the passage’s deliberate vagueness: these marginalized souls could be nonconformists in general in a world that oppresses those who are free-thinking, creative, and different, or they could be people trying to survive as homosexuals in mid-twentieth century America, or they could be members of the American avant-garde who were silenced by the forces of the literary establishment and the culture at large in the bland and repressive Cold War era.35 Ultimately, the poem reverberates with each of these possibilities and, in the process, becomes a complex parable about the costs of idiosyncratic individualism and the “hazards of the course” such a stance forces one to navigate, in both specific and general terms (SP, 88). Of the poem’s various semantic levels, perhaps the most important is Ashbery’s allegory of the avant-garde and its dilemmas now that “youth had grown old, chanting and singing” (“The Bungalows,” SP, 114). The movement from rebellion to acceptance, from youthful vigor to middle-age passivity and wisdom underlies the poem’s wistful explorations. In this, “Soonest Mended” is cut from the same cloth as Ashbery’s essay about “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” the essay I discussed in chapter 2, which he had given as a talk just a year before he wrote this poem. The first half of the poem explores those obstacles that “were some hazards of the course,” perhaps of a particular way of living, as nonconformists in a hostile

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world (complete with an “us” and a “they”). We should not be surprised at our difficulties, he asserts, because we were aware of what to expect: “we knew the course was hazards and nothing else” from the start. What the poet has achieved through his long, difficult journey is a kind of balance, one that he recognizes to be a fiction but that grants him power to continue: “But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal” (SP, 88). In these famous lines, Ashbery crystallizes his pluralistic, inclusive aesthetic that calls for an ongoing resistance to partisan commitment and consistency in the name of remaining free from fixity. At this moment, Ashbery has hit on his most distinctive, most successful poetic stance: impossibly poised, straddling age and youth, wisdom and ignorance, present and past, tradition and experiment, stability and motion, communion and isolation. Echoing the conclusion of “Sortes Vergilianae,” Ashbery has recognized that he need not be one more strident rebel in a group of rebels loudly rejecting cultural or literary mores en masse, nor does he need to be a drone blindly following the dictates of convention—the truth, any truth, lies always somewhere between extremes, because extremes imply a certainty and a finality that can only ever be illusory. “Soonest Mended” arrives, in its last third, at a potent statement of a particularly Ashberyan negative capability: the willingness to remain in doubt, uncommitted, and unaligned with any community, whether mainstream or avant-garde. In “The Bungalows,” Ashbery asks himself, “How does it feel to be outside and inside at the same time?” and this sort of dual, border-straddling position dominates Ashbery’s poetry from this point forward (SP, 114).The “fence-sitting” stance delineated in “Soonest Mended” epitomizes a pragmatist, pluralist refusal to adopt any one program, dogma, or poetic style over any other; instead, the poet opts again for the tentative rather than the determined, conclusive, or heroic, much like the ever-patient, gumption-deficient speaker of “Sortes Vergilinae.”36 At the end of “Soonest Mended,” nothing is settled, not even the past with its “moments, years, / Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts.” Despite their apparent reality, these things are “not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day / When it had been outgrown.” This deeply Emersonian poem suggests that if we cast things off as they are outgrown—the once solid meaning of our memories or our sentences, the philosophical or aesthetic positions we once held, the communities we once belonged to—we enjoy a better chance of being “small and clear and free” and of remaining active, in motion. Similarly, Ashbery questions the assumption that as one ages one learns hardand-fast rules of wisdom that can be applied like universal laws to experience. The pragmatic Ashbery knows that “the promise of learning / Is a delusion” since “tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned”; thus, “the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint / None of us ever graduates from college” (88). Here Ashbery wryly follows the pragmatist

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 161 notion of fallibilism, the idea that we must continually revise our beliefs and interpretations of the world based on the ongoing arrival of new information, contexts, and situations; from this standpoint, learning is continuous and incomplete, like the world it contends with, and thus defies the closure some would impose on it.37 Instead of considering our development finished, viewing ourselves as fully mature poets and individuals who have arrived at profound insights into how to live, “probably thinking not to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate.” The paradox Ashbery outlines is intractable: the healthiest kind of adulthood calls for never really being an adult, if maturing means that we must discard our flexibility and become rigid and sure of ourselves. In that sense, being not grown up, open, and forever unsure actually affords us a truer wisdom. In this, Ashbery’s line takes part in the wider trend in postwar American literature and culture that Morris Dickstein traces, in which characters “eager to escape the conventional and oppressive social roles that others have foisted on them . . . recoiled from the 1950s regime of family and responsibility”: “in a world that tailors maturity into a strait-jacket,” Dickstein observes, “they are determined to avoid growing up” (Leopards, 10–11). Ashbery’s refusal to relinquish youthful openness also resembles Emerson’s wish to break out of our habitual modes of thinking by recovering the way one sees as a child (“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun”) and Stevens’s demand that “You must become an ignorant man again / And see the sun again with an ignorant eye” (“Nature,” EL, 10; “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” Collected 380). The problem, as William James warned, is that “habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent” (Writings, 16). Pragmatists fear that once we are settled into, and conform to, the acceptable forms and habits of adulthood, our ability to see freshly and individually is severely diminished and must be vigorously sought and renewed. However, the fight that Ashbery urges against time, habit, and “growing up” has proved nearly impossible to win, since, as he explains in one of the poem’s bleaker moments, echoing King Lear’s pessimism, “nothing / Has somehow come to nothing.” Inevitably, time passes, and growing up occurs. In fact, the once barely tolerable nonconformity this group began with has been somewhat tamed: the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have made—well, in a sense, “good citizens” of us, Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out

The energies of the vanguard, as Ashbery had argued in “The Invisible AvantGarde,” inevitably become absorbed, domesticated; by literalizing that concept here, Ashbery ironically suggests that even rebels and outcasts, if they don’t die

162 Beautiful Enemies young like James Dean or Jackson Pollock or Frank O’Hara, tend to reach middle age like himself, become boring model citizens, and conform more and more to the “rules.” The pathos of the passage resides in part in the connection between the vague “us” and Ashbery himself: here he is writing at age 42, with one of his best friends and fellow provocateurs dead, with “Andy Warhol and Viva and the rest of the avant-garde on The Tonight Show,” his own work increasingly accepted, and his group’s salad days of experimentation ever further behind (“Invisible Avant-Garde,” RS, 392). However, Ashbery slides away from that vision of a settled, domestic self with a concluding—eloquent and complex—turn toward action and change. In the end, continued movement and artistic and personal health are not associated with either conforming to the rules or with brash dissent, but rather with learning to accept what pain and loss offer and, in a quite antiheroic gesture, with uncertainty itself: For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago. (SP, 89)

This is action: not aggressive gestures or declarations, not screaming slogans from the barricades, but remaining unsure, forever loose and careless, which recalls Ashbery’s frequent equation of doubt with motion. Action is getting ready to forget our rigid adult selves and our engrained habits of thinking and talking; it is the process of forever starting over in building our selves and our art. Poetic action, experimental poetic activity in the pragmatist, American avant-garde vein, is not found in achieving perfection, closure, or finality. Rather it is found in planting new seeds (redolent as that image is with future possibilities, future poems), not in well-ordered rows, but erratically, freely. After all the hazards of the course, Ashbery seems to have learned that the act of poetic creation, like the art of living, calls for us to be continually starting over, perpetually wiping the slate clean.38 I read the final movement of “Soonest Mended” as a particularly powerful example of the strain of pragmatist poetics and experimental individualism that I have been analyzing throughout this study. Ashbery’s shifting conclusion rests (or slides along) on a belief in the need to unsay what has been said, to view any representation of self or idea as imprisoning and therefore as what Richard Poirier calls “a provocation to escape,” a notion so dear to Emerson, to O’Hara and Baraka, and to Ashbery (Poetry, 23).39 So the closing passage turns against both the conformist, domestic self and the marginal self previously depicted, and toward continued action and doubt. In “Soonest Mended,” the poet seems to have discovered, through hard experience and loss, through self-imposed exile and willfully destructive avant-garde experimentation, that he can remain neither in nor out of the center or the collective, neither aloof from all moorings

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 163 nor stuck in one place. Knowing all too well that we are always in “danger of substituting one conformity with another,” Ashbery insists that the truly autonomous individual “neither accepts nor rejects acceptance but is independent of it” (RS, 393–394).40 To conclude this investigation of the role of friendship and individual freedom in Ashbery’s poetics, I would like to briefly examine a poem that looks even more closely and specifically at the nature of friendship than “Soonest Mended.” Written in early 1973, six years after Frank O’Hara’s death, the poem “Lithuanian Dance Band” displays Ashbery’s recurring tendency to evoke the loss of his friend and fellow poet as a vehicle for meditating on the subject of friendship (SPT, 52–53).41 Immediately noticeable is the poem’s uncharacteristic form, with its lack of punctuation and final end-stop, features that unmistakably recall O’Hara’s poetry. Although it is not the only Ashbery poem to appropriate O’Hara’s patented devices for keeping a poem “quick,” mobile, and syntactically ambiguous (others from this period include “As You Came from the Holy Land”), Ashbery seems to have self-consciously adopted his friend’s mode for this poem (CP, 49). In this manner, the poem becomes an investigation of the problems of friendship, intertextual appropriation, and influence as well as a moving elegy. The poem’s speaker suggests that he has suffered some tremendous loss (“Something in me was damaged I don’t know how or by what”), and that some occurrence has led “us”—the speaker and the friend addressed in the poem— “out of literature and life into worldly chaos.” The poem has the tone of a casual, intimate letter to friend who has now departed, after a “sudden demise,” into what appears to be an ironic (O’Hara-esque) version of heaven:“What with skyscrapers and dirigibles and balloons the sky seems pretty crowded / And a nice place to live at least I think so do you.”The speaker seems engaged in a revery in which he imagines his lost companion’s whereabouts: “I write you to air these few thoughts feelings you are / Most likely driving around the city in your little car . . . but now I want to concentrate on this / Image of you secure and projected how I imagine you / Because you are this way where are you you are in my thoughts.” In contrast to his projected, more cheerful image of the friend safely driving around the city or in the sky, Ashbery ends the poem on a note of solitude: Yet we are alone too and that’s sad isn’t it Yet you are meant to be alone at least part of the time You must be in order to work and yet it always seems so unnatural As though seeing people were intrinsic to life which it just might be And then somehow the loneliness is more real and more human You know not just the scarecrow but the whole landscape And the crows peacefully pecking where the harrow has passed

In this remarkable and suggestive conclusion, it would seem that his friend’s demise has led Ashbery to consider the irresolvable tensions between isolation and com-

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munal brotherhood. Though he muses about the benefits, even the necessity, of solitude for the creative mind—“You are meant to be alone at least part of the time / You must be in order to work”—he also acknowledges the strong pull of relationships, of exchange with other people which is “intrinsic to life.” To be isolated and insulated seems “unnatural,” and the speaker realizes, just as in “The New Spirit,” that “we must learn to live in others” (TP, 13). The poem’s resonant final image pulls back, as with a camera, from the lonely individual, standing by himself like a “scarecrow,” to an entire relational matrix, “the whole landscape.” Rather than viewing the individual as a solitary being, frightening away the competition with outstretched arms, Ashbery stresses the interrelations between the various figures, the crows, the scarecrow, and the harrow. How fitting an image for a poem that borrows style, tone, and content from another poet in the landscape. As John Shoptaw has usefully pointed out, the word “harrow” contains a submerged reference to “O’Hara.” But why? As an encoded reference to O’Hara, the final image contains an interesting trope for the complexities of poetic influence and dark undertones that suggest Ashbery’s own anxieties (Outside, 158).42 O’Hara, as a harrow, has passed across the field, after breaking the soil and tilling it; Ashbery is left behind writing this poem in O’Hara’s style, just as “crows” are seen “peacefully pecking” those “heavy seeds” (from the second line) left behind in the plow’s path. Ashbery suggests that by adopting O’Hara’s form and voice in this poem (and perhaps others), he is paying tribute to his friend’s artistic innovations—but perhaps even to the point of jeopardizing his own. The image resembles Pound’s famous “Pact” with Whitman, in which he declares, “It was you that broke the new wood, / Now is a time for carving,” but lacks the earlier poem’s bravado (27). Instead, Ashbery’s poem says, in effect, “It was you who broke and planted the new ground, and now is a time for me to peacefully peck in your path.” Furthermore, the moment is quite self-reflexive and metapoetic as Ashbery acknowledges that neither he nor O’Hara could ever be a lone scarecrow, a kind of heroic poet standing unaccompanied in a field battling with the literary past. No, such is not possible because of the social character of the self, because other people are so important, because we only read our own minds through the lenses of others. Because every poem grows out of the soil fed by one’s friends and fellow writers. Even though you may need to be alone to create, he suggests, you have to consider the whole landscape—what Bourdieu calls “the cultural field of production”—where the writing and the plowing get done: a useful admonition to the poetry critic as well, I believe. Perhaps Ashbery is even warning those reading his own work to not view him through Harold Bloom’s lens, as the lone scarecrow anxiously wrestling with poetic influence in brave solitude, but rather as a poet in a network of interrelationships, who once played in an ensemble (a member of the “New York School,” here figured, ironically, as a “Lithuanian Dance Band”), who is more a humble crow pecking away in the furrow left by his

John Ashbery and the Interpersonal 165 friend’s passing than a swashbuckling isolato. Ashbery stresses that poetry, his own included, emerges out of the web of friendships, and grows intertextually from the seeds of other poet’s writings. Far from being oblivious to the pain, pleasure, and mystery of human relationships, Ashbery’s work chronicles the process of growing up amid and away from a crowd of brothers and friends, and he circles endlessly around the duet of self and other. As the recent poem I quoted in the epigraph to my introduction suggests, from his earliest to his latest works, Ashbery is drawn to the image of friend pitted against friend, to pairs of beautiful enemies furiously resisting each other’s power and “songs.” His poetry dives headlong into the riddling relationship between nonconformity and friendship itself, a bond that Ashbery views as, by turns, idyllic, stimulating, “corrosive,” discordant, and hopelessly contingent and unstable. As the poems discussed here reveal in abundance, Ashbery consistently writes “off of ” the most important people in his life, creating an influential approach to the problem of the independent artist struggling with the beckoning call of friendship and avant-garde group identity. With his paeans to amity and its discontents, his moving, slippery narratives of career, Ashbery poses the protean self as an agent in a complex literary and social terrain, working both with and against a panoply of other texts, writers, and selves. Although they differ in so many obvious ways, Ashbery and Amiri Baraka, as we will see in the next chapter, share a profound awareness of that difficult triggering truth of American philosophy and avant-garde poetics, that creed of the Cold War experimental artist: to stand still is to be dead. To face the “pragmatic, kinetic future,” to remain free from all the alluring yet dangerous forms of “settlement” and stasis requires that one be willing to abandon everything—all forms of stability and security, including what one has already accomplished and those one has loved. One must always be moving, always leaving.

5

AMIRI BARAKA AND THE POETICS OF TURNING AWAY

But this was a marvelous thing he had just witnessed. A Black Pragmatist . . . The mulattoes were always held in suspicion by the Blacks anyway, but a Black Pragmatist could be anything he chose to be. Why that was freedom, wasn’t it? —Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. (Can I be light and weightless as a sail? Heavy & clunking like 8 black boots.) I CAN BE ANYTHING I CAN. —Amiri Baraka, “How You Sound??”

I

think / I know now / what a poem / is,” Amiri Baraka writes at the end of his pivotal 1960 poem “Betancourt.” “A / turning away . . . from what / it was / had moved / us” (T, 41). This statement about the supreme importance of turning away—and its centrality to the definition of poetry itself—speaks volumes about Baraka’s poetics and the course of his volatile, controversial career. The strenuous effort to push off from whatever has moved him, at whatever cost, is truly the soul of Baraka’s work. He attempts to resist the “hell” of stasis and conformity at every turn, and to embrace continual motion and change instead (SD, 153). This impulse underlies Baraka’s constant, controversial reinvention of himself, his restless, slippery poems, and his intense ambivalence toward friendship and community. It also connects him—poetically, philosophically, temperamentally—to O’Hara, Ashbery, and other experimentalists in the American grain. With its basis in the American avant-garde’s cardinal principle of continual turning away, in an Emersonian pragmatist aversion to conformity, Baraka’s poetry, like O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s, finds its impetus in an often contentious dialogue with his friends and fellow writers, as the poetic self struggles with various forms of affiliation and influence, racial, literary, and social.1 But at the same time, his work thrives on the stimulation and provocation of the postwar New York poetry and arts community, a collective avant-garde movement made up of like-minded creative souls dedicated to resisting the status quo and inventing new aesthetic and social forms. 166

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 167 Baraka’s emphasis on “turning away” closely resembles the idea of “abandonment” so important to the brand of radical, experimental individualism that begins with Emerson and energizes the New American Poetry of Baraka and his compatriots. As we have seen, this form of individualism holds that the self remains powerful and vital only by continually moving away from—or abandoning—whatever concepts, forms, or words it has settled into, a vision enunciated in myriad ways in the poems by O’Hara and Ashbery discussed in the previous two chapters. As with the other poets, for Baraka it is process, not product, that is paramount. “Hunting,” he declares in the title of an important essay, “Is Not Those Heads on the Wall”: in this encomium to improvisation, spontaneity, and process-oriented art, Baraka’s declares that the “hideous artifact” the world worships as art is nothing but a static product, the dead remains of creative activity (H, 174–175). Instead, he advises us to “Worship the verb, if you need something” and he celebrates “the unconnected zoom,” “the doing, the coming into being, the at-the-time-of ” (H, 174, 175). For Baraka, O’Hara, and Ashbery, to avoid turning into an inert artifact, to escape the deadening grip of habit, we even have to resist any settled or coherent vision of ourselves. Thus, in his early phase, Baraka presents a self that is dramatically unstable, uncertain, and is, as he puts it in one poem, “constantly changing disguises”—all “verb” and no noun, if you will (T, 73). “What / you are,” he writes in one poem, “will have / no certainty, or / end” (T, 53). When he asks, “What is hell?” at the end of The System of Dante’s Hell, the answer given is “your definitions,” because, for Baraka, such demarcations tend to limit and entrap the self (SD, 153). Therefore, as Kimberly Benston has observed, Baraka spends his career writing “in proud defiance of the hell of fixity” (Imamu, 6). In this chapter, I investigate the effects of Baraka’s nonconformity and antipathy to fixity on the sense of self that the poems project, the distinctive poetics of process he develops, and on his understanding of the relationship between race and identity in the most fertile period of his writing. To a greater extent than is often acknowledged, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Baraka stood at the very center of the social and artistic universe that came to be known as the New American Poetry. Baraka arrived in Greenwich Village in 1957, and although he was seven to ten years younger than many of the leading figures of a postwar avant-garde that had been operating for years, he entered that scene as a dynamic young turk and quickly became an indispensable, unusual figure, one who was equally at home with his elders from the Black Mountain, Beat, and New York School camps. The series of apartments Baraka shared with his wife, Hettie Jones, on West Twentieth Street., East Fourteenth Street, and Cooper Square became famous as latter-day literary salons—magnets for members of the New York poetry community eager to engage in socializing, debauchery, and artistic activity. By coediting the influential small journals Yugen and The Floating Bear, Baraka established himself as an important catalyst—as a promoter, editor, critic,

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and poet—while at the same time building close relationships with many of the poets themselves. Socially, aesthetically, and as an editorial impresario, Baraka (like O’Hara, but to an even greater extent) served as a kind of bridge between different factions, drawing from and moving within several of these overlapping groups as a kind of “Pan-New-American Poet.” The cover of the 1963 Christmas issue of the Floating Bear, perhaps drawn by Baraka himself, neatly captures Baraka’s centrality to this universe. It features a Santa Claus figure sitting on a toilet—The Toilet being the title of a 1963 Baraka play—reading Baraka’s newly published book, Blues People, surrounded by a wide variety of names, almost entirely of white writers involved in the intertwined circles of the bohemian, New American Poetry scene. New York School poets such as Frank O’Hara are on his right side, Beats including Ginsberg are behind his head, and filling out the scene are Black Mountain-affiliates such as John Wieners; the painter Robert Rauschenberg; and journals including Locus Solus, Partisan Review, Evergreen Review. Ezra Pound and other predecessors are at the top (notably placed at the source of the water for the toilet). During a crucial eight-year period as the 1950s turned into the 1960s, Baraka came to embody an exciting experiment in collaboration, friendship, and intertextuality across traditional boundaries of race at a moment when American writers had both the opportunity and the desire to establish productive alliances in a space outside the officially sanctioned discourses of American identity and community. The moment, however, was brief. Few, if any, major African-American writers have ever been as thoroughly enmeshed in a community of white writers, lovers, and friends as Baraka, and few have so dramatically extricated themselves from this kind of interracial dialogue. Utterly immersed in the bohemian world of Greenwich Village, in the heady days when integration seemed both “hip” and possible, Baraka––whose wife, closest friends, and influences were white—was pressured by the increasingly urgent racial politics of the time to reconsider and rediscover his connection to African-American culture. In responding to those pressures, Baraka found himself painfully caught between black and white cultures, communities, and identities. The story’s trajectory is a familiar one. In the early 1960s, Baraka grew more and more dissatisfied with these friendships, with white poetic influences, and with his interracial marriage, and increasingly uncomfortable with what he saw as the apolitical stance of the bohemian avant-garde. This extended transitional moment ended abruptly in 1965 when Baraka left his wife and children, cut off all ties with his former companions, and physically left the Lower East Side to move uptown to Harlem, and then to Newark, where he helped found the Black Arts movement. He quickly adopted a much more essentialist, race-based concept of identity, rejected integration as a failed liberal fantasy, and espoused separatism; he became a spokesman for black cultural nationalism and a militant political organizer and leader.

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 169 Critics of Baraka’s work have dutifully discussed his early affiliation with white bohemia in postwar New York. But it is mostly viewed as a brief and unsatisfying stepping-stone on the way to his triumphant arrival at a militant, politicized Black Arts stance, rather than as the source of Baraka’s most enduring work and as one of the most exciting moments of cross-racial dialogue in recent American literature.2 Baraka’s relationship with the white avant-garde community is not, as most accounts have it, a simple case of a young, confused African-American poet desperately searching for his “true” voice, eventually triumphing by shedding his white friends and their way of writing and at last arriving at a more political and “blacker” art.The major, book-length studies of Baraka—such as those by Werner Sollors, Kimberly W. Benston, and William J. Harris—are excellent in many ways, but they tend to treat his oeuvre, following Baraka’s own commentary on his career, as one big conversion narrative. We follow the questing poet on a journey of progressive enlightenment, a clear movement from whiteness to blackness to Third World Marxism (after 1974). They chart the growth from a detached, passive, overly white, and obscure Beat poetics to an activist black aesthetic in which the poet finds his “real” identity at last. Having outgrown his more derivative early mode, Baraka is said to have achieved an understanding of black selfhood, of solidarity with a black community, and to have arrived at a magically successful fusion of politics and art—achieving, in the perhaps oxymoronic term Sollors takes from Baraka, a “populist modernism” (Amiri, 8). However, Baraka’s powerful, agonized pre-Black Arts writings suggest a much messier, more interesting story. His so-called “Beat period” is much more than “just whiteness,” as he called it in 1968, much more than a misguided, temporary stop along the way to his being what he referred to as “even blacker” (BM, 1; H, 10). I have decided to focus on Baraka’s earlier career in this book for several reasons. First, during this period, when his life is so intertwined with his white friends, Baraka writes about the conflict of nonconformity and friendship with great intensity and ambivalence, thus making the early Baraka an exemplary figure in my overall argument. Second, during this stage, Baraka espouses a form of Emersonian pragmatism and individualism which he will later abandon and which has been largely overlooked by critics. Third, this period produces what is arguably Baraka’s strongest and most enduring work. Last, I think that critics of American poetry have neither analyzed Baraka’s often difficult early experimental writings closely enough nor explored Baraka’s connection to the New York School of poetry—and his more general role in one of recent American literary history’s most important cross-racial dialogues—fully.3 It is undeniable that the increasingly tense race relations of the early 1960s, along with heated debates about the compatibility of art and politics, drove a wedge between Baraka and his friends. His growing identification with the African-American struggle for freedom and self-determination against oppression,

170 Beautiful Enemies and the righteous anger and impatience for change fostered by Malcolm X, forced Baraka to reject his earlier skeptical outlook, which, like the New York School’s prevailing ethos, had depended on a wariness of partisan commitment, ideology, and dogma. As the Civil Rights movement progressed, the tentative, fence-sitting (though, I would maintain, not apolitical) stance of the New York School poets and the tune-in, turn-on, drop-out ethic of the Beats began to seem far too complacent, detached, and ineffectual to Baraka. At the same time, the militant black nationalist politics of separatism made it almost impossible for him to stay so intimately tied to the white world and still manage to retain credibility as a leader or spokesman. Almost completely renouncing his earlier pragmatist orientation, Baraka grew impatient with the outlook that we have seen to be so central to O’Hara and Ashbery, one that he had cherished: an outlook that features a resistance to rigid absolutism, unflinching certainty, and essentialism, a rejection of blatant protest within literature and a refusal to mix art with propaganda. One of the most fascinating things about Baraka’s work from roughly 1958 to 1966 is that it offers us the opportunity to see a dynamic writer hashing out such dilemmas in public, in slow motion as it were. Baraka’s writing becomes a space where the problems of American individualism and experimental poetics, liberal and radical politics, racial identity and the communal avant-garde, are all tested and critiqued as he tries on, assesses, and discards a variety of stances and identities.This collision of cultural and racial crisis with the pragmatist ethos raises complex questions about politics, aesthetics, identity, and symbolic versus revolutionary action. Though racial tensions and ideological differences certainly play a major role in Baraka’s conflicted feelings about the avant-garde and the idea of a poetic community, they are also rooted in his belief in the virtues of nonconformity and his antipathy to fixity. Although critics have not made much of the connection, Baraka’s aggressive nonconformity, and the poetics of turning away it fosters, can usefully be seen—as he himself argued in 1963—as an outgrowth of a “continuing tradition,” a “stance . . . of self-reliance, Puddn’head Wilson style” (Moderns, xvi). Indeed, Baraka’s poetics and his inveterate commitment to radical individualism spring from a pragmatist idiom that begins with Emerson and passes through William James, the modernist poets William Carlos Williams,Wallace Stevens, and Gertrude Stein, and black thinkers and writers including W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Sterling A. Brown, and Ralph Ellison, to postwar poets who greatly influenced Baraka like Robert Duncan and O’Hara.4 In other words, Baraka, particularly in his earlier career, should be seen as a key poet in the tradition of American individualism and experimentation. This is not to say that such an identification is unproblematic: considering Baraka’s role in a pragmatist, avant-garde tradition leaves one confronting the intractable contradictions of the man and the work, since, as I just suggested, the exigencies of 1960s racial politics drove Baraka to reject so much of that very tradition. Furthermore,

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 171 Baraka’s about-face swing toward absolutism and rigid ideological thinking, while inimical to the pragmatist devotion to skeptical, provisional responses to the world, is nevertheless based on a radical commitment to “turning,” to ceaseless change and an openness to self-revision that are quintessentially Emersonian. Thus, the dramatic shifts, repudiations of earlier positions, and zigzagging turns in his career and art actually could be said to exemplify the refusal to remain consistent that Emerson and his followers advocate, while also highlighting the profound ramifications such a stance entails. At the same time, the positions and aesthetics he adopts—collectivist, didactic, first separatist and later communist, and harshly critical of “bourgeois liberal individualism” as complacent, complicit, self-serving, and hypocritical—often place him at odds (at least nominally) with the tradition of American individualism. But a latent strain of individualism persists in his later work, which also still retains many components of that earlier avant-garde aesthetic. At the very least, Baraka’s insistence on the word and concept of turning reveals the similarities between Baraka’s poetics and the pragmatist tradition. In The Renewal of Literature, Richard Poirier has drawn our attention to William James’s “characteristic fondness for the word ‘turn’—as in ‘turns his back,’ ‘turns away,’ ‘turns towards’”: “The word suggests an active, not merely reflective, response to the given, and it is synonymous with ‘trope’” (Renewal, 17). As Poirier explains, “turning” is a tactic that helps us avoid being “caught or fixed in a meaning or in that state of conformity which Emerson famously loathed” (17). To do so, it demands that you turn away from ideas and words previously spoken by others and by yourself. “It is the central task of the pragmatist-poet,” Poirier claims in another essay, “to ‘turn’ away from another’s ‘work’ or another’s ‘facts,’” just as the poet must also “turn away even from your own creations, your own ‘facts’” (“Why,” 354).5 For Baraka, the project of turning away, of evading the hell of fixed, pigeonhole identity often takes the form of an effort to forget, even to destroy, and then re-create the self. In “Circles,” Emerson links abandonment with self-erasure and self-(re)invention in a way that prefigures Baraka’s writing: The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle. (EL, 414)

As Poirier says, for these writers, “you are free only when you are getting out of whatever closet you are in, including your idea of yourself ” (Poetry, 73). This is a necessary but exceedingly difficult process as it calls for the relinquishment of our most cherished conceptions of ourselves and the loosening of our bonds to those closest to us. Needless to say, this commandment is easier said than done. As we have seen, poets in this tradition, like O’Hara and Ashbery, struggle with the need to shed

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the encumbrances of friends, lovers, and communities, and even their own idea of themselves, in order to evade conformity. But if any contemporary poet can be said to have taken up the task of Emersonian abandonment, to have actually given up friends, daughters, and lovers, his own precious thoughts, and ideas of his own identity, and thus taken the trope to its furthest, and most literal, point, it is Amiri Baraka. This commitment to ceaseless turning and defiance of fixity leads the early Baraka—in sharp contrast to his later, and more familiar, black nationalist stance— to oppose the idea that there is such a thing as an essential “black” self or identity based on race. As I discussed in chapter 1, Baraka resists being branded a “Negro poet” or pigeonholed by any other label, and maintains that identity is mutable, varied, and indefinite. The early Baraka is of course not alone among AfricanAmerican writers in his reluctance to view identity as predicated on race. Like Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, and many other black writers, Baraka struggles with the demands and conflicts of being an African-American artist in America, especially during the extremely conservative and repressive Cold War years. Although Baraka does tackle oppression, injustice, demeaning stereotypes, and other racial themes in his early poetry, he repudiates the notion that AfricanAmerican authors have only a particular set of influences and subjects open to them by displaying his immersion in the white Western tradition from Dante and Shakespeare to Eliot and Joyce, and by writing about a range of experiences and topics. He refuses to be consigned to a category marked by prescribed expectations and predetermined limitations. Wishing to transcend the narrow confines of a racialized literary identity, style, and subject matter, Baraka refuses to be told that his works must protest the victimization of blacks at the hands of a racist white society or that he must use dialect or portray the “folk” life of AfricanAmerican culture. Ellison spoke frequently and eloquently of his own “struggle to stare down the deadly and hypnotic temptation to interpret the world and all its devices in terms of race” (Shadow, xix). As different as Baraka and Ellison may have been and as deep as the ideological divisions between them became in the 1960s and beyond, Baraka’s earlier work dovetails with Ellison’s attempt to “identify the areas of life and personality which claimed my mind beyond any limitations apparently imposed by my racial identity” (Collected, xi). Both Ellison and Baraka perpetuate a tradition that takes a dim view of racial essentialism and espouses instead a pluralistic vision of protean, contingent selfhood, and as such, both exemplify the intertwining of African-American and pragmatist thought. In Color and Culture (1998), Ross Posnock traces the rejection of essentialism and embrace of cosmopolitanism in the African-American intellectual tradition by convincingly demonstrating the profound connections between this tradition and pragmatism. Arguing that “the interracial exchange” between pragmatism and the black intellectual tradition has been overlooked, Posnock explores the Jamesian orientation in the thinking of Harvard gradu-

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 173 ates Du Bois and Alain Locke, a forward-looking, change-loving, experimental attitude taken up by figures like Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Baraka (6). Above all, Posnock sees pragmatism, in Dewey’s terms, as the revolt against “that habit of mind which disposes of anything by tucking it away in the pigeon holes of a filing cabinet” (qtd. Posnock, Color, 23). Students of James, such as Du Bois and Locke, inherit his “refusal of coercive, closed systems” and perpetuate his “critique of identity logic”—a skepticism of those limited categories of identity that obscure the “more,” the unclassifiable excess, that all our imposed definitions fail to encompass (24). Rejecting what Ellison disparagingly refers to as “blood magic and blood thinking,” these thinkers choose to view American culture and the self as incessantly improvised, invented, and achieved, not biologically inherited or a thing owned by members of this or that group (17). They consider the self and culture to be cosmopolitan, motley, endlessly overlapping and mixed. For Posnock, much of this outlook stems from James (although I would also point to James’s intellectual father, Emerson): James distrusts the appeal to identity as a grounding category, for it violates the “inextricable interfusion” of “our immediately-felt life.” . . . Any point of view that imagines itself complete and definitive betrays a commitment to identity that suppresses the stubborn crudity of experience which remains inassimilable to or denigrated by philosophy’s closed systems. (23)

Deeply uncomfortable with identity logic, these writers bridle under the onerous obligation “to represent their race,” to be “a race man or woman,” not least because having to serve as a group representative enforces conformity on artists who often yearn for a free, independent, even idiosyncratic vision. Figures such as Du Bois and those who follow him, Posnock argues, “sought to ventilate the psychic and intellectual constriction imposed by racial identity” and “the constraints of both race responsibility and provincialism,” without eschewing the struggle for racial and political equality (5, 35). Baraka, like many figures within the African-American lineage and like his fellow poets O’Hara and Ashbery, takes up the “task faced by all pragmatist pluralists” that Posnock isolates: “turning identity from an accomplished fact that excludes and forecloses to a continuing practice of skepticism” (Color, 227). The pre–Black Arts Baraka fears the burden of being a “race man,” or a “Negro” spokesman for his “people.” As late as 1964, even after the success of Dutchman and The Toilet, controversial plays fueled by racial conflict, Baraka was still complaining to interviewers about “this business of being a Negro writer”: That’s finally the worst of it, because you have to be faithful as an artist but you have to carry the weight around of knowing that anything you say is going to be misunderstood simply because you are a Negro. They have to be racial dramas because they’re about Negroes. Then people want to take your plays and make

174

Beautiful Enemies them strictly social. Melville was a social writer in the same way I strive to be. But no one would call Pierre a novel of racial protest, or Omoo. Jesus, nobody calls Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson a novel of racial protest, but the comment it makes on what they call race relations is pretty strong. It’s a wild book. I’ve never seen anything so strong. Nobody would say that’s social protest, but it’s more so than The Toilet. (C, 9)

Baraka, like Ellison, is dismayed that African-American works are ghettoized as pieces of “racial protest.” He yearns for them to be considered more broadly, as first-rate American art in the vein of Melville and Twain, as examples of what he refers to as the Pudd’nhead Wilson brand of self-reliance (Moderns, xvi). In his 1964 play The Baptism, a character called the Homosexual (who personifies the avant-garde bohemian aesthete that Baraka both identifies with and increasingly loathes) mockingly derides proscribed racialized roles while embracing pluralistic, variable identity: I want it all. I want nothing to pass me. . . . Come commentators, salesmen, radicals, let no one say we have not tried to be everything. Let no one say we have not fucked everything and everyone we could. Let no one say we have failed the spirit of the Renaissance. I be Giotto of the queers. I be Willie Mays of the queers. I not be lim-lim-limited to tiny nigger songs. (BT, 19)

What I am suggesting is that Baraka’s hostility toward “definition,” labels, and all forms of closure is inseparable from this unwillingness to be limited to “tiny nigger songs.” Some may be surprised, given the baldly political, didactic poetry of his later career, that Baraka continued, well into the 1960s, to take other African-American artists to task for using their art to make dogmatic political arguments about race. In a 1962 review of the album Mingus in Wonderland, by jazz bassist and composer Charlie Mingus, Baraka complains at length about what is sacrificed when art is undermined by the “wish to editorialize”: Recently Mingus has gotten deeply involved in “social protest,” and is making his music a vehicle as much for it as pure abstract expression, in much the same manner as Max Roach. Some of Mingus’ recent tunes like Fables of Faubus [a piece critical of Orval Faubus, the anti-integration governor of Arkansas], Blues for Your Mamma (which is preceded by a short hortatory poem of Mingus) &c. have usually suffered musically under the weight of Charlie’s wish to editorialize. It is unfortunate that Mingus (and Roach) do not realize that finally it is the deep sincerity of the musical content which will propose the degree and mode of moral engagement, alright, protest, for the jazz musician, as performer . . . while singing about how evil a man Faubus is, or how Africa will rise, does nothing but lower the quality of music these men make, and in Mingus’ case even resurrects the faint damned image of minstrelsy. (“Charlie Mingus” 103, ellipsis in original)

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 175 Baraka frets that the Mingus’s work has “suffered musically” because of its overly obvious political engagement. Of course in hindsight this critique is highly ironic, since it is the exact same charge about the aesthetic quality of his own work that Baraka has relentlessly received (and defended himself against) since the late 1960s. The reference to the taint of “minstrelsy” accruing to Mingus’s “black-oriented” art again suggests Baraka’s profound wariness of being pegged as a “Negro artist” who is expected to perform in a certain limited way for white audiences. The censure of Mingus further illustrates Baraka’s uneasiness with direct or didactic preachiness in an artistic statement—indeed, this essay reveals the proximity of Baraka to O’Hara and Ashbery’s ideas about reducing art’s richness by saddling it with partisan politics and ideological commitment. He claims that ambiguity, elusiveness, honest expression of personal emotion and struggle, and the rejection of convention in the name of exploratory searching—qualities germane to his own work of the 1950s and early 1960s—are more important acts of subversion and nonconformity than any propaganda can ever be. Trumpeting your political commitments, no matter how sincere, justified, or enraged you are, is ultimately much less important than the sheer individuality and virtuosity of your performance as musician or poet. He concludes that “this album is full of Charlie’s ‘protean’ (as Nat Hentoff calls it) personality, and his powerful bass playing makes it clear, past any sincere doggerel, who Charlie is, and that he is also, anti-establishment” (104). For Baraka in 1962, if the work and artistic personality are dynamic, “protean,” and innovative enough, they will be sufficiently avantgarde and “anti-establishment.”6 Eschewing direct or didactic polemics, Baraka’s own challenging, virtuosic early writing embodies the kind of cross-racial avant-garde poetics that Nathaniel Mackey has traced as a general practice within experimental poetry in his book Discrepant Engagement. Such writing attempts to open “presumably closed orders of identity and signification, accent fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety, imperfect fit between word and world” (19). This kind of writing intentionally disrupts fixed boundaries and rigid demarcations in order to evade the strictures of an essentialist identity logic that can be especially detrimental to writers of color. As Mackey puts it, to embrace flux rather than fixity, “to see being as verb rather than noun is to be at odds with hypostasis, the reification of fixed identities that has been the bane of socially marginalized groups” (20). Mackey’s last point is particularly instructive for reading Baraka and other postwar experimental poets: writers who are compelled to be outsiders because of the color of their skin, their sexual orientation, or their gender, are often (or perhaps should be) the most aggressively hostile to the reification of identity, which tends to confine them to “tiny songs.” For a writer to embrace fluidity in this way is “to be at odds with taxonomies and categorizations that obscure the fact of heterogeneity and mix” (20).7 The unconventional, difficult poetic strategies espoused by Baraka, O’Hara, and Ashbery in part grow out of their

176 Beautiful Enemies reluctance, as socially marginalized writers, to be pinned down to someone else’s reductive, crippling category or identity-based label. The works I will be discussing by Baraka relentlessly experiment with poetic form and language in an ongoing attempt to pry open fixed definitions, identities, and boundaries and to accept the experience of flux and groundlessness. Literally positioned at the ever-shifting crossroads of “black” and “white,” Baraka’s writings delve into the gray areas of the protean self, investigating the fluid border spaces where American identity and culture are continually formed, dissolved, and reformulated. To undertake an escape from the boundaries of a resolute identity can be both terrifying and exhilarating, a mixture that surges through Baraka’s writings. For Baraka, the security of his sense of self first began to tremble when he started to immerse himself in the Western literary and intellectual tradition. Thrilled and inspired by his reading, Baraka recalls: My ascent toward some ideal intellectual pose was at the same time a trip toward a white-out I couldn’t even understand. I was learning and, at the same time, unlearning. The fasteners to black life unloosed. I was taking words cramming my face with them. White people’s words. Profound, beautiful, some even correct and important. But that is a tangle of nonself in that for all that. A nonself creation where you become other than you as you.Where the harnesses of black life are loosened and you free-float. (A, 174)

Examining this passage’s imagery, Posnock argues that “the threads binding him to black life would continue to unravel and his distance increase until Baraka ended his free-float in 1965” (Color, 44). But before that return to “the harnesses of black life,” Baraka experienced a “vertiginous moment of ‘free-float,’ of leaping beyond himself, ‘unloosed’ from racial boundaries, open to ‘all kinds of connections’” (45). Although Posnock portrays this “free fall” in positive terms of liberty and expansiveness—an “exhilarated experience of being uprooted” that Baraka “halted” by “returning to roots”—in Baraka’s works of the late 1950s and early 1960s this experience is also guilt-inducing and utterly destabilizing and confusing (45). The poems painstakingly register all sides of the “vertiginous moment” when “you become other than you as you,” the moment just before Baraka’s determined turn toward a grounded, racially defined home in the later 1960s. As we will see, this difficult act of “leaping beyond himself ” and his ambivalence about this process occurs at the center of his writings and makes them such potent, disturbing works. “Notes for a Speech,” the moving last poem in Baraka’s first book, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), catches the poet articulating his rejection of separatist and essentialist notions of African-American identity. Here he asserts, much as did Ellison, Locke, and Du Bois, that his identity as an American of complex, mixed character defies simple racial classifications that would sever black

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 177 from white. However, because this poem enunciates a vision antithetical to his later black nationalism, the dogmatic position toward which his poems supposedly wend their inexorable way, Baraka’s critics have either ignored this poem (as was the case with William J. Harris and Lloyd Brown in two of the several book-length studies of Baraka) or distorted its meanings. For example, Werner Sollors’s reading of the poem situates it within his study’s guiding narrative, which charts Baraka’s journey toward a political and “ethnic” art. So it is not surprising that Sollors characterizes “Notes for a Speech” as a step backward, a “return to resignation” that pulls away from the communal African-American identity that Baraka will later embrace (Amiri, 60). To see the poem as a useful or progressive statement about the ineradicable Americanness and diversity of the black American experience would not fit into Sollors’s scheme. He argues that the poem’s theme is “the isolation of the Black Bohemian from other Black people, his alienation from Africa and the Black American community” and sees its ending as sounding a “resigned note,” a sign that Baraka has not yet achieved his vision of a politically committed African-American art (60–61). But the details of the poem reveal a different, and more complex, picture. For whom is this “speech” intended? Baraka’s fragmentary, provisional “notes” seem to be composed for those contemporaries who were beginning to embrace all things African as a way of establishing a sense of rootedness, ancestry, and coherent communal identity for black Americans, as well as for his white peers within the avant-garde: African blues does not know me. Their steps, in sands of their own land. A country in black & white, newspapers blown down pavements of the world. Does not feel what I am. (T, 48)

Clearly the speaker feels cut off from Africa as a land of origin—for an American intellectual and poet like himself, Africa seems utterly alien. There, in that “country,” all is “black & white,” as in a newspaper, a stark, binary contrast that differs from the mottled, variegated nature of American experience. That place of pure cultural “blackness” “does not feel / what I am.” What Baraka typically leaves unstated is the large, perhaps unanswerable, question of “what I am.” But whatever it may be, his identity is not reducible to “African blues.” Looking back to Africa, imagined here as a land of sand and wind, can blind Negroes (not yet known as African-Americans) even as it may instill a sense of power within them:

178 Beautiful Enemies Strength in the dream, an oblique suckling of nerve, the wind throws up sand, eyes are something locked in hate, of hate, of hate, to walk abroad, they conduct their deaths apart from my own. Those heads, I call my “people.”

Blinded by African sand, his compatriots become blinkered by hate, as they segregate themselves from America and from the speaker, conducting their deaths apart from his own in a far-off “black & white” country. The triple repetition of “hate” tolls like a bell, prophetically warning about the dangers of crippling anger and race hatred, the pitfalls Baraka would later encounter as a black nationalist and eventually reject as a symptom of “the supremacy game.”8 Baraka ponders his distance from his “people”: “And who are they. People.To concern / myself, ugly man.”Though the reference to “people” could imply other African Americans, it is more likely that Baraka means native Africans, whose “steps, in sands / of their own / land” the poem opens with. Cut off from his roots in Africa, the poet’s gaze typically turns toward his own racial hybridity, and through erotic imagery, his interracial marriage to Hettie Jones. Thus, Baraka’s poem stages the complex mingling of black and white he found himself currently inhabiting: Who you, to concern the white flat stomachs of maidens, inside houses dying. Black. Peeled moon light on my fingers move under her clothes. Where is her husband. Black words throw up sand to eyes, fingers of their private dead. Whose soul, eyes, in sand. My color is not theirs. Lighter, white man talk. They shy away. My own dead souls, my, so called people. Africa

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 179 is a foreign place.You are as any other sad man here american. (48–49)

This closing movement suggests the intertwining of white and black within his own, and by extension, any American’s, soul. The passage alternates motifs of dark and light: while his fingers have “peeled moon / light” on them, “Black / words throw up sand” to blind him. When he claims “My color / is not theirs. Lighter, white man / talk,” the ambiguity is rich. Although critics often believe the poem expresses Baraka’s alienation from his fellow African Americans, who find their roots in Africa and cherish their pure blackness, “Notes for a Speech” actually seems to say that the “color” of black Americans, in general, “is not theirs,” meaning that of their African peers. “Africa / is a foreign place,” and black Americans are necessarily “lighter,” metaphorically—because of the “white man / talk” they have inherited, make poems out of, and have greatly altered by their own adaptations, and through which they inevitably view the world—and literally, because of the mixing of the races that has occurred since the time of slavery.9 Does this ending mean that Baraka is rejecting the African-American community that he feels severed from because of his “whiteness”? Such a reading seems to overlook the ramifications of the crucial last phrase: “You are / as any other sad man here / american.” What Baraka actually rejects here is separatism and racial essentialism. In fact, the poem asserts that all of us, black or white, are simply “american.” With a deft touch, Baraka omits the capital “A” to suggest a sense of diminishment, shared sorrow, and skepticism about what America has traditionally meant. There is no monolithic, absolute, or reified American identity that can be equated with white Anglo-Saxon parentage, Baraka implies. Prying open the resolute definition of “American” via the twisting syntax of this indeterminate poem, Baraka suggests that being “american” means being rootless, even “sad,” unable to look back to Africa or England or anywhere else. It means living on a frontier of perpetually changing, fluid experiences, thrown together with a multitude of other people from wildly diverse backgrounds. It means living in a state of flux that may leave one unhappy, confused about “what I am,” but also, in a strange way, free. Baraka finds that disentangling himself—from entrenched ideas about his own identity, from friends and group affiliations—is no easy task; the process itself actually becomes the subject of many of his poems, since, for him, a poem is, by definition, a turning away. It is in “Betancourt,” one of his most important early poems, that Baraka crystallizes this definition.The poem itself marks a pivot in Baraka’s life and writing, and like many of his poems, it projects the poet’s mind at a crossroads. We see him in the very act of contemplating the possibility and the pain of changing positions and rebelling against his earlier views and his friends’ views.

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Beautiful Enemies

The standard narrative of Baraka’s career often considers “Betancourt” a “transitional” poem between the supposedly apolitical, Beat poems of Preface and the more politically engaged poems of The Dead Lecturer. A closer look reveals that the poem is not only transitional in the conventional sense, but that it also embodies an Emersonian “poetics of transition,” to borrow Jonathan Levin’s apt name for the pragmatist aesthetic. Though Baraka’s conversion-like experience during a visit to revolutionary Cuba has been much discussed, it may be useful to sketch in the details.10 In the summer of 1960, Baraka was invited to visit Cuba along with a group of black intellectuals because he had published a pamphlet of poems by various poets, including one he had written, in praise of Castro’s revolution. By all accounts, the trip was a major turning point for Baraka, as it sparked what would become (quite a bit later) his full-blown commitment to radical political activism and hastened his dissatisfaction with the bohemian stance and its purely aesthetic and “individualistic” forms of protest and critique. In the essay “Cuba Libre,” his first major piece of prose, Baraka chronicled this journey and the awakening it stirred in him. While visiting Cuba, Baraka engaged in a disturbing conversation with a Mexican intellectual, Rubi Betancourt, who questioned him about America and its seemingly rabid anti-communism and domineering interference in Cuban affairs. On the defensive, Baraka exclaimed: “I’m a poet. . . . [W]hat can I do? I write, that’s all, I’m not even interested in politics.” Betancourt harshly critiqued his apolitical position, calling Baraka a “cowardly bourgeois individualist,” words that stung the young poet (H, 42). Her accusation, which seemed to haunt him through the next several years, would encourage Baraka to wrestle with the contradictions inherent in the term “individualist” and, eventually, to at least nominally modify his ideas about the individual’s relationship to the collective. Later in the trip, a young Mexican poet named Jaime Shelley attacked him even more hurtfully, “screaming: ‘You want to cultivate your soul? In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of ” (H, 43). “Cuba,” Baraka wrote in a letter to Betancourt, “split me open” (qtd. in Harris, Poetry, 7). Before the trip, Baraka had been relatively content to be an experimental poet and bohemian nonconformist; he was certainly troubled by racism, the inequities of capitalism, the conservative ideology of Cold War culture, and the U.S. exercise of imperial power in emerging Third World countries, but was nearly as wary of blurring art and partisan politics as O’Hara and Ashbery. Upon returning from Cuba, Baraka’s stance changed. Suddenly, he was sharply aware that “the rebels among us have become merely people like myself who grow beards and will not participate in politics. Drugs, juvenile delinquency, complete isolation from the vapid mores of the country, a few current ways out” (H, 61). Dropping out of a corrupt society in order to protest its iniquities, as his gang of Beats and other hipsters advocated, suddenly seemed like escapism, passivity, and

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 181 at best a superficial form of revolt. The postwar avant-garde creed of nonconforming individualism seemed like an elitist excuse for quietism and selfishness. As Baraka recalls in his autobiography, his friendships became the ground of contention, as “the arguments with my old poet comrades increased and intensified” as a result (A, 246).11 Baraka soon wrote the poem “Betancourt,” which reflects, quite self-consciously, on a dramatic change the poet feels impending within himself and his art. Like so many of his poems, it is addressed to a friend, in this case Rubi Betancourt. As such, the poem demonstrates the Emersonian idea that friendship can and should provoke the self to move and change and grow. Emerson always stresses how socially indebted the self is, but he urges us to see, as James Albrecht observes, that “others can truly aid us only by pushing us to our own work” (“Saying,” 51). Since for Emerson “activity is contagious,” it is always provocation rather than instruction we seek from other souls (qtd. Albrecht, “Saying,” 51). In this poem’s opening line, Baraka wonders about the effect that meeting Rubi Betancourt, and by extension, experiencing the revolution in Cuba, will provoke in him. “What are / influences?” he asks (T, 37). In effect, he is wondering, What sparks a change in one’s self-definition or compels new turns in one’s work and being? Although Baraka would later recall a fourteen-hour train ride conversation with Señora Betancourt, here he portrays a seaside dialogue: We sat with our backs to the sea. Not in the gardens of Spain, but some new greenness, birds scorching the yellow rocks at the foot of the sea’s wall. A barrier of rock, tilting backwards, damp, thrown up against a floating dreary disgust. Even fear without self possession.

Contrasted with the “gardens / of Spain”—a symbol of the “ruined minds of Europe” that Baraka often opposes—the “new greenness” represents the spirit of the Americas as a New World of fresh starts, rebirth, and, in Cuba’s case, revolution (H, 113).This greenness holds out possibilities of political and personal change. Still, a “barrier” blocks him from such change, tilts backward, traps him with his “floating dreary / disgust.” “Without self possession,” which would entail holding or owning a clear idea of oneself, the speaker seems to fear change. His new friend’s

182 Beautiful Enemies words (presumably her attack on his “cowardly bourgeois individualism”) have stirred and disturbed him—“Walking all night / entwined inside, I mean / I tasted you, your real & fleshy / voice / inside my head / & choked.” As if realizing the passivity, the apathy of the American poetry world he belongs to, he continues: Our gestures are silence. The sea’s wet feathers slowly black. (You die from mornings, looking down from that silence at the silence of roofs. Disconnected flesh. Not even cars from this distance are real. (38)

Baraka critiques his own ineffectual gestures, his silence, the disconnection between himself and the flesh of real, suffering people (“the millions of starving people to feed” that Jaime Shelley had screamed at him about), whose roofs remain silent because the poet fails to “make poems out of ” them (H, 43). Behind this barrier of aestheticization, from this distance, not even cars look “real.” Always restless with the status quo, Baraka directly considers, in the poem’s final section, the idea that poetry calls for continual change, departure, and abandonment. I was reading some old man’s poems this morning. A lover hid himself under the stink of low trailing sea birds, heavy sun, pure distance. He had to go away, I mean, from all of us, even you, marvelous person at the sea’s edge. Even you Sra. de Jiminez. Rubi. And I think he knew all this would happen, that when I dropped the book the sky would have already moved, turned black, and wet grey air would mark the windows. (40)

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 183 This evocation of the old poet who knows he must leave reads like a parable of Emersonian abandonment and nonconformity. Perhaps a figure for Emerson himself, or Whitman (whose musings by the sea as he “ebb’d with the ocean of life” are echoed by the seaside imagery of “Betancourt”), Baraka’s old man recognizes that he must not serve as a model to be imitated. Instead, he must be a prod, an inspiration for later writers to reach their own insights.Whitman and Emerson want nothing more than to call readers to themselves, provoking them to change and go on changing, while erasing themselves as instructors. “I have been writing and speaking what were once called novelties, for 25 or 30 years, and have not now one disciple,” Emerson admitted in his journal. “Why? Not that what I said was not true; not that it has not found intelligent receivers; but because it did not go from any wish in me to bring men to me, but to themselves. I delight in driving them from me. What could I do, if they came to me?—they would interrupt and encumber me. This is my boast that I have no school follower. I should account it a measure of the impurity of insight, if it did not create independence” (April 1859, S, 376). Similarly, Whitman always felt that “he most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher” (qtd. in Posnock, Color, 18). This paradoxical notion of influence explains why Baraka’s mentor William Carlos Williams insisted that “the only way to be like Whitman is to write unlike Whitman. Do I expect to be a companion to Whitman by mimicking his manners?” (“America,” 2). Perhaps Baraka says “I think he knew / all this would happen” because Whitman had already spoken so eloquently of his own leave-takings: “I depart as air,” Whitman writes in the final lines of “Song of Myself,” “I stop somewhere waiting for you” (Leaves, ed. Cowley, 86). In “Poets to Come,” Whitman addresses some future Baraka: I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, Leaving it to you to prove and define it, Expecting the main things from you. (Leaves, ed. Kouwenhoven, 12)

Whitman’s writing demonstrates the self-erasing nature of the Emersonian tradition—which, in Poirier’s words, looks “to the past less for a ‘resting place’ than as an incentive to further creation, the making of further additions to reality” (Renewal, 18). Baraka’s turning away from this old man to write his own poem is an apt illustration of this process. Furthermore, Baraka implicitly identifies himself with this poet who “had to go away” from “all of us, even / you,” Rubi Betancourt herself. The poem suggests the connection between self-reliant independence and the abandonment of personal attachments (here figured as needing to go away) that I discussed earlier. True and useful nonconformity demands a departure “from all of us.” As if in answer to the opening question—“What are influences?”—Baraka asserts that

184 Beautiful Enemies influences are absolutely essential forces we must nonetheless resist, which must at best merely drive us toward new horizons. The old sage knew that when the speaker put down the book, he would be back in his own changing world, with its turning sky, and he would need to be ready to embrace the flux of his own moment. Baraka goes on to say that the old man seemed to know That there are fools who hang close to their original thought. (40–41)

This passage closely echoes Emerson’s famous jab at those “little minds” whose hobgoblin it is to opt for a “foolish consistency” rather than arriving at new beliefs or opinions (EL, 265). In “Experience,” Emerson warns us that “dedication to one thought is quickly odious,” and in “Self-Reliance,” he argues that we are frightened away from trusting in ourselves, from being nonconformists, because we fear being inconsistent with our “original thoughts.” “The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them” (EL, 476, 265). A fitting motto for Baraka’s entire career could be Emerson’s comment that “with consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. . . . Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day” (EL, 265).12 Rather than resting, like those uninspired “fools,” with “some / slightness / of feeling / they think is sweet / and long to die / inside,” Baraka chooses to change, regardless of whether his new thoughts and poems contradict his old ones. Following in the steps of O’Hara’s “My Heart,” in which the poet defiantly claims, “I’m not going to cry all the time / nor shall I laugh all the time. . . . And if / some aficionado of my mess says ‘That’s / not like Frank!’, all to the good!” Baraka’s “Betancourt” is a similar statement of poetic self-reliance that defends the poet’s right to change, to be open and variable (CP, 231). The poem’s close relates this post-Cuba revelation: Think about it! As even this, now, a turning away. (I mean I think I know now what a poem is A turning away . . .

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 185 from what it was had moved us. . . . A madness. Looking at the sea. And some white fast boat. (41, ellipses in original)

With its hesitancies, short, jagged lines, and broken thoughts, the poem exemplifies what Nathaniel Mackey calls Baraka’s tendency to “slide away from the proposed,” his refusal to commit himself “to any single meaning” (38). The poet not only deviates from the fixed and definitive, from the original thought, but shows us the process as it happens: “as even / this, now, a turning / away.” The poem also portrays the self turning away from its former identity, from its friends, from “what / it was / had moved / us”—even from its country of origin. “Moved” is intriguingly ambiguous here, as it could imply that a poem turns away either from things that have touched us emotionally or from things that have driven, pushed, or “influenced” us (recalling the opening question of the poem), and both meanings remain possible and relevant. Furthermore, in defining the poem as a turning away from something that has moved us, Baraka plays on the etymological root of “verse,” which comes from “to turn.” In effect, he highlights the connection between verse and what Stanley Cavell calls “aversive thinking,” the arch-American aversion to conformity (since “aversion” means literally an “act of turning away”).13 This ending also displays Baraka’s characteristic obliquity in its ellipses and omissions of connections: after the voice trails off, we cannot be certain what “a madness” refers to. Is a poem “madness”? Or does one turn away from madness (in this case, the bohemian world of noncommitment or the evil corruption of America itself)? Or is it madness to turn away from that which has moved us? Furthermore, the meaning of the “white fast boat” and its destination is similarly open-ended and indeterminate—is this vessel leaving Cuba for an unhappy return to America and its problems? Does it represent a method of escape from America? And what is the racial significance of the boat being white? Baraka typically leaves these questions unresolved in order to dramatize the mind’s ambivalence in facing the need to change, its mixture of anxiety and excitement about movement and the evasion of stasis. “Betancourt” does more than simply portray Baraka’s renowned transition to a more politicized and “blacker” art, and is a better poem for it. The poem’s density and slipperiness, and its reliance on tropes from the Emersonian pragmatist tradition suggests that the outward revolution in Cuba has sparked difficult

186 Beautiful Enemies thoughts about an inward revolution, in which the old self must relinquish its comfortable certainties in order to be reborn into a “new greenness.” At the heart of the poem, Baraka questions his individualistic detachment yet holds fast to his aversive poetics of nonconformity and disaffiliation. Establishing a paradigm that much of Baraka’s writing will follow, the poet urges himself to accept a fluidity of self that is at once liberating and disturbing, and he contends with the sharply mixed feelings this conflict arouses. This need to be always changing results in the hostility toward the self we find in Baraka’s early poems, which portray a persona constantly in transition, in the process of transforming into someone else, being killed or dissolved or razed only to be re-created. I agree with Kimberly Benston’s observation that much of Baraka’s early poetry “carries the direct charge, overtone, or echo of self-criticism”—although I assert that this self-critique is more than the product of selfhatred and racially motivated guilt: it is also intertwined with the precepts of experimental individualism and protean selfhood (Baraka, 99). “Let my poems be a graph / of me,” Baraka writes in “Balboa, the Entertainer,” and in many of the poems collected in his first two volumes, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and The Dead Lecturer, his poems are just that: Baraka fashions poems that use jagged, staccato forms, slippery syntax, indirection and contradiction to explore the instability of the “me”—the multiplicity of his own identity, and the masks, guises, and personalities it wears (T, 54). For example,“Ostriches and Grandmothers!” begins with a gathering of the poet’s various selves: All meet here with us, finally: the uptown, way-west, den of inconstant moralities. Faces up: all my faces turned up to the sun. (T, 25)

Lines like these in Baraka’s work point to his absorption of O’Hara’s poetry, in particular his friend’s tour de force evocation of the variousness of selfhood, “In Memory of My Feelings,” which Baraka probably read in 1958 when it was first published in Evergreen Review. There O’Hara writes, “My quietness has a number of naked selves,” and he refers to his body as “the naked host to my many selves” (CP, 253, 256). In “Ostriches and Grandmothers,” Baraka’s speaker stands at the nexus of manifold “faces” that have “finally” come together, the uptown and the way-west. “Uptown,” for Baraka, usually refers to Harlem and “black” identity, while “way-west” suggests Western, white tradition, as in the contemporaneous poem “Way Out West,” which acerbically riffs on the classical and Eliotic inheritance:“beauty / collapsed, with moldy breath / done in . . . / Tiresias’s / weathered cock” (T, 30). Thus, the poem stages a momentary fusion of Baraka’s contrasting selves, like the colliding, contrasting planes of a Cubist portrait.14 After the phrase

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 187 “den of ” one expects to find the word “iniquity,” but it is replaced by “inconstant / moralities”—a play on a cliché which may imply that Baraka values this inconstancy negatively. Much as O’Hara does, Baraka highlights the thin line between stimulating variousness and lack of integrity, between pluralism and amoral relativism. But he goes on to portray his own inconstant nature lyrically: Unbelievable changes. Restorations. Each day like my niña’s fan tweaking the flat air back and forth till the room is a blur of flowers.

With this striking image, Baraka evokes the undulations of the self through passing time, a confusing cycle of change and restoration that leaves him feeling blurred. The contingency of the self is matched by the contingency of its relations with others, its friends and lovers—the unfixed self grows closer to another person and then falls away: “Intimacy takes on human form . . . / & sheds it like a hide. / Lips, eyes, / tiny lace coughs / reflected on night’s stealth” (T, 25). It is in the act of writing, Baraka implies, that the self is momentarily created: It’s these empty seconds I fill with myself. Each a recognition. A complete utterance. Here, it is color; motion; the feeling of dazzling beauty Flight. As the trapeze rider leans with arms spread wondering at the bar’s delay

Desiring his poems to serve as a graph of the self, the poet fills each blank second, like the blank page, with a recognition or “utterance” of himself. Again and again in these poems, Baraka juxtaposes a sense of identity’s rigid boundaries with his power to alter and even create a provisional self through imagination and words. In his statement for The New American Poetry, Baraka writes, in the comment I used as an epigraph above, “MY POETRY is whatever I think I am. (Can I be light & weightless as a sail? Heavy & clunking like 8 black boots.) I

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CAN BE ANYTHING I CAN” (Allen, 424). Similar gestures recur throughout these poems, as in “Audobon, Drafted,” where Baraka claims “I am what I think I am,” again asserting that the self is not imprisoned by firm definitions but rather creates its own experience, not unlike Wallace Stevens’s Hoon, who says, “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself ” (T, 94; Collected, 65). Baraka’s hesitant affirmation of self-invention dovetails with the cardinal themes of William James’s pragmatism, which asserts that “mind engenders truth upon reality” and that “in our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. . . . [T]he world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands” (Writings, 448, 456). However, the self created in this manner is never a stable or complete image, a final, proposed self—in “Ostriches” it is marked by color, motion, flight, dazzling beauty: a sense of exhilarating liberty (T, 54). The final simile suggests that this high-wire act of self-creation in the moment of the poem may leave the self temporarily frozen, suspended. But there is also a sense of risk, of impending fall, of imminent change, in the trapeze artist’s waiting for the delayed bar—in another instant there may be a crash, and the jumble of faces will be in motion again. Even the poem’s strange title has an oblique connection to the idea of conflicted selfhood that Baraka delineates here: the reference to “ostriches” evokes a protective hiding of one’s head and self in the sand, or even an evasive refusal of confrontation, and “grandmothers” suggests genealogy and an inherited biological and racial identity. Perhaps the title is meant to yoke these two approaches to identity together, leaving the poem poised, like the floating trapeze rider with arms outstretched, between the two. An intense scrutiny of his own fragmented and divided selves fills the earlier poems. In “The Turncoat,” Baraka writes, “I am alone & brooding, locked in / with dull memories & self hate, & the terrible disorder / of a young man” (P, 26). The speaker says, “I glide down / onto my own roof, peering in at the pitiful shadow of myself.” (In “Vice,” Baraka further underlines this confusion by referring to the “Mosaic of disorder I own but cannot recognize. Mist in me” [T, 34]). The “self hate” this “turncoat” feels presumably stems from his guilt about betraying his “coat” or “skin,” his treacherous lack of allegiance. At the same time, by “turning” from his origins, from the fixity of a externally defined, skin-based identity, he finds release in art and imagination: I dream long bays & towers . . . & soft steps on moist sand. I become them, sometimes. Pure flight. Pure fantasy. Lean. (26)

Through imagination, metaphor, or poetry, the self becomes malleable, can metamorphose into something other (“I become them, sometimes”), can be released from limited definitions of self. (Note that he does not dream of “long bays & towers,” but actually seems to create or conjure them.) The reference to “flight” recalls

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 189 the word’s appearance in “Ostriches.” It is again used as a trope for the freedom from strict definitions of self that poetry might provide. One could read the ending as a dubious celebration of bohemian escapism, a dig at the romanticized, Beat image of the bardic “Poet.” Baraka will increasingly wish to purge such a vision of the artist’s role. However, the poem’s sweeping movement from being “locked in with dull memories & self hate” to the “Pure flight” of artistic creation suggests, at least for the moment, the liberating power of self-invention through imagination and words. But getting out of your idea of yourself is far from an easy task, and the poem displays the benefits of that freedom jostling up against the sense of betrayal and treachery involved in being a “turncoat” to one’s own sense of self (Poirier, Poetry, 73). For Baraka, the free-float away from the predictable and limited expectations of racialized identity is inextricably bound up with a sense of guilt and anxiety about betraying and losing his roots. In a slightly later poem,“The Dance” (from The Dead Lecturer), Baraka underscores this desire for continuous self-creation and for movement and fluidity. The poem, like many others, is sparked by the work of one of Baraka’s contemporaries, in this case Robert Duncan, who was fifteen years his senior. From Duncan’s writing, the young poet seems to have learned that poetry and experience must be conceived as a dance, as kinetic process. (Fittingly, another poem in The Dead Lecturer is titled “Duncan Spoke of a Process.”) Baraka begins by pointing toward Duncan’s own poem “The Dance,” which was included in The New American Poetry (Allen, 46–47). He suggests that “the dance” is (held up for me by an older man. He told me how. Showed me. Not steps, but the fix of muscle. A position for myself: to move. Duncan told of dance. His poems full of what we called so long for you to be. A dance. And all his words ran out of it. (DL, 71)

Duncan’s 1956 poem is about “our circulations” that “sweeten the meadow,” about the “cool excess / of movement,” replete with images of dancers who “Turn, turn, turn” (Allen, New, 46–47). This powerful example demonstrates the importance of “turning” and shows Baraka that the poet’s goal or proper “position” is “to move.” As I noted in chapter 2, Duncan, perhaps more than any other avant-garde poet of the New American Poetry scene, self-consciously aligns himself with Emerson and pragmatism. He would later observe, in “The Self in Postmodern Poetry,”

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“how Emersonian my spirit is” and speak directly about the profound connections between the aesthetics of Dewey and James and the open-form, exploratory postwar American poetics I have been examining in O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka (Fictive, 226). Duncan’s belief that poetry is a form of “dance,” a dynamic act that can take us beyond the parameters of our being, beyond the “sad meat of the body,” and can create “some bright elegance,” stirs Baraka’s own thoughts the nature of the self. From this “older man,” Baraka learns that the self can be malleable and changing, that there is “Some gesture, that / if we became, for one blank moment, / would turn us / into creatures of rhythm.”The liberating gesture appears to be the act of imaginative creation, of writing: “I want to be sung,” Baraka continues, “I want / all my bones and meat hummed / against the thick floating / winter sky. I want myself / as dance.” Through song, the rigid self (depicted in such negatively charged images of limitation as “sad meat” and “bones,” “Where they . . . keep me against my will”) can give way to flux and dance. This idea echoes Duncan’s own notions about the evasion of “the laws that bound me” via the act of writing. In the introduction to Bending the Bow (1968), Duncan writes that “working in words I am an escapist; as if I could step out of my clothes and move naked as the wind in a world of words” (“Equilibrations,” 627). In this view, the poem becomes a concrete manifestation of “The time of thought” and “The space / of actual movement.” The poet, again echoing Stevens’s Hoon, is “given to feeling things / I alone create,” including his own improvised identity: And let me once, create myself. And let you, whoever sits now breathing on my words create a self of your own. One that will love me. (DL, 72)

The writer hopes not only to fashion a self but to provoke the reader to do the same.The relationship between writer and reader that Baraka posits in this passage mirrors Emerson’s ideas about the “uses” of books, influences, and “great men”— which are to be at most stepping-stones to our own perpetual self-creation (EL, 615). However, the conditional voicing of this conclusion (“let me once”) suggests the poet’s deep desire for the freedom to invent himself, rather than its existence as a definite actuality. Furthermore, the ending, growing out of an uneasiness with himself that often borders on self-hatred, displays Baraka’s poignant wish to create a persona that will be not only of his own choosing (rather than imposed by history, biology, racial categories, literary mores, or cultural stereotypes) but also one that will bring him connection with others, that will enable a reader to “love” what he has chosen to become. Baraka’s unusual effort to dislocate or dissolve the self in these poems recalls the “insatiable desire . . . to forget ourselves” that Emerson speaks of in “Circles”

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 191 (EL, 414). Baraka’s powerful, important poem “The Bridge” is a good example of a poem that puts such a gesture into practice and then watches what kinds of sparks fly when one does. The poem explores the moment of free fall when the self plunges away from any former sense of itself and from all connections to others. By dedicating the poem to two fellow poetry associated with New American Poetry, John Wieners and Michael McClure, Baraka signals that he has one eye on his fellowship with other poets. In this multilevel poem, Baraka fuses three concerns at once: a meditation on selfhood and community, a contemplation of avant-garde jazz, and a depiction of an urban scene that includes a bridge, two bars, and a street. It begins with a moment of self-forgetting: I have forgotten the head of where I am. Here at the bridge. 2 bars, down the street, seeming to wrap themselves around my fingers, the day, screams in me (T, 31)

Baraka cleverly riffs on a series of jazz terms: the “head” (the main melody of a song, often taken from a familiar piece of popular music), “bridge” (a transitional passage that departs from the main melody and connects two sections), “bar” (a fixed unit or measure of a song), and “changes” (the recurring chord changes of a song’s central melody).15 The poem’s speaker has lost his way by forgetting his “head,” like a trumpeter who has gone so far “out” in his improvising that he finds it difficult to get back to the main melody. Losing himself in this manner causes a sense of dislocation, of forgetting “where I am,” which, in Baraka’s view, is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, such self-forgetting is liberating, as it opens the individual up to new possibilities beyond the stifling boundaries of the self. On the other hand, it also pushes one into a frightening, fluid chaos beyond old certainties. The “bridge,” the part of the song which should lead back to the familiar melody, also stands for that which joins the speaker to stability and to other people. He continues: I can’t see the bridge now, I’ve past it, its shadow, we drove through, headed out along the cold insensitive roads to what we wanted to call “ourselves.” “How does the bridge go?”

Leaving the bridge and its long shadow behind, the poem turns away from order and toward flux on a number of levels, a swerve that includes a rejection of both poetic heritage and personal identity. One sign of the poet’s detour from the touchstones of American poetic tradition is the obvious allusion in this bridgejumping poem to Hart Crane’s The Bridge.16 Not only does he cast off this inheritance, but also any sense of his identity as a stable, continuous entity. Baraka writes:

192 Beautiful Enemies “The changes are difficult, when / you hear them, & know they are all in you, the chords // of your disorder meddle with your would be disguises.” The difficult, unscripted “changes” the speaker experiences disrupt any sense that an internal, ordered self may exist. This movement toward “disorder” resonates with the poem’s musical motifs and theme of protean identity. This poem deliberately invokes the new style in avant-garde jazz, as Nathaniel Mackey has pointed out, which at that moment was shocking people by turning away from the recurring melodies of bebop and was drawing fire for being “structureless and incoherent” (37–38). As Baraka later put it in his Autobiography, “free jazz” meant that bebop was suddenly “cut loose from the prison house of regular chord changes” (260).17 But such freedom, such cutting loose, has its costs: the imagery of the poem’s conclusion suggests that jumping off the bridge of familiarity and interpersonal connection is a terrifying, even suicidal leap into “black” water, a chaotic newness that threatens to drown the self: you have forgotten the color when you touch the water, & it closes, slowly, around your head. The bridge will be behind you, that music you know, that place, you feel when you look up to say, it is me, & I have forgotten, all the things, you told me to love, to try to understand, the bridge will stand, high up in the clouds & the light, & you, (when you have let the song run out) will be sliding through unmentionable black. (T, 31–32)

One could argue that this ending narrates a turn to racial “blackness”—that we see Baraka rejecting the recognizable melodies of Western poetry, including Crane’s American epic, even the avant-garde poetry that his friends, like Wieners and McClure, “told” the young Baraka “to love, to try to understand”—in order to embrace what Mackey calls “the black subconscious” (38). However, as the first line just quoted suggests, forgetting one’s head also involves forgetting “the color,” presumably of one’s skin. In this sense, the poem actually expresses the escape from, to recall Ellison’s phrase, “any limitations apparently imposed by [one’s] racial identity” (Collected, xi). What lies beyond the “uneasy sanctuary of race,” beyond predetermined categories of ethnicity, community, aesthetics, and music? (Shadow, xxiii). “Unmentionable black.” Rather than a sign of a “purer” black identity, this ineffable “blackness” seems to represent the uncertain flux beyond a fixed sense of self and of place—beyond the comfortable assurances of camaraderie, or of an identity based on skin color. What this “suicide” really destroys is an old, imprisoning self. But what is on the other side of that plunge? Rather than offering answers, the poem’s conclusion is more ambivalent than anything else: a mixture of threat and release, of death, on the one hand, and a possible escape

Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away 193 from familiarity, habit, and paralysis, on the other. These “unmentionable” waters seem to be the unlit and uncharted seas that poets voyage into when they depart from the safety of the crowd. As in Shelley’s Adonais, this place lies “far from the shore; far from the trembling throng / Whose sails were never to the tempest given” (406, lines 489–490). It is where writers reach when they take a credo of radical nonconformity to its logical endpoint. As a central figure within the New American Poetry movement, Amiri Baraka was swept up in the Cold War cultural milieu that was clamoring about the dangers of conformity and the possibilities of a meaningful form of individualism. He shared his avant-garde peers’ hatred of group thought, uniformity, containment, and stagnation. Fostered by the pluralism and experimental individualism of the Emersonian pragmatist ethos, Baraka’s ideas about poetry and his potent, early works are driven by a profoundly American restlessness, a problematic, unsettling refusal to stay bound by any parameters of self, group identity, convention, or propriety. To escape the hell of fixity, Baraka projects a precarious, self-erasing, tormented, and protean self in experimental poems that are part of a ceaseless (and multivalent) project of “turning.” Intended to be “graphs” of a self in constant motion, they rely on fragmented poetic forms, twisting syntax, ambiguity, and wordplay in order to wriggle free from all forms of closure, static representations of self or community, and settled political stances (T, 54). Poems like “Notes for a Speech,” “Ostriches and Grandmothers,” and “The Bridge” refuse to accept “the reification of fixed identities” that threatens to imprison the socially or racially marginalized, and deliberately explode “closed orders of identity and signification” (Mackey, Discrepant, 20). Perhaps it is not surprising that such a kinetic and fiercely independent self finds the idea of sustaining harmonious friendships or assimilating into a group identity deeply suspect, if not untenable. In the next chapter, I turn to how Baraka’s work, often with shattering drama and personal emotion, compulsively represents friendship and weighs its puzzles and satisfactions. Impelled by his conviction that the human self is, for better or worse, “a social animal,” Baraka’s poems, prose, and plays of the early 1960s begin to acknowledge that despite the bracing oxygen of companionship, collaborative exchange, and avant-garde community, he must forcefully turn away from his closest allies, their writing, and even the ideal of permanent friendship (SD, 153).

6

“AGAINST THE SPEECH OF FRIENDS” Baraka’s White Friend Blues

True jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment . . . springs from a contest in which each artist challenges all the rest; each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvasses of a painter) a definition of his identity as an individual, as a member of the collectivity and as a link in the chain of tradition. —Ralph Ellison

lthough in 1965 Amiri Baraka would dramatically cut himself loose from the Greenwich Village poetry scene and the wider New American Poetry movement, many of his best, and most famous, works absolutely depend on his complex relations with his white avant-garde companions for their subject matter, their emotional force, and their aesthetic complexity. Like O’Hara and Ashbery, Baraka envisions poetry to be a form of contentious position-taking in the literary field—or, to paraphrase Ellison’s definition of jazz above, a contest in which each person challenges all the rest by riffing within and against the group. In his poems, his plays, and his one highly experimental novel, Baraka’s writing confronts, in diverse ways, the conflict between the nonconformist impulse and the desire to join forces with a collective artistic movement. From his older friend Frank O’Hara, Baraka learns that poetry itself can be an arena in which to grapple with friendship and its discontents, even to play off the writing of one’s friends, leading Baraka, like O’Hara, to address his fellow poets (often by name) in poem after poem, to praise, critique, and goad them. However, Baraka’s writings are fraught with even greater pain, urgency, and indecision than O’Hara’s ambivalent poems, and as such, they demonstrate the limitations of the poetics of “sociability” often celebrated as a key feature of the New York School, and to a lesser extent, the Beat, San Francisco, and Black Mountain poetics of the postwar period (Kane, All, 178). His works simultaneously celebrate and try to jettison a series of intertwined values and concepts: avant-garde

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Baraka’s White Friend Blues 195 poetics, whiteness, Western literary tradition, and, as I will suggest, homosexuality. Like O’Hara, Baraka writes as much about friendship’s discontents, mysteries, and burdens as he does its pleasures. In a 1964 interview, Baraka drew attention to the source of the bitter tensions in his recent work: “I’m trying to work with complications of feelings, love and hate at the same time” (C, 8). This is a key insight into one of Baraka’s most fruitful periods, in which he repeatedly dramatizes these “complications of feelings,” his struggles with what he both loves and detests. However, critics have glossed over the strength and sources of this ambivalence and its crucial importance to Baraka’s most successful writings. They also tend to simplify Baraka’s actually quite varied and nuanced associations with white writers and to neglect the importance of his misgivings about the notion of a communal avant-garde project. In doing so, readers also risk overlooking Baraka’s profound interest in philosophical questions about the conflict between friendship and autonomy.1 But the struggle is everywhere: when the poet in The Dead Lecturer speaks as “Joseph to his Brothers” or screams, “Choke my friends” (T, 70, 99); when a character in The System of Dante’s Hell sings the “white friend blues” (SD 86); when Ray secretly sobs and cradles the head of the beaten white homosexual boy in The Toilet; when Walker Vessels in The Slave murders his erstwhile white friend Bradford Easley; and when Baraka alludes to his friendship with O’Hara by writing, “I’ve loved about all the people I can. Frank, for oblique lust, his mind,” or announces his desire “to begin, aside from aesthetes, homosexuals, smart boys from Maryland” (SD, 15, 29). At the heart of The System of Dante’s Hell, one of Baraka’s most tormented works, he writes, “YOU LOVE THESE DEMONS AND WILL NOT LEAVE THEM” (59). This painful combination of attraction and repulsion, this self-dividing need to leave behind what one cherishes, is at the root of the turmoil, the tremendous ambivalence that surges through so many of his works, and it explains why reading early Baraka can leave one with the disturbing sensation of witnessing a person trying to rip off his own limbs.

roi and frank: the bobbsey twins in gre e nwich vi llage Soon after Baraka dived into the heart of the New York avant-garde milieu in the late 1950s and began establishing a tight network of literary alliances and friendships, he grew close to that human whirlwind at the center of the art and poetry world, Frank O’Hara. Of all the friendships Baraka established with prominent members of the avant-garde, his relationship with O’Hara was one of the most important in his early development, and one of the most interesting alliances within the New American Poetry movement.2 At what was arguably the peak of both of their careers (from roughly 1958 to 1964) they were deeply involved in

196 Beautiful Enemies each other’s lives and works, supporting one another’s writing, reading each other closely, performing together frequently, appearing alongside one another in the pages of Baraka’s two journals, Yugen and The Floating Bear, and working as editors together on the journal Kulchur. If for this reason alone, it is necessary for us to reconsider Baraka as a figure deeply intertwined with the developing New York School and its poetics. In his recent, posthumously published memoir about O’Hara, one of his closest friends and longtime roommate Joe LeSueur includes Baraka in a short list of people who were not merely “casual friends and acquaintances” of O’Hara’s, but rather “friends who saw him all the time, who confided in him, and who in some instances went to bed with him” (Digressions, 126). LeSueur adds that, among the legions of young poets who flocked to O’Hara in the early 1960s—such as the acknowledged members of the New York School’s so-called “Second Generation,” including Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Bill Berkson, Frank Lima, Tony Towle, and David Shapiro—Baraka was surely one of the most important: “Frank was closer to Roi than he was to Ted or any of the others, Bill Berkson excepted” (244). And because Baraka was “unusually mature and accomplished for his age” and as editor of Yugen and The Floating Bear “was one of Frank’s publishers,” LeSueur affirms that “from the beginning of their friendship, Roi was a colleague of Frank’s and never, like some of the other budding poets, a disciple, or in future years, after his death, what I called an O’Hara freak, as in Jesus freak” (245). In one letter, O’Hara characterized his friendship with Baraka by using the familiar trope of siblinghood, simultaneously hinting that such closeness can turn into a threatening merger of identities: “We’ve been giving a lot of readings together which is getting to be like the Bobsy [sic] Twins so we’re stopping out of exhaustion” (Gooch, City, 426). At editorial meetings for Kulchur, the poet Jim Brodey recalled, the two were playfully in cahoots—“[Frank] would make remarks, then LeRoi would make a remark, and they’d kick each other under the table” (qtd. in Gooch, City, 388). In her memoir, Baraka’s ex-wife, Hettie Jones, observes that this tight, even fraternal bond was founded on a sense of kinship and resemblance. “He and Frank O’Hara had become good friends,” Jones writes, “They were equal and alike, small, spare, original, confident, stuck on themselves for good reasons” (How, 98). Despite such ample evidence of their close affiliation, despite their frequent references to one another in their works, little attention has been paid to Baraka’s friendship with O’Hara or to his more general proximity to the New York avant-garde milieu centered around O’Hara and the New York School of poets (in contrast to the Beats, with whom he is much more often associated).3 Almost a decade younger and a much later arrival on the New York scene, Baraka was deeply influenced by O’Hara’s poetry and intellectual sensibility. In his Autobiography, Baraka offers a capsule assessment of what he saw and admired in his friend’s work: steeped in “the high sophistication and motley ambience of the

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 197 city,” O’Hara’s was “a French(-Russian) surreal-tinged poetry. A poetry of expansiveness and big emotion. Sometimes a poetry of dazzling abstraction and shifting colorful surfaces. It was out of the Apollinaire of Zone but also close to Whitman and Mayakovsky” (233). When asked years later by an interviewer about what he might have learned from O’Hara and Ginsberg, Baraka responded, with a touch of defensiveness: The only aspect I could say of O’Hara and Ginsberg that I could have possibly appropriated was the kind of openness that I always got from them. . . . O’Hara’s openness was much more casual and personal (Ginsberg’s was super dramatic). O’Hara’s openness and Ginsberg’s openness might have influenced me because finally I wanted to write in a way that was direct and in that I could say the things I wanted to say, even about myself, and maybe that did help me to lose any restraints as far as doing it. (qtd. Harris, Poetry, 141)

Notwithstanding Baraka’s rather cagey retrospective assessment, his work shows the profound influence of not only O’Hara’s candor and open, mobile poetic form, but also his embrace of the demotic, the casual, and the colloquial, his pluralism and impatience with rigid absolutism, his attention to popular culture and quotidian urban existence, his use of ironic humor and play within the heretofore deadly serious realm of poetry, and his steady attention to friendship and the vagaries of the protean self. As we will see, O’Hara himself makes often subtle appearances in Baraka’s work, becoming a locus of complex attitudes about friendship and homosexuality. Just as Baraka would become a figure, or as Aldon Nielsen puts it, an “intertext” in O’Hara’s poetry, O’Hara is an important marker in Baraka’s verbal and mental landscape, a magnetic force he is drawn towards and repulsed by—an attractive symbol of the avant-garde, whiteness, and homosexuality he will later feel compelled to renounce (Writing, 214). In other words, Frank O’Hara (via both his poetics and his presence as avant-garde companion) plays a significant role in Baraka’s poetry and its ongoing effort to represent and understand friendship and community. It is also not hard to spot signs of O’Hara’s language, his poetic tone and typical motifs, in Baraka’s work. For example, the dire, prophetic ending of Baraka’s important essay “Cuba Libre” seems to echo, in a strange way, the last words of O’Hara’s “Personism.” O’Hara writes in 1959 that “Personism,” “like Africa, is on the rise.The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.” In 1961, Baraka characteristically appropriates O’Hara’s admonishing tone and his reference to post-colonial Africa and recasts them into a more political, serious statement: “But the Cubans, and the other new peoples (in Asia, Africa, South America) don’t need us, and we had better stay out of their way” (CP, 499; H, 63). In his 1984 Autobiography, Baraka spends several pages recalling his relationship with O’Hara with evident fondness. “Frank and I were friends,” he writes.

198 Beautiful Enemies “I admired his genuine sophistication, his complete knowledge of the New York creative scene” (234). In his eyes, Frank was one of the most incisive and knowledgeable critics of painting in New York at the time. The New York school was chiefly, to me, O’Hara. And if you were anywhere around Frank, as he launched into this subject or that, always on top, laughing, gesturing, exclaiming, being as broad as any topic, and the easy sense of sophistication which gave him an obvious “leadership,” you’d understand. (He’d turn red at such a suggestion. “Listen, my dear, you can take that leadership business and shove it!”). (233)

As Baraka recalls, the friendship took off quickly and was energized by a sense of camaraderie, alliance, and mutual exchange: “I started meeting Frank for lunch some afternoons at joints near our workplaces—We’d meet at some of those barrestaurants on the Upper East Side and drink and bullshit, exchange rumors and gossip, and make plans and hear the latest about the greatest” (234). (One of these lunches would be immortalized in O’Hara’s well-known “Personal Poem,” where the two poets dine on fish and ale, talk about Miles Davis being beaten by police, and gossip about their likes and dislikes.) Baraka informed O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch that the two had an unusually healthy alliance that stood out in the back-biting, competitive avant-garde scene: “I think Frank and I had an unspoken agreement not to jump on each other. We tended to be allies. It was a political jungle Downtown. Even as an artsy world, it was still very political, and very much he-said and she-said, and rumors of this and rumors of that, and a coup in the East and a coup in the West. But we were very supportive of each other” (City, 338). An alliance with the well-connected O’Hara also undoubtedly opened doors for Baraka, as he recalls that “with Frank O’Hara, one spun and darted through the New York art scene, meeting Balanchine or Merce Cunningham or John Cage or de Kooning or Larry Rivers” (A, 235). In Gooch’s biography, Baraka explains that “Frank introduced me to Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall. Bernstein came up with this idea that he wanted to do music for The Toilet” (although he does go on to say how he rebuffed the tuxedo-wearing Bernstein in true bohemian fashion, telling the composer “I would get somebody elegant like Duke Ellington. I told him he didn’t even dress as good as Duke Ellington”) (427–428). Like many intense friendships, the relationship seems to have been inspiring, mutually satisfying, and even symbiotic. For his part, O’Hara was drawn to Baraka for a number of reasons. For one thing, Baraka stirred O’Hara’s political sensibilities and his passionate convictions about racial equality and justice.4 Gooch observes that “Jones’s involvement with the politics of race in America was thrilling to O’Hara. As Kenneth Koch once remarked to David Shapiro, ‘Frank is a revolutionary poet without a revolution’”—and knowing Baraka gave him special proximity to the most burning issue of the day (426). Even long after Baraka had

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 199 renounced the entire world of the avant-garde for what he felt was its apolitical passivity, he still believed that O’Hara, like Allen Ginsberg, was more politically progressive and committed to the civil rights struggle than the rest. “Frank at least had a political sense,” he told Gooch. “Kenneth Koch and Kenward Elmslie and all those people were always highly antipolitical, which is why I couldn’t get along with them longer than two minutes” (425). Furthermore, as I discuss later in more detail, O’Hara’s fascination with Baraka was no doubt complicated by a powerful romantic, sexual attraction that may or may not have been reciprocated. (Critics have begun to unpack O’Hara’s complicated attitudes about race, including the sexual fantasies about black male sexuality that frequently enter his work, which undoubtedly shaped his friendship with Baraka.)5 Gooch relates that “O’Hara’s relationship with Jones was always a matter of conjecture to those around them and O’Hara did little to allay the confusion.” He goes on to quote Kenneth Koch’s recollection of O’Hara’s initial excitement upon meeting Baraka: He said he’d met this marvelous young poet who was black and good-looking and very interesting. “And not only that,” he said, “he’s gay.” . . . I don’t know whether LeRoi yielded to Frank’s almost irresistible charms or not. . . . So I assumed that LeRoi was gay for a while, but that’s before I got to know him. I don’t know whether Frank was serious or not. Maybe he was just optimistic. (337)

At the very least, we can assume that the relationship between O’Hara and Baraka was flirtatious and intense, and that O’Hara—who was both notoriously attracted to black men and had a tendency to fall for his ostensibly straight friends—probably propositioned Baraka. Baraka’s own sexuality seems to have been rather fluid at this point; as we will see, he filled his writings with oblique allusions to his own bisexual experimentation and homoerotic desires. Gooch mentions that Diane di Prima, who was sleeping with the married Baraka, “was also privy to signs of the light flirting [between Baraka and O’Hara] that went on at the time. According to di Prima, ‘When Roi and I were in the thick of our affair, I said to him, ‘Let’s run away together to Mexico.’ He said, ‘You’re the second person who asked me to do that this week.’ I said, ‘Who was the other one?’ He said, ‘Frank’” (370). In LeSueur’s memoir, we find yet another clue: he relates that Baraka would frequently drop by the apartment that LeSueur shared with O’Hara, “sometimes staying over and sharing Frank’s bed, while I, the very soul of discretion, was in my own bed, minding my own business, never asking questions, never saying a word to anyone about what I thought might be going on, Roi being a married man, a father, a stud, a sexist, a heterosexual!” (Digressions, 246). For whatever mixture of reasons, O’Hara took a keen interest in the young, energetic Baraka (whom he described in a letter to Ashbery not long after meeting him as “editor of Yugen and a saint”) and became an avid and vocal advocate

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of his work, at the same time that Baraka was printing O’Hara’s poems in his own publishing ventures (29 October 1959). In 1961, he told Vincent Warren about a reading they had given together, informing him that “Roi has now completed his The System of Dante’s Hell (he read parts of the last ‘canto’) and I think it is one of the best and most important works of our time” (17 July 1961). In an open letter that O’Hara wrote to defend Baraka after he had been arrested on obscenity charges for publishing excerpts of The System of Dante’s Hell (a play) and William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, O’Hara wrote that “Mr. Jones’s play I found powerful and moving. Part of a longer and not-yet published work, it is a strong indictment of moral turpitude.This work as a whole, The System of Dante’s Hell, is to my mind a major contribution to recent literature, certainly the finest piece of American prose since Kerouac’s first publications. I was therefore grateful for the publication of even this excerpt” (16 October 1961). In 1964, O’Hara reported to Larry Rivers that “Roi has also had a resounding triumph at the Cherry Lane . . . with a one-act play called Dutchman. It’s a thrilling play. . . . Roi also had an almost full page on him in Newsweek. Isn’t that heaven?” (18 April 1964). When Dutchman became a succès de scandale in 1964, and was hotly debated by the intelligentsia and roundly criticized by Philip Roth, O’Hara wrote a forceful defense of the play in a letter to the New York Review of Books. Countering Roth’s preference for Edward Albee’s Zoo Story over Dutchman, O’Hara argues that Albee’s play has “a ridiculous denouement and puts in question all that went before; Dutchman grows in power, concentration and meaning through every word and gesture” (qtd. in Gooch, City, 427).Typically unwilling to see the play as a diatribe simply about racial hatred, O’Hara writes that his friend’s play offers “a larger, and more final, vision of American life which relates as closely to thirty-eight mute witnesses to murder in New York City as it does to brutalities in Florida and Mississippi. This is all rendered in action and its wide application cannot be denied” (qtd. in Gooch, City, 427). In another letter to Rivers, O’Hara mentions playing the role of sounding board for (or even collaborator with) Baraka as he worked on his play The Toilet: “I have to get myself down to the 5 Spot where I am going to meet LeRoi and get the manuscript of his new play which he is giving me to read because his square agent wants him to make some changes which will render it less ‘out.’ He is certainly asking the right person to read it, for as you know I would never ask him to put it back ‘in’” (7 April 1963). Not only did O’Hara vet, champion, and influence Baraka’s work, but he was influenced by Baraka in turn, finding poetic inspiration in his friend’s presence and example. It is worth stressing the pivotal, almost collaborative, role Baraka plays in the genesis of O’Hara’s most important statement of poetics, “Personism,” the mock manifesto that announces the arrival of O’Hara’s own “movement.” Reflecting on this manifesto in a later statement, O’Hara indicates that without Baraka the piece would presumably not exist: “It was, as a matter of fact, intended

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 201 for Don Allen’s [New American Poetry] anthology, and I was encouraged to write it because LeRoi told me at lunch that he had written a statement for the anthology” (CP, 510–511). As Baraka remembers it, this new “movement” was born out of their insouciant, spontaneous conversation, and, despite its lightheartedness, it seems to have had its roots in aesthetic soil they both shared: “We went to lunch and said ‘Let’s think of a movement.’ ‘What movement?’ ‘Personism.’ It was Frank’s movement. He thought it up. What was good for me was that it meant that you could say exactly what was on your mind and you could say it in a kind of conversational tone rather than some haughty public tone for public consumption” (Gooch, City, 338). At the very crux of the manifesto itself, O’Hara relates this curious moment of inception: “It was founded one day by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person.While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. . . . It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person” (CP, 499). If one of the raison d’êtres of O’Hara’s poetics, as he lays out here with half-seriousness, is the idea of poetry as an intersubjective, communicative act, it is interesting to note that although the inaugural “Personist” poem he wrote that day, “Personal Poem,” is in some ways a love poem (for Vincent Warren), it remains largely about the dialogic exchange carried on by O’Hara and Baraka over lunch (“LeRoi comes in / and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12 / times last night . . . we go eat some fish and some ale it’s / cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling / we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like / Henry James so much we like Herman Melville” (CP, 335–336). As Michael Magee notes, “The poem itself recounts the conversation between O’Hara and Baraka, so it is some sense already ‘between’ them as much as it is ‘between’ O’Hara and Warren” (“Tribes,” 698). With Baraka as its inspiration, O’Hara’s poem captures the sense of friendship as conduit and exchange, where “we” align our tastes and judgments within a network or cultural field of literary affiliations and cultural forces (for example, jointly deciding that Don Allen trumps Trilling). For all its sense of camaraderie, the encounter and the sense of unity the poem fosters is depicted as momentary, fleeting, and shadowed by trouble. First, as a tableau of interracial communication, the racially charged beating of Miles Davis—sparked by his rapprochement with a white woman—lingers ominously in the background of this “integrated” poets’ lunch.6 (At the same time, it is notable that what touched off the disturbing incident in which Davis was beaten was the musician’s daring to cross the racial divide in 1950s America, just as O’Hara and Baraka do in this poem.) Second, the poem breaks off with a departure and return to solitude: “I wonder if one person out of 8,000,000 is / thinking of me as I shake hands with LeRoi / and buy a strap for my wristwatch and go / back to work happy at the thought possibly so” (CP, 336).

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Perhaps O’Hara’s friendship with Baraka had something to do with his effort, in “Personism,” to account for his poetics as a kinetic, improvised art form founded on both friendship and its distances (“It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!”). Magee makes a forceful case that Baraka is extremely important to “Personism” and to O’Hara’s poetry in general, pointing out that not only did “Personal Poem” and “Personism” first appear in Baraka’s Yugen, but that his conversations with Baraka (and especially the latter’s belief in “jazz as a form of democratic symbolic action”) inspired O’Hara’s interest “in the politics of poetic form and the possibilities of collective improvisation” (“Tribes,” 697).7 For O’Hara and his vision of friendship, Baraka in some ways embodies both the inspiring possibilities of person-to-person communication (“the only truth is face to face,” he puts it in his greatest poem about interracial concord, “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets”) and its limitations (CP, 305).This doubleness is borne out in an apparently little known, unpublished O’Hara poem about Baraka that can be found among the O’Hara papers in the Kenneth Koch archive at the New York Public Library, titled “Finding Leroi a Lawyer.” Again turning to the phone call as a central trope for friendship, O’Hara portrays Baraka as a friend with whom connection is both terribly important yet also perennially disrupted, frustrated. This long-buried “I do this I do that” poem captures the aftermath of Baraka’s 1961 arrest on obscenity charges, and it is yet another poem in which O’Hara stages the complications and burdens of friendship. Here is the poem in full: So you’ve finished the Locus Solus poster, Jane, and I must write to Richard Miller, thanking him for his having done it for nothing—we could use more of that! but meanwhile I stop in a flowershop on 8th Avenue and buy Patsy Goldberg a print by Hokusai (they knew the meaning of snow in those days!) and also I look, a little, into the opened cups of the flowers, don’t get fresh! and I realize that Norman is probably out of booze by now, so I stop in Parente’s Wines Whiskey Spirits and buy him a little schmootz, it will go well with the tomato paste he likes so much to use in his smaller paintings. And I go to the newsstand to get Joe his copy of Pash, Bill his Opera Guide, and Joel Oppenheimer a pack of Gauloises, even though I have by now a lot more than I can possibly carry since I have been shopping for people for hours, and I am beginning to feel very Machado-esque like having little chapters instead of trotting about all day in one big museum when suddenly I see it: LUCIA DLUGOSZEWSKI IS HAVING A CONCERT ON FRIDAY, and I run to the nearest phonebooth which is hot and sweaty, I think, because you are not in it,Vladimir

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 203 Ussachevsky, and I pull off the mouthpiece but not the receiver, which I will give to Leroi Jones because he is in trouble over something the postoffice says is obscene in The Floating Bear and I know that he needs one, although he does not need the receiver, but when I try to call him there’s nothing but the horrible silence, which is Dietrichesque, and when even screwing the mouthpiece back doesn’t do any good I decide that nothing will, and I take a drink of the schmootz which tastes like the vodka I put in Stevie River’s Koolade the night Fabian collapsed in Hoboken and which I wrote a poem about which Ned Rorem set, but I am very sorry anyway at how things have turned out, and I discover, besides, when I am outside the phone booth that I have lost my shopping list. Well, if nothing happens to me in the next two minutes I can stop here and make another.8

The poem almost reads like an intentional self-parody of O’Hara’s famous shopping trip in “The Day Lady Died,” here exaggerated to highlight the vexing problems of friendship. In this later poem, the poet is so burdened by buying gifts for his friends that he can barely walk: “Even though I have by now a lot more than I can possibly carry / since I have been shopping for people for hours.” Overextended, even hobbled, by what he calls in another poem “wanting to be everything to everybody everywhere,” he is most bothered by the fact that a close friend, Baraka, faces a serious crisis and he is utterly unable to help (CP, 331). Knowing that Baraka needs a “mouthpiece” (a lawyer), O’Hara rather urgently tries to call him, only to be greeted with a broken pay phone and “nothing but the horrible silence.” This would seem to spell the ironic undoing of the phone call metaphor of “Personism,” in which O’Hara realized he “could use the telephone instead of writing the poem”; here, he has to write the poem because the phone is inoperable. It is the antithesis of the “presto” moment of connection we saw earlier in O’Hara’s poem about speaking to Kenneth Koch on the phone (“Poem [The fluorescent tubing burns . . .]”). It suggests that friendship—perhaps interracial friendship, especially—stretches across an unbridgeable chasm. It hints at an inability to connect with Baraka in particular, and at the despair and helplessness this failure causes (“when even screwing the mouthpiece back doesn’t do any good / I decide that nothing will”). The poem ends on a poignant note of regret for the fate of friendship and the self ’s difficult progress through this social universe: “I am very sorry anyway / at how things have turned out.” With Baraka unreachable, friendship—symbolized by the now-lost shopping list, the totem that would enable the speaker to fulfill the needs of all his companions—gives

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way, dissolves, at least until he can regroup and again attempt to sustain the ties that bind him to all these other selves. As intertexts in each other’s writings, as friends deeply intertwined with one another’s lives and poems, O’Hara and Baraka exemplify the way friendship and poetry criss-cross in postwar American poetry. Like O’Hara’s “Finding Leroi a Lawyer,” Baraka’s writings find him articulating again and again the severe ambivalence and confusion he feels about the friendships he had fostered with a circle of brilliant, ambitious, creative white friends at a moment when everything in his life and times seemed to be spinning wildly out of control.

singing the white frie nd blue s: the system of dante’s he ll and the toi let Nightclubs, are, finally, nightclubs. And their value is that even though they are raised or opened strictly for gain (and not the musician’s) if we go to them and are able to sit, as I was for this session, and hold on, if it is a master we are listening to, we are very likely to be moved beyond the pettiness and stupidity of our beautiful enemies. —Amiri Baraka, liner notes for John Coltrane’s Live at Birdland, 1963

In the early 1960s, Baraka’s most creative and frenetic period of activity, his agonized ambivalence about friendship, about his alliances with his comrades in the white avant-garde, becomes more and more palpable. Even the titles of his poems—“Joseph to His Brothers,” “[Robert] Duncan Spoke of a Process,” “A Short Speech to My Friends,” “A Poem for Speculative Hipsters,” “A Poem for Democrats,” “I Don’t Love You,” “Will They Cry When You’re Gone,You Bet”— reveal the extent to which his poems are preoccupied with addressing his fellow writers and his relationships with them. Looking back, he has frequently recalled that by around 1960 he was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his own writing because of its similarity to the writings of his friends. For an innate nonconformist like Baraka, such a recognition was deeply troubling. “The imitator is the most pitiful phenomenon since he is like a man who eats garbage,” Baraka bluntly put it, echoing Emerson’s similar warning that “imitation is suicide” in “Self-Reliance” (H, 176; EL, 259). Baraka recalls that at the time he was “writing defensively” in a very conscious way: “I was trying to get away from the influence of people like Creeley and Olson” (C, 91). In his autobiography, Baraka directly links the idea of motion with his self-reliant resistance to the influence of friends, a figurative connection that we have already seen at work in O’Hara and Ashbery: I felt, then, that I was in motion, that in my writing, which I’d been deadly serious about, was now not just a set of “licks” already laid down by Creeley, Olson, etc., but was moving to become genuinely mine. I felt I could begin to stretch

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 205 out, to innovate in ways I hadn’t thought of before. And in all my poetry which comes out of this period there is the ongoing and underlying contention and struggle between myself and “them” that poetry and politics, art and politics, were not mutually exclusive. (A, 247–248)

For the avant-garde poetry of O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka, “writing defensively,” deliberately “turning away” from riffs already laid down by one’s friends via turning or troping, and finding inspiration in contentious differences between oneself and one’s friends are all integral parts of innovation and distinctive creativity. One important result of this effort was the experimental novel The System of Dante’s Hell, Baraka’s only novel and one of his most innovative and important works.9 Baraka has often referred to System as a “pivotal work,” and returns to the novel again and again in interviews, stating that it was at this point that he consciously set out to find his own voice and to stop writing like his contemporaries (C, 100).10 The book, which Baraka recalls writing “around 1960–61” (though sections date from 1959), is a crucial locus of his ongoing conversation with his predecessors and his contemporaries, and with “white” tradition and culture in general (SD, 153). Aldon Nielsen’s astute discussion of the novel charts Baraka’s willful attempt to dissociate himself from not only his white friends, but also from the central tropes of Western literary tradition. Rather than an outright rejection of constraining European models, Baraka enacts what Jerry Ward calls a full “frontal assault” against the tradition from within its own walls (qtd. Writing, 72). In turning to Dante, and the canonical schema of the Inferno as “a structuring guide,” and by populating his novel with a wide range of allusions to white literary predecessors and contemporaries, Nielsen argues that Baraka is deliberately “harrowing his own language” (73). Many critics have interpreted the novel as a chronicle of Baraka’s victorious emergence from a white man’s hell of conventional forms. Although his introduction to Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality establishes a theoretical framework that contests fixed racial positions, Nielsen’s chapter on System itself charts Baraka’s progress toward a “blacker” aesthetic. Along with Kimberly Benston and other critics, Nielsen sees the novel as a triumphant movement from personal detachment, solitude, and wretched unhappiness to a purer, blacker, and communal black present in which the ability to create a new black art is possible (“moving back toward the grace of the remembrance of blackness,” he calls it) (90). I find this approach not only problematic because of the way it reinscribes a binary (and essentialist) logic, one that pits “dead” white traditional forms against those vital black forms that innovate upon them, but also because it seems to overlook, or at least to downplay, the terrible ambivalence and confusion of the book itself. This tendency in readings of the novel likely draws from several extratextual factors—first, there is Baraka’s own repeated assertions that System was “the breakaway book—in terms of the breakaway from older, more derivative forms,

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and getting more clearly into my own voice,” which encourages readers to see the novel enacting a movement toward a more genuine and black art by its conclusion (C, 156). Second, there is the fact that the book was not published until five years after it was written, and for Baraka, this period was unlike most five-year spans in a writer’s career—he was figuratively and literally in an utterly different place when the book finally saw print. That is, even though its experimental cantos were written between 1959 to 1961—in the thick of Baraka’s New American Poetry days alongside O’Hara, Ginsberg, Olson, Creeley, McClure, and Wieners, and years before Baraka was actually to leave the white “demons” of this book behind—the book appeared in full only after Baraka’s conversion to black nationalism and his departure from Greenwich Village. The coda he wrote later and appended, “Sound and Image,” explains the book’s genesis and essence from the more clear-headed—and absolutist—perspective of 1965 (SD, 154). For these reasons, there has been a reasonable inclination to view System as both a vehicle and an expression of Baraka’s transformation from “white” writer trapped by his white models to black writer who has found his way “home.” But this interpretation fails to do the novel justice. The System of Dante’s Hell does in fact change from beginning to end: from obscure and disjunctive prose improvisations (which Baraka calls “association complexes”), it shifts to fairly clear, linear storytelling (“fast narrative”) in its last third (SD, 153). The majority of the novel, theoretically a tour of the circles of Hell, is actually lyrically rendered autobiography, a kind of prose-poetry portrait of the artist as a young and older man. As Baraka says in the “Sound and Image” epilogue, the book constitutes the “vision” of hell he had “around 1960–1 and that fix on my life, and my interpretation of my earlier life. Hell in the head” (SD, 153). The text is filled with characteristically staccato, jagged, impressionistic riffs on Baraka’s childhood and present state of mind that are sometimes moving and arresting, sometimes inscrutable. Toward the center of the book, three major set pieces emerge out of the preceding swirl and crystallize: first, “The Eighth Ditch (Is Drama,” a controversial play dramatizing a homosexual gang rape in a barracks and/or a schizophrenic encounter between two parts of one self; second, “The Rape,” an apparently autobiographical anecdote chronicling a night when the narrator and his Newark buddies pick up and abuse a drunk prostitute one summer during college; and last, “The Heretics,” a coherent short-story-like narrative about the narrator’s adventures with a prostitute in a black ghetto in Louisiana during his Air Force days, also drawn from the author’s own experience. Several central aspects of the novel concern us here: Baraka’s ongoing emphasis on the problems of selfhood, his struggle to disentangle himself from his relationships with his white friends and family, and his longing for movement in order to escape paralysis.The great villain in the world of this book is a stagnation that seems almost unavoidable. “All I want is to move,” he states near the novel’s beginning, and the often disconnected, turbulent writing shows the intensity of

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 207 that effort. The “hell in the head” that the novel limns is a function of Baraka’s “wish to be lovely, to be some other self. . . . Some other soul, than the filth I feel. Have in me”—the same desire to escape the self that we saw in other works of this period in the previous chapter (134). Baraka’s conception of hell, while growing out of Dante’s Inferno, owes much to Charles Olson, perhaps the poet and theoretician who served as the most significant, and dominating, influence on Baraka’s developing aesthetic. Olson’s important poem “In Cold Hell, In Thicket” (written in 1953) conceives of hell as an internal condition. For Olson, Western man is lost in hell because the self is imprisoned within and tormented by itself: ya, selva oscura, but hell now is not exterior, is not to be got out of, is the coat of your own self, the beasts emblazoned on you (Selected, 185)

Thus Dante’s dark wood (“selva oscura”) lies inside, not out. It is as inescapable as one’s “coat” or skin, a trope of particular interest and use for Baraka. For Olson, humans have created their own hell through their dependence on imposed, fixed definitions that carve up and limit the world and the self to abstract categories. Such abstractions are detached from the pulsing vitality and flux of experience itself (“precise as hell is, precise / as any words,” Olson says). Following Olson, Baraka holds that hell is a “place of naming,” and, as Benston observes, Baraka similarly attempts, with “proud defiance,” to counter the “hell of fixity” (qtd. Sollors, Amiri, 150; Benston, Imamu, 6). But hell, in Baraka’s eyes, is also inseparable from our social experience. At the end of System, Baraka asserts that hell is, as in Sartre, other people: “What is hell? Your definitions. I am and was and will be a social animal. Hell is definable only in those terms. I can get no place else; it wdn’t exist” (153). Baraka’s point recalls pragmatism’s foundational conviction that the social sphere is inescapable, and Emerson’s grim aphorism: “Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal” (qtd. Alkana, Social, 9). We cannot easily escape those chains that bond us to others, but such chains also tend to bind us to fixed definitions of ourselves. For Baraka, because we are “social animal[s]” we are subject to “your definitions,” those confining labels imposed by other people, which result in “the torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject” (153). Much like Ellison’s Invisible Man, who is incessantly observed and defined by others but whose actual nature remains unseen, Baraka’s self writhes under the gaze of a world that would determine his identity. The novel opens with notes of profound restlessness that typify Baraka’s contrariness to the “given,” to the status quo. In his opposition to accepted forms, Baraka was consciously engaged in a search for a literary equivalent to the agitated searching he was hearing in John Coltrane’s new experiments with jazz at the time:

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System similarly picks up chorus after chorus from Dante and other Western prototypes, taking the music apart, splintering it, “reaching for new definition” to replace the stifling definitions that constitute hell itself. The first word of the novel is “But,” and the opening sentence as a whole is a reversal (“But Dante’s hell is heaven”). The second sentence continues to insist on contrariness, telling us to “Look at things in another light.” Soon the pages fill with Baraka’s characteristic impatience and disgust with who he is. “You’ve done everything you said you wdn’t,” Baraka says near the beginning, chastising himself for his failures and weaknesses. Everything you said you despised. A fat mind, lying to itself. Unmoving like some lump in front of a window. Wife, child, house, city, clawing at your gentlest parts. Romance become just sad tinny lies. And your head full of them. What do you want anymore? Nothing. Not poetry or that purity of feeling you had. . . . Turning towards everything in your life.Whatever clarity left, a green rot, a mud, a stifling at the base of the skull. No air gets in. (13)

The feeling of suffocation and dissatisfaction with his own writing that Baraka would later recall experiencing at this point in his life erupts here, as he rejects “poetry or that purity of feeling you had” previously. Such a rejection of “poetry,” the métier of the lyric poet who, like the poet of the Preface poems, is absorbed with his own beautiful feelings, is a common motif in Baraka’s writings of this period: as he writes in “Rhythm & Blues”: “I am deaf and blind and lost and will not again sing your quiet verse. I have lost / even the act of poetry, and writhe now for cool horizonless dawn” (DL, 47). With the strange, associative prose of System, Baraka self-consciously turns his back on traditional lyricism and literary convention, along with everything else he holds dear in his life (“Wife, child, house, city”). Baraka’s effort to write “defensively,” against fixity, is built into the jittery movement of the prose as well as its imagery. “Go back.Turn,” he says to himself at one point. “The door will swing open into sun. Into Autumn. Into the cold. . . . I kill everything . . . I can.This is This. I am left only with my small words . . . against the day. Against you. Against. My self ” (45). “Against,” which, like “turn,” is one of Baraka’s favorite words, rings throughout the book. It is almost like a mantra that suggests Baraka’s equation of writing with “aversive thinking.” One chapter even ends with a dire call for

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 209 Violence against others, against one’s self against God, Nature and Art. (36)

which is essentially to call for a resistance to almost everything. As much as System is concerned with the self-critical movement “against one’s self,” the novel is at the same time consumed with the difficult need to turn “against others,” violently if need be. Near the beginning, the narrator admits “I’ve loved about all the people I can. Frank, for oblique lust, his mind. The satin light floating on his words. His life tinted and full of afternoons. My own a weird dawn” (15). Although the reference has been overlooked by critics of the novel, I find it intriguing that the very first example of someone he has “loved” is Frank O’Hara.11 With his “oblique lust, his mind” and his satiny, bright words, O’Hara stands for everything Baraka deeply loves yet feels that he must depart from: he is a white experimental poet, a sophisticated avantgarde figure, immersed in high (white) culture, a homosexual, an intellectual, and an aesthete. In the next paragraph, Baraka writes, “He was lovely and he sat surrounded by paintings watching his friends die” (16). The reference may be indirect, but certainly seems like a memorable evocation of O’Hara, the elegist and art-world figure. However, the narrator insists he must move on now, away from such relationships. And yet: this proves to be a chore he cannot bear to undertake. In one of the most telling moments of the book (to which I alluded earlier), Baraka writes, using all capital letters, so as to make no mistake about its cardinal importance: “YOU LOVE THESE DEMONS AND WILL NOT LEAVE THEM” (59). The statement epitomizes this period of Baraka’s life and writing. Encountering in his journey through the circles of hell the shades of these demons he cherishes, the narrator discovers the need for abandonment to be a bruising commandment, even “tho they are evil” (59). Another passage speaks of the narrator’s departure from a woman named “Diane,” whom we can assume to be Baraka’s lover, the young white avant-garde poet Diane di Prima, who bore one of Baraka’s children in the early 1960s: “Diane disintegrated into black notes beneath my inelegant hands. She died. She died. She died. I walked out into the morning with her breathing on my face. I never came again” (21). Even the most intimate relationships need to be severed. What is it about the “dead,” these “demons,” that Baraka feels so compelled to move away from? Most obviously, Baraka wishes to reject the white world, because his immersion in it has left him feeling cut off from the possibility of reclaiming African-American roots. But more is at stake than simply race: as Posnock has convincingly argued, in System Baraka tries to extricate himself not

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only from whiteness, but from the role of the “intellectual,” the bookish and elitist thinker and writer who tries to assimilate to white cultural norms. As Baraka moves into his Black Arts period in the later 1960s, Posnock argues, the “intellectual seems definitively rejected, now made synonymous with white men and with homosexuality—in short, with an abject betrayal of genuine blackness” (Color, 44). Before that point, Baraka’s works of the early 1960s self-consciously wrestle with his pointed uneasiness about a series of related identities that are all envisioned as tempting yet problematic, all sources of guilt, often projected as features of himself or his friends: the avant-gardist, the lyric poet, the apolitical bohemian aesthete, and, centrally, the homosexual. In Baraka’s writing of this period, homosexuality actually becomes a site of tremendous ambivalence. As it is for O’Hara and Ashbery, unconventional sexual identity in early Baraka represents a form of nonconformist behavior with a special charge at a time of hysterical Cold War homophobia: for some within the bohemian subcultures of the period (Larry Rivers, Jack Kerouac, and Bill Berkson come to mind as well as Baraka), sexual identity was fluid, hedonism was the watchword, and rigid notions of heterosexuality were relics of the “square,” conformist world they rejected. In his writings, Baraka clearly depicts homosexual liaisons and desires, only to be wracked with a mixture of attraction and repulsion toward such desires and acts, presumably his own. His later homophobic (and some might say “he-doth-protest-too-much”) railing against “fags” during his Black Arts period, as much a vehicle for further demonizing whites and middleclass blacks as it is an actual attack on homosexuals, is both well-known and about as subtle as a hammer. However, the complexity of his feelings about and nuanced treatment of homosexuality in his earlier work remains largely unexplored.12 A thematics of homosexuality runs through his early works; for example, two of his major plays feature sympathetic gay characters (The Baptism’s “Homosexual” and James Karolis in The Toilet), and at the very heart of System is a vexed relationship with homosexuality that most of the novel’s readers have skirted. Throughout his earlier work, friendship across racial lines is connected to profound anxieties about sexuality and his own masculinity, bound up with issues of personal power and freedom of the self: homosocial bonding, for Baraka, seems to be implicated in homosexual desire, which greatly throws into confusion his feelings about friendship and avant-garde community. Throughout the novel, homosexuality becomes, as Posnock points out, “a locus of tenderness and regard,” while remaining a source of guilt and a thing to be disavowed (Color, 249). It is also, I contend, associated with the figure of Frank O’Hara, and thus entangled with Baraka’s anxieties about his friendships with his contemporaries.Thus, we hear, in the chapters devoted to the “virtuous heathens” in hell, about the narrator’s loving Frank for his “oblique lust” (15), and then shortly afterward, we find a strange homoerotic passage, again about “Frank”:

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 211 Frank in armor thrust out his sword. My flesh is stone but I scream and he cringes with grunts. He screamed when we were close and laughed at the night. Its wet insanity. (21)

This paragraph, coming just after another admission that “you’ve done everything you / despised,” hints at either a literal or a fantasized erotic union between the autobiographical narrator and “Frank.” The speaker seems aroused yet reluctant (“My flesh is stone but I scream”) and the encounter, with its swordplay and shrieking, has overtones of violence, which suggest that if this sexual intimacy (“when we were close”) did occur, it resulted in severely mixed feelings and guilt. We cannot surmise from this passage that Baraka and O’Hara were sexually intimate, but, as mentioned earlier, we do have reason to believe that O’Hara’s “oblique lust” for Baraka complicated their friendship. Whether Baraka “yielded,” as Kenneth Koch put it, to O’Hara’s “nearly irresistible charms” or not, this passage hints, at the very least, at an erotic tension between the two poets, and suggests how in some ways homosexuality and O’Hara overlap in the metaphorical world of Baraka’s work (Gooch, City, 337). For another example of this tendency, we might consider an uncollected Baraka poem that appeared in The Floating Bear in 1963.Titled “In Wyoming Territory,” the piece is a series of oblique poems each devoted to people closest to Baraka’s life—his mistress Diane di Prima; Frank O’Hara; his wife, Hettie; and his close friend A. B. Spellman.13 The poem for O’Hara (subtitled “a veil”) includes lines that further align O’Hara with sexual acts and tensions that are represented in tense tones: The man who sees, the man who seeing, acts, acting, takes me close to him. The ship will not move. The sea moves under it. The men who love me, who facing what lies I use, cut me down, come at me naked. Stars under glass, under the hard flesh.

Throughout Baraka’s novel, one finds a multitude of such equivocal references to homosexuality, some linked to O’Hara, some not. For example, Baraka opens a chapter by remembering his youth, being “on a porch that summer, in night, in my body’s skin,” but calls now for a departure into a new life, a Dantean “Vita Nuova”: “To begin. There. Where it all ends. Neon hotels, rotten, black collars. To begin, aside from aesthetes, homosexuals, smart boys from Maryland” (29). This Emersonian call for re-beginning also insists on a turning away from three

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personae one could associate with his friend O’Hara: an aesthete, homosexual, and smart boy who was born in Baltimore (and soon moved to Massachusetts). Again we see Baraka attempting to extricate himself from his friendships, from O’Hara, and from those qualities that induce guilt in him, in order “to begin” again. But at the same moment that the narrator calls for a new start “aside from . . . homosexuals,” his effort is hijacked by his frequent allusions to homosexual acts and desires. As Posnock observes, “his own narrator’s homoerotic sensibility and homosexual behavior undermines Baraka’s blanket hostility” toward homosexuality and lends ambiguity to the work (Color, 249). For example, the narrator recalls a friend who “loved me because he knew I’d sucked his cousin off,” and mentions just-missed trysts with “a mystery man who lived near the flower box. The refrigerator. I loitered there but he didn’t respond” (62). Most important, memories of homoerotic liaisons at some earlier moment in Chicago recur throughout the novel. By the end, “Chicago” becomes a shorthand metonymy for the narrator’s homosexual past, a prior moment of connection and love, and a sin that torments him in his hell, that he wishes to purge but cannot. “In Chicago,” he tells us about midway through the novel: I kept making the queer scene. Under the “El” with a preacher. And later, in the rotogravure, his slick (this other, larger, man, like my father) hair, murrays grease probably. He had a grey suit with gold and blue threads and he held my head under the quilt. The first guy (he spoke to me grinning and I said my name was Stephen Dedalus. And I read Proust and mathematics and loved Eliot for his tears. . . . One more guy and it was over. On the train, I wrote all this down. A journal now sitting in a tray on top the closet, where I placed it today. The journal says “Am I like that?” “Those trysts with R?” And move slow thru red leaves. (57–58)

The narrator’s soul-searching journal writing tries to make sense of these homosexual encounters, revealing the connection between homosexuality and questions of identity, as he attempts to determine whether I am like that.14 Later he will recall that “my idea was to be loved. . . . And it meant going into that huge city melting. And the first face I saw I went to and we went home and he shoved his old empty sack of self against my frozen skin” (124). He hearkens back to “my cold sin in the cities. My fear of my own death’s insanity, and an actual longing for men that brooded in each finger of my memory” (125). In the notorious mini-play that stands at the very center of System, “The Eighth Ditch (Is Drama,” Baraka continues to explore the crisis of selfhood and the question of “an actual longing for men” at the same time. Baraka turns to drama (for one of the first times in what would be a long career as a playwright) in order to stage his own inner divisions and conflicts, to make them more concrete and literal.15 In this play, the abstract idea of “being of two minds” is given flesh in

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 213 a striking manner. Two characters, named 46 and 64, are in a barracks-like setting, talking. The “young, smooth-faced” 46 is thoroughly occupied in reading a book while 64 taunts and berates him (79). They discuss 46’s life and his future. Eventually 64 moves over to 46’s bunk and begins to undress and have sexual intercourse with him, despite the other’s mild protestations. Another youth, 62, comes into the tent and says, “I want some” (88). Although 46 and 64 rebuff him, in the final scene several other men join in and wait their turn. Although founded on this basic scenario, “The Eighth Ditch” is engrossingly multivalent, open to multiple, unresolved possibilities: for example, the scene could be taking place among boys in a Boy Scout camp or, later, with adult men in the Army;16 the central figures are two distinct characters but at the same time represent two incarnations of the author at different periods of his life engaged in conversation, and/or two parts of his personality; the sexual encounter is either a gang rape or a seduction; and the events are either drawn from memories, are meant to be wholly allegorical, or are a blend of both. The play is essentially a dialogue of a self split in two. It is especially interesting because Baraka has taken the concept of constantly changing selfhood that we have seen in his poems and in works like O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings,” and dramatizes it. He creates a situation in which two facets, two temporal stages, of a protean identity meet, converse, and most unnerving of all, fornicate, across time. In what Baraka calls a “foetus drama,” we witness an older, wiser, more bohemian, and independent Baraka (“64”) confronting a younger, naïve Baraka, described as a “sheep” and a “middleclass Negro youth” (“46”) (84, 80, 85). Though 46 seems, as do the speakers of many Baraka poems, lost within his own head (“I sit, abstracted, suckling my thots”), and does not recognize his older self, 64 knows everything about his younger counterpart (81). “Who are you really?” the younger half asks the elder, who replies: “The Street! Things around you. Even noises at night, or smells you are afraid of. I am a maelstrom of definitions” (80). The younger man embodies the middle-class identity Baraka loathes within himself, the self who tries to assimilate to white conventions and fears black culture as base and alien to his sensibilities: “I delivered papers to some people like you,” he tells 64. “And got trapped in it; those streets. Their mouths stank of urine, black women with huge breasts lay naked in their beds” (81). For his part, 64 despises the bourgeois trappings of his younger incarnation: “Rarities. Elegance. Foppishness. Not really knowledge. . . . tho I guess I wdn’t know . . . actually. I take it as aggression . . . and hate you for it” (81, ellipses in original). In a desperate attempt to forewarn and to alter the self he has developed from, 64 tries to force himself into 46’s life and thoughts. “I want you to remember me . . . forever. . . so you can narrate the story of my life,” he says. “I want to sit inside yr head & scream obscenities into your speech. I want my life forever wrought up with yours!” (82). This speech, which illustrates 64’s impossible desire

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to instill a sense of the future in his fledgling self, may help explain the motivation behind 64’s sexual assault on 46, and their subsequent discussion about the probability that 46 will become “pregnant” as a result (82, 87). When 64 quizzes his younger self about his aesthetic tastes, the gulf between them becomes more evident: 64 . . . I do know you don’t see anything at all clearly. Who’s yr favorite jazz musician? 46 Jazz at the Philharmonic. Flip Phillips. Nat Cole. 64 Ha Ha . . . OK, sporty, you go on! Jazz at the Philharmonic, eh? 46 Yeh, that’s right. I bet you like R & B & those quartets. 64 You goddam right . . . and I probably will all my life. (84) The passage reveals how this artistic identity has evolved, from a penchant for assimilated “white” jazz to “those quartets,” a reference to the new jazz of bebop and beyond. The younger man, who remains engrossed in a book throughout most of the play, even while being raped, also takes on qualities of the literary aesthete, the poet, within himself that Baraka cherishes yet wishes to purge. The older man, connected to an always problematized sense of “genuine” blackness, brags about his more mature and honest use of what Baraka calls elsewhere “the bad words of Newark” (T, 107): I talk like Morton Street, Newark, where I live now. Three blocks down from Hillside Ave. I talk like a hippy dip negro with turned up shoes. I talk like where we are. My friend, my honorable poet, you hear, exclusively what you want. (Lying on top 46, begins moving his hips from side to side). (85)

As he begins to undress 46, 64 informs him about what the future has in store for this young “honorable poet”: Blues. I Got. Abstract Expressionism blues. Existentialism blues. I Got. More blues, than you can shake your hiney at. (Tugs harder at trousers). Kierkegaard blues, boy are they here, a wringing and twisting. I even got newspaper blues. Or, fool, the blues blues. Not one thing escapes. All these blues are things you’ll come into. I just got visions and words & shadows. I just got your life in my fingers. Everything you think sits here.

This passage, which I mentioned in the second chapter, suggests 64’s proximity to the Baraka of the early 1960s. It ironically expresses Baraka’s weariness with the postwar avant-garde, with its conventions, dominating movements, and fashionable intellectual clichés. Here in 1961, Baraka sings his blues about the Greenwich Village coffeehouse and Cedar Bar scene, with its increasingly stale haze of Pollock and Clement Greenberg, Sartre and Kierkegaard—the moment when, as the title of Anatole Broyard’s memoir of this period has it, Kafka was the rage. In this

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 215 way, Baraka uses these two characters to pit tendencies within himself—the bourgeois and the avant-garde—against one another. On the one hand, the precious, innocent boy with literary pretensions, and on the other, the jaded bohemian longing to break away from his friends and their stifling literary community: Got poetry blues all thru my shoes. I Got. Yeah, the po-E-try blues. And then there’s little things like ‘The Modern Jazz Blues.’ Bigot blues . . . White friend blues. Adultery blues . . . I had the Kafka blues . . . and give it up. So much I give up. Chicago, Shreveport, puerto rico, lower east side, comeon like new days. Sun everywhere in your eyes. Blues, comeon, like yr beautiful self. (85–87)

These “poetry blues” echo Baraka’s rejection of “poetry or that purity of feeling you had” earlier in the novel, and again imply his impatience at this moment with given literary forms, even the New American Poetry of his friends, which he feels cowed by. The litany of things that give him the blues (and that 46 is told to anticipate) include two crucial problems with relationships that Baraka was facing at the time of the novel’s composition: the “adultery blues,” as his marriage faltered because of his own, followed by his wife’s, infidelities, so common in the fashionably loose relationships of Baraka’s milieu, and the “white friend blues” I have been discussing.17 Confined by the parameters of this world, he explains that we must, as in “Betancourt,” divest ourselves of “what / it was / had moved / us” (T, 41). “So much I give up” he poignantly puts it, as if acknowledging the costs of such abandonment. But, as Emerson avers, “who leaves all, receives more” (EL, 426). Just as Emerson says, “I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain,” Baraka insists he must leave behind the past and turn toward “new days” (EL, 413). What specifically must he give up? Sites from his past, each loaded with associations: Chicago, linked with his awakening to literature, homosexuality, and human connection; Shreveport, the scene of the nightmarish final chapter’s partial but failed awakening to black roots and identity; Puerto Rico, site of his days in the Air Force and where he first began to write poetry; and the racially integrated Lower East Side, his current home and locus of the contemporary avant-garde. The deeply unsettling drama of self-division played out in “The Eighth Ditch” stages the intractable dilemmas of a person at war with himself and his situation. Loathing both the “sheep”-like bourgeois youth he was and the singer of “white friend blues” he has become, Baraka feels there is much he must relinquish, true to the command implicit in experimental individualism. In the last two chapters, where the writing turns to “fast narrative,” Baraka’s intent seems to be to confess and purge his own sins in the hope of redemption, to liquidate his past identity in order to invent yet another reincarnated self. The novel’s final chapter, “The Heretics,” is an act of confession driven by self-division and self-disgust. As we follow the narrator into “The Bottom,” a

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ghetto in Shreveport, Louisiana, we journey into the deepest circle of hell as well as into some of the novel’s finest and most resonant writing.The story builds on a real-life incident Baraka barely pauses to mention in his autobiography: In Shreveport, Reilly, Burke, and I tried to go off base together, but the locals discouraged it. I ended up two days AWOL. I had gotten lost and laid up with a sister down in the Bottom (one black community of Shreveport—see The System of Dante’s Hell) and finally came back rumpled and hung over and absolutely broke. (A, 170)

In “The Heretics,” the narrator, obviously a stand-in for Baraka, goes out for the night with a buddy from the Air Force, who is overtly described as being “like Virgil, the weary shade” to his own “Dante, me, the yng wild virgin of the universe” (125). The two ride a bus until after “the last white had gotten off a mile back,” descending into the Bottom, “where the colored lived,” for a night of carousing and sex away from the base (122, 121). At a bar called The Joint, Baraka and his guide meet a group of “17 year old whores strapped to negro weekends” and he begins to dance with one named Peaches (127). The two military men are readily identifiable as outsiders in this southern black scene—“of course the men didn’t dig the two imitation white boys come in on their leisure”—and are treated with a hostility that intensifies Baraka’s uneasiness with the sights and smells of downhome African-American culture (128). As soon as he speaks, others notice “the quick new jersey speech, full of italian idiom, and the invention of the jews” (128). For his part, he recoils from the “smell of despair and drunkenness,” from “their frightening lives” (128). This estrangement from the crowd carries over to the narrator’s reluctance to have sex with Peaches. When she begins to seduce him, the narrator tries to escape, and answers her protests by explaining:“I’m sorry. I’m fucked up. My mind is screwy, I don’t know why. I can’t think. I’m sick. I’ve been fucked in the ass. I love books and smells and my own voice. You don’t want me” (131). Eventually she coaxes him into going home with her, tries to have sex with him, and, angry at his failure to be aroused, hits and pulls at him and yells, “Fuck me, you lousy fag.” As Posnock says, it is as if Peaches tries “slapping the white sissy intellectual out of him” (Color, 247). “Please, you don’t know me,” he tells her. “Not what’s in my head. I’m beautiful. Stephen Dedalus. . . . My soul is white, pure white, and soars” (140). Meanwhile, the narration cross-cuts to memories of his homosexual past: “It was Chicago. The fags & winter. Sick thin boy, come out of those els. . . . That I walked the streets hunting for warmth. To be pushed under a quilt, and call it love” (138–139). Clearly Baraka intends to further intertwine literature, whiteness, and homosexuality. He outlines a central tension: on the one hand, he insists that these facets of his self sever the narrator from the black community (and a purer and more virile black identity), which causes him agonizing guilt. On the other,

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 217 he conveys his obvious regard for these very attributes, a sentiment that hopelessly isolates him from Peaches and the African-American crowd at the Joint. The crux of “The Heretics” occurs when, after spending the night with Peaches, the narrator awakens on a sunny morning to a temporary sense of peace, a moment of identification with the social world of the Bottom: “But the smell was good. A daytime smell. And I heard daytime voices thru the window up and fat with optimism” (146–147). A domestic idyll ensues, in which Peaches brings “a huge slice” of watermelon for his breakfast, while a radio plays “heavy blues and twangy guitar. . . . And I felt myself smiling, and it seemed that things had come to an order” (147). Though the reference to “order” is offhand, it is highly significant that for the only time in a book so focused on the painful experience of flux, uncertainty, and fragmented selfhood, stability appears.“It seemed settled.That she was to talk softly in her vague american and I was to listen and nod, or remark on the heat or the sweetness of the melon” (147). Anyone familiar with the restlessness of experimental writing like Baraka’s will probably not be surprised to find how illusory and dangerous a settled feeling of this sort is. But for the moment, the narrator revels in the thought of black men sitting on their beds this saturday of my life listening quietly to their wives’ soft talk. And felt the world grow together as I hadn’t known it. All lies before, I thought. All fraud and sickness. This was the world. It leaned under its own suns, and people moved on it. A real world of flesh, of smells, of soft black harmonies and color. The dead maelstrom of my head, a sickness. . . . I cursed chicago, and softened at the world. (148)

Renouncing the effete and literary past symbolized by Chicago, he hugs Peaches, noting “the smell of her, heavy, traditional, secret,” and experiences a glimpse of a possible home. But this world, however attractive, is not, as some critics would have it, his own home. He is not and can not ever be a member of this community, with his “quick new jersey speech,” his love of books and “Stephen Dedalus,” and his “chicago.” For one thing, Baraka’s iconoclastic, avant-garde sensibility could never rest in this “heavy, traditional” air for long, since he is so deeply opposed to the fixity of such a communal identity and so resistant to convention. For another, he knows he is perhaps even more alienated from the “genuine” black life in this southern town than he is from the white world.Thus, as he returns from the store, the sense of order and the feeling of black solidarity are quickly shattered: It was a cloud I think came up. Something touched me. . . . A despair came down. Alien grace. Lost to myself, I’d come back. To that ugliness sat inside me waiting. And the mere sky greying could do it. Sky spread out thin out away from this place. Over other heads. Beautiful unknowns. And my marriage [i.e., to Peaches] a heavy iron to this tomb. (149)

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As he comes back to that “ugliness” within, he returns from a vision of another life that could never be his to his own self, with a mixture of despair and a sense of release from what had suddenly seemed a “tomb.” The sight of the sky “greying”—notably turning to the ambiguous color of black and white combined— reminds him of all he would have to renounce to really remain here, not least a world that is less strictly defined and polarized by race. He suddenly sees again the limitations of this place, remembering all the “other heads” and “beautiful unknowns” beyond this settled locale and identity. He realizes that he has gone as far into “authentic” black life and community as he can go: “To come to see the world, and yet lose it. And find sweet grace alone” (150).18 Clanging shut on the word “alone,” this brief vision of commonality ends as Baraka turns away, back to the “sweet grace” of independence and solitude. At the conclusion of the book, as the narrator starts to leave the Bottom, to “get back to the world” (143), he takes stock of what his epiphany at the sight of the “greying” sky meant: “I began to calm. To see what had happened. Who I was and what I thought my life should be” (150). But suddenly he is attacked by three African-American men who call him “Mr. Half-White muthafucka.” As they beat him into a daze, he experiences a final vision: It was in a cave this went on. With music and whores danced on the tables. I sat reading from a book aloud and they danced to my reading. When I finished reading I got up from the table and for some reason, fell forward weeping to the floor. The negroes danced around my body and spilled whisky on my clothes. I woke up 2 days later, with white men, screaming for God to help me. (152)

The closing hallucination, which recapitulates the entire narrative of “The Heretics,” replete with the music, liquor, and dancing whores, situates the narrator as a writer, isolated from the “negroes” (marked as other by his use of this word) and women who dance to his reading. Like Eliot’s Prufrock, stirred by human voices from his reverie of mermaids in the chambers of the sea, the narrator wakes up only to drown. He does not awaken with Peaches at home in an idyll of southern black domesticity, but rather back in a world of white faces, locked in his old torment. On a literal level, Baraka has come back to the Air Force base, his two-day AWOL over—when he “finally came back rumpled and hung over and absolutely broke” after being “laid up with a sister” in Shreveport. Metaphorically, Baraka seems to create this scene of self-flagellation as retribution for his guilty sense of being an “imitation white boy”—for being the token “Negro,” for being the one black poet out of 44 in The New American Poetry (128). At the same time, he admits his utter inability to disentangle himself from the white world, from Frank and Allen, from Chicago and all it symbolizes in his personal mythology, from his wife and daughters, from Stephen Dedalus and Dante. Before the novel begins, Baraka explains in a note that he has altered Dante’s scheme in one significant way: “I put The Heretics in the deepest part of hell,

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 219 though Dante had them spared, on higher ground. It is heresy, against one’s own sources, running in terror, from one’s deepest responses and insights . . . the denial of feeling . . . that I see as basest evil” (7). Many readers have taken this to mean that the most severe punishment in Baraka’s own system of hell is reserved for those who commit what one critic calls “racial heresy,” whose sin is their alienation from their ethnic roots (L. Brown, Amiri, 80). As I mentioned earlier, critics tend to view the final chapter as a tale of redemption and deliverance from the hell of whiteness. But in doing so, they neglect the profound equivocation of the chapter and of the novel as a whole.19 Considering the complexities of “The Heretics,” Baraka’s prefatory comments about his alteration of Dante seem a good deal more ambiguous: though the chapter tells of a young man’s uneasiness with and flight from black roots, it also shows him “running in terror” from his own aesthetic sensibility, his homosexual yearnings, and his intellect. Furthermore, those black roots (as embodied in the Bottom and its culture and sensibility) are hardly cast in a positive, desirable light (after all, it seems to be the pit of the Inferno itself). So what, then, are his “deepest responses and insights,” and which world is he actually betraying? Does this young narrator, suffering inside the “maelstrom of my head,” even know? (148). Baraka’s later works would lead one to assume that his “sources” and “deepest responses” are to be found in being “focused on blackness,” but within the space of this novel, one finds only a self “split open down the center,” unsure of what his sources even are (153). At this point—and recall this is 1959 to 1961, not 1965—Baraka’s pragmatist pluralism keeps him from embracing the logic of racially determined identity and selfhood founded on a bedrock of racial essence. In this sense, the novel is much closer in spirit to the poem “Notes for a Speech” than one might have thought. Baraka leaves open the question of which responses, insights, and sources he is guilty of running in terror from—ultimately, the “hell” he suffers in actually stems from his alienation from and longing for both worlds. The strength of Baraka’s renunciation of the Bottom and of his clinging to art, “Chicago,” and the “beautiful unknowns” of protean rather than fixed identity, his inability to abandon the world of those demons he loves, result in a much more self-conflicted, ambivalent text than a strictly ideological reading that stresses only the narrator’s alienation from and return to essential blackness would suggest. Baraka’s remarkable only novel is a masterpiece of agonized irresolution, not redemption and self-discovery. In his play The Toilet (1961), Baraka transforms the mixed feelings towards his white friends and homosexuality so central to The System of Dante’s Hell—his stinging confusion about whether to go on living and writing within the white New York poetry community or to embrace African-American solidarity—into a drama that stages the clash between individualism and the pressures of the social.20

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Trying in vain to exorcise the demons he seemed unable to escape in the novel, Baraka uses the play to explore what happens when a sensitive and intelligent protagonist encounters a violent gang who think and act as a mob. In Baraka’s own estimation, The Toilet is a tale of nonconformity and its costs: he explained in an introduction to the play that it is about “a boy’s inability (because he is a victim) to explain that he is something stranger than the rest,” and who suffers because of the close-minded “social order” to which he belongs.21 The short play, which is based on an actual incident from Baraka’s teenage years, features a confrontation in a high school bathroom between a group of African-American boys (led by tough guy Ora Matthews) and James Karolis, a white boy. Through much of the play, the kids are waiting for their leader, the “short, intelligent, manic” Ray, who they call Foots, to arrive. Ray (another stand-in for Baraka himself) is supposed to fight Karolis, because the white boy has sent a love letter to Ray “telling him he thought he was ‘beautiful’ . . . and that he wanted to blow him” (BT, 56). When Ray finally appears, he is very obviously reluctant to fight Karolis (whom the others have already begun to batter), but he is pressured by the other boys. The play’s considerable irony and tension stem from this: it is clear to the audience and reader, though not to the gang members, that Ray has already been intimate—across supposedly indelible barriers of race and sexual orientation— with Karolis and, therefore, is painfully caught between his need to impress the thugs who follow him and his tender feelings for Karolis. Finally Karolis, exasperated, challenges Ray to fight, saying: “You have to fight me. I sent you a note, remember. That note saying I loved you. (The others howl at this.) The note saying you were beautiful. (Tries to smile.) Remember that note, Ray?”When Ray refuses to respond and begins to fight, Karolis presses harder on the splitting seams of Ray’s identity: Did I call you Ray in that letter . . . or Foots? (Trying to laugh.) Foots! (Shouts). I’m going to break your fucking neck. That’s right. That’s who I want to kill. Foots! . . . Are you Ray or Foots, huh? . . . I’ll fight you. Right here in this same place where you said your name was Ray. . . . Ray, you said your name was. You said Ray. Right here in this filthy toilet.You said Ray. (He is choking Foots and screaming. Foots struggles and is punching Karolis in the back and stomach, but he cannot get out of the hold.) You put your hand on me and said Ray! (BT, 59)

By insisting on the disjunction between the two names, Karolis exposes the gap between Foots, the gang leader who conforms to the group’s expectations, and Ray, the sensitive, smart, homosexual young man who is a nonconformist, who is “stranger than the rest” but cannot reveal it.22 As we have seen, Baraka will often attempt to kill off one part of himself in his writing, and in this case, Karolis tries to murder the Foots who is imprisoning Ray, or, if you will, the Amiri cloaking LeRoi. Hiding his true feelings because of the fierce (and homophobic) social pressure to conform, Ray refuses to engage (or even to deny) Karolis’s questions.

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 221 When the two boys begin to fight, Karolis quickly gains the advantage, and the other boys, led by Ora, jump in to save Foots and end up pummeling the white boy senseless. Lying bloodied on the floor, Karolis says: “No, no, his name is Ray, not Foots. You stupid bastards. I love somebody you don’t even know” (BT, 60). The boys drag the beaten Foots out of the bathroom, leaving Karolis alone, crumpled in a heap. The final stage directions create a crucial tableau: At this point, the door is pushed open slightly, then it opens completely and Foots comes in. He stares at Karolis’ body for a second, looks quickly over his shoulder, then runs and kneels before the body, weeping and cradling the head in his arms. (BT, 62)

This play’s conclusion surely stresses human compassion over violence, interracial connection over racial hatred, and same-sex affection over close-minded bigotry. As such, The Toilet epitomizes Baraka’s mixed feelings in the early 1960s about his identity, friendship, and race, and is a good example of the aesthetically rich and ambiguous works those feelings sparked. Like the narrators of “The Heretics” and Ducthman, the protagonist is caught between the seductive “white” world and the “black” gang and fits comfortably into neither.23 For Werner Sollors, Baraka’s plays of this period all critique their main characters’ lack of ethnic solidarity: works like Dutchman, The Slave, and The Toilet condemn their “sensitive protagonists” for their “central weakness”: “Their lack of group identification is viewed as alienation from ethnic roots” (102). However, if this play is meant to condemn Ray’s failure to identify with his “blackness,” as Sollors suggests, why would Baraka portray a group of African-Americans summarily brutalizing his play’s sympathetic white and gay character in a release of sickening power and violence, and why is the AfricanAmerican hero subsequently plagued by such remorse and indecision? In my eyes, Baraka’s plays of the early 1960s express a deep wariness about the kind of group identification Sollors privileges and are far more ambivalent than critical. In addition to conveying such mixed feelings about racial brotherhood, The Toilet also forces us to assess why Baraka attempts once more the kind of failed exorcism of the homosexual and sensitive intellectual that we saw in “The Heretics.” Once again, Baraka alludes to his own bisexual experimentation and homoerotic desires, only to be wracked with a mixture of attraction and self-lacerating repulsion toward such desires and acts. The central conflict and resolution of The Toilet suggest Baraka’s bitterly divided attitudes about both homosexuality and interracial relationships, two of the main ingredients in his experience of the New York poetry scene—in short, his devastating need to relinquish and destroy everything he loves. Perhaps uncomfortable with the play’s expression of equivocal feelings, Baraka later disavowed The Toilet’s ending. Asked about his earlier work in the midst of his black nationalist phase in 1971, Baraka responded:

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Baraka’s revisionist claim that the final gesture of connection “did not evolve from the spirit of the play” and was merely a false concession seems dubious, given the overwhelming emphasis throughout the play on the secret relationship between Ray and Karolis. In any case, these comments make clear that the creation of The Toilet, and the meaning of the play, stem from Baraka’s increasingly strained relationships with white poets and, more generally, from his complicated navigation of the problem of friendship that the postwar avant-garde community presented to him. Growing out of “where I was at that time,” his “social situation,” at a time when he was “working through things I didn’t understand,” The Toilet is powerful because of its author’s confusion and ambivalence, and the ambiguity with which he treats its central conflicts—not marred by them (C, 189). The play arises from the questions plaguing Baraka: Should he brutally reject his white friends and lovers and relinquish his sensitive and poetic side in favor of strident and committed political action, here symbolized by a thuggish, intolerant African-American mob? Or should he espouse nonviolence and strive for reconciliation and friendship across racial lines? I take Ray’s gesture of love for the white homosexual Karolis to be an important metaphor for Baraka’s conflicted feelings toward his white friends—and perhaps most specifically, one of his closest white gay friends, Frank O’Hara. This becomes even clearer when the play is viewed in the larger context of Baraka’s work.The haunting, bathroom-beating incident from Baraka’s childhood that The Toilet re-creates also appears in an important earlier poem, “Look For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today.” In the midst of that scattered, collage-like poem, Baraka moves from the Karolis brawl to a subtle allusion to Frank O’Hara—a movement that illuminates the lingering personal guilt that The Toilet attempts to work through and the connection between that play’s central conflict and O’Hara himself. He writes: An avalanche of words could cheer me up. Words from Great Sages. Was James Karolis a great sage?? Why did I let Ora Matthews beat him up in the bathroom? Haven’t I learned my lesson.

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 223 I would take up painting if I cd think of a way to do it better than Leonardo. Than Bosch Than Hogarth. Than Kline. Frank walked off stage, singing “My silence is as important as Jack’s incessant yatter.” (T, 17–18)

In this passage, Baraka echoes O’Hara’s famous 1956 poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” (“I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not”) and suggests the importance of artistic originality (CP, 261). He acknowledges the inevitability of competition among creators—one enters the field of cultural endeavor only if one can think of how to do it better than past and current masters. This is followed by Baraka’s intriguing reference to “Frank” and “Jack,” which has thus far escaped notice by critics. He is alluding to a notorious incident involving O’Hara and Jack Kerouac that further highlights the question of competition among artists. In March 1959, O’Hara gave a poetry reading with his good friend Gregory Corso at the Living Theatre, in an event that suggests the fragile coming together of “Beat” and “New York School” poetries, a congruence that Baraka was also a part of. (It is worth noting that the audience included Franz Kline, who is mentioned in the previous line, and presumably Baraka). Kerouac, very drunk and apparently jealous of O’Hara’s friendship with Corso and Corso’s high regard for O’Hara’s writing, became abusive during O’Hara’s reading. Joining in with Corso’s teasing homophobic onstage comments (“You see, you have it so easy because you’re a faggot. Why don’t you get married?” he asked O’Hara), Willard Maas yelled from the audience, “Why don’t you marry Frank, if you want to so much, Gregory?”, while Kerouac insisted that they let him read instead (Gooch, City, 322; Lehman, Last, 335–336). At one point, Kerouac shouted out, “You’re ruining American poetry, O’Hara,” to which O’Hara, not missing a beat, acidly replied: “That’s more than you ever did for it.” After a heated scene of remonstration, argument, and apology during the intermission, Kerouac joined the two readers on stage, sat with his back to the audience and heckled O’Hara as he tried to read. Finally O’Hara simply gave up and left the stage, explaining, “This may seem uninteresting but it’s no more uninteresting than Jack Kerouac’s wanting to read.”25 Why does Baraka move so quickly, in “Look for You Yesterday,” from the memory of the Karolis beating to a statement about artistic originality and individualism, then to an allusion to the O’Hara incident? For one thing, Kerouac’s homophobic attack on O’Hara seems to be a replay of Ora Matthews’s assault on the homosexual Karolis. Apparently, Baraka still feels guilty about not trying to stop this attack, suggesting that the two are parallel. “Haven’t I learned my lesson,” he asks, and then immediately goes on to recount the Kerouac-O’Hara fight, thus

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implying that the answer is no. Furthermore, Baraka celebrates O’Hara’s proud stand against his aggressor (as he walks off stage “singing” his witty defiance) and implicitly links the “Great Sage” Karolis with his current friend O’Hara, a latterday exemplar of artistic individualism and nonconforming homosexuality. The connection between “Look For You Yesterday” and the play makes it even more likely that the rapprochement between the black Baraka character Ray and the white homosexual Karolis in The Toilet directly parallels the friendship between Baraka and O’Hara. Because Baraka’s later comments make it clear that the play “actually invokes my own social situation at the time,” and because of the linkage already made in “Look For You Yesterday,” we can safely see Karolis as in some ways a stand-in for O’Hara (C, 189). This congruence seems particularly germane if we recall that O’Hara seems to have flirtatiously propositioned Baraka (inviting him to run off for a tryst to Mexico, as Diane di Prima recalls)—which parallels Karolis’s expression of love for Ray, the letter that forces Ray into the uncomfortable position of having to renounce his affection for the white friend/ lover. This further underscores that the play dramatizes Baraka’s vexing friendship with O’Hara as a metaphor for the larger questions underlying his alliances with the white avant-garde. The Toilet reveals a writer caught in a titanic struggle with what he loves and despises at the same time; like so many of his works, the play conveys the distress Baraka feels about the two communities that were exerting overwhelming, competing claims on his writing and his very soul—the white New York poets and the radical black nationalists. In works like The Toilet and System, Baraka has claimed he was self-consciously working through things he did not fully understand, and though he would reject this kind of uncertainty in his later, more absolutist stages, it results in writings of tormented equivocation that succeed as multidimensional and highly emotional works of art.

baraka to his brothe rs Like The System of Dante’s Hell and The Toilet, many poems in The Dead Lecturer, Baraka’s second, and to many eyes, best book of poetry, are born out of the conflicts that were erupting between himself and his friends. As Baraka explained: “Again and again [the poems] speak of this separation, this sense of being in contradiction with my friends and peers” (A, 255–256). If the book merely delineated the poet’s denunciation of his white companions, their politics and their aesthetics, it would be a rather simple affair, and perhaps make for uninteresting poetry. However, as in the other works I have been discussing, the brilliance and emotional charge comes from the indecision and ambiguity within the poet himself, his attitudes, and his language. In these poems, Baraka creates a running dialogue with his friends, those people he admits he genuinely loves but needs to leave, about the changes he is

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 225 experiencing. In the poem with the telling title “Joseph to His Brothers,” Baraka immediately draws a distinction between “them” and “me”—“They characterize / their lives, and I / fill up / with mine” (T, 70). Whereas his friends are detached and passive, talking about their lives abstractly, Baraka wishes to live actively and passionately, to “Fill up with what I have, with what / I see (or / need.” The resonances with the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers are notable: Baraka alludes to the story of the most-loved son of Jacob and his difficult relationship with his brothers as a way of exploring the problems of poetic siblinghood. Like O’Hara and Ashbery, Baraka also draws on the metaphor of brotherhood to figure both the closeness and the rivalrous emotions underlying the bond of friendship. Just as O’Hara will make recourse to the story of Cain and Abel in working through his relationship with Ashbery (as I will discuss in the next chapter), Baraka deliberately links himself with Joseph, the poet-like interpreter of dreams, whose father gives him a coat of many colors, eliciting the resentment and hatred of his more prosaic brothers, who decide to sell him into slavery rather than murder him. Years later, when he is a powerful advisor to the Pharaoh of Egypt because of his dream-reading abilities, Joseph reveals himself to his brothers, saying, “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt” (Genesis 45:4). Unlike the tale of Cain and Abel, however, the biblical story of fraternal rivalry Baraka chooses ends with reconciliation, not murder. By drawing on this figure who is sold into slavery by his brothers (obviously rich in metaphoric associations regarding his racial heritage), only to be eventually reunited with them, Baraka hints that reconciliation or understanding is still a viable possibility. In the poem, Baraka does not yet demand a breaking off of communications between himself and his brothers, insisting instead that they listen to him and his changing ideas: “The story is a long one. Why / I am here like this. Why you / should listen, now, so late, and / weary at the night.” In “Joseph to His Brothers,” Baraka seems to be revealing himself to O’Hara and Ginsberg, Creeley and Olson, Corso and Dorn, saying, with dire forewarning and a powerful demand for recognition: “I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt.” In “Green Lantern’s Solo,” Baraka takes another individualistic flight away from the group melody, explaining that “I break and run, or hang back and hide” (T, 102). The poem opens with a reference to “the field”—which for Baraka is associated with the projectivist notion of the poem as an open field—noting that it has now “drawn in / as if to close, and die, in the old man’s eyes / as if to shut itself.” For Baraka, it seems that Olson’s open field poetics—so important to the New American Poetry—have become constricting. The time has come, he implies, to go solo—both enacting his philosophical commitment to individualism and literally foreshadowing his imminent departure from the Village for Harlem. The bohemian community he depicts is decidedly unpleasant and stifling, where one is “surrounded / in dim rooms by the smelly ghosts of wounded intellectuals.” He then goes on to wickedly critique a series of unnamed friends

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for their hypocrisy and detachment from life (“my friend, the lyric poet, / who has never had an orgasm. My friend, / the social critic, who has never known society”) and their pomposity (“My friend” who acts “as if he was the slow intellect who thought up / God”). Throughout the poem, Baraka attacks a moribund intellectual scene in radical decline, “their lives, dwindled, rusted, corrupted / away” (T, 103). In contrast, he holds up the Green Lantern’s heroic independence, his ability to go it alone. At the same time, he remains aware of the impossibility of total autonomy—he admits no one is “completely free” or “completely innocent,” conceding this is a state “no thing I know can claim.” But the poem still ends by attacking the dangerous tendency toward dogma, toward absolutism, while invoking the Emersonian wariness of instructors who bully their disciples: “No man except a charlatan / could be called ‘Teacher,’ as // big birds will run off from their young / if they follow too closely.” This recalls the Whitman-like old man in “Betancourt” who knew he had to go away, so that his readers wouldn’t “follow too closely.” In the end Baraka critiques those “naïve fools” who can not but yearn for the One Mind, or Right, or call it some God, a thing beyond themselves, some thing toward which all life is fixed, some static, irreducible, constantly correcting, dogmatic economy of the soul. (T, 104–105)

In the poem “Betancourt,” Baraka chastises fools who cling to their original thought, rather than “turning” and embracing change and inconsistency. Similarly, here he satirizes those absolutists, those dogmatists, whose desire for stability, for unity, leads them to foolishly imagine that life has a fixed end, foundation, or static meaning. His comic book alter ego, the Green Lantern, fights against such fixity by playing his solo, by at least trying to remain independent and free from conformity. Baraka would soon reject the skeptical stance so forcefully laid out here in favor of a much more dogmatic and absolutist worldview: an essentialist belief that race and, later, economics are that foundation, that thing toward which “all life is fixed.” And the man who felt that only a “charlatan” could be called “Teacher” was soon to dub himself “Imamu Amiri Baraka”—which means “spiritual leader and blessed prince/warrior chief.” In the final poem in The Dead Lecturer, “The Liar,” Baraka self-critically wonders about his “constantly changing disguises” and turns resolutely to the future, to the drastic changes he knows are coming (T, 73). It is another literally transitional work, a poem about the self in transit. He begins by recognizing the need to relinquish his ties, now that he knows that it is more fear than affection that has kept him moored: “What I thought was love / in me, I find a thousand instances / as fear” (T, 113). Fear of change, fear of hurting others, fear of himself or his

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 227 changes has locked him into his marriage and friendships. But, sensing imminent transformations, he goes on to reflect quite directly on his own protean nature: Though I am a man who is loud on the birth of his ways. Publicly redefining each change in my soul, as if I had predicted them, and profited, biblically, even tho their chanting weight, erased familiarity from my face. A question I think, an answer, whatever sits counting the minutes till you die. When they say, “It is Roi who is dead?” I wonder who will they mean? (T, 113)

Fascinated and troubled by the fluidity of identity in equal measure, Baraka is unable to say who he was or will be definitively. Since Baraka fears rigidly defining the self, the most he can say of identity is that it is “whatever sits / counting the minutes / till you die.” To venture a more coherent definition risks reifying and falsifying the incessantly shape-shifting self. The poem is chilling in its prophecy: when his friends lament that their dear old friend Roi has abandoned them and is dead, as they would soon do, who will they be referring to, he asks? The “renegade / behind the mask” (referred to in “A Poem for Willie Best”)? (T, 68). His friends may be left wondering, to echo the famous line from Baraka’s beloved Lone Ranger, “Who was that masked man?” Who, ultimately, is the liar referred to in the poem’s title? The old self, Roi, or the new self who will substitute for him? Again, Baraka highlights the thin line between multiplicity and a lack of integrity—if one is constantly shifting views and personae, is any incarnation to be trusted? This is a risk Baraka has courted throughout his career: Emersonian inconsistency, however stimulating and creative, can look like relativism, opportunism, and like a cowardly absence of firmly held convictions.26 Baraka, like O’Hara, senses this danger in the pragmatist stance, and makes poems about the mixed feelings it engenders. Ultimately, the “liar” seems to embody the vibrant, changing process of being a self, “the changing same” that is a human being (Jones/Baraka Reader, 186). It is the constant force that, like the slippery serpent in O’Hara’s “In Memory of My Feelings,” persists through all its incarnations.

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A final example, “Duncan Spoke of a Process,” may help sum up the struggle at the heart of Baraka’s work that I have been exploring, as it presents the conflict rather starkly. Picking up on the title’s reference to Robert Duncan’s ideas about “process,” Baraka begins “And what I have learned / of it, to repeat, repeated / as a day will repeat / its color, the tired sounds / run off its bones” (T, 92). As is evident in the poem “The Dance” discussed earlier, Baraka learned much from Duncan’s quite Emersonian view of experience as “dance” and motion. But here he seems to have wearied of the ideas he finds himself mouthing without inspiration (underscored by the triple repetition of “repeat”). He admits that his attraction to ideas like Duncan’s is due, in part, to a sense of fellowship—“What // was only love,” Baraka writes, “or in those cold rooms, / opinion.” Thus, he seems to be guilty of adopting what he calls in the essay “Milneburg Joys” the hip “code words” of the group (42). The poem, like that essay, takes pains to say “I repudiate the cult of Opinion.” But despite his rejection of derivativeness, Baraka still worries how empty he would be without the work of his friends, which, he implies, “filled me / as no one will. As, even / I cannot fill / myself.” This duality, this balancing act between the speaker’s companions and his autonomous individuality, persists through the poem’s open-ended conclusion: I see what I love most and will not leave what futile lies I have. I am where there is nothing, save myself. And go out to what is most beautiful. What some noncombatant Greek or soft Italian prince would sing, “Noble Friends.” Noble Selves. And which one is truly to rule here? And what country is this?

In effect, with this conclusion Baraka crystallizes the dilemma of friendship and self-reliance so central to his work. The “noncombatant,” “soft,” and literary side of Baraka clings to his “Noble” friendships.The other, more combative side clings to his “Noble Selves.” Which of the two is “most beautiful” remains ambiguous. Baraka even structures these lines so that “Selves” rings like an echo of “Friends,” highlighting the blurry relationship between the two. And which one is to rule here, he wonders, “friends” or “selves”? Are they mutually exclusive, or can they be reconciled? “What country is this?” he asks, as if intending to stress how central to American literature and thinking such questions are. Is “America” a country founded on principles of democratic community and togetherness? Or on self-reliant individualism, a go-it-alone frontier spirit that resists group thought, numbing conformity, and received ideas? Can it

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 229 be both? The poem ends on a note of irresolution, unable to choose between our selves and our friends. Baraka’s feelings about these issues were soon to be much less wracked with ambivalence and uncertainty, and his writings more resolute. Immediately after the assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965, Baraka finally did what he had known for some time he would have to do: he made a clean break with his white companions and his wife and family.27 For Baraka, it was an exhilarating new start: “When we came up out of the subway, March 1965, cold and clear, Harlem all around us staring us down, we felt like pioneers of the new order. Back in the homeland to help raise the race” (A, 295). In “I Don’t Love You,” another direct address to his erstwhile companions in the white avant-garde, Baraka portrays a figurative and literal escape from Greenwich Village as a geographical and symbolic space, and celebrates his release from all bonds to his white friends and lovers, and to white culture itself: The dont’s of this white hell. The crashed eyes of dead friends, standing at the bar eyes focused on actual ugliness. I don’t love you. Who is to say what that will mean. I don’t love you expressed the train, moves, and uptown days later we look up and breathe much easier I don’t love you (BM 55)

Those he had left behind downtown were understandably confused and stung by his departure. As Joe LeSueur recalls, “the community of artists and intellectuals who had taken LeRoi up . . . felt stabbed in the back” (247). O’Hara, who was dedicated to racial integration and suspicious of identity logic—he had insisted several years earlier that “dying in black and white we fight for what we love, not are”—deplored his old friend’s newfound commitment to racial separatism as a distressing step backward (CP, 305). Soon after Baraka’s departure, O’Hara wrote to Ashbery: “LeRoi seems not to be interested in us-all any more and is reported to have removed himself to Harlem. . . . Perhaps only because I find it so personally disappointing, it reminds me only of 1868” (26 April 1965). However, LeSueur relates an incident in which Leonard Bernstein “launched into a diatribe against Roi, whose recent behavior he characterized as a betrayal of his friends,” and when LeSueur asked O’Hara the next day how he had responded to Bernstein, O’Hara said, “I told him that Roi was someone I loved and I couldn’t possibly discuss anything like that with him” (248).28 Despite Baraka’s drastic break with the Village world, the connections were never entirely severed: although for many years, Baraka harshly dismissed his old

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companions as elitist, bourgeois white liberals, he has continued to speak fondly of figures like Ginsberg and O’Hara who, he feels, were not completely apolitical (Gooch, City, 425).29 When Baraka was arrested during the Newark riots of 1967 and sentenced to prison for the illegal possession of firearms, sixteen white poets—including Ashbery, Corso, Creeley, di Prima, Duncan, Ginsberg, Koch, and Olson—sent a letter of protest in his defense (Sollors, Amiri, 202, 295 n. 9). Following this rupture, the dramatic social, cultural, and political pressures of the times seem to have driven Baraka toward a more direct and instrumental poetry of communal African-American identity and empowerment. However, even in his later phases, Baraka retained many of the techniques he had learned from and added to the New American Poetry, including a devotion to rapid verbal shifts, the use of playful and cutting riffs and puns, and spoken American speech. Though he continued to espouse an avant-garde, revolutionary aesthetic and a commitment to nonconformity, his emphasis shifted, at least superficially, from the primacy of the individual to the primacy of the group—specifically, to a concern for the black “nation,” which he now viewed as a “community of nonconformists,” and, later, for all disenfranchised, oppressed, and Third World peoples (H, 93). But as Werner Sollors points out, Baraka and the Black Arts Movement he helped lead were not able to escape the contradictions of individualism and community so easily: The demand for a “collective” art was often a camouflage for individualistic, modernizing artists who feigned collectivity. Despite all the invocation of “the people,” despite the claims that alienation had been transcended in Black cultural nationalism, there remains a struggle between the elitist writer and the people who are to learn the right Black consciousness from him. (194)

Along with his move to Harlem and then Newark came certain changes in Baraka’s writing and philosophical outlook. Gone from his poetry is the tentative, skeptical, self-doubting and lyrical sensibility that energizes—or, to some eyes, mars—the earlier work. In its place, one finds in both his Black Arts writing and his later Marxist work much straightforward political writing, dogmatic convictions, and an impatience with pragmatism’s emphasis on the symbolic action inherent in troping and imaginative language use, in favor of a conception of the poem as a utilitarian weapon with real-world results. However, even the notorious poem “Black Art” always seems aware of its problematic status as rhetoric rather than action: Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step . . . We want poems

Baraka’s White Friend Blues 231 like fists beating niggers out of Jocks or dagger poems in the slimy bellies of the owner-jews . . . We want “poems that kill.” Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland . . . Another bad poem cracking steel knuckles in a jewlady’s mouth . . . We want a black poem. And a Black World. Let the world be a Black Poem And Let All Black People Speak This Poem Silently or LOUD (T, 142–143)

Much of the later Baraka is filled with didactic invective and sloganeering and with revolting antiwhite, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and misogynistic bigotry. “Most American white men are trained to be fags,” he writes in an essay, and in “Black People!” he states (echoing the commandment in Emerson’s Nature to “build therefore your own world”) (EL, 48): “We must make our own / World, man, our own world, and we can not do this unless the white man / Is dead. Let’s get together and killhim my man. . . . [L]et’s make a world we want black children to grow and learn in” (H, 216; BM, 225).The conclusion of the 1981 poem “Reggae or Not!” reads “Only Socialism / will save the Black Nation / Only Socialism will save / America / Only Socialism will save / the world!” (T, 185). Since the 1960s, Baraka’s reputation as a very public, radical political figure, as a fiercely ideological writer, has often obscured the experimental poet who loathed conformity, doctrinaire positions, and all forms of definitive closure, who embraced uncertainty and flux, and who declared “a position / for myself: to move” (DL, 71). Ross Posnock isolates the dilemma faced by African-American intellectuals like Baraka who are torn between being “race men” (spokespersons for their people) and pragmatists who distrust essentialism and espouse pluralism, a dilemma that seems to have weighed heavily on Baraka in the 1960s: “How to reconcile a philosophy that refuses the primacy of identity with the politics of racial group advocacy.” There are simply no easy resolutions to this nagging conundrum. But in the later 1960s, Baraka’s response was to largely jettison the former and champion the latter, rather than try to juggle the two. The anger and political conviction of Baraka’s later work can be extremely potent, and his innovative use of black vernacular and emphasis on the musical, performative dimension of poetry have been highly influential. (His later poems

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function as scores for his dynamic performances). But largely missing from his later work is the struggle over the nature of his own identity and the energetic dialogue carried on in writing with his white companions.30 Reading Baraka as a poet adjacent to and in conversation with the New York School of poets and other literary communities, who writes incessantly about his ambivalent relation to those collectives, gives us a better understanding of both this perennially controversial writer and of those poetic groupings that have become such convenient, misleading markers for literary history. Baraka’s works of the early 1960s represent a fascinating chapter in the history of American poetry, a moment when innovative poetry was inspired by the possibilities and tribulations of integration and cross-racial colloquy. Rather than being solely a paean to the intimate coterie ethos of the postwar avant-garde (or the extended and triumphant kiss-off to white bohemia that some critics have made it out to be), Baraka’s earlier writing suggests the pleasures, the limits, and the burdens of community and a poetics of sociability, as it repeatedly stages the irresolvable face-off between American individualism and friendship. Writing at the knotty center of the New York poetry universe in the 1950s and 1960s, Baraka arrives at a vision of poetry as a continual and painful process of turning away from and returning to group affiliations and forms of assimilation. In the coda Baraka added to The System of Dante’s Hell in 1965, almost five years after he wrote that disturbed, unsettled book, he stated, “The world is clearer to me now, and many of its features, more easily definable” (153). But to find his way to that sense of “home,” to arrive at that certitude about his own identity and his interracial friendships with his avant-garde companions, Baraka had to abandon much, had to turn away once and for all from that which had moved him.

7

“A RAINY WOOL FRANKIE AND JOHNNY” O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship

P

icture John and me as brothers,” Frank O’Hara once wrote in a letter, suggesting the intensity of his friendship with fellow poet John Ashbery.1 Throughout the course of a seventeen-year friendship, the two poets found in each other a kindred spirit, an avant-garde companion, a stirring example of nonconformity to be emulated in spirit but not copied, an enthusiastic reader, a cheerleader, a critic, a goad, and a competitive rival. Of all the myriad friendships that O’Hara and Ashbery sustained with a wide range of writers and artists, the personal and literary bond they shared with each other became one of the closest and the most important to each poet’s development. Indeed, O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s lives and careers were so intertwined that their poetry, in part, grew out of their interaction, and each body of work can be misconstrued when considered in isolation from the other. As I argued earlier, such decidedly social poetry needs to be considered not as the transcendent expression of a singular, isolated genius, but as a materially situated issuance from a multivalent social network of persons and institutions, made up of a multitude of interpersonal strands, some less important, and some, like the O’Hara-Ashbery dialogic encounter, defining and generative. Although critics have long noted the close friendship between these two poets, the nuances of this relationship, its effect on the poets’ writings, and its recapitulation of larger issues of friendship and artistic independence deserve greater scrutiny.2 As we have seen in the previous three chapters, O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka are profoundly concerned with friendship as a theme and as an intellectual, poetic, 233

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and personal problem. Each poet creates a tense oscillation in his work between a complex experimental individualism—dependent on the notions of “abandonment,” aversion to conformity, and protean selfhood—and an awareness of both friendship’s ineradicable importance and its limitations. In this chapter, my intention is to zero in on the relationship between O’Hara and Ashbery in order to better understand how such dynamics play out in the realm of one particular—and one particularly important—poetic friendship, as well as to propose that this specific pairing could stand as a kind of synecdoche for the broader collision between friendship and radical individualism that shapes and determines innovative postwar American poetry and its writing communities. After meeting as undergraduates at Harvard in 1949, O’Hara and Ashbery quickly aligned themselves against the decorous verse being written by postwar “academic” poets. Struck by a sense of personal and artistic kinship, they began to read each other’s work, inspire each other’s creativity, publish in the same journals, and compete for the same prizes. But some gnawing questions haunt their work and particularly mark the poems they write with each other in mind: Can one be a nonconformist, an avant-garde poet, and still identify with a communal aesthetic or with a close friend’s style? Who is more original, daring, or experimental? If I am too close to you and your poetry, isn’t my work in danger of becoming fixed, frozen in conformity, indistinguishable from your work? Rather than being shackled by your work, can I answer your writing and use it as a stepping-stone for my own work? Despite their similarities, O’Hara and Ashbery deliberately cultivated different poetic styles, aesthetic concerns, and personalities, creating bodies of poetry that are utterly distinctive yet closely interrelated. From the first, the relationship was based on a deep sense of creative and personal affinity, mingled with an equally strong desire, on the part of each, to maintain his individuality and distinctive character as a poet and as a person. Such a mixture results in a heady brew of affection, mutual envy, and anxious competition, with often quite self-conscious overtones of sibling rivalry. O’Hara, Baraka, and Ashbery, we have seen, frequently draw on tropes of siblinghood, figuring their closest friendships in what Jacques Derrida calls “the language of fraternity” (Politics, 305). By doing so, they exemplify one important tendency operative within postwar American culture’s countermovement: the fostering of chosen fraternal ties—the elected brotherhood of fellow marginalized and “deviant” souls—in lieu of the biological, imposed bonds of nuclear family, which are so redolent of Cold War culture’s deification of the heterosexual, domestic idyll. Carving out a space for themselves outside sanctioned, normative relationships, as homosexuals in a hyper-repressive climate (or, on a slightly less urgent level, as experimental artists in an age of constraint, tradition, and decorum), individuals like O’Hara and Ashbery (or Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser) imagine each other as brothers, creating bonds of kinship that form the fundamental webs holding together wider communities of out-

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 235 siders. But, as Derrida shows in Politics of Friendship, and as these poets are sharply aware, such friendship, energized by its “language of fraternity,” is fraught with problems and questions: “What is meant when one says ‘brother,’ when someone is called ‘brother’?” What do we make of friendship if it means “the alterity of the other” is “resumed and subsumed”? How do we deal with the proximity of affiliation and rivalry—the “reversal of friendship into enmity,” the sense that “the enemy had to be waiting, lurking close by, in the familiarity of my own family, in my own home, at the heart of resemblance and affinity. . . .This enemy was a companion, a brother, he was like myself, the figure of my own projection. . . . [H]e was already there, this fellow creature, this double or this twin” (305, 175, 172). What of the contingency of friendship, its evanescence, especially when conceived as a bridge between two incessantly mobile entities? This dark undercurrent—which Derrida locates as the aporia within the logic and philosophy of friendship, which, in turn, closely resembles the ambivalences and contradictions in the vision of friendship that Emerson and pragmatism articulate—constantly shadows the celebration of fraternity one finds within postwar American poetry and within the O’Hara-Ashbery relationship. This chapter chronicles the rich dialogue, full of encouragement and disagreements, between O’Hara and Ashbery in their letters and poems. Friendship’s basis in provocation (in Emerson’s sense) rather than harmony can be seen in O’Hara and Ashbery’s sometimes contentious conversations, their grappling with what Libbie Rifkin refers to as the “socially charged choices that poets make and remake” (Career, 35). For example, these writers struggle over which previous poets to model themselves upon, how to present the lyric subject, the role of personal autobiographical detail in poems, and how best to cope with—and whether even to address—their homosexuality.3 If, as Pierre Bourdieu argues, the literary field is “a field of competitive struggles,” and within it, writers’ “position-takings (works, political manifestos or demonstrations, and so on)” are “the product and the stake of permanent conflict,” we can assess the various choices poets like O’Hara and Ashbery make as at least in part socially derived, strategic, and competitive (Rules, 232). By focusing largely on O’Hara’s dialogue with Ashbery in his correspondence and in a series of intriguing dedicated poems, we will see how O’Hara strategically positions himself vis-à-vis his friend within the literary field, self-consciously imagining their alliance in terms that make a bid for the poets’ own canonization in history’s annals of famous pairs, yet pitting them within a network of oppositions (avant-garde versus conservative, candid about sexuality and personality versus evasive and reticent, dedicated to empirical reality versus metaphysical and abstract, Williams versus Stevens). In the poems O’Hara writes to and for Ashbery, the contingencies and paradoxes of friendship are often very close to the surface, externalized, so that the texts serve as miniature verbal stages on which the poet can dramatize the dynamics of friendship.

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In a revealing piece titled “A Reminiscence,” John Ashbery tells the story of how he met O’Hara. This was in 1949 at a cocktail party in a bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when both poets were near the end of college. “It was rather a surprise when I overheard a ridiculous remark” about modern classical music “such as I liked to make uttered in a ridiculous voice that sounded to me like my own” (“A Reminiscence,” 20). Taken aback by O’Hara’s deliberately and refreshingly controversial opinion about Poulenc’s superiority to Stravinsky, Ashbery reflected on this strange person soon to be his friend, noting that O’Hara’s “assertion was in the way of a pleasant provocation.” Ashbery recalls, “It summed up a kind of aesthetic attitude which was very close to my own.” It is worth stressing how Ashbery’s reminiscence dwells at such length on how similar O’Hara seemed to himself—as if friendship were, in a way, a means of looking at one’s image in a mirror. He emphasizes more of what Emerson refers to as the “likeness” than the “unlikeness” at the heart of a friendship (EL, 350). Ashbery focuses not only on the aesthetic outlook O’Hara displays but even more so on the alarming resemblance between O’Hara’s voice and his own. Though we grew up in widely separate regions of the east, he in Massachusetts and I in Western New York state, we both inherited the same flat, nasal twang, a hick accent so out of keeping with the roles we were trying to play that it seems to me we probably exaggerated it, later on, in hopes of making it seem intentional. I don’t know what the significance of this was, but it fascinated us and was doubtless one reason why we became friends so quickly after our first meeting. On the telephone, I was told, we were all but indistinguishable. (20)

For Ashbery, at least in retrospect, a cornerstone of this friendship was to be the profound similarity—even beyond an affinity—between the two developing artists. The resemblance between their voices was so striking that it verged on an identity or merging. Indeed, the incidences that Ashbery reports resemble the typical stories of pranks identical twins play on unsuspecting people: Once when I was at Frank’s apartment in New York I picked up the phone and impersonated Frank to Joe LeSueur, one of Frank’s closest friends, pretending to pick a quarrel with him for several minutes during which he was entirely taken in. Another time when Frank came to visit my parents’ farm in upstate New York he walked into the kitchen one evening when my mother was washing dishes and asked if he could help: without turning round from the sink my mother said, “No, John, go back in and talk with your friends.” (20)

Since “voice” is so often a synecdoche for poetry itself (both traditionally and in the work of these poets), Ashbery’s recollection suggests a perhaps submerged sense that the two poets, in their poetry, had “both inherited the same” literary voice and “were all but indistinguishable” as poets. This similarity not only “fascinated” them, but was “doubtless one reason why we became friends so quickly,”

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 237 he recalls. Intrigued by their shared enthusiasms, attitudes, and artistic and tonal inheritance, they were drawn close together immediately. But for such strong individualists, young avant-gardists hell-bent on achieving novelty, originality, and personal vision, such indistinguishability of voice and loss of alterity would presumably have carried as much anxiety as comfort. As their work and friendship developed, as their ambitions increased, and as they began to vie more and more for recognition as independent artists, this issue seemed to become of more pointed concern. The relationship, while always supportive and close, quickly took on an air of sibling rivalry and subterranean competition. When O’Hara first visited New York and met Ashbery’s friends in the early 1950s (on vacation from his graduate studies at the University of Michigan), he dazzled them all with his vivacious charm, energy, and wit and made quite an impression on Ashbery’s tight-knit social world of painters and poets. Ashbery has made no secret of his tendency to envy O’Hara, both his charisma and his writing, and has insisted that it was he, rather than O’Hara, who was prone to jealousy (though evidence suggests the feelings were mutual). “All my friends, so it seemed to me, liked him better than they did me,” Ashbery has remarked about this period. “So I went through a period of being very depressed that he was more popular than I was and that my friends were only too happy to trade me in for him” (Gooch, City, 178). Ashbery’s anxious sense of their exchangeability can only have been exacerbated by the sense that they were virtually identical as writers and otherwise. Nevertheless, Ashbery was soon swept up in O’Hara’s own quirky, precocious enthusiasms: his new friend immediately influenced Ashbery’s tastes and aesthetic sense by teaching him that “nothing is too silly to bother with” and giving him the courage to read and appreciate underground and unknown authors that O’Hara insisted he read, such as Ronald Firbank, Flann O’Brien, and Samuel Beckett (138). One of their first areas of agreement, interestingly enough, was a belief in the importance of Wallace Stevens and a rejection of Eliot’s then omnipotent influence. Harold Brodkey, who was also at Harvard at the same time, recalls running into Ashbery and O’Hara, who excitedly told him “that Stevens was a more important poet to them than Eliot”—a daring and provocative attitude in those Eliotic, New Critical days in Cambridge—and that they “wanted to abandon Eliot for Stevens and they wanted me to go along with them” (138). What an intriguing wrinkle: O’Hara, always assumed by critics to be so distant from Stevens and his influence, actually began his friendship with Ashbery with a shared mutual passion for the poet.4 (Stevens, of course, is the precursor who has been most firmly linked with Ashbery, from O’Hara’s initial review of Some Trees to Harold Bloom’s campaign to canonize Ashbery as Stevens’s greatest descendent.) Just as Ashbery recalls that they “both inherited the same flat, nasal twang” of a voice, Stevens’s poetry and its pragmatist underpinnings served as an early and

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important shared poetic inheritance. This mutual (overt) commitment to Stevens would soon fade as O’Hara discovered a passion for the work of William Carlos Williams. Implicitly, perhaps, O’Hara saw Stevens’s old friend and rival, with his alternative conception of poetry (equally indebted to a pragmatist poetics), as a way to differentiate himself from his nearly identical friend John. After O’Hara told Ashbery of his admiration for Williams in an early letter, Ashbery wrote back: “I’m glad W. C. Williams has made a hit with you. By a strange and no doubt explainable coincidence, I’ve been reading tons of Wallace Stevens” (173). This “strange and no doubt explainable coincidence,” I think, can be explained (as Ashbery seems to be wryly aware) as an example of “strategic self-positioning”: two poets who are friends opt for different poetic models (two who were, in turn, opposed) as part of their bid to establish their difference from one another, while still being loosely united within a shared aesthetic (Rifkin, Career, 35).5 Such gestures serve as a way of staking out a space within the literary field and of remaining mobile rather than fixed within a joint identity. Though he overlooks the literary significance of this crucial difference in the poets’ choice of models, Brad Gooch does note that “O’Hara always liked to keep some irritating distinction operating in his friendships with his aesthetic soul mates. . . . With Ashbery the need to define his own voice and stance was even more crucial as the poets’ voices actually sounded alike” (City, 173). For O’Hara, as for Emerson, true or “high” friendship is, by nature, invigorated by discord—it finds its fuel in lively disagreement and provocation. In a 1950 letter, Ashbery makes clear his frustration with O’Hara’s tendency to be contrarian about their aesthetic preferences: You always disagree with everything I say. Such as when I liked Lyon [Phelps] you didn’t and now vice versa, and the similar business with Stevens and Williams, and you liking Shelley and Shostakovich, while I preferred Keats and Prokofiev, etcetera. (qtd. Gooch, City, 174)

With these specific uneasy disagreements, the two writers align themselves as later players in a dramatic history of paired yet tensely diverging poets—Stevens and Williams, Shelley and Keats. It is a typical gesture for this friendship, one that recurs throughout their interactions. Though the duos Ashbery mentions have been linked by temperament, by literary history, and by a degree of shared aesthetics, each artist remained coolly independent from the other, a fact that these two well-read young poets would presumably have been aware of. Thus, the Ashbery-O’Hara rivalry self-consciously develops along the lines of earlier rivalries, and even uses those previous antitheses as points of ongoing opposition. Indeed, the clash between artistic freedom and friendship in their own relationship bears some resemblance to the Shelley-Keats friendship, about which Keats remarked to a friend: “You see Bailey how independent [sic] my writing has been—Hunts dissuasion was of no avail—I refused to visit Shelley that I might have my own

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 239 unfettered scope” (Letters, 27). By disagreeing with one another over their choice of artistic predecessors, and even by casting themselves as rival poets by choosing rival poets in those disagreements, each poet, in effect, attempts to retain his “own unfettered scope.” Although, as I will show, the energies and frictions of this friendship would fuel the writing of poems, much of the dialogue between the poets is carried on in their abundant and fascinating correspondence. (Because Ashbery was primarily living in France from 1955 to 1966, the bulk of the years this friendship spanned, a good deal of their dialogue took place in the wonderful letters the two poets sent back and forth across the Atlantic.) Their charming, witty letters are of special interest because they reveal both how dependent each poet was on the other’s work for inspiration or for a competitive push and how threatened and exasperated it could make them feel. Though one finds O’Hara and Ashbery frequently lavishing extravagant praise on each other’s writing, the mixture of affinity and resistance at the heart of this relationship actually sparks a subtle spirit of ongoing critical give-and-take. For example, O’Hara’s comments sometimes register a touchiness about Ashbery’s reactions to his own work. In a 1954 letter to Fairfield Porter, O’Hara mentions that he has recently translated a sumptuous divertissement by Jean Genet “Un Chant d’Amour” (it’s easy to see what’s on our minds these dog days) which JA has pronounced one of my best works—I hope this doesn’t mean that it’s a terrible translation, but can’t figure out what else it could mean. There you are, he giveth with one hand and taketh with the other. (25 June 1954)

That Ashbery’s abundant praise for his new translation—either devaluing the original poems O’Hara has written or in mockery of his skill as a translator—has struck a sore spot reveals how much Ashbery’s approval means to O’Hara.6 The poets’ letters to one another often follow a typical pattern: the writer bemoans his own creative efforts while expressing rather anxious elation about his friend’s recent poems, and begs for more poems to be sent to kindle his own imagination. In one telling letter to Ashbery, O’Hara remarks that Fairfield has been badgering me to show him your splendid long letter with its beautiful long poem which I LOVE, but I can’t find it and assume I have tucked it into my pillow case, hoping that a little of your inspiration from said poem will slip into my subconscious and ferment like Shakespeare did for Keats. But nothing’s happened yet and I am 30 years old and haven’t accomplished a damn thing. How do you like that? (27 March 1957)

O’Hara’s wish for his own creativity to be sparked by “your inspiration from said poem” recalls the Emersonian belief that “it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul” (“Divinity School Address,” EL, 79). Again, O’Hara likes to devise theatrical roles from literary history for the two poets to

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play, in this case Keats and Shakespeare. The comparison serves a neat rhetorical function: rather than imagining himself as dependent upon or derivative of Ashbery’s genius, O’Hara portrays himself as a strong poet who assimilates influences, such as Ashbery’s, yet who still creates works of startling originality, like Keats creating his odes after being influenced by Shakespeare. In this scenario, Ashbery is portrayed as the consummate genius, the greater, yet safely dead writer, while O’Hara is the later, less accomplished yet still brilliant upstart poet, decisively influenced by the masterful predecessor. Though he desperately hopes Ashbery’s new long poem will provoke him into writing his own works, it is clear that this generative effect has not yet occurred— “but nothing’s happened yet.” O’Hara’s letters often chronicle his creative torpor and lack of confidence in his abilities. He wrote in one letter: “I haven’t the faintest impression that I am able to accomplish any more than I have and there comes a point when it is really depressing to do less than less. I believe that sort of activity is called the abyss.” Presumably, having just read Ashbery’s successful, adventurous new long poem (probably “A Last World”) would not have alleviated O’Hara’s fears about his poetic powers and his inability to write.7 Later in the letter, O’Hara asks anxiously “Are you writing lots?” and then goes on to say I would so like to write a play but I can’t. That’s that, I guess. I would like to write some new poems and I mean NEW, but can’t do that either. In order to show you what I’ve been up against (sand in the brain) I’ll enclose my two latest efforts and perhaps you can tell me where I went off onto the dirt road. (27 March 1957; “new” is printed in red ink)

The letter features many of the gestures one finds in friendships between individualistic poets, motifs familiar from the letters of Shelley and Keats or Stevens and Williams: O’Hara nervously commends his friend’s latest masterpiece, expresses his own desire to be original and innovative, asks for Ashbery’s opinion on his recent poems, self-deprecatingly dismisses their worth, and finally appeals to Ashbery for inspiration and for suggestions on his supposedly faltering career. “Try to write me a letter,” he writes, “and that will make things seem better. If you have any advice, such as switching to ceramic tear-vases, it will be most helpful.” O’Hara closes the letter with an especially resonant phrase: “I await your figure in the garden of words.” Even though reading Ashbery’s new work probably magnified his feelings of inadequacy, O’Hara suggests how much he relies upon his friend—his friend’s words, and even more interestingly, his “figure(s)” or tropes—to induce and stimulate his own writing. When struck by Ashbery’s brilliance, O’Hara makes no effort to hide the fact that he finds his friend’s poetry both captivating and influential on his own writing: “I’ve read a lot of your work lately and think you are a genius, so there. Bill Berkson has also been dipping liberally into the Ashes Fount and we talk about your ‘gift’ frequently, perhaps in the endeavor to compete for who can be more

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 241 influenced by you” (8 March 1961).The metaphor of drawing ink from “the Ashes Fount” for his own poems suggests just how much O’Hara relies on his friend for provocation. “I had the divine inspiration of trotting down to the Gotham Book Mart this noon,” O’Hara tells Ashbery at one point, “to pick up two copies of the Tennis [Ashbery’s second book] . . . and I must say it is a work of desperate genius, second only to its author in beauty. I have been dipping hysterically into it all afternoon and haven’t gotten a thing done that I should have been doing” (9 March 1962). As so often, the poet’s excitement about reading his friend’s newest works seems mingled with a hint of fear that this brilliant accomplishment will dwarf his own supposedly meager creative efforts. Even though he is probably referring to his museum work, O’Hara’s letter suggests that such “hysterical” admiration of the other’s “desperate genius” can paradoxically cause a poet to fail at doing what “should have been doing”—one’s own work.

“poet to poet”: frankie write s to johnny The camaraderie and critical give-and-take between O’Hara and Ashbery inspires the writing of a string of poems that O’Hara explicitly addresses to Ashbery. As so often for O’Hara, the collision between friendship and poetry explodes into works marked by ambivalence, tenderness, confusion, and affection. Just as the relationship between the two poets has received little scholarly notice, scant— virtually no—attention has been paid to these revealing texts, which are telling manifestations of the O’Hara-Ashbery relationship as well as complex expressions of the intellectual and poetic problem of friendship. A very early example of this dialogue appears in the 1950 poem “A Note to John Ashbery,” which O’Hara wrote within a year of meeting him (CP, 33). Using bizarre disjunctive imagery, O’Hara lavishly praises Ashbery’s poetry. The poem appears to be O’Hara’s attempt to match or exceed the strangeness of Ashbery’s fanciful early experiments with his own eccentricity and his perhaps even more illogical creation: More beautiful even than wild ducks paddling among drowned alley cats your green-ringed words roll nooses of elephant smells and hoop fine delicate grunts of giraffes around our neck.

O’Hara’s intention seems to be to praise the incongruous beauty of Ashbery’s poetic experiments that O’Hara so admires. In this way, the poem can be seen as a “note” in the sense of a humble “footnote” appended to a larger, more impor-

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tant work (his friend’s). But in his search for irrational, unexpected images to laud Ashbery’s “green-ringed words” adequately, O’Hara does not seem to reach merely for the wholly laudatory or the randomly surreal: notably the lines convey violence and distress at the same time that they proclaim the beauty of Ashbery’s work. So a sense of equivocation complicates this encomium. In six lines, O’Hara refers to drowned cats, “nooses,” and “grunts” “hung around our necks.” Such tropes reveal O’Hara’s perhaps submerged sense of anxiety brought on by his friend’s poetic triumphs. In a later essay on Robert Motherwell’s painting, O’Hara uses a similar image when he mentions the dangers of mounting a retrospective of a living artist’s work: “you have put your head in the noose of your admiration for this artist” (SS, 175). In this poem, admiration for Ashbery threatens to put the poet on the gallows. In another, more significant early poem written for Ashbery, “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon,” O’Hara converses with his friend directly, playfully using his affectionate nickname for Ashbery in the poem’s title (February 1952; CP, 77–78). Originally titled “Poet to Poet,” the poem finds O’Hara caught with his friend in a shared moment of Saturday depression and creative crisis, pondering “What is the poet for.” It begins with a scene marked by ugliness, banality, languor, and stasis: The banal machines are exposing themselves on nearby hillocks of arrested color: why if we are the anthropologist’s canapé should this upset the autumn afternoon? It is because you are silent.

These “banal machines” seem to be representatives of some uninteresting industry going on outside, “on nearby hillocks of arrested color.” Nothing favorable or desirable is ever described as “arrested” in O’Hara’s kinetic poetry, whose motto could be “How I hate . . . all things that don’t change / photographs, / monuments, / memories . . .” (CP, 275).This scene of “arrested color” is one devoid of art, vitality, and creativity, and it is meant to mirror the speaker’s own state of mind. Though the exact nature of these “machines” remains vague, the references to “exposing” and “arrested color” suggest that the devices may in fact be cameras. At end of the poem O’Hara will directly allude to Ashbery’s well-known early poem about “flowers . . . and photographs,” “The Picture of Little J. A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” where he explores the “sick moment / The shutter clicked” and ponders the problematic stasis of photographs (CP, 78; SP, 12–13). Thus, we can probably surmise that in this poem, the machines and hillocks of “arrested color” are, at least on one level, related to cameras and their ability—one especially troubling to a pragmatist devoted to mobility and fluidity—to freeze experience. Why should these banal machines, O’Hara wonders, snapping their photos, upset the autumn Saturday afternoon? Indeed, if “we are the anthropologist’s

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 243 canapé”—the tasty morsels that social scientists study—why should this art of “arrested” moments bother us? The reader is left wondering who the “we” in line 3 refers to. Presumably humans would be the prime food for anthropologists. But more specifically for these two writers, perhaps the line refers to homosexuals. O’Hara may be suggesting that “we” gay men—so often conceived of as “perverts” and “deviants” in the fiercely homophobic cultural environment of the early 1950s—are food for the scrutinizing eyes of critics and social scientists of all stripes. But why the distress? “It is because you are silent,” O’Hara realizes. Ashbery’s silence is actually the motivating force behind this poem. Because O’Hara is partially dependent, as we have seen, on Ashbery for provocation and inspiration, his own creative crisis is stimulated by his friend’s taciturnity, his reluctance to speak or write. On this occasion, then, O’Hara seems to be waiting impatiently for Ashbery’s “figure in the garden of words.” In “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon,” O’Hara tries to stir up the dying “ashes” or embers of creativity, and of this poetic relationship, hoping to kindle a flame whose roar could drown out the silence of the “void” (CP, 78). But there is an even more specific, revealing subtext here: speaking “poet to poet” in this missive, O’Hara also seems to be covertly advising Ashbery in how to proceed as a poet, and in particular, as a poet who is also homosexual. Faced with a world where flamboyant, “color[ful]” people are “arrested” for “exposing themselves” and their true nature (in gay bars, for example), the poet must not withdraw into evasiveness and silence. Implicit in the poem, then, is a sly critique of Ashbery’s silence, his withdrawal in the face of homophobia. How “loud” or outspoken should poets be about their sexual orientation in their lives and in their art? (In the previous chapter, we saw Baraka’s vexed negotiation of this issue as well.) Should the protean self so dear to these poets avoid any and all identifications or revelations of self that might result in being pinned down to a particular (and persecuted) identity, sexual or otherwise? A significant gulf exists between O’Hara and Ashbery on precisely this issue. Critics have only recently begun to consider the role of homosexuality in Ashbery’s work, largely because of his own near-total silence about his sexual orientation, while O’Hara has long been seen as a gay poet, mostly because of his early and unabashed openness about his sexual orientation.8 This key difference in stance was not lost on the poets themselves, and it quietly underlies many of the tensions in their ongoing dialogue. It surfaces in O’Hara’s later identification of himself, and not Ashbery, with the rebellious James Dean in the movie East of Eden, and in the gap between O’Hara’s emphasis on “openness,” “honest” directness, and autobiographical detail in his poems and Ashbery’s desire to write “generalized transcript[s]” of experience, of an “all-purpose subjectivity,” his creation of a poetic style that is even more resolutely indeterminate about identity.9 Though both resist reifying identity on the basis of sexuality, and though I agree with Hazel Smith that O’Hara,

244 Beautiful Enemies like Ashbery, is a poet of “non-essentialist gay identity” who “espouses sexual fluidity rather than sexual transparency,” O’Hara is less willing than Ashbery to opt for silence regarding his sexuality (Hyperscapes, 103, 112). This poem, in effect, is a form of position-taking in which O’Hara stakes out a place for himself in direct contrast to Ashbery’s within the cultural field. As I mentioned in chapter 1, several critics, led by John Shoptaw, have recently addressed the connection between Ashbery’s poetics and his experience of the severely homophobic culture of the Cold War era. Shoptaw argues that “Ashbery’s poetry is not so much representative as ‘misrepresentative’” and that “chief among Ashbery’s misrepresentations is his avoidance of homosexuality as a subject matter” (Outside, 4). Ashbery’s “distortions, evasions, omissions, obscurities, and discontinuities” are “historically conditioned,” since his poetics “evolved during the late 1940s and early 1950s, a particularly repressive and paranoid period of American history marked by the investigation and harassment of homosexuals and Communists by Senator McCarthy, the House Un-American Affairs Activities Committee, the FBI, the Selective Service System, and the police” (4–5).Thus, Shoptaw argues, Ashbery’s development of “misrepresentative” and evasive poetic strategies were “not only an aesthetic principle but a survival tactic” (5). In interviews, Ashbery has often stressed how terrifying this period was for him, and how the stifling cultural atmosphere of the Cold War fueled his decision to live in France from 1955 to 1966. David Lehman relates that Ashbery “told me more than once that the only time in his life that he ever suffered from writer’s block was in 1950 and 1951 and that in his mind it was connected to the politics of intimidation in Washington” (Last, 310). Having gone on record as a homosexual to avoid being drafted for the Korean War, Ashbery went through a period of real fear of persecution. He recalled that “in the early 1950s” (exactly when “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon” was written): I went through a period of intense depression and doubt. I couldn’t write for a couple of years. I don’t know why. It did coincide with the beginnings of the Korean War, the Rosenberg case and McCarthyism. Though I was not an intensely political person, it was impossible to be happy in that kind of climate. It was a nadir. (Kostelanetz, “John Ashbery,” 20, italics added)

Ashbery told John Gruen, “I’ve never had a period as sterile as the one between 1950 and 1952” (Party’s, 158). Although Ashbery’s fearful withdrawal into silence or evasive misrepresentation at the height of McCarthyism’s war on homosexuals is completely understandable, O’Hara was much less quiet about his sexual orientation even then. Perhaps because of basic differences in temperament from his friend, he delighted in brashly defying the paralyzing conventions of narrow-minded Cold War decorum. In the introduction to O’Hara’s Collected Poems, Ashbery discusses precisely this quality of O’Hara’s writing of the early 1950s. With a tinge of dis-

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 245 dain, Ashbery notes: “Frank’s early work was not only provocative but provoking. One frequently feels that the poet is trying on various pairs of brass knuckles until he finds one that fits comfortably” (CP, vii–viii). Rather than being unable to write, like Ashbery, O’Hara wrote voluminously. These poems were, as his friend’s introduction points out, “crammed with provocative sentiments” and often marked by a shocking, daring outspokenness about sex and homosexuality. In early poems such as “Poem (At night Chinamen jump”), which discusses how “in our willful way / we, in secret, play // affectionate games and bruise / our knees . . . we couple in the grace / of that mysterious race”; “Easter” (“O sins of sex and kisses of birds at the end of the penis”); “At the Old Place,” about dancing in a gay bar with a group of friends that includes “Ashes” himself; and the bravely titled “Homosexuality” (“So we are taking off our masks, are we”)—to name just a few of many—gay love and gay argot boldly take center stage (CP, 13–14, 98, 223, 181).10 “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon,” then, can be seen as a curious manifestation of a particular moment in Cold War culture, when McCarthyism and homophobia drove one poet, John Ashbery, into silence. Lying tacitly at its core is a distinction between how O’Hara and Ashbery each deal with homosexuality within a culture of persecution. In the face of his friend’s diffidence, O’Hara’s admonishes Ashbery: Speak, if speech is not embarrassed by your attention to the scenery! in languages more livid than vomit on Sunday after wafer and prayer.

In the midst of Ashbery’s painful bout of sterility and writer’s block, O’Hara urges him to speak out without embarrassment. This gesture resembles the first lines of O’Hara’s 1954 poem “Homosexuality”: “So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping / our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance!” (CP, 181). Choose exposure rather than concealment, he urges his fellow poets and homosexuals, speech rather than silence. “It’s wonderful to admire oneself / with complete candor,” that poem later reports (before listing some favorite New York latrines for sexual trysts). In a letter to painter Michael Goldberg, O’Hara defends his gushing, campy lament “For James Dean,” which his friend Bunny Lang had deemed “too out” (meaning too wild and too overtly “queer”) for publication, by rejecting the debilitating effect of embarrassment: “If one is going to start being embarrassed about one’s work I don’t know where it would stop, or rather it would stop” (16 February 1956). Similarly, “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon” wrestles with questions about self-admiration and candid, unembarrassed self-expression.11 However, O’Hara does not only urge Ashbery to express himself—he nudges him to do so in a particular direction, in a particular mode. The poem actually urges Ashbery to be more O’Hara-like. After all, it is the lapsed Catholic O’Hara,

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not Ashbery, whose rebellious, overtly subversive early works speak in “languages more livid than / vomit on Sunday after wafer and prayer” (CP, 72). O’Hara, in the words of Gooch’s biography, was “a renegade Irish Catholic of the worst sort,” and his nonbelieving and anti-foundational poems could be seen as a response in occasionally livid language to a forced Catholic upbringing (6). (In his “Autobiographical Fragments,” he explains “I was sent against my will to Catholic schools” [SS, 30].) Though Ashbery’s own brand of lyrical skepticism is similarly resistant to religious dogma and absolutist visions of transcendence, his poems of the early 1950s—so much more decorous, elegant, and self-consciously “reticent” (see his early poem “Some Trees”) than O’Hara’s brash ones—do not speak in “languages more livid than vomit on Sunday.” Thus, O’Hara uses the poem to prod Ashbery to move toward his own poetics. O’Hara ends the poem by calling on Ashbery for both succor and inspiration: You, dear poet, who addressed yourself to flowers, Electra, and photographs on less painful occasions, must save me from the void’s external noise. (CP, 78)

Here, immersed in this more painful occasion, O’Hara asks Ashbery for language that might stave off silence, stasis, death (“the void’s external noise”)—words that may help him defend against the void and, more important, that might steer him toward his own words. Hemmed in by “banal machines,” the stasis of photographs, and the sensation of being the “anthropologist’s canapé,” O’Hara is unable to spark his own creative energy and finds himself dependent on his friend’s creativity to engender a “renaissance” for his own art and self. In O’Hara’s universe, writers rely on friendship with other writers to save them from succumbing to silence and despair. However, in “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon,” he despairs that such a renewal may not be forthcoming, since his talented friend appears to be even more “burnt out” than he, used up, the poetic fire reduced to silence and lifeless cinders. The flip side of the Emersonian belief that we depend on friendship for inspiration is the fear that if the friend is unable to prompt us, we may be lost. Ultimately, the short poem offers a suggestive contrast between Ashbery’s meditative, evasive, reticent mode and O’Hara’s personal and direct, speech-oriented poetics. The latter will later evolve into O’Hara’s notion of “Personism,” in which the poem is seen, at least with half-seriousness, as an act of energetic conversation between two people, much like this dialogic poem (CP, 499). Here, O’Hara celebrates his friend’s (now dormant) artistic powers, critiques his perilously reticent poetics, and strains against Ashbery’s quietist response to Cold War containment and homophobic repression, all the while delineating his own style and stance.

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 247 All of O’Hara’s “Ashbery poems” contain this kind of complex and ambivalent meditation on the general nature of friendship and on the characteristics of this poet-to-poet conversation in particular. In the tender lyric “To John Ashbery,” O’Hara again pays tribute to the creative friendship he and Ashbery share, while confronting the forces of time that relentlessly erode and terminate even the most inspiring relationships. The 1954 poem opens with a gesture of defiance in the face of such imminent loss: I can’t believe there’s not another world where we will sit and read new poems to each other high on a mountain in the wind. (CP, 211)

Unwilling to accept the brute fact of mortality, O’Hara at first takes issue with the notion that human experience is contingent and finite. It is not incidental that O’Hara uses an image of the two reading “new poems to each other / high on a mountain in the wind” to depict this friendship: he implies that its most important aspect is mutual creative exchange. He portrays the two writers not as isolated geniuses but as a pair, high above the crowd of other poets, sharing new work in an idealized dialogue between peers, a tête-à-tête in a world outside the supposedly unified, national “we” of Cold War culture in the 1950s. There is also something self-conscious, deliberate, about the way this poem has one eye on posterity and canonization—evident in its transformation of two then-unknown poets in their twenties into famed Chinese poet friends and in its use of Ashbery’s full name in the title (unlike some of his other poems, “For Grace, After a Party,” “Letter to Bunny,” “Larry,” “For Kenneth and Janice Au Voyage,” and so on). As we have seen, O’Hara tends to theatricalize his friendships in his poems, celebrating, as he does in “John Button Birthday,” “the lift of our experiences / together, which seem to me legendary”—here dramatizing and heightening his relationship with Ashbery, there assigning himself and Ashbery roles as earlier famous pairs (CP, 267–268). In one letter to Ashbery, O’Hara—self-conscious about his own creative casting—writes “this makes me feel like Hart Crane writing to Waldo Frank, if you don’t mind the position I’m putting you in” (30 December 1959). He’d rather set himself up as tragic, brilliant Hart than hapless, less famous Waldo. Here O’Hara whimsically fancies Ashbery and himself playing the parts of two ancient Chinese poets: You can be Tu Fu, I’ll be Po Chü-i and the Monkey Lady’ll be in the moon, smiling at our ill-fitting heads as we watch snow settle on a twig. (CP, 211)

O’Hara casts Ashbery as the eighth-century Chinese poet Tu Fu (712–770). Although one would expect him to select two contemporaries as stand-ins for

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him and his friend, strangely enough, for himself he chooses the popular poet of the subsequent historical period, Po Chü-i (772–846), rather than Tu Fu’s famous contemporary and rival, Li Po (701–762). We might assume that in writing the poem O’Hara simply reached for two names of Chinese poets somewhat at random. But given what Kenneth Koch calls in a letter O’Hara’s “exactitude for ephemera,” especially regarding details such as this in his poems, it remains mysterious why O’Hara chooses to refer to two poets who did not live at the same time if it was O’Hara’s intention to compare himself and Ashbery to two Chinese poets who are remembered for their legendary friendship.12 Although it may have been a simple mistake, it is possible that O’Hara substituted Po Chü-i for Li Po in order to cast himself, figuratively, as the great poet presiding over the generation following Ashbery’s. In this way O’Hara disrupts the synchronic relation and rivalry between him and Ashbery with rhetorical sleightof-hand. O’Hara has broken the bond, shattered the troubling contemporaneity that joins them, and offered Ashbery the role of a poet who was buried before his own character was born. (This rhetorical move resembles O’Hara’s reference to Ashbery inspiring him as Shakespeare did Keats in the letter discussed earlier.) In this way, O’Hara manages to project himself into the future ahead of his nowdeceased peer. The later poet has the good fortune of succeeding his friend in literary history, of having a generation all to himself, as it were. At the same time, the later poet must also write with the burden of belatedness, in the shadow of his predecessor. (In fact, Po-Chü-i greatly admired Tu Fu, the master of the preceding generation). Perhaps the incongruity of the names suggests a deeper sign of anxiety on O’Hara’s part, a fear that the two are not fully equals, a sign that he feels he must labor in Ashbery’s shadow, like Po Chü-i writing with the famous Tu Fu before him, or Keats writing in Shakespeare’s wake. In any case, the poem is only briefly content to imagine this timeless moment of friendship between heroic writers. The moment is at once idealized, especially in the lyrical beauty of the images, and undermined by irony. O’Hara’s use of motifs and diction familiar from (English translations of) Chinese poetry allows him to toy with the attractive possibility that some kind of Eastern-tinged reincarnation exists, only to undercut the possibility later. A less skeptical poet than O’Hara might have spun out the rest of the poem as a meditation on this “other world” where the two writers can remain indelibly on that mountaintop forever, sharing their poems, watching “snow settle on a twig.” But O’Hara’s pragmatist skepticism will not let him. In fact, the poem seems to echo a comment by Emerson: “Other world? There is no other world; here or nowhere is the whole fact” (qtd. Richardson, Emerson, 382). As is the case with so many of O’Hara’s poems, he arrives at a poignantly skeptical incredulity toward the transcendent, the mystical, and the absolute. Indeed, O’Hara will never let such a mystical reverie get very far without questioning his own assertions:

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 249 Or shall we be really gone? this is not the grass I saw in my youth! and if the moon, when it rises tonight, is empty—a bad sign, meaning “You go, like the blossoms.”

Despite his initial refusal to believe that there cannot be another world for them, here O’Hara accepts the facts of human fate, that we will be “really gone,” permanently, without hope for some other life. Because the delicate, lyrical images seem lifted so directly from translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry, or from Imagism and its descendants, the poem feels like a subtle parody of Western poetry’s flirtation with Eastern mysticism. The stilted diction of the poem’s ending (“Or shall we be really gone?”), with its fortune-cookie-like syntax and tone (“if the moon . . . is empty—a bad sign”), adds to the parodic feel.13 At the end of the poem, we are back in a secularized world, alone in what Stevens calls an “Evening without Angels” (Collected, 136). The moon, a moment earlier the home of the mythical Monkey Lady smiling on our endeavors, is viewed now stripped of fictions or myths. Though O’Hara does say “if “ the rising moon is “empty,” the resigned tone and abrupt ending imply that of course it will be, always is, empty. The demystified moon is a “bad sign,” since it means that “You go, like the blossoms.” A poem celebrating friendship and unity therefore succumbs to an undercurrent of loss, inevitable separation, and skepticism. Rather than resting in eternal, idealized togetherness, as the middle lines of the poem wishfully propose, O’Hara sees the bond between friends as momentary—as marked by abandonment, by leaving. Friends—even legendary pairs of writers—are as transitory as petals on the wind. O’Hara would seem to agree with Emerson that “a wise man is not deceived by the pause: he knows that it is momentary: he already foresees the new departure, and departure after departure, in long series. Dull people think they have traced the matter far enough if they have reached the history of one of these temporary forms, which they describe as fixed and final” (journals, autumn 1845, S, 276). In this case, such “dull people” would be those who do believe there can be “another world where we will sit / and read new poems to each other.”The pragmatist poet looks at both experience and friendship and sees only “departure after departure, in long series.”

try! try! and the snake-in-the-grass Though such a poem as “To John Ashbery” questions and punctures the durability of idealized, absolute friendship, other O’Hara works explore even more directly the tension and rivalry underlying the relationship between the two poets. O’Hara’s early verse play Try! Try! is yet another important work in which

250 Beautiful Enemies he theatricalizes his relationship with Ashbery, and this time it is literally staged. O’Hara actually wrote two quite different versions of this play, which has for the most part eluded critical attention.14 The original Try! Try!, subtitled “A Noh Play,” was written in 1951 while O’Hara was at the University of Michigan working on his master’s degree; it was performed on the opening night of the new Poets’ Theatre at Harvard on a bill that also featured a one-act by Ashbery. The stars of Try! Try! were O’Hara’s close friend and muse at the time, the poet and playwright Violet “Bunny” Lang, who played a character named Violet, and John Ashbery, who played the character John. (A friend of Bunny’s named Jack Rogers played the character Jack, rounding out a cast that overtly and playfully linked the actors with barely fictionalized characters.) The play, which parodies the ritualistic drama of traditional Japanese Noh plays, is set “after any war.” It tells the story of a lonely home-front wife, Violet, and her reaction to the return of her long-absent husband, Jack, from battle. The character John acts as a chorus, who both helps Violet bide the time and questions her about her unhappiness. He is also meant to be a stage version of the actor John Ashbery, which is made clear by the character’s references to himself as a friend of the absent playwright, the Michigan-bound O’Hara. In this first version, he functions as a detached and ironic observer commenting on the action. The basic scenario invites us to read it somewhat allegorically, since O’Hara chose to include his friends as characters in the play and used their real names, and because, like “Jack,” he had served in World War II while “John” Ashbery had stayed home. (As noted earlier, Ashbery also stayed home from Korea, revealing his homosexuality in order to avoid the draft.) Given that the play was written during a particularly frigid winter while O’Hara was in Ann Arbor, enduring a difficult year of separation from his Boston and New York friends, and since he composed the play for Ashbery to act in with his very close friend Bunny Lang in his old stomping grounds, Cambridge, it seems likely that it is an expression of O’Hara’s anxieties about being exiled from his own home front. Like a wandering soldier far from home, he seems to have felt left out, worried about his friends feeling deserted, and jealous of the relationships developing between those he had left behind, like Ashbery and Lang.15 As O’Hara’s biographer Brad Gooch notes, when O’Hara left on short notice for graduate school, “his Cambridge friends, feeling a bit abandoned, found the move perplexing, inspiring, threatening, and sad” (City, 166). Also, another detail may have been important: he and Ashbery had both applied to the University of Michigan with the hopes of trying for the prestigious Hopwood Award (which O’Hara went on to win), and Ashbery had been rejected. This background may have inspired O’Hara to write a play in which Violet, her husband long gone, tells John about her despair and feelings of abandonment, while John comforts her. He even urges her to see who is to blame for her sorrow: “Jack created this emptiness / by his departure” (AN, 21). Perhaps sensitive

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 251 to the “emptiness” his own “departure” has created for the “real”Violet and John, O’Hara created the character of Jack, a fairly ridiculous and stiff soldier figure who returns from his meandering voyages, smugly ready to pick up his marriage where it left off. Jack narrates his wild war adventures in a long, surreal, somewhat absurd, but nevertheless moving speech. He explains how, after he left Violet, his company rode “like dashing Cossacks,” and reports that “I sat my mount prettily and hacked / babies and old women with a song / on my breath.” Triumphing over enemies, he remarks that “I was / good and I knew it”; however, the moment of victory is short-lived since “something / went wrong”: One minute I was lord of all I surveyed, and the next I knew that I’d be beaten—that I’d better go back to my easy throne, and leave this virgin land I’d first laid heavy hands upon. That was a retreat! how I cried to shove off from the rich rough land, my kind of country, and go home! (AN, 24)

Jack’s montage of exaggerated, archetypal war stories is obviously meant to be parodic. However, given the context, knowing that O’Hara had been accepted, unlike Ashbery, into a competitive graduate program because of his writing (“I was / good and I knew it”) and had moved to a lonely place far away from Violet, John, and all he had ever known to try to “make it” as a writer, perhaps we can find more at work here than the readily evident satire of postwar melodramas like The Best Years of Our Lives. If we read Jack as a version of O’Hara himself, this soldier character who fights battles with “a song / on my breath” can be seen, figuratively, as an ambitious, perhaps avant-garde poet who suddenly realizes he will fail at his creative efforts (knowing that “I’d be beaten”), and who considers returning to his “easy throne” (perhaps to Cambridge, to be ensconced in the bosom of his friends). Wondering “what was it that beat me?” Jack considers, with humility, that it may have been “the land, the air, the sun, all / bigger than the gods intended / me to own.” He offers a semicomic narrative of failure to explain why he has returned to his old home, ending with his being wounded by a “sniper in a tree.” This sniper is reminiscent of a generic critic shooting down aspiring writers; the critic, always a nemesis figure for O’Hara, is called in another poem from the same period “the assassin // of my orchards” (CP, 48). On some level, then, the play uses the Jack-as-returning-soldier motif to grapple with O’Hara’s own anxieties about his vocation as a writer, about whether he can in fact make it in that “rich rough land,” and about how his individuality as a poet squares with his intimate relationships. For all its autobiographical resonance,

252 Beautiful Enemies the focus is not, however, on the Ashbery figure or the relation between Jack and John. Although Jack and his wife are reunited, it is an unhappy reunion; we are told that although this flawed marriage will persist, it will do so with loneliness at its core. John remains an outside observer of this relationship, who raises the marriage to a more general level by telling the audience at the end that “we all know that this goes on and on and on” (AN, 28). A curious shift occurred when O’Hara almost entirely rewrote this play in 1953 for a New York production. He drastically altered the basic plot, transforming the benign relationships of the first play into a tense love triangle. Jack, the veteran returning from the war, now comes home to discover that his wife Violet is more than just lonely—she is having a love affair with John, who is now a cynical “boarder” with a campy wit and biting tongue whom she has been living with while Jack was away. Ultimately, Jack loses his wife to John; he is forced to walk sadly offstage as a betrayed cuckold, having seen John usurp his position in both the bedroom and Violet’s heart. The first half of the new Try! Try! features Violet and John verbally sparring, flirting, and campily insulting one another, merrily playing while the cat—Jack— is still away. As they tease and abuse one another, John cajoles Violet to let him see a long love letter Jack sent her from the war, which he then reads aloud with great sarcasm. As Philip Auslander notes, Jack’s letter is “embarrassingly personal and maudlin, but touching nevertheless” as it chronicles his terrible romantic and erotic longing for Violet in such lines as: “When I wake up, and I wake up every time I think of you, my prick presses against my belly like a log of foreboding, and I’m afraid that I’ll die before I feel that thing that you are that nobody else is to my body” (New York, 59; AN, 38). After reading the letter aloud, John quips critically: “He has a funny style, doesn’t he? It seems like a pose but it must be that he isn’t used to writing” (AN, 39). When Jack finally enters, he catches his wife and John emerging from the bedroom and declares, “I’ve come a long way for your sake, / my back all decorated like this / and my feet covered with mold.” “He is like his letters!” John jabs satirically in response to this overdramatic speech (AN, 41). Jack then offers the same extended narrative of his war adventures that was featured in the first play. As this speech remains intact and clearly serves as the centerpiece of both versions of Try! Try! O’Hara must have felt particularly close to it. However, whereas in the first version the speech is delivered uninterrupted and uncommented upon, here John butts in to criticize and poke fun, culminating in his withering response at the end of the monologue: “Pardon me, I’ve got to take a terrific shit” (AN, 43). In its rapid movement and quick jumps, its expansive emotion and its tone, Jack’s war speech bears notable similarity to O’Hara’s own poems, despite the fact it is meant to be “bad,” to be easily deflated by John. Not only does John, the Ashbery figure, critique Jack’s language—he also wins the love of Jack’s wife. When the soldier desperately tries to win Violet back,

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 253 she eventually, after wavering for a moment, chooses to remain with her lover and sparring partner, John. When Jack tells his rival, “You can’t have her,” John responds simply and icily: “You’re wrong. / She wants me, because she’s interested enough / to hurt me.” Jack, realizing that he has lost this contest for his wife’s affection, plaintively wonders about his loss and his solitude: “What did I do wrong? What’s happened to me? It’s / like coming onto the stage, sitting down at the piano, / and finding no orchestra there!” (AN, 48). John interjects in a climactic speech: I suppose I’m the snake-in-the-grass but I can’t say I’m sorry. Someone has to smile at her as she comes back from the bathroom. Do you think everything can stay the same, like a photograph? What for? (48)

Here, O’Hara has John (Ashbery) admit to being the betrayer, an unapologetic “snake-in-the-grass.” Unlike the deluded Jack, who naively believes his life could stand still while he went away on his own adventures, John (like a good pragmatist poet) knows that hoping “everything can stay the same, / like a photograph” is an impossible dream. Life is flux and change—Jack has forgotten this crucial Emersonian lesson, and has paid for it. (Notably, Ashbery, who had “addressed” himself to “flowers . . . and photographs on less painful occasions,” here has a powerful, climactic line about the stasis of photographs) (CP, 78). With nothing left to say, Jack walks slowly offstage and leaves Violet in the arms of his rival. What are we to make of this odd play? Much as Baraka would in his own plays and poems, O’Hara seems to be using Try! Try! both to stage the conflict between warring parts of his own sensibility and as a way to work through his own anxieties and emotions about his friendships. In particular, the play enacts the triangular struggle between two male poets for the love and attention of a female muse.16 This struggle seems to be both metaphorical and literal, with O’Hara and Ashbery jostling for the favor of Bunny Lang, who, in turn, is elided with another important woman artist and muse in their lives, Jane Freilicher.17 Furthermore, on one level, O’Hara uses Jack and his language for a bit of what Auslander calls “ironic self-parody,” to create a self-critical attack on his own indulgences (New York, 59–60). By contrasting this self-involved, tough bore in military uniform, whose speech sounds something like an O’Hara poem, with the more wanton, bohemian, effeminate, and bitchy John, he may be exploring different aspects of himself: the navy sailor and the gay aesthete, the gushing romantic who wants love to remain unchanged, and the cynical pragmatist who knows that nothing, including love or friendship, can “stay the same.” However—and this fact complicates our reading of the play—the nasty and funny asides that deflate Jack’s language are almost entirely supplied by John (Ashbery). (For example, John, ironically echoing Keats, remarks, “Do I wake or

254 Beautiful Enemies sleep?” as the soldier is somberly chronicling his ludicrous adventures.) By having the Ashbery character score all the savage digs, O’Hara seems to be exposing the raw nerve touched by Ashbery’s estimations of his own writing that I mentioned earlier (as in his letter about Ashbery, in which he comments: “That’s that. He giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other”). On the one hand, Jack’s self-revealing, personal, heart-on-his-sleeve speech can be seen as a pointed self-parody of O’Hara’s own “exhibitionistic” poems of “gorgeous selfpity”; but on the other, John’s biting critique can be seen as O’Hara’s way of dramatizing Ashbery’s tendency to criticize his own writing for these and other weaknesses (CP, 36). Try! Try! is rife with simmering tensions and nervous, barely concealed worry—what if John usurps his friends, Bunny or Jane, or worse, the Muse herself? What if he is ultimately the more successful poet? By having John Ashbery’s character be a snake in the grass who steals his alter ego’s wife and home, O’Hara explores, sotto voce, anxious feelings of resentment and sibling rivalry. If these sentiments churn just below the surface of his 1953 rewriting of Try! Try!, even more overt feelings of sibling rivalry with Ashbery could easily have been sparked in 1955 by one of the most important incidents in the developing careers of both poets. O’Hara and Ashbery had submitted manuscripts for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, which carries with it publication of a first book and a great deal of prestige. O’Hara’s submission had been returned for arriving too late, and Ashbery’s did not make it past the screeners. The judge, W. H. Auden, was dissatisfied with the work of the finalists he saw and was not going to award a prize at all. However, the young New York School poets had had the good fortune to become acquainted with Auden through their mutual friend, James Schuyler, and revered him as a kind of elder statesmen of poetry (and a gay mentor to boot).18 When Auden heard that the Ashbery and O’Hara submissions had been among those he had not seen, he requested that his two young friends send their manuscripts to him immediately. Soon after, Auden chose Ashbery’s Some Trees for the prize. In a rejection letter to O’Hara that apologized for not choosing his work, Auden included a stern warning about the young poet’s experimental excesses. He chided O’Hara—and Ashbery too, although he still chose the latter’s work—for their overly “French” use of disjunctive, illogical imagery (Perloff, Poetics, 248–250; Gooch, City, 260–261; Ward, Statutes, 96–97). I think you (and John too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any “surrealistic” style, namely of confusing authentic non-logical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue. (qtd. in Perloff, Poetics, 249–250)

Though both are scolded by this authority figure for their shared weaknesses, Ashbery was still given the prize and O’Hara penalized. (Perhaps Ashbery’s own

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 255 penance came in the form of Auden’s notoriously lukewarm introduction to Some Trees). Most people thrust into such a situation would be consumed with jealousy and even resentment, especially after losing out to a friend in such a head-to-head competition. Auden’s letter acknowledges as much when he reports to O’Hara: “I’m sorry to have to tell you that, after much heart searching, I chose John’s poems. It’s really very awkward when the only two possible candidates are both friends” (qtd. in Perloff, Poetics, 249). But commentators, from Gooch to David Lehman to Ashbery himself, have remarked on O’Hara’s lack of bitterness and envy in his response to this outcome; Lehman notices the “generosity of spirit” evident in O’Hara’s glowing review of Some Trees in Poetry later that year, which is “all the more remarkable when it is recalled that” O’Hara’s manuscript had not been chosen, and Gooch claims that O’Hara “seemed unconcerned by the loss of the prize to a close friend” since his keenest feelings of competition were not aroused by things like prizes and honors, but rather by “the actual writing of poems or the winning of love and friendship” (Lehman, Beyond, 19; Gooch, City, 261). (It is hard to see how these things could be unconnected for a figure like O’Hara, especially in a situation when a famous, admired older poet has chosen a friend’s writing over his own.) Ashbery recollects: “I certainly had no hard feelings about it since Auden chose my manuscript. . . . But I don’t think Frank did either. That wouldn’t have been characteristic of him. He was much less jealous than I, I think” (Gooch, City, 261). Though Ashbery, like Gooch, is right to stress O’Hara’s lack of interest in the more conventional forms of recognition (publication in high-profile journals or respectable publishing houses, the winning of prizes), Ashbery may not have realized (or wished to avoid considering) the extent of O’Hara’s conflicted feelings. It would be hard to imagine that any poet as serious about his writing or about the competitive nature of creative friendships as O’Hara was would not be affected, inspired, and threatened by this sort of situation. In fact, O’Hara wrote a remarkable letter just one month after receiving Auden’s rejection letter, which suggests that the Yale Younger Poets prize had a greater impact on him than people have realized. Written to the painter Fairfield Porter on 7 July 1955, the letter discusses O’Hara’s obsession with the recently released movie East of Eden, which he saw at least four times. Based on John Steinbeck’s novel and starring O’Hara’s favorite movie icon, James Dean, the movie is, fittingly enough, a modern version of the archetypal story of brotherly conflict—the biblical tale of Cain and Abel. A rebellious, “bad” son named Cal (based on Cain, and played by Dean) vies with his “good” brother, Aaron (based on Abel), for their father’s praise and love, inspiring a mix of jealousy, violent rage, and guilt in Cal. Although both Brad Gooch and David Lehman briefly discuss this letter, O’Hara’s strange, illuminating response to the movie deserves closer attention. Why does O’Hara have such a strong reaction to seeing this movie

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about a fratricidal relationship, and what drives him to tell Fairfield Porter about his impressions? Following so close on the heels of Ashbery’s winning the Yale prize, the letter, with its reliance on the language of fraternity to describe friendship, can be seen as an intriguing exploration of O’Hara’s only barely submerged feelings of jealousy and sibling rivalry toward his twin, John Ashbery. Porter, who was almost 20 years older than O’Hara and Ashbery, became a sort of avuncular figure to the young poets of the emerging New York School, frequently inviting them to spend extended vacations at the Porters’ houses in Maine and Southampton, and even allowing the mentally unstable James Schuyler to live with his family for more than a decade. So O’Hara’s letter, in which he explicitly discusses his relationship with his “brother” John, can be read as a kind of plea and explanation by a son to a father figure about his conflicted feelings toward his sibling. In the letter, O’Hara tells Porter about his experience of seeing East of Eden (for the second time), and urges Porter to see this “marvellous movie.” O’Hara claims that the movie seemed strangely similar to his own life, that “it made me remember more things about childhood and my family than I have in years” (7 July 1955). As one might expect for a friendship based on lively disagreements about aesthetic preferences, O’Hara reports that Ashbery was less fond of the movie than O’Hara and less inclined to identify with the Dean character, toward whom O’Hara felt a strong affinity: John didn’t like it and in telling me about it, it was so strange, because the main character, a sort of naughty boy wondering why he’s different, I felt very illuminating and even that eerie feeling that I was being exposed to an intimate, scarcely-remembered level, whereas John identified with his brother, who is treated less fully though equally sympathetically, and didn’t like the role he was put in.

Seeing the Dean (Cain) character strikes a nerve in O’Hara, tapping into his sense of his own eccentricity and nonconformity.The image of the poet as a lonely misfit youth—a Stephen Dedalus-like self-image that steps straight out of O’Hara’s early favorite A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man—recurs with some frequency in O’Hara’s poems, such as “Autobiographia Literaria”: “When I was a child / I played by myself in a / corner of the schoolyard / all alone . . . and birds flew away” (CP, 11). O’Hara strongly identifies with the rebellious outsider played by Dean, who declares, “I’ve been jealous [of my brother] my whole life, so jealous I couldn’t stand it.” Meanwhile, he casts Ashbery as Aaron/Abel to his own Cain. O’Hara is convinced that the film’s fraternal relationship eerily resembles not only his own family dynamic but also his friendship with Ashbery. Though he admits that “my own brother was not at all like John, or Aaron in the movie,” he concludes that “the relationships and the things said were very close, especially in the father relationship.” In other words, he feels that the way Cal and Aaron relate

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 257 to their father is “very close” to the way O’Hara and Ashbery relate to some father figure. But since of course Ashbery and O’Hara do not literally share a father, what “father relationship” is he talking about? O’Hara, always concerned with (what he calls in one poem) his “lineage / poetic or natural,” must be contemplating their contrasting relationships with artistic fathers or predecessors (CP, 307). The most directly present paternal possibility is the letter’s recipient, Porter, the much older, brilliant artist whose opinion they highly valued.19 However, O’Hara also seems to be working out his complicated feelings about the poetic precursors he and Ashbery share, such as Stevens, Williams, and, especially in this case, Auden. O’Hara quickly adds: “To give you an idea of what I mean, picture John and me as brothers.” What follows is an enigmatic dialogue, written as a play, that closely paraphrases and mixes several scenes from the movie. O’Hara inserts “me,” “John,” and “Jane” for the characters Cal, Aaron, and Abra. (Jane is Jane Freilicher, the attractive and charming young painter who served as an early muse for all the poets in this circle, and seemed to be the subject of considerable jealousy and struggle). In these movie-scene dialogues, O’Hara consciously portrays his relationship with Ashbery for Porter’s benefit. The Frank character begins: me John, aren’t you going to ask me where I was last night? john You wouldn’t tell me if I did. me No, I wouldn’t. Is dad mad at me? john Well, you did stay out all night. He was worried. me Yeah, I’ll bet he was. Where are you going? john Down to the ice-house, want to come? me Will dad be there? john Of course, silly, that’s why we’re going. me Then I’m not. john (aside to Jane) He’s coming. (I do.) Here O’Hara casts himself as the rebel to Ashbery’s safer, more conventional and dutiful character: as the ever-faithful son, Ashbery does not break rules and does not anger the “father.” A tense distance and silence exists between the two brothers (“You wouldn’t tell me if I did,” “No, I wouldn’t”), one sympathetic to the father’s concern, the other flaunting his own rebellious actions. “John” chooses to go wherever the father is, to follow him to “the ice-house”—in fact, he explains “that’s why we’re going,” while O’Hara, as the Cain figure, refuses to visit “dad” and implicitly resents his brother’s role as the better loved and more successful son. But “John” knows how far this rebellion really goes, and he sees through O’Hara’s posturing: “He’s coming,” he says knowingly. And we see that in the end John is right—O’Hara joins him in the trip to see the father. This letter is fascinating because it seems to offer an allegorical representation, however conscious, of the recent Auden experience.20 Indeed, it appears

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that, despite all overt appearances of equanimity, O’Hara does feel passed over by Auden, the conservative, admonishing father figure (who even doled out a chastising rejection note), and jealous of Ashbery’s comparative favor with him. The transgressive act in the movie—staying out all night—becomes a metaphor for the acts Auden disapproves of: specifically, the “great danger of the ‘surrealistic’ style” that Auden had warned O’Hara about a month before (Perloff, Poetics, 249–250). In contrast, “John” has managed to stay in the father’s good graces, and apparently O’Hara, like Cal, cannot help but resent this.We may recall that in the Bible, Cain resents the bountiful harvest Abel brought in, and he becomes murderously jealous that his brother’s offering of the “choicest firstlings of his flock” pleased God while his own did not; this dynamic is directly mirrored in the present situation, with Ashbery’s “offering,” his submission of his early poems, being awarded with the important literary prize granted by Auden. Evidence suggests that during the spring and summer of 1955, Auden, Ashbery, Cain, and Abel, all seemed to have been on O’Hara’s mind even before he learned of Auden’s decision. In April, a couple of months before the Auden incident and the letter to Porter, O’Hara wrote a letter to Koch in which he joked: “What will you name your baby? Frank O. Koch? John Auden Koch (he can grow up to be an anthologist)? Larry Niederhofer Koch? . . . Gerard Manly Koch? . . . Abel Cain Koch?” (22 April 1955). Behind the playful name-game is a sense of competition within their circumscribed social sphere, a jockeying for the position closest to Koch, driven home by the offhand reference to the bloody biblical brothers: will his friend name his child after Frank? Or after John (Auden)? Or after Larry and Jane? (Niederhofer was Jane Freilicher’s maiden name.) By depicting Ashbery in the letter to Porter as the brother who dotes on and follows the father, O’Hara’s dialogue implicitly criticizes Ashbery for being more Audenesque, less aggressively experimental than himself—which at this time was a valid assessment, given the restrained lyricism, Stevensian meditation, and Auden-like use of rhyme and traditional forms like the pantoum and sestina in Ashbery’s Some Trees. The same equation of Ashbery with their elder seems to underlie O’Hara’s reference to “John Auden Koch” and perhaps suggests that O’Hara was anticipating Auden’s preference for Ashbery’s work. What O’Hara subtly suggests is that Ashbery has acquiesced to the demands of the “father” and literary tradition—in contrast, he portrays himself as avant-gardier than thou: the more daring, experimental poet, more resistant to conformity, defiantly casting off past and tradition. Here the “avant-garde” versus “mainstream” binary (or the raw versus the cooked, in 1950s parlance) becomes a socially charged distinction played out across the chasm of the intense friendship between the poets. But O’Hara’s view is not the whole story. Apparently both poets wished to identify with the rebel and to distance themselves from the goody-two-shoes brother. Ashbery wrote to O’Hara the following year: “Don’t think I’ve forgotten, either, that you said I was like R. Davalos [the actor who played Aaron], the most

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 259 mealy-mouthed sissy the screen has ever dared to exhibit. You’re quite wrong, Frank, it’s I and not you who am like James Dean” (qtd. Lehman, Last, 92). Why would each poet wish to resemble the Cain figure? Wayne Koestenbaum, in a discussion of literary collaboration, makes the intriguing point that “Cain, murdering his brother” represents “the headstrong writer breaking the collaborative covenant . . . the first strong poet” (Double, 10).Thus both poets vie to align themselves with the primordial avant-garde rebel, Cain. At the same time, each poet wishes to distance himself from the effeminate “sissy” Aaron, thus illustrating the intertwining of mainstream discourses about gender roles and masculinity into homosexual discursive practices. The discussion of the movie embodies a larger struggle over who is the more avant-garde, stronger, less “sissy”-like poet, the one more resistant to conformity.21 In his letter, O’Hara goes on to offer Fairfield Porter the tools to differentiate between himself and his “brother” Ashbery. It is as if O’Hara attempts to answer his own request from the previous year’s collaborative poem-letter to Koch and his wife, which I discussed in chapter 1: “Explain to us all the differences between us.”22 O’Hara tells Porter that the brothers’ contrasting gifts at the movie’s climax directly parallel the differences between his own poetic “offering” and Ashbery’s: I think one of the things about East of Eden is that I am very materialistic and John is very spiritual, in our work especially. As an example, the one boy gives the father $5000 he has earned by war-profiteering in beans for a birthday present, but the good boy gives him the announcement of his engagement. . . . John’s work is full of dreams and a kind of moral excellence and kind sentiments. Mine is full of objects for their own sake, spleen and ironically intimate observation which may be truthfulness . . . but is more likely to be egotistical cynicism masquerading as honesty.

With acute insight into their respective poetics, O’Hara contrasts his more “materialistic” poetry—his tendency to be grounded in objects, daily experience, local details, and empirical reality—with Ashbery’s more “spiritual” or metaphysical tendencies. He often sees, with twinges of envy, Ashbery’s poetry and personality as being more “beatific” (O’Hara to Lawrence Osgood, 27 September 1950) and “serious” than his own. In juxtaposing his own “materialism,” “objects for their own sake,” and “intimate observation” with Ashbery’s highly poetic spirituality and dreams, O’Hara also perpetuates (albeit in reductive, simplistic form) one manifestation of the split between their very own American father figures, Williams and Stevens. Williams was famous of course for his dictum “no ideas in things” and dedicated to contact with the local, empirical details of experience for their “own sake.” In this, he diverged from Stevens, maestro of the metaphysical, tireless chronicler of the interplay of imagination and dreams with reality, and quester for meanings, or fictions, that could supplant the loss of outdated spiritual values. Thus, in a strategic

260 Beautiful Enemies move characteristic of O’Hara’s efforts at self-positioning, he implicitly casts himself as Williams to Ashbery’s Stevens, just as he plays Cain to Ashbery’s Abel. O’Hara’s unsettling struggles with the problems of artistic independence and friendship lead him to admit at the letter’s close: I’m sorry if you’re bored by this, but sometimes I think that writing a poem is such a moral crisis I get completely sick of the whole situation. Where Kenneth and Jimmy produce art, for instance, I often feel I just produce the by-product of exhibitionism.

The poet’s comparison of his own work to that of his friends, his anxious need to distinguish himself from them, to define his individual style, sparks a severe “moral crisis” that threatens further creativity. However, O’Hara knows that such creative crises often push one toward new poems, new directions, and even greater individuality, since he would agree with Emerson’s injunction about friendship and influence: “Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo” (EL, 350). By drawing on the rhetoric of fraternity and the Cain-and-Abel metaphoric of East of Eden to depict his friendship with Ashbery, O’Hara’s letter to Porter suggests how near friendship resides to animosity, how our closest friend can appear to be what Emerson calls “a beautiful enemy.” Competition, difference, rivalry, resentment, and betrayal bubble just beneath the surface of an outwardly placid bond, which complicates the simplistic notion that postwar poets fell happily into communities of like-minded others all motivated by what Alan Golding refers to as a “collective purpose” (From, 121). The East of Eden letter reveals how the fratricidal “moral crisis” at the heart of the avant-garde project, set off by the clash between the individual and the movement, colors and shapes O’Hara’s own ideas about friendship, poetry, and his own writing in relation to his friends’.

passing things I have been suggesting that each of O’Hara’s Ashbery-related writings can be seen as another “specimen of a relation,” to adapt Koestenbaum’s description of strictly collaborative writings (Double, 2). But perhaps the most unusual specimen of the O’Hara-Ashbery relation is the poem “Choses Passagères,” which O’Hara wrote in May 1955 and dedicated to John Ashbery. “Choses Passagères,” however, differs from the other works I have been discussing in that O’Hara composed this very strange poem in French. Although it appeared in a 1961 issue of the literary journal Locus Solus and was included in O’Hara’s Collected Poems (1971), “Choses Passagères” has been rendered in English only once, and it has rarely, if ever, been mentioned by commentators on either poet.The sole translation was published in 1973, in The World, then a mimeographed literary magazine of limited circulation,

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 261 and that version does not adequately represent the poem’s meanings nor reflect its complex methods of composition. Translated more accurately and viewed in its proper context, “Choses Passagères” emerges not only as a compelling poem, but also as a fascinating linguistic experiment that illuminates the dynamic relationship between these two poets at a pivotal moment in their development. O’Hara wrote “Choses Passagères” just a couple months before the East of Eden letter, during a period when his feelings of rivalry toward Ashbery seem to have been at a peak. Just at the moment in mid-1955 when Auden was judging the firstlings of each of their flocks, Ashbery applied for a Fulbright scholarship to study in France. When O’Hara wrote his poem in May 1955, Ashbery had been (or soon would be) notified that he had received the scholarship. Some confluence of Ashbery’s hope to live in France, a country whose language he did not know very well, and O’Hara’s mixed feelings about such a prospect seem to have inspired the latter to write a poem in French and dedicate it to his friend. “Choses Passagères” is not a poem with paraphrasable content that happens to be written by an American poet in French. There is something quite unusual about its use of this foreign language, and we might bear in mind that O’Hara was always quick to admit that his own French was rather limited. The poem, apparently one of O’Hara’s first in French, is actually a playful jigsaw puzzle, whose jagged pieces are strange, hilarious, and suggestive French idioms that the poet has appropriated and stitched together rather than invented himself. In 1961, when Kenneth Koch edited the very important issue of the New York School house journal, Locus Solus, dedicated to collaborations, he included “Choses Passagères,” claiming that it was a collaboration between Frank O’Hara and the French language. In fact, one might go further and call the piece a collaboration between O’Hara and a 1951 edition of Cassell’s French-English English-French Dictionary. When translating this poem I discovered by a fortuitous coincidence that many of its lines largely consist of strange idiomatic phrases that are found verbatim in this particular dictionary. In other words, I inadvertently stumbled upon the “key” to the poem’s unusual methods of construction. What follows is O’Hara’s French poem and then my translation of it:23 choses passagères à John Ashbery 1

5

J’écorche l’anguille par la queue, peut-être un nœud d’anguille, ou il y a anguille sous roche, je ne fais que toucher barres. Chapeaux bas! mais, il n’y avait pas un seul chapeau, et moi; j’avais beaucoup travaillé dans le temps. J’avais souffert un grand échec, mystériuesement. Qui se sent galeux se gratte!

262

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J’aime partout les kinkajous. Hier soir, j’étais un labadens; maintenant? je suis un lavabo. Je mange les morilles moresques, quelle suffisance! Je suis un homme qui se noie, montant un cheval à nu, et mon ciel est couvert de nuances. Est-ce que j’ai un bel organe, hein? je fais ses orges très bien, pourquoi pas?

15

Ce fruit est du poison tout pur, c’est la pure vérité, et pourquoi pas? ça ne nous rajeunit pas! La rouille ronge la fer, c’est un souvenir soviétique. La trébuchage, le tric-trac, vous vous trompez! dites voir turlututu chapeau pointu! Ce drap est d’un bon user, pour trouver l’usurpateur utérin. Oui, mais, je suis seul. Par monts et par vaux, le valet de bourreau vient, c’est un wattman vulcanien, et j’ai peur. Il pleut. Je mange un xiphias. Il n’y gagnera rien, je suis un yole, un you you, moi. Tu es un homme zélateur, donc? Mon ange, tu as un oeil qui dit zut à l’autre.

20

passing things to John Ashbery 1

5

I begin this thing at the wrong end, maybe a running bowline, or there is a snake in the grass, I am off again without stopping. Hats off! but, there wasn’t a single man there, and me; I used to study a good deal formerly. I have suffered a terrible blow, mysteriously. Let him whom the cap fits wear it! Lodging? I am off an island, it’s a stroke of luck, and I am not a hack, full of immodesty, no, no, I communicate movement to a machine, when two Sundays come in one week (never), in the good old times.

10

I love kinkajous everywhere. Last night, I was an old school chum; now? I’m a washstand. I eat Moorish mushrooms, what self-sufficiency! My affairs are going to the bad, riding a horse barebacked, and my sky covered with nuances. Do I have a good voice, do I? I feather my nest very well, why not?

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 263 15

20

That fruit is downright poison, it is the plain unvarnished truth, and why not? That doesn’t make us out any younger! Rust corrodes iron, it’s a Soviet souvenir. The weighing and sorting of money, the backgammon-board, you are mistaken! Dites voir turlututu chapeau pointu! This cloth wears well, in order to discover the uterine usurper.Yes, but, I am alone. Up hill and down dale, the assistant-executioner comes, he is a vulcanian tram-driver, and I am afraid. It’s raining. I’m eating a swordfish. He will get nothing by it, I am a yawl, a dinghy, me. You are a zealot, then? My dear, you squint. (CP, 221–222)

As one reads the poem, three principles become clear: (1) each line contains somewhere within it one or more words that are keyed to a letter of the alphabet; (2) many of these key words figure in expressions that Cassell’s cites as examples of idiomatic use of those words; and (3) the key words are arranged in alphabetical order, though with several significant omissions. Thus, “anguille” is the key word for the first line, corresponding to the letter “a,” so O’Hara appropriates three phrases given in Cassell’s as examples for idiomatic expressions using “anguille”; “barre” is the key word for the second line, corresponding to the letter “b,” leading O’Hara to borrow its phrase from the entry for that word, and so on, until the last line, whose key words are “zélateur” and “zut,” and whose phrases appear in the dictionary under those words. Though this is the general rule of composition, the poem is far from rigidly systematic. There is no line keyed to q; r and s seem to share a line, there are two lines for u, and the phrase for f appears out of order (in line 9). We can assume, then, that O’Hara was not interested in observing these principles of construction too precisely. Furthermore, not all the phrases employed are idiomatic ones, and in quite a few lines, O’Hara does not appropriate a prefabricated phrase from the dictionary at all. However, even in these lines, he seems to have lifted the unusual key words—such as “kinkajous,” “labadens,” “morilles” and “moresques”—from the dictionary, often taking two words from the same or adjacent pages. After selecting his key words, he often places them in his own syntactical arrangements, such as questions or parallel structures (“Last night I was . . .; now? I am a . . .”). He also adds connecting clauses and invents some full sentences that do not appear to be dictionary-derived at all. However, once the general method becomes apparent, we can retrace O’Hara’s romp through the French language, his whirlwind passage through the dictionary. The only translation of this poem that I have found, John Bátki’s 1973 version, misses its hidden principles of composition. Bátki treats the poem as a standard, if zany, French poem. But in fact it consists largely of idiomatic phrases lifted from the dictionary in alphabetical order, stitched together only by the poet’s act

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of selection. For example, the poem seems to begin with some remarks about eels (“l’anguille”): J’écorche l’anguille par la queue, peut-être un noeud d’anguille, ou il y a anguille sous roche, je ne fais que toucher barres.

Bátki renders these phrases literally: I grab an eel by the tail, perhaps it is an eel-knot, or an eel under the rock, all I do is touch bars.

Bátki does not notice that each of these phrases is idiomatic in French. More important, each of these appears in Cassell’s as an example under the words “anguille” and “barres.” That is, after this dictionary defines “barre” as “bar (of metal, wood, etc.),” it cites various idiomatic phrases that employ “barre”; one of ten such phrases is “je ne fais que toucher barres,” which is offered in English as “I am off again immediately or without stopping.” Because the phrases O’Hara uses in “Choses Passagères” are so consistently found intact in this edition of the dictionary, we can conclude that he was trolling through Cassell’s as he wrote it. If the English translations of these dictionary examples are sewn together, the lines take on a strikingly different (and eel-less) “meaning”: I begin this thing at the wrong end, maybe a running bowline, or there is a snake in the grass, I am off again without stopping.

It is clear that attention to French idiom is extremely necessary in translating this particular piece, but Bátki continues to translate each phrase literally, so that “there wasn’t a single man there” is rendered “but there was only one hat,” and “my affairs are going to the bad” as “I am a drowning man.” Furthermore, his version is marred by inaccurate translations of even the non-idiomatic phrases, such as “I eat a xylophone” for “je mange un xiphias” (“I eat a swordfish”) and “I was a lavatory” for “j’étais un labadens” (“I was an old school chum”). Although Bátki’s translation manages to convey the strangeness of the words’ literal meanings quite well, much of the significance and playful complexity of the poem is lost, since the poem calls for an awareness of the difference between literal and figurative meanings, as well as between French and English phrases. When the poem’s secret key is discovered, one begins to see not only the correct English meaning of the French idioms, but the crucial counterpoint between the three linguistic elements—the French original, the literal meanings of the words, and the idiomatic expressions as rendered in English. The poem’s experimentation with language is ingenious and amusing, in part, because O’Hara forces the careful reader to consider both idiomatic meaning and literal meaning at once,

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 265 while an uninformed, or dictionary-less, non-French reader is doomed to misunderstanding. Though the literal meaning (“I peel the eel by the tail”) is often less “correct,” as far as French goes, than the idiom (“I begin this thing at the wrong end”), it remains shimmering behind the figurative: both meanings coexist and hang suspended in midair. Perusing that treasure trove of language, the dictionary, the poet is drawn to each of these linguistic constructions; the poem demonstrates how habituated we become to language’s strangeness, how little we understand of its bizarre workings in our everyday usage. Language’s slippery, elusive qualities are always emphasized when a work foregrounds the unstable relationship between languages, and it is this gap that O’Hara’s poem plumbs. For example, to render “du temps que . . . Berthe filait” (“in the times when . . . Bertha marched”) accurately (and not literally) we must use the bland phrase “in the good old times,” which lacks the colorful specificity of the French idiom. No translation, of course, can adequately represent the full experience of such a text, which depends on moving from French into English, aware of the interplay of the literal and idiomatic meanings in both and between both. Thus, the poem remains virtually untranslatable. It is impossible to transfer the French to the English without loss and change, just as it is impossible to say what the single, univocal meaning of any given line is. After all, when you say “il y a anguille sous roche,” is there “an eel under a rock,” “something in the wind,” or “a snake in the grass”? In a way, all these meanings exist simultaneously, in transition from one to the next: each are fleeting, passing, mobile things—“choses passagères.” As Robert Frost said,“poetry is what gets lost in translation,” and both O’Hara and Ashbery are deeply inspired by the chaotic plurality of meanings, the indeterminacy of language, that such a cross-language experiment reveals. (In the 1960s, Ashbery would write a series of dense, indeterminate poems in French, which he titled “French Poems,” and then translate them into English as a kind of experiment in avoiding habitual word patterns). “Choses Passagères,” then, can be seen as O’Hara’s tribute to the poets’ mutual fascination with the absurdity, strangeness, and arbitrariness of language. Since it is an experiment in “found language,” one might assume that any ideas or themes found in it are merely incidental. However, its suggestive title, its unexplained dedication to Ashbery, and its predominant images offer enough oblique allusions to the O’Hara-Ashbery relationship to indicate that O’Hara’s choices of phrases and words were hardly random. For starters, by naming his poem for Ashbery “Passing Things,” O’Hara may be suggesting that he and his friend share a profound sense that life—like our words, our friendships, and our selves—is kinetic, unstable, and transitory. By declaring at the outset “I begin this thing at the wrong end,” O’Hara is perhaps self-consciously reflecting on the way his poem is composed: he acknowledges that to write a poem one usually writes first and checks the dictionary later, rather than beginning with dictionary phrases as your point of

266 Beautiful Enemies departure. From that moment forward, O’Hara is “off again without stopping,” as he jumps from point to point at high speed, as he does in so many of his motionobsessed poems. Despite its rapid transitions and non-linear development, the poem does sustain three interconnecting themes. On the first of these thematic planes, O’Hara stages a dialectical conflict between self and other, “I” and “you,” individual and group. It is a struggle he carries throughout the poem, since this tension lies at the heart of his ideas about the simultaneous gift and burden of friendship. Thus, many lines in the poem deliberately play intimacy against isolation, communion against singularity. For example, the opening reference to a “running bowline,” a kind of slipknot that both holds and, at times, slides, is an extremely apt figure for the paradoxes of friendship the poem addresses. But even this dubious evocation of friendship’s bond immediately gives way to another alternative, a sinister sense of betrayal, a fear that “there is a snake in the grass.” The phrase “there wasn’t a single man there” could imply that the place specified is empty, or point to a lack of available men to date, but it could also suggest that in such knot-like gatherings (of friendship or community) no man can remain single, no person a self-reliant self. Being part of a duo or a group can be a threat to one’s singularity, one’s “selfsufficiency,” and it is this possibility inherent in friendship that so unsettles these poets and leads to much of their ambivalence. Near the end of the poem, O’Hara suddenly inserts the line “Yes, but, I am alone,” which simultaneously implies a defiance of conformity and a lonely sadness. Though he supplies many connecting phrases and grammatical constructions, this sentence is one of the few in the poem that O’Hara has wholly invented, without recourse to a word or phrase from the dictionary. As such, this statement about solitude, coming just after the reference to the “uterine” (that is, a sibling) “usurper” contains a certain gravity, poignancy, and urgency, especially since the rules of the game do not account for its appearance. The penultimate line casts the self as a boat, mobile and solitary: “I am a yawl, a dinghy, me.” However, in the counterpoint between French and English, there is a deliberately confusing play of pronouns that intentionally highlights the paradoxes of self and other. In French, O’Hara writes, “je suis un yole, un you you, moi”; by splitting the single French word “youyou” (dinghy) into two “you’s,” O’Hara graphically demonstrates the vertiginous merging of identities in close friendship, so that the line appears to be saying “I am you, you me” at the same time it proclaims “I am a yawl, a dinghy.” Though it is impossible to reproduce in translation, this playful and highly suggestive interlingual gesture increases the poem’s blurring of “me” and “you.” The entire poem is driven by these paradoxes which hold together sameness and difference. O’Hara’s treatment of this tension recalls Whitman’s self-contradicting lines from “Song of Myself,” which define

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 267 human relationships as dramatic moments in which “opposite equals advance”: “always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction” (Leaves, ed. Cowley, 26–27). With the second, related theme, O’Hara dramatizes emotions of suspicion, jealousy, and violence as he introduces elements of a Cain-and-Abel-like sibling rivalry that we have observed in his friendship with Ashbery. With its warning about “a snake in the grass,” the poem opens under a sign of betrayal, suggesting something wicked this way comes. The phrase is an especially resonant one in O’Hara’s oeuvre, because, as we have seen, it appears two years earlier in one of his plays, coming out of the mouth of a character based on and originally played by John Ashbery himself: after John has usurped Jack’s place, he states at the play’s climax: “I suppose I’m the snake-in-the-grass but / I can’t say I’m sorry. . . . Do you think everything can stay the same / like a photograph?” (AN, 48). Thus, O’Hara has already linked the phrase, with its air of rivalry and betrayal, with Ashbery before it appears in this poem. (Other definitions of “il y a anguille sous roche” include “I smell a rat,” and “there’s more here than meets the eye,” both of which resonate with the poem’s tense atmosphere, hidden principles, and submerged themes.) Similarly, O’Hara seems to have been drawn to two words found virtually next to each other on the dictionary page, “usurpateur” (usurper, one who illegally seizes another’s place or power) and “uterine” (a half-sibling; brother or sister on the mother’s side). Why fuse these two words together into “l’usurpateur uterine,” the uterine usurper? O’Hara introduces this Cain-like betrayer near the end in order to reinforce the numerous hints along the way that this poem, like East of Eden and Try! Try!, is driven by feelings of sibling rivalry, by a worry that friendship can quickly shade into enmity. The “you” of the poem is a backstabbing sibling or friend who threatens to usurp the rightful place of the “I.” O’Hara further stresses this air of threat and violent confrontation between self and other by including a poisonous fruit, an approaching “assistant-executioner” (who may or may not be the friend) that frightens the speaker, and by ending with a phrase whose literal meaning is “you have one eye that says ‘go to hell’ to the other.” The third thematic plane of the poem concerns time and the transience of poetic powers and friendship itself. Jointly preoccupied with the paradoxes of motion and stasis, O’Hara and Ashbery wish for their poems to encompass or mirror the kinetic, “passing things” of experience in art, so it is fitting that from the title onward, this jagged, rapidly shifting poem both embodies and addresses the chaotic flux of experience. Loss and nostalgia crop up repeatedly, hand in hand with dynamic motion: the poem stresses the relentless passage of time (“that doesn’t make us out any younger! rust corrodes iron”) and hints at a mysterious transition that has occurred, from an earlier moment of happiness, creativity, and union to the current moment of deprivation, creative insecurity, and separation.

268 Beautiful Enemies “I used to study [work] a good deal formerly,” the speaker laments, as if uncomfortably aware that his poetic productivity has declined. “I am not a hack,” he protests uneasily, but then confesses that he only “communicate[s] movement to a machine” (that is, writes his poems) when “two Sundays come in one week,” which is to say never, unlike “in the good old times.” Hovering over everything is a sense of O’Hara’s insecurity about his own literary talent, an emotion both O’Hara and Ashbery frequently felt in the face of the other’s rather threatening, disconcerting genius. After confessing that his “affairs are going to the bad,” O’Hara betrays his anxiety about his poetic ability by nervously asking, “Do I have a good voice, do I?” The transformation seems to have been both intense and enigmatic: “I have suffered a terrible blow, mysteriously.” Though the nature of this wound is never revealed, the sudden transition from intimacy to estrangement is most tellingly apparent when he asserts that “Last night, I was an old school chum; now? I’m a washstand.” O’Hara’s deliberate “then . . . now” syntactical construction sets up a sharp contrast that highlights the transient nature of friendship. This recognition about the nature of intimacy may ultimately be the “plain unvarnished truth”— the poisonous fruit—the poem struggles to articulate. Though it seems like just yesterday evening that he and his friend were old pals fresh out of Harvard, now he feels alone, as inert and insignificant as a bathroom fixture. The poem’s mixture of affection and bitterness is pervasive. For example, at the end, O’Hara asks “You’re a zealot, then?” in a tone that implies he doubts the “you’s” true zeal. However, he immediately addresses the other with the word for “angel”: “mon ange” which means “my love” or “my dear.” He ends the poem with the phrase “avoir un oeil qui dit zut a l’autre,” which is a wonderful, odd idiom Cassell’s defines as “to squint.”The English version of the conclusion—“my dear, you squint”—again combines tenderness and critique. However, since the idiom literally means “you have one eye that says ‘go to hell’ to the other,” the angry tone of “zut”—a slang interjection used to convey flat refusal (“damn,” “drats,” and “shut up”)—lingers after the poem concludes. The whole poem, with its struggle between identity and distinction, its drama of bitter confrontation, and its sense of loss, suggests that even the closest friendship, like poetic creativity and independence, like everything else, is a precarious, fleeting thing. The three intersecting thematic planes, combined with the poem’s linguistic play, create a dense and complicated piece full of ambivalent emotion and paradox. Perhaps it is not surprising that the poem is fraught with such tension, given that “Choses Passagères” was written at a moment when feelings of competition between the two poets were presumably at a high point. Ashbery’s successes apparently made O’Hara feel provincial, insecure, left out, and even jealous. On 23 May 1955 (three weeks after writing “Choses Passagères”), O’Hara reported the news to Kenneth Koch:

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 269 Glorious Ashes has captured a Fulbright to Montpellier, isn’t that heaven? He will be there in time to be god father to little Christian Kiesler Koch [a joking reference to the Koch’s expected, as yet unnamed, child]. I just hope he’s willing to accept such responsibility. He is so serious. What with this and his projected trip to Mexico next week with Jane, Joe, Grace and Walt, our little gamin is really in his travellin shoes, isn’t he? It makes me feel like Emily Dickinson.

Though O’Hara seems genuinely glad about Ashbery’s good fortune, beneath his witty, light-hearted comments is a tremor of jealousy and resentment at Ashbery’s good fortune and the exciting opportunities awaiting him. Other than his time in the Navy, O’Hara had traveled little, and he would not see Europe until his work for the Museum of Modern Art took him there in 1958. Evidently, O’Hara’s bitterness about not having the opportunity to travel was palpable to his friends. Ashbery recalls that after O’Hara had gotten to see Europe, it “made him much easier to get along with. . . . I think that people who have never been to Europe have a certain chip on their shoulder” (Gooch, City, 310).24 O’Hara understandably envied and even resented the romantic, Fulbright-subsidized, European adventures enjoyed by his friends Koch (who in an earlier poem O’Hara referred to as one who “continually goes away”) and Ashbery (CP, 94). His alignment of himself with a major American poet who almost never left her home, Emily Dickinson, is, in effect, a subtle reversal of poetic power that seems to arise from uneasiness about his own artistic ability. His quip rhetorically turns the tables, as he posits himself as the poetic genius despite, or almost because of, the fact that he is not going to France.25 This mixture of pique, insecurity, and self-confidence, and the ambivalent attitude toward “Glorious Ashes” and his Fulbright (which O’Hara refers to in another letter to Koch, with more cutting humor, as Ashbery’s “recent liaison with the Government”) erupts in “Choses Passagères,” a poem conspicuously written in the language Ashbery would soon have to cope with (6 June 1955). It would seem that Ashbery’s impending French sojourn, then, spurred O’Hara’s poetic experiment in a language he himself was not really fluent in. By composing this poem, with its bizarre phrases, esoteric vocabulary, and hidden key that so defamiliarizes the French language, and by addressing such a work to Ashbery, O’Hara playfully and deliberately challenges his friend, since Ashbery has frequently mentioned that his own French was imperfect when he first moved to France. The punch line to the joke is that its dedicatee would have to read this difficult poem using his flawed French, presumably misinterpreting the unfamiliar idiomatic phrases, and, realizing his failure, would need to turn to the dictionary; at this point, he would perhaps become aware that the author has so arranged things that he must plod alphabetically through the dictionary in order to make sense of the poem at all.

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To drive home this dig at his friend’s linguistic deficiency, O’Hara even includes a practically untranslatable shibboleth that Cassell’s tells us is used by the French to detect a foreign accent: “Dites voir turlututu chapeau pointu.” (I have left the sentence in French in my version because the phrase remains untranslated in the dictionary, only explained as this kind of shibboleth.) By putting this teasing phrase into his poem, O’Hara tests his friend, mocks his not-yet-perfected French, and draws attention to Ashbery’s distance from the French people he intends to live among. On one level, then, O’Hara’s poem says to its recipient: “You think you know French well enough? Try to read this!” Once it was written, O’Hara apparently felt quite excited about and invested in his odd poem, curious about whether those who could read French would understand it or detect its oddity. He hurriedly mailed it to Kenneth Koch, who was living in France at the time, saying “I’m sending you my first poem in French. If you find any mistakes please let me know. . . . Does it sound French, I wonder?” When he learned that Koch may have missed the letter because he had left for Italy, O’Hara quickly mailed it again, this time adding: “Since I cannot wait to have you see my first poem in French I hasten to send it along to you in Italie. I wonder if it makes any sense one way or the other?” He even closes the letter with another reminder to “tell me what you think of choses passagères.” Writing the poem seems to have at least temporarily assuaged O’Hara’s anxieties about his creative prowess (perhaps exacerbated by his friends’ European travels) that are expressed in the poem: “Anyway, it was such a joy to write as I have been having a drought with English the likes of which hasn’t been seen since Koch last went to Europe” (23 May 1955). Upon receiving it, Koch seems to have picked up on the complexities and the teasing qualities of the poem right away: “I like Choses Passagères a lot. It’s very lively and witty and nuts, besides being a little course in French for those who think they know it all (French; me).” Sensing its unusual genesis, he asks O’Hara: “How did you ever write it? I guess I can figure that out, without at the same time being able to duplicate the feat (feet?), for when writing French poems I’ve never been able to face up so squarely as you did to the fact that it’s a foreign language” (1955, n.d). Koch astutely zeroes in on O’Hara’s defamiliarizing play with the French language in this poem, and goes on to note that, in this, it exhibits one of the strengths of his friend’s poetry in general: “Come to think of it, you have the same true opinion about English [that it is a foreign language], which is what always keeps one jumping around in one’s seat while reading your poems.”26 One of the numerous reasons why “Choses Passagères” is so interesting is that the poem amply demonstrates O’Hara’s inveterate fascination with the mystery, the absurdity, and the sheer mobility of language itself.27 In addition to its cross-language game-playing and exuberant oddity, “Choses Passagères” is a good example of what O’Hara would later call “personism,” as it is a poem that “is at last between two persons instead of two pages” (CP, 499). Dedi-

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 271 cated to his “old school chum” John Ashbery, the poem grows out of, comments on, and inserts itself within the poet’s relationship with another person, to whom the poem is addressed. Recall that for O’Hara, such a poem of friendship—in which the intervening poem, and not the sender or recipient, “is correspondingly gratified”—is both an act of communication and of distancing. Given the biographical context in which it was written, and O’Hara’s ideas about friendship and poetry, we can begin to surmise why this bizarre French poem written for a close friend is marked by such ambivalence, why it dramatizes both the bond and the conflict between I and you, between brother and brother.

ðe parture afte r ðe parture Over the course of the later 1950s and 1960s, O’Hara and Ashbery stayed in relatively close contact by mail while Ashbery remained in Paris, regularly exchanging poems, praise, and gossip about their personal lives, the New York art and poetry worlds, their developing careers, and the dramas and tribulations of the friends in their circle. Though they each obviously engaged in more substantial daily contact with friends and lovers in their respective cities, the correspondence suggests the poets were able to sustain an active, thriving personal—and intertextual—relationship for years despite only intermittent physical proximity. As an emissary for the Museum of Modern Art, O’Hara immensely enjoyed several trips to Europe, where he was reunited and traveled with Ashbery to the great delight of both parties. Their letters often discuss such matters as the fortunes of Locus Solus (the journal Ashbery began with Harry Mathews and which became a vehicle for New York School aesthetics) and, usually with large, comic doses of self-deprecation, their latest efforts in poetry. Despite the distance, the two continued to be intimately connected to each other’s lives and work, continued to inspire and threaten one another’s creativity, just as Ashbery continued to make frequent cameo appearances in O’Hara’s poems.28 Perhaps because of a strange twist of literary fate, the two poets’ strengths and weaknesses always seemed to operate on a kind of seesaw. In the early 1950s, when O’Hara won the Hopwood Award and was writing wildly, experimentally, and voluminously, Ashbery sank into silence and depression. A few years later, Ashbery won his Fulbright and garnered the Yale prize, which launched his career; but then he moved to France, where, disheartened by the chilly reception of his book Some Trees, he agonized about what to do next in his poetry. For several years, he wrote the strange, disjunctive poems in his second book that he no longer feels close to, at the same moment that O’Hara entered his most fertile period, from 1957 to 1962. In the early 1960s, as O’Hara’s own creativity began to enter hibernation, Ashbery seems to have hit his artistic stride. During O’Hara’s near-silence from 1963 to his death in 1966, Ashbery wrote his ambitious 1964 poem, “The

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Skaters,” generally regarded as a major breakthrough and turning point in his developing poetics, and two other pivotal, expansive works, “Fragment” (1964–65) and “Clepsydra” (1965). In the years just after O’Hara’s death, Ashbery’s career truly began to soar. Although it is not clear whether the poets were aware of this situation, toward the end of Ashbery’s stay in Paris in the mid-1960s, they seem to have begun to drift. There are fewer letters, fewer exchanges of poems in the years from 1962 to 1965—though this is not surprising, since during this period, O’Hara virtually stopped writing both letters and poems (Gooch, City, 439). Though he undoubtedly missed Ashbery’s presence in New York, O’Hara also may have subconsciously felt it beneficial to keep his potentially threatening friend at a distance. In one letter, he tells Ashbery, who had complained about missing out on the exciting doings of the city: “Actually, you shouldn’t feel too out of New York things as everyone is always talking about you and your work. And if you stay there I’ll remain the authority on your life, tastes, and customs, which gives me some much-needed cachet around here” (19 July 1961). O’Hara is clearly being humorous in his joke about wishing Ashbery would stay in Paris so that he can retain some clout (not through his own poetry, but rather through his knowledge of the increasingly popular Ashbery’s life), but the quip reveals both O’Hara’s subtle desire to keep Ashbery at bay and his anxiety about the avid general interest in all things Ashbery that seems to be diminishing his own “cachet.” Ashbery finally did return to New York in late 1965, but unfortunately, in Ashbery’s words, O’Hara “had only a few months left to live” (“A Reminiscence,” 21). Of course neither of them could know the dire prognosis at the time: that in late July 1966 O’Hara would be killed in a freak accident on Fire Island, NY, struck by a fast-moving beach buggy in the middle of the night while he stood on a beach. When Ashbery first reentered the New York art and literary scene that O’Hara had dominated for so long, he came wrapped in a kind of magical aura. “Because Ashbery lived in France, he was mysterious. Nobody ever saw him,” Ron Padgett, a young disciple at the time, recalls (Gooch, City, 407). Ironically, Ashbery’s growing reputation—which could certainly have made O’Hara feel uncomfortable about his own increasingly distressing inability to write—had been helped along by O’Hara’s constant praise of his friend’s work and by O’Hara’s unusual habit of reading his friends’ poems whenever he read in public. By reciting Ashbery’s difficult poems from The Tennis Court Oath at his own readings, O’Hara “helped the distant Ashbery become a bit of a cult figure” (407). Looking back, Ashbery recalls that this stage of their relationship was less than ideal. He remarks that after his return to the United States, he thought, “Well now, at least I’ll be able to spend a lot of time with Frank, but you never could, because so many people wanted to see him and there was just so much of him to go around. You’d make a dinner date and find the curator from Stockholm at the same table. So I got rather pissed off at him. As did his other friends. I think

O’Hara, Ashbery, and the Paradoxes of Friendship 273 we were all very jealous of each other and Frank’s attentions” (439–440). In “A Reminiscence,” Ashbery offers more recollections of this period: And during those months, alas, we seldom took the opportunity to see each other. Frank’s job at the museum had become more time-consuming; he was busy with the Nakian retrospective which opened just a few weeks before his death; his circle of business and personal acquaintances seemed to be constantly expanding at a geometrical rate. I was having problems of my own readjusting to New York and my new job at Art News after a decade abroad, finding and furnishing an apartment, picking up the thread of interrupted friendships, re-learning the New York patois. Our moments together were few and far between. (21)

He goes on to recount a particularly bleak Sunday morning, one of the last times the poets saw each other, when Ashbery visited O’Hara in his apartment and found his old friend, usually so vibrant, so excited about everything around him, lying in bed, mysteriously ill. “There was a kind of melancholy I didn’t remember from before, and a kind of tiredness,” Ashbery says. “I remember being surprised to see him feeling so down, physically and mentally” (440). For whatever mysterious alchemy of reasons, when O’Hara died in 1966, his writing was at a virtual standstill, and his relationship with Ashbery was at low tide. Was O’Hara bothered by the fact that Ashbery’s poetry was growing better and more ambitious while his own seemed to be drying up? Perhaps being influenced by and dependent on his friend’s work—his desire or, worse, need to “dip liberally into the Ashes Fount” for inspiration—seemed more and more problematic for him (letter to Ashbery, 8 March 1961). Perhaps it was hard to watch Ashbery return to the New York scene he himself presided over as a kind of “cult figure,” while he saw himself slipping into a more and more enduring silence. Perhaps none of the above was the case; we surely will never know. But in any event, I am once again less interested in the actual biographical details than in how and why the O’Hara-Ashbery friendship gets represented in the poets’ work. And one effect of Ashbery’s return was a curious piece of writing by O’Hara, the second-to-last poem he ever wrote and one of only two poems he wrote in the seven months of 1966 he lived through.29 This is the poignant, terse piece in its entirety, as it appears—stark, climactic, and revealing—on the final page of the posthumous volume Poems Retrieved: Why are there flies on the floor in February, and the snow mushing outside and the cats asleep? Because you came back from Paris, to celebrate your return. (PR, 220)

The images in O’Hara’s untitled, penultimate poem obviously evoke death, transience, and dormancy—the cats are static, not mobile as usual, lost in their naps,

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the flies are not flying, the snow melts. Here, at this late date, O’Hara directly echoes the imagery of a poem he had written sixteen years earlier, which depicts a similar moment of cold weather torpor: “The flies are getting slower now / and a bee is rare . . . the snow will settle / like a sheet over all live color . . . The flies crawl / their lonely ways” (“Poem,” CP, 24). In that poem, the slow insects are linked to the image of the snow, which acts as a winding sheet for the death of all vitality. The late poem’s sad recognition of stasis, like the earlier poem’s, seems to erupt from a creative crisis within the writer that happens to be mirrored by the moment’s outer reality. Both pieces convey the poet’s desperate inability to break out of lethargy into activity, into writing. The last lines answer the poem’s initial question with a touch of tragic irony: this torpor has occurred “Because you came / back from Paris.” It is here to welcome “you,” “to celebrate your return.” Though I cannot guarantee this poem refers to Ashbery, the most important person in O’Hara’s life that I can imagine to have “come back from Paris” at exactly this point would have been his “old school chum” Ashbery. And that particular homecoming seems, at this moment at least, to have left O’Hara feeling as active as a fly in February, as inspired as a poet who recycles his own sixteen-year-old tropes. This dejected welcome for his old friend is as warm as slushy snow. The existence of this last testament—in O’Hara’s oeuvre, at least—to the relationship between these two friends further underlines the profound importance of this bond to the arc of O’Hara’s development as a poet. From his earliest works to his latest, from “A Note to John Ashbery” (written in 1950, when O’Hara was 24), through Try! Try! and “Choses Passagères,” to the bleak finality of “Why are there flies on the floor” (written at 40 just before his death in 1966), Ashbery’s figure is inextricably intertwined with O’Hara’s “garden of words.” When we look closely at the poems he writes to and about John Ashbery, like those concerning other friends, we not only see O’Hara’s poetics of friendship to be in tension with his espousal of experimental individualism, we can also observe how he mobilizes one particular and pivotal friendship in his writing: staging its dynamics, casting each poet in roles, staking out positions for himself, using texts and intertexts to work through and manage mixed feelings of anxiety, affection, admiration, envy, and rivalry. O’Hara’s “Ashbery poems” also stand as a kind of microcosm of the larger trends I have focused on throughout this book, as they demonstrate how avant-garde American poetry finds rich poetic material in the simultaneous burden and delight of friendship, especially the companionship and competition between two friends who thrill to “read new poems to each other / high on a mountain in the wind.”

CONCLUSION

Dispersing, each of the Troubadours had something to say about how charity Had run its race and won, leaving you ex-president Of the event. —John Ashbery, “The Other Tradition”

B

y all accounts, the close-knit community of New York poets and artists was devastated by the news of Frank O’Hara’s sudden death in the summer of 1966, as if the invisible webs that had fused together a far-flung series of fascinating people who thrived on a sense of community and shared principles had suddenly dissolved. In an obituary essay, Peter Schjeldahl observed, without undue hyperbole, that “the New York art world was collectively thunderstruck. In 15 years as poet, playwright, critic, curator, and universal energy source in the lives of the few hundred most creative people in America, Frank O’Hara had rendered that world wholly unprepared to tolerate his passing” (Schjeldahl, “Frank O’Hara,” 139).The dance critic and poet Edwin Denby noted that “Frank was the center and joined them all together. After his death there was no center for that group” (Waldman, “Paraphrase,” 32). In the years that followed, many significant and diverse poets wrote moving elegies for this poet who was so fond of elegy himself, two of the most memorable being Allen Ginsberg’s “City Midnight Junk Strains” (written just a few days after O’Hara died) and James Schuyler’s “Buried at Springs.”1 However, it has been widely assumed that because of the allegedly abstract, metaphysical, and impersonal nature of his poetry, John Ashbery never wrote a memorial to O’Hara in verse. In her book on O’Hara, Marjorie Perloff writes, “One poet who did not write an elegy for Frank O’Hara, even though he wrote the beautiful introduction to the Collected Poems, was John Ashbery” (O’Hara, 190). 275

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In fact, after O’Hara’s death, Ashbery actually does write about his friend in a number of poems (including “Lithuanian Dance Band,” discussed in chapter 4) which respond in profound ways to the death of one of his closest friends and peers and to the catastrophic loss of the New York arts community’s “center.” The most powerful and moving of these poems is the 1977 poem “Street Musicians,” an elegy fraught with feelings of sibling rivalry, regret, jealousy, and even survivor’s guilt that reveals another important dimension of the role played by friendship in Ashbery’s work and in postwar poetry more generally.2 If, as I have argued throughout this study, the most influential experimental American poetry emerges out of the generative and anxious dialogue between poetic peers, out of the friction between an excitement about collaboration and a stubborn commitment to individual style, then Ashbery’s “Street Musicians” is surely a poem that embodies this phenomenon. In this case, Ashbery’s close relationship with O’Hara and O’Hara’s work offers him a special aperture, a unique way to meditate on friendship, intimacy, loss, and loneliness, as well as on the shape of his own career. “Street Musicians” can be read as a kind of valedictory address to Frank O’Hara and as a farewell to the whole idea of the avant-garde as a shared point of origin and collective effort. The poem articulates a moving allegory of the dispersal of the New York School itself, beginning with its rich and suggestive title, which seems to be an evocative figure for the poetic community that fostered Ashbery’s own growth as a poet. Though it seems to refer to performers on the street, no sidewalk buskers appear in this poem, so the plural phrase can be seen as a trope for “city artists,” or better yet, “New York poets.”3 It is clear from the beginning that “one” of the two musicians in the poem has died, and that the other must go on living, moving forward while shouldering the burden of surviving: One died, and the soul was wrenched out Of the other in life, who, walking the streets Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on The same corners, volumetrics, shadows Under trees. (SP, 207)

The powerful image of wrenching grief at the poem’s opening suggests that the death of one has left the other soulless and empty. The person lost seems to have been a very close friend, a fellow musician; he is also a sibling in what is later called “an obscure family.” The poems Ashbery writes in the aftermath of O’Hara’s death frequently intertwine the loss of a friend with the loss of a brother. For Ashbery, such a gesture is more than the characteristic turn to a rhetoric of fraternity to represent an intimate friendship: Ashbery has been haunted his entire life by the death of his nine-year-old brother to leukemia when he was twelve (Shoptaw, Outside, 363 n. 34). Rarely forthcoming about his personal

Conclusion 277 life, the poet has made several candid remarks about the death of his brother in interviews: “I had a younger brother whom I didn’t get along with,” Ashbery told Peter Stitt. “We were always fighting the way kids do—and he died at the age of nine. I felt guilty because I had been so nasty to him, so that was a terrible shock. These are experiences which have been important to me” (“Art of Poetry,” 35). In another, recent interview, Ashbery suggests the centrality of this loss to his life and poetry. He discusses his powerful sense of “nostalgia for my childhood” and then goes on to recall that he and some friends “had a mythical kingdom in the woods. . . . Then my younger brother died just around the beginning of WWII. The group dispersed for various reasons, and things were never as happy or romantic as they’d been, and my brother was no longer there. I think I’ve always been trying to get back to this mythical kingdom” (Rehak, “Child,” 15). As we saw in chapter 4, many of Ashbery’s best and most famous poems chronicle this sense of loss, this dispersal, and this desire to return to a mythical realm of idealized fraternity, a desire that continuously slams into the impossibility of that illusory dream. The painful, guilt-provoking loss of a brother—of both his actual sibling and his “brother” Frank O’Hara—seems to take on archetypal significance in the world of Ashbery’s work, something he makes quite clear in the late poem “The History of My Life,” which begins “Once upon a time there were two brothers. / Then there was only one: myself ” (Your, 31). In “Street Musicians,” after the death of the “other,” the remaining musician has apparently been called, summoned to fill some new role: Farther than anyone was ever Called, through increasingly suburban airs And ways, with autumn falling over everything . . .

In the absence of the loved one, the speaker travels into brave new worlds and has departed the urban locale—a nod to the New York School identity they shared as street musicians—to arrive in a world more tame, prosperous, “suburban.” Perhaps needled by a kind of survivor’s guilt, the speaker acknowledges that he has come a long way from the rebellious phase as a young “street” poet and has perhaps reached a more comfortable middle age. At the same time, his friend, the other bohemian “street musician,” died before having to make this journey, and thus avoided that problematic trajectory—essentially the one from avant-garde marginality to acceptance. On one level, then, “Street Musicians” is another Ashberyan “vague allegory” of poetic vocation and friendship that recapitulates the movement of Ashbery’s own career. It reflects his discomfort in the mid-seventies with his newfound fame and critical acclaim, his induction into the mainstream of American poetry, which occurred on the heels of his fellow outsider’s death. Ashbery catapulted to literary stardom in 1976 when he won the year’s three major prizes for his break-

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through volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror; so it is not surprising that this poem became the first piece in his next book, Houseboat Days. In a 1980 interview, Ashbery reflects on that moment in the mid-seventies when his “voice became recognized as separate” from the New York School: “I sort of separated myself, or got separated, from the others” (“An Interview in Warsaw,” 299). The tension between active and passive voice in this comment—two ways of looking at that separation—perfectly capture Ashbery’s mixed feelings about his own position relative to the insularity of the New York School community, mixed feelings this poem eloquently probes. Not only does Ashbery’s poem imply a certain guilt or uneasiness about the fact that he has moved into suburban comfort, it also suggests a recognition that he has moved into a bittersweet moment of maturity that brings with it an awareness of his own transience. In fact, everything in the poem seems to be declining, dying, with “autumn falling over everything.” The poem is filled with what Shoptaw calls “a deliberate trail of leavings”—forgotten songs, “the year turning over on itself in November,” the gaps among the days becoming more real, drifting smoke, water seeping up, trash, excrement, and so on (Outside, 208). As we have seen, the anti-foundationalist poetics of movement that Ashbery and O’Hara share is built upon a rhetoric of such abandonments and constant departures. The poem’s litany of departures includes a reference to an “obscure family” who is being evicted “into the way it was and is.”Though Ashbery does not make it clear, this family can perhaps be read as another figure for that band of musicians, the New York School itself. The “plush leaves” may even hint at pages of poems in their books. Constantly charged with difficulty and willful obscurity by critics, ever courting the pleasures of ambiguity, the tight-knit group of New York School poets could easily be viewed as an “obscure family”; at the same time, their lack of general fame and acceptance (particularly in the 1950s, and especially prior to Ashbery’s rise to prominence in the ’70s) made them an obscure community indeed. Furthermore, the reference suggests how much of the poem’s tensions are driven by sibling rivalry and Freudian “family romance.” The end of the first stanza indicates that some evolution and change in the relationship between the two musicians has occurred over time. “So they grew to hate and forget each other,” the speaker admits.The moment recalls O’Hara’s lines about the fragility of friendship in “Choses Passagères”: “Last night, I was an old school chum; now? I am a washstand.” These two figures who were once so close became estranged. In life? After the death of the other? It is not clear. But they have grown apart, diverged with animosity, and have tried to forget each other. What are we to make of this moment? To forget the other, if the other is a strong poet and rival, is to avoid the pressures and burdens of influence, of the impingement of a rival poet’s words, tropes, and poetic strengths. But something else about this particular line reinforces my point that this poem is not only generally about friendship and rivalry, but in the most specific sense is about

Conclusion 279 Ashbery’s divergence from O’Hara and his work. If we compare the line in “Street Musicians” with the final line of O’Hara’s earlier poem “Blocks,” which is about the adolescence and growth of two close siblings (a boy and a girl), we hear a curious echo: And thus they grew like giggling fir trees (O’Hara) (CP, 108). So they grew to hate and forget each other (Ashbery).

For his poem, which, like “Blocks,” is about sibling rivalry, Ashbery misreads, twists, and revises O’Hara’s earlier trope. O’Hara had used this image to convey the trajectory taken by the siblings; Ashbery echoes it, builds upon it, and changes it.4 With this intertextual echo, Ashbery transforms O’Hara’s positive celebration of the unity of the siblings (as identical as two laughing trees) and recasts it as a distinct movement of divergence, enmity, and forgetting. By troping O’Hara’s words in this way, by even willfully “forgetting” them in a sense, Ashbery is able to clear (textual, stylistic) space for himself as the remaining street musician. As this moment of allusive riffing suggests, for postwar American poetry, friendship between writers becomes as much an intertextual as a social relationship. The rather impersonal first stanza gives way to a much more personal-sounding second stanza, which shifts from “one” and “they” to “I,” and from the past tense to the present: So I cradle this average violin that knows Only forgotten showtunes, but argues The possibility of free declamation anchored To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself In November, with the spaces among the days More literal, the meat more visible on the bone. (SP, 207)

Here the speaker’s tone becomes quite self-deprecatory, as he calls his violin “average,” and his poems mere “showtunes,” as he seems to suggest rather anxiously that because the other is gone and wiped from memory, he is alone with his average abilities, continuing to play old and “forgotten” songs. The pathos of the poem results from the sense that one member of the duo has been left alone, attempting to sing, while unrelenting time constantly takes us ever further away from our origins (SP, 89). It seems to pose a question:Where has the passing of time left the friend and the poet himself? Back before the suburban airs and ways, before “one died,” wasn’t there some “mythical kingdom” where they were truly together as a “we,” young New York poets attempting to leave their marks on a rapidly vanishing world? Against this rising sense of drift and loss, Ashbery hopes to locate some sense of “origin,” but any poet as skeptical of fixity and foundations as Ashbery or O’Hara knows that such starting points are never static or isolated. They are always in motion, like fading wisps on the breeze:

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Beautiful Enemies Our question of a place of origin hangs Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests, In coves with the water always seeping up, and left Our trash, sperm, and excrement everywhere, smeared On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

The ending of the poem thus questions whether the duo shared a point of origin at the same time that it wonders whether they leave any joint legacy to the future. If they do share an originary point, would that erase the potency and uniqueness of the speaker as an individual artist? In either case, is it a place that is at all recoverable? The remembered moment of union is first cast as idyllic and pastoral— possibly an echo of Ashbery’s early poem “Some Trees” which depicted a winter morning communion of self and other in the forest as a “chorus of smiles”—only to be ironically undermined by the threat of water rising up, and the repulsive mess of the remnants “we” leave there (SP, 19). The end of “Street Musicians” brings two disparate selves together momentarily (for as brief a moment as in O’Hara’s poem “To John Ashbery”): a “we” united, as poets. It imagines them as fellow picnickers who attempted to smear themselves, create and perpetuate themselves and their art on a stubborn, fleeting world, however briefly and however in vain it may seem or be. But that moment of joint artistic endeavor, that knit of identity, remains drifting like smoke in the lovely, distant past, long before “the soul was wrenched out / Of the other in life” and that lonely survivor began to move “Farther than anyone was ever / Called, through increasingly suburban airs / And ways.” Although it summons a dim memory of rather idealized union, the poem moves away from friendship and its certainties into solitary wanderings, loss, and leave-takings. Again and again across the long arc of his career and to his latest poems, Ashbery has returned to such gestures, as he continually contemplates the relationship between the poetic self and the group, which, by turns, nurtures, inspires, and imprisons that self. In his 2005 book Where Shall I Wander, one finds Ashbery, near 80, still pitting the individual talent against the “school” in which he “first discovered how to breathe” (SP, 83): Time to get out and, as they say, about. Becalmed on a sea of inner stress, sheltered from cold northern breezes, idly we groove: Must have been the time before this, when we all moved in schools, a finny tribe, and this way and that the caucus raised its din. (“Wolf Ridge,” 36)

Ever aware of what it means to be part of a din-raising “finny tribe,” of what happens to such caucuses over time and to the individuals who swim within them, the

Conclusion 281 poets I have focused on in this book frequently fashion representations of friendship by recourse to an image of troubadours dispersed, of friends as pairs of beautiful enemies torn apart by time and circumstance.This haunting trope embodies the dynamic of disaffiliation, loss, and inviolable separateness that must complicate any simplistic notion of American poetic communities and alliances. In Richard Yates’s pitch-perfect evocation of the 1950s, the 1961 novel Revolutionary Road, he portrays two suburban couples who get together regularly for drinks in their comfortable suburban homes and complain tirelessly to one another about “the outrageous state of the nation” (59). It is clear that the culture of the Cold War has scarred them as much as anyone else and they know it: “The cancerous growth of Senator McCarthy had poisoned the United States, and with the pouring of second or third drinks they could begin to see themselves as members of an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground” (59). They find more to critique and agree on than just the scourge of McCarthyism: And even after politics had palled there had still been the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, or The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today. “Oh Jesus,” Shep might begin, “you know this character next door to us? Donaldson? The one that’s always out fooling with his power mower and talking about the rat race and the soft sell? Well, listen: did I tell you what he said about his barbecue pit?” And there would follow an anecdote of extreme suburban smugness that left them weak with laughter. “Oh, I don’t believe it,” April would insist. “Do they really talk that way?” And Frank would develop the theme. . . . “It’s all the idiots I ride with on the train every day. It’s a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.” . . .They would all agree, and the happy implication was that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture. (59–60)

As Yates ironically suggests, these figures are perfect examples of what Barbara Ehrenreich would later dub the “gray flannel rebels” of the 1950s—conformists themselves, yes, but at least highly aware of the evils of conformity. They recognize their society’s exaggerated genuflection before the breadwinner ethic and its accoutrements (the suburban home, the housewife and children, the spiffy car, the comfortable living, the hat and suit, the cheerful optimism) and lament the bland homogeneity of a consensus culture in which everyone is fat with disposable income and fearful of stepping out of line. But though they may chatter about conformity endlessly, they do not necessarily do anything to break from the numbing sameness. The passage from Yates’s novel highlights just how prevalent “the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity” was at the moment when the

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first postmodernist American poets were beginning to emerge, and just how marked by contradiction this subject was. These four suburban “cultural critics” smugly congratulate themselves on being so different from the herd around them, all the while living nearly the exact same life in the exact same place, conspicuously agreeing with one another about how to think and talk and rarely uttering an original word or idea. What Yates darkly hints at is the basic paradox vibrating beneath this cultural moment’s house of cards: when everyone is lionizing the “individual,” en masse, you’ve got a fundamental problem (Schaub, American, 142). More self-aware and more serious about nonconformity and resistance than are Yates’s characters, the postwar avant-garde poets discussed in this book stare this problem right in the face and try to make sense of, and art from, the paradoxes wrapped within it. Committed individualists, they consciously resist all forms of conformity, even the tendency to conform to their own prior positions and words. But they also know total autonomy is impossible. They are pragmatists convinced that human identity is fundamentally social. They are deeply invested in the idea of community and collaboration with other like-minded artists, and, because they are buoyed by a sense of mutuality, they tend to “all agree” that it is their group of friends that is free from the stagnant homogeneity of American culture and literature. But then recognizing that “all agreeing” about such a thing, about how to talk, write, and act, contradicts their most cherished value, they recoil from such groups and affiliations and reassert their individuality in a kind of ongoing dialectic. If your guiding mandate is to resist habits, conformity, and stasis, you may realize that intense friendships within a vanguard coterie, with a group of fellow “street musicians,” can quickly instill brand-new stultifying habits and types of conformity. In the midst of the odd cultural atmosphere of the Cold War years, this enduring problem resurfaces with new urgency. For American avant-gardists who are constantly aware of the conflict between autonomy and assimilation, an almost compulsive fascination with questions of conformity, friendship, and selfhood becomes the engine driving their writings. Throughout this book, I have stressed that close attention to this colloquy about friendship and individualism can offer us a valuable key for reinterpreting American poetry at its most innovative and distinctive. Despite much fashionable discussion of the death of the author and the demise of the human subject, one still finds within contemporary American poetry and culture the persistent lure of individualism and autonomy, alongside continuing worries about the dangers and comforts of conformity and group-think, the perennial urge to probe and represent (rather than to simply “decenter”) personal subjectivity, and the desire to use poetry to explore the enigma of friendship among human selves—and this study has highlighted rather than skirted the presence of such concerns in our poetry. Postmodernism’s “decentering” of the author and the subject hasn’t made it any

Conclusion 283 easier to figure out the relationship between self and other, between the individual and the groups that the individual inevitably belongs to, nor has it made the problem go away. As I discussed in the introduction, such questions have continued to trouble and inspire more recent American poets, like the members of the avant-garde movement known as Language poetry, who have forcefully taken up the problem faced by every avant-gardist, by every writer: how to avoid appropriation, how to ward off absorption by groups, institutions, and other forces that might reduce one’s ability to change, move, or create freely, while at the same time navigating and feeding off of literary communities and friendships. Although some purists idealistically maintain that the artist must resist all forms of absorption and cooption, others—particularly those who follow in the footsteps of the New American poets I have focused on here—take a more pragmatic approach. To turn to one representative example among many, I would like to briefly consider Charles Bernstein and Language poetry, the most dominant avant-garde poetry movement to come along since the heyday of the various New American Poetry groups and a movement that has overtly struggled with questions of community and individual signature for three decades now. Bernstein, a leading practitioner and theorist of Language writing, is a poet whose work self-consciously builds on the innovations of O’Hara and Ashbery, as well as the entire experimental tradition from Whitman and Mallarmé to Williams, Pound, Stein, Zukofsky, Olson, and the European avant-garde. Echoing the figures in this study, Bernstein promotes the idea that “poetry is aversion of conformity, in pursuit of new forms” (a notion he borrows from Stanley Cavell, with whom he studied philosophy at Harvard), and in this way, he consciously extends the postwar “poetics of turning away” this book has analyzed (Poetics, 2). An inheritor of the Emersonian pragmatist experimental tradition and a major figure in postmodernist poetry, Bernstein exemplifies how the ideas and strategies articulated by the postwar avant-garde poets continue to motivate the most adventurous contemporary writers. Much like Lyn Hejinian, whose attitudes I touched on in the introduction, when Bernstein reflects on the collective emphasis of Language poetry, the movement he helped usher in with a group of like-minded companions in the 1970s, he insists on the importance of productive, collaborative exchanges among friends to the creation of poetry. But he also stresses his own efforts to resist the “closed circle” that can be a by-product of “loyalty” to “old friends” (My Way, 251). He struggles instead to cultivate “affinities” while resisting any and all “unities” (116). It is an admittedly tricky task that Bernstein lays out, but it is one that echoes the conflict I have traced throughout this book, in which poets strive to sustain and write about friendships and communities without ever reifying or cementing them into place: “The point is to pursue the collective and dialogic nature of poetry without necessarily defining the nature of this collectivity—call it a virtual collectivity or, to appropriate Stanley Cavell’s phrase for Emersonian moral per-

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fectionism, ‘this new yet unapproachable America’: this unrepresentable yet ever presenting collectivity” (116). Like Emerson and James and his own poetic predecessors, Bernstein is extremely sensitive to the problems and pitfalls of defining identity in the context of the communities, friendships, and group affiliations in which any self is situated. For Bernstein, it is actually one of poetry’s primary tasks to assess and probe the social, rather than leaving such matters to the realm of the novel: in other words, it is poetry’s job to try to help us understand the self ’s navigation of social universes, to critique the individual’s relationship to institutions, and to examine and sometimes to resist the various forms of assimilation that press in upon us at every moment of our lives. In an essay, he insists, “Poetry, at its most active, can investigate the constitution of persons as much as groups; it explores identity rather than fixing it” (My Way, 65). With his belief that “poetry provides a way for dealing with inside and outside—with membership in groups,” Bernstein seems to have absorbed the predecessors I have examined here, who so frequently use poetry in precisely this manner (Interview). Much like Emerson, the pragmatists, and the poets I have discussed, Bernstein never denies that the self is socially indebted and compromised and never idealizes an impossible autonomy from other people or institutions: “There are so many kinds of assimilation. Assimilation is everywhere—poetry is a way of investigating processes of assimilation from the inside: for example, being American, being alive. The only unassimilated poet is the dead poet who never wrote anything” (Interview). As we have seen, in the hands of the American avant-garde from Ashbery to Bernstein, poetry becomes an ideal space in which to contemplate such issues, and to contest, subvert, question, and performatively challenge fixities of self, pair, and community. In his provocative, deeply Emersonian book My Way, Bernstein points to the vital afterlife of the dilemmas I have discussed here: In the 1990s, the problems of group affiliation (the neolyric “we”) pose as much a problem for poetry as do assertions of the Individual Voice (the lyric “I”). If poems can’t speak directly for an author, neither can they speak directly for a group. Just as poetry may wish to question the authorial voice, it also may wish to question all forms of group affiliation—national, state, linguistic, ethnic, and indeed, aesthetic. Each poem speaks not only many voices but also many groups and poetry can investigate the construction of these provisional entities in and through and by language. (8–9)

In an epigram that may have pleased Emerson himself, Bernstein encapsulates the core dilemma, the aporia, that so many of the strongest, most influential works by Ashbery, Baraka, and O’Hara enact: “If individual identity is a false front, group identity is a false fort” (My Way, 9). This book has examined how invested postwar avant-garde poetry is in precisely these sort of paradoxes, as poems by O’Hara or Ashbery or Baraka again

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and again challenge and probe definitions of self and group—and especially that form of affiliation closest to home, friendship. Understanding this effort can help us see how and why Bernstein and his fellow Language poets have so deliberately taken up this project: “I participate in many aspects of institutional and group identity,” he says, “and I try to open up, redefine, and reconceptualize those definitions” through writing (Epstein, “Verse,” 53). “I consider my work as being about conflict,” he explains, “about ambivalence, and assimilation, and resistance to assimilation” (Interview). I mean to suggest that on some level, Bernstein and his postmodernist peers adapt the impetus for this project—this vision of poetry as a continual turning away from and return to group affiliations and assimilation—from the experimental poetics of O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka and their contemporaries. The postwar avant-garde New American Poetry and the various tributaries that flow from it, among them Language poetry, establish poetry as a unique forum in which to negotiate the paradoxes of affiliation, assimilation, friendship, and personal autonomy. In fact their writing is, as Bernstein suggests regarding his own work, about such conflict. Since the poetry itself never forgets this deeply American triggering problem, neither should we as readers. By continuously confronting in memorable words and metaphors its philosophical, psychological, social, and poetic quandaries, postwar American poetry demonstrates that friendship is surely one of the most curious of human phenomena, one that Emerson rightly calls a “paradox in nature” (EL, 351). From the nineteenth century to the present moment, some of the most vibrant, most enduring American writing has attempted to shed light on this infinitely rich relation, this knotty oxymoron so central to our cultural narratives, our literature, and our lives.

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NOTES

Introduction 1. For examples of this kind of biographical, anecdotal approach to literary friendship, see David Laskin, A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence (1994), which discusses the mixture of affinity and rivalry in the friendships between Melville and Hawthorne, Henry James and Edith Wharton, Katharine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop; and Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854–1967 (2004). Cohen’s book is an unusual mix of biography, dramatized anecdote, and novelistic speculation that enthusiastically presents, and imagines, encounters between 30 different writers and artists, ranging from William Dean Howells and Henry James, to Gertrude Stein and William James, to Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, as it celebrates (rather than analyzes) the essential role such collisions have played in the course of American literature and art. 2. Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry was the earliest and most important gathering of the anti-academic, avant-garde poetry that emerged in the postwar period. Allen grouped the poets into loosely defined and somewhat arbitrary camps: the Black Mountain poets, the San Francisco Renaissance poets, the Beats, the New York Poets (in which Allen included O’Hara and Ashbery), and a cluster of writers who fit in multiple groups (one of whom was Baraka).The name, which was further solidified by a second anthology of prose writings, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, is still used to refer to the diverse experimental poets of the 1950s and 1960s who grew out of the Whitman/Pound/Williams/ Stein/Dada/surrealism traditions. I will use the name throughout this study in that sense. For a particularly helpful and well-researched essay on the context from which The New American Poetry arose—Donald Allen’s editorial decisions, the literary politics of the era, the diverse voices and rivalries within and among poetic communities—see Alan Golding, “The New American Poetry Revisited, Again.” Golding’s essay stresses the epoch-shap-

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ing power of this anthology, arguing that it “helped promote and canonize ideas of field composition based on Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’; a (re)definition of poetic form as immanent and processual; a poetics of dailiness and of the personal (as distinct from the confessional); and a poetry of humor and play (as distinct from wit)” (180–181). 3. Although Allen himself noted the limitations of his own categories (“Occasionally arbitrary and for the most part more historical than actual, these groups can be justified finally only as a means to give the reader some sense of milieu”) (xiii), the anthology’s groupings have had what Alan Golding calls a “central place in most readings or structurings of postwar literary history” (180). For a few symptomatic examples of anthologies and literary histories that decide to rely on these categories in order (in the words of Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury) “to give some shape to the abundance of poetic output during the postwar years” (412), see the introduction to the new edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramanzani, Richard Ellman, and Robert O’Clair (xlviii–lv); the introduction to Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology; Ruland and Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, 394–416 (in its section on post–World War II poetry, the authors write, “We can speak of three more or less coherent schools”: Beat, Black Mountain, and the New York School (412); Richard J. Gray’s American Poetry of the Twentieth-Century Poetry; and David Perkins’s A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (although Perkins’s explanation of his decision to treat Ashbery in a chapter separate from the New York School—“though Ashbery was initially associated with this group, his achievement completely transcends this early identification”—would seem to suggest the impact of Bloom’s excision of Ashbery from his erstwhile community). One might also consider the structure of James Breslin’s landmark study From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945–1965; as he explains, “In subsequent chapters I select one figure from each of the major clusters of poets that emerged in the late fifties: Ginsberg from the Beats, Lowell from the Confessional poets, Levertov from the Black Mountain group, Wright from the Deep Image, and O’Hara from the New York School” (xv). Though Breslin’s 1984 study is certainly still one of the finest accounts of postwar poetry, it both reinforces these categories and, in effect, divorces his chosen poets from the actual context and exchange that each of these communities may have provided for their work. 4. Although the secondary literature on the Beat Generation is extensive, much of it has taken the form of biographical, anecdotal portraiture of a colorful community. A by no means exhaustive list would include The Birth of the Beat Generation, by Steven Watson; This is the Beat Generation, by James Campbell; The Beat Hotel, by Barry Miles; Naked Angels:The Lives and Literature of the Beat Generation, by John Tytell; the collection of essays in Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture, edited by Holly GeorgeWarren; Women of the Beat Generation, by Brenda Knight; and the many books of Ann Charters, including Beats and Company: A Portrait of A Literary Generation and Beat Down to Your Soul. Among the slew of biographies of central members, see Michael Schumacher’s Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg; Dennis McNally’s Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America; and Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee’s Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. For memoirs by long-suffering women who hovered on the fringes of the community, see Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters and Carolyn Cassady’s Off the Road. 5. The most comprehensive group portrait of the New York School poets to date is David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (1998). The first book-length critical study to address itself to the New York School as a phe-

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nomenon is Geoff Ward’s 1993 book, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School of Poets. For other criticism concerned with this “school” as a whole, see the essay collection The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets, edited by Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller; Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s, which focuses primarily on the second-generation of poets who followed in the footsteps of the original poets; and William Watkin’s In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde.To get a sense of the New York School’s social and artistic milieu, see Marjorie Perloff ’s pioneering study Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters; the memoirs and other materials collected in Homage to Frank O’Hara, edited by Bill Berkson and Joseph LeSueur; Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Hara, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara; Joseph LeSueur’s unusual memoir and commentary, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara; John Gruen’s reminscence of the 1950s, The Party’s Over; and Stephen Clay and Rodney Phillips’s exhaustive documentation of the small-press publishing scene from 1960 to 1980, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. For the Abstract Expressionists as a group, see Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning. 6. Koch’s poem “Fate” appears in the book The Burning Mystery of Anna (11–14), and “A Time Zone” appears in One Train (22–30). 7. It should be mentioned that Lehman’s invaluable, popularizing account of these poets is intended to be more of an introductory cultural history than a work of literary criticism for specialists. 8. I have benefited from a number of such recent critical studies that stress avant-garde community formation, seek to construct institutional histories, and examine twentiethcentury poetry’s relationship to material culture, institutional dynamics, and the “social,” including Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic; Michael Davidson’s San Francisco Renaissance and Guys Like Us; Libbie Rifkin’s Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde; Terence Diggory’s “Community” (a perceptive essay on the New York School poets’ concept of community that has been particularly useful for my understanding of this issue); Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome and his essay “Angel Hair Magazine, the Second Generation New York School, and the Poetics of Sociability” (both of which offer literary histories of the Lower East Side avant-garde poetry scene in the 1960s that highlight processes of community formation and poetry as a social form); Reva Wolf ’s Andy Warhol (which looks at the role of poetry and gossip in the formation of avant-garde community); Beret Strong’s Poetic Avant-Garde; Stephen Clay and Rodney Phillip’s Secret Location on the Lower East Side; Lytle Shaw’s “On Coterie”; Gerald L. Bruns’s “Poetic Communities”; and Oren Izenberg’s “Language Poetry and Collective Life” (which examines this latter-day avant-garde movement as a self-described “social enterprise”) (133). For an early example of this interest in examining community formation, see Martin Duberman’s excellent cultural history of Black Mountain College. There have been several studies that look closely and rigorously at the friendship between pairs of modern poets, like The Web of Friendship: Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens by Robin G. Schulze (1995) and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore:The Psychodynamics of Creativity by Joanne Feit Diehl (1993). For an essay on Shelley and Keats that highlights the problems of friendship and influence, see my article “‘Flowers That Mock the Corse Beneath’: Shelley’s Adonais, Keats, and Poetic Influence,” which discusses the ambivalent relationship between Shelley and Keats, especially as it manifests itself in Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Adonais. 9. For example, Michael Davidson argues that Jack Spicer’s work seeks “to enforce solidarity among a small group of adepts” (Guys, 45); David Herd argues that one of the primary functions of collaboration for the New York School poets is to be “the means by

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which this small, unknown, secretive group held itself together,” the medium “by which a group of marginalized poets must necessarily strengthen their identity” (John Ashbery, 67); and Daniel Kane is interested in “framing poetry as a communal effort,” examining “the poetry reading as a staging ground for an alternative community,” and so on (All Poets xiv–xv). 10. I will touch on this again in chapter 3, but Davidson’s critique in Guys Like Us of the “compulsory homosociality,” misogyny, insularity, macho posturing, and homophobia of postwar avant-garde communities does not really apply to the New York School poets, who were considerably more progressive and egalitarian in their attitudes toward women, much less interested in striking tough-guy stances, more willing to act campy and “queer,” and considerably less hierarchical and exclusive than their compeers. This is perhaps why Davidson’s argument centers on the Black Mountain, Beat, and San Francisco communities and largely omits the New York School group. 11. Quotations from O’Hara’s unpublished correspondence are taken from the typescript of a large selection of his letters archived at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. 12. Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (1997) participates in a recent trend in which some critical theorists have turned their attention to theorizing friendship and the philosophical problems it raises. See also South Atlantic Quarterly’s 1998 special issue titled “Friendship,” edited by Peter Murphy, and the special issue of Critical Inquiry titled “Intimacy,” edited by Lauren Berlant, also from 1998. Derrida takes as his starting point the paradoxical phrase “O my friends, there is no friend,” which Montaigne used and Aristotle was said to have originated, and which was later repeated (and inverted) by Nietzsche and others. His own text relentlessly probes the contradictions of friendship, the aporia at the heart of fraternity as a concept. Derrida’s sense of the paradoxes of friendship and his deconstruction of the “friend/enemy” binary (the enemy, he says, “had to be waiting, lurking close by, in the familiarity of my own family, in my own home, at the heart of resemblance and affinity”—so similar to Emerson’s notion of friend as a “beautiful enemy”) has informed my thinking (172). 13. Kenneth Koch’s letters to John Ashbery can be found in the Ashbery Archives, AM6, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 14. Ashbery’s 1998 poem “The Friend at Midnight” seems to allude to the parable about prayer and persistence that Jesus tells in Luke 11, where “the friend who came at midnight” knocks on the door in need of bread, a tale which Jesus uses to illustrate the concept that “ask and it shall be given to you, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened to you,” a sentiment Ashbery subverts in his riff on this passage (Wakefulness, 29). 15. In his Autobiography, Baraka recalls learning of the work of Berrigan and Lorenzo Thomas (the African-American poet associated with both the Umbra group and the second-generation New York School): “[Thomas’s] work appeared about the same time that Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard, the Oklahoma free association semi-surrealists began to appear. I was especially impressed by Thomas and Berrigan, and very curious about Thomas because he was black” (A, 268). Baraka dedicated a celebratory poem titled “The Rare Birds” to Ted Berrigan, in which he connects his fellow New York poet to other “rare birds” who “brook no obscurity, merely plunging deeper / for light,” and he fills the poem with symbols of artistic independence and courage like Charlie Parker, Langston Hughes, Pablo Picasso, William Carlos Williams, John Coltrane, and, implicitly Berrigan himself (Waldman, 174). The poem appears in Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan. There is no reference to the poem’s date of composition, but given the sharp break between Baraka and his white friends and their poetry in about 1965 and the timing of

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Berrigan’s emergence as a poet in New York, one would assume the poem dates from roughly 1963–1964. 16. Some important exceptions to the general neglect of such overlapping territories can be found in the critical works of Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Nathaniel Mackey. In addition to Nielsen’s book Writing Between the Lines, see his Black Chant, which admirably recovers an extensive postwar African-American poetic avant-garde that existed side by side with and was intertwined with the New American Poetry, and Integral Music, which continues this project and further advances the argument that “critics and historians, even historians of the community Baraka describes [of New American poets], have proven unwilling to acknowledge the significance of what must be seen in retrospect as America’s first racially integrated avant-garde” (Integral, 118). See also Mackey’s Discrepant Engagement, which rejects rigid categories and rubrics of recent literary history and deliberately places writers from across racial and cultural boundaries in dialogue with one another—most centrally AfricanAmerican writers (including Baraka), white projectivist poets, and Caribbean writers. 17. Although little has been written on the subject within the rather extensive body of criticism on Language poetry, it is not hard to detect the pragmatist orientation of poets like Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian. For example, Bernstein’s poetry and prose are clearly indebted to an Emersonian pragmatist outlook, not least in his frequent recourse to the ideas of one of his former teachers, philosopher Stanley Cavell (one of the foremost exponents of this strain of American philosophy), or his recurring references to Emerson, Thoreau, and so on. Similarly, Hejinian’s collection of critical writings, The Language of Inquiry, is written overtly under the sign of William James’s pragmatism, and is studded throughout with references to James, pluralism, pragmatism, radical empiricism, and Emerson’s essays. For a recent critical account of the idea of “the social” within Language writing’s poetics and its poems, see Oren Izenberg, who argues that Language poetry’s “disparity between theory and practice—between imagined and actual forms of collectivity—arises from a pair of contradictory commitments: to a radical concept of freedom on the one hand and to a repressive hypothesis of cultural determinism on the other” (134). One of the major points of Izenberg’s essay is to describe how it is impossible for Language poets to imagine and construct “a nonparodic version of collectivity in the wake of the fall of historical communism” (149). 18. A version of this formulation appears in the poem “How Hard It Is to Keep From Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation”: “the only certain freedom’s in departure” (Poetry and Prose, 424). Later, in the essay “On Emerson,” Frost declares, “I am on record as saying freedom is nothing but departure” (863) 19. Dickstein’s evaluation of pragmatism as a more constructive alternative to modernist pessimism and postmodernist nihilism is typical. See also Poirier, Renewal, 16–17, and “Modernism and Its Difficulties,” 95–113; and Ihab Hassan, “Making Sense,” in which he writes that pragmatism is a “balm to the crisis of postmodern discourse, balm enough,” and states that “I believe American Pragmatism offers us now genuine possibilities of thought and action. For it cheerfully avoids the extremes of philosophical skepticism and ideological dogmatism” (208).

Chapter 1 1. For a prominent example of this sort of assessment of American poetry, see Roy Harvey Pearce’s landmark 1961 study, The Continuity of American Poetry, which argues that our poetic tradition has always been defined by an antinomian, “Adamic” spirit that

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sees the poet as a “simple, separate person” writing “a poetry of the self ” (187, 137, 140, and passim). 2. For more on Goodman as a pragmatist, “whose aesthetic philosophy is centered around an insistence that speech ‘is itself a practical event,’” and on this particular essay “as an attempt to explain American advanced-guard writing via the lexicon of pragmatism,” see Michael Magee (Emancipating, 135ff). 3. Diggory points out that “this gesture implies the erotic dimension of community that is never far from the surface of Goodman’s writing” (“Community,” 18). For more on Goodman’s bisexuality, see Joe LeSueur’s extensive discussion of his own life-changing relationship with Goodman, in the context of O’Hara (Digressions, 5–19). O’Hara’s “brief, abortive friendship” (19) with Goodman is described on 117–121. For an account of the role Goodman’s sexuality played in his troubled experiences as a teacher at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1950, see Duberman, Black, 347–351. 4. These critics have recently hailed the importance of Goodman’s essay to O’Hara’s poetry, especially as it pertains to avant-garde community, the addressing of friends by name, and occasional poetry of the everyday. For example, see Brad Gooch’s discussion of O’Hara’s admiration for Goodman’s poetry and his excited response to this essay (City, 186–188) and Terence Diggory’s provocative reading of the Goodman essay and its influence on O’Hara; Diggory usefully observes that the Goodman essay’s insistence on the avant-garde as an alternative to an alienating society “sets O’Hara’s practice in a specific political context,” and he notes that “keeping Goodman in mind, as O’Hara vowed to do, helps us to see O’Hara’s pursuit of ‘intimate community’ not only in his poetry but in a variety of social experiments in which he participated after moving to New York” (“Community,” 18). Diggory goes on to contrast Goodman’s theory of community with Jean-Luc Nancy’s approach in The Inoperative Community in order to “locate the point at which O’Hara departs from Goodman” (17). Also, see Michael Magee’s enlightening discussion of Goodman’s influence on O’Hara in Emancipating Pragmatism (esp. 134–142), in which he argues that “Goodman stands alongside Stein and Williams as one of the most pervasive influences on O’Hara’s poetic method—indeed Goodman’s role in O’Hara’s development as a pragmatist may be paramount” (135). Also, it is perhaps worth mentioning that O’Hara’s enthusiastic endorsement of the essay to Jane Freilicher, one of his closest friends at the time, suggests that he, at least (like the other New York School poets) does not fall prey to the emphasis on the homosocial aspect of avant-garde community, the tendency that is so central to Michael Davidson’s critique of the avant-garde’s reliance on misogynistic and sexist male bonding in Guys Like Us. 5. Some recent criticism has also pointed to the importance of Goodman’s essay to writers beyond O’Hara, like Ashbery, Olson, and the New American Poetry in general. For example, see David Herd on Goodman’s influence on Ashbery’s “occasional” aesthetic (John Ashbery, 53–55); Libbie Rifkin on postwar avant-garde community formation, Charles Olson, and Goodman’s essay (29–30); and Alan Golding on the connections between the Goodman piece, Olson, and the communal project behind Origin magazine (Outlaw, 122–123). 6. As David Herd notes: “Locus Solus was the only publishing venture to carry the poets’ collective imprimatur. Part of its purpose, accordingly, and within the bounds of an aesthetic that aimed to resist all conventions of style, was to identify and distinguish the New York School. As [James] Schuyler put it in a letter to Chester Kallman: ‘I and “others” (it is a deep secret; the other is John Ashbery) are invisibly editing an anthology-magazine. . . . Part of its unstated objective is as a riposte at The New American Poetry, which has so thoroughly misrepresented so many of us—not completely, but the implications of context are rather overwhelming” (John Ashbery, 52).

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7. See also Pierre Bourdieu, who traces the origins of the avant-garde to nineteenthcentury France and figures like Duranty and Champfleury, who conceive “literary activity as engagement and collective action, founded on regular meetings, slogans, and programmes” (Rules, 91); he discusses more generally the “the process of constitution and dissolution of avant-garde groups,” noting that “avant-garde positions, which are defined mainly negatively, in opposition to the dominant positions, bring together for a while (in the phase of the initial accumulation of symbolic capital) writers and artists who are very different in their origins and their dispositions and whose interests, momentarily coming together, will later start to diverge” (267). 8. Although Davidson’s analysis of these groups is acute and revealing, it does not fit the very different dynamics of the New York School poets, who, like those in the Spicer circle, were mostly gay. The central male New York School poets (here I am thinking of O’Hara, Ashbery, Schuyler, and to a lesser extent Koch) avoided the macho posturing of Spicer et al. (as when O’Hara writes, “I was made in the image of a sissy truck-driver” [338]) and maintained close, respectful friendships with women, treating them as (at least near) equals, and lavished attention on women painters and writers at a time when the other groups of the New American Poetry were comparatively neanderthal-like in their attitudes about gender. For this reason, Davidson’s central argument that homosociality serves merely to reinforce masculine, sexist interests within postwar American poetry cannot really account for the New York poets’ attitudes toward community, friendship, and gender, which may be why the New York School does not really figure in his critique. 9. For more on collaborations within the New York School milieu, see Perloff ’s chapter on O’Hara and painters (Frank, 75–112); Russell Ferguson’s In Memory of My Feelings (passim); Herd’s chapter, “The Art of Life: Collaboration and the New York School” (John Ashbery, 52–68); and Kane’s All Poets and “Angel Hair.” 10. Koestenbaum focuses on the paradoxes created by the blurring of identities and languages in collaborative writing, and discusses the phenomenon of “double talk”—the “evasive and ambiguous language” at work in collaborations between men. His overall theoretical argument about “the erotics of male literary collaboration” emphasizes how (nominally straight) men writing together use collaboration to “express homoeroticism and then strive to conceal it” (Double, 3). Also, see Arthur Danto’s remarks on Kenneth Koch’s joint works: “a strategy of self-discovery, like making love” in which “identities are enhanced,” where “our selves . . . are part of what we hope to find in the process of making the work” (“Koch,” n.p.). See also Ron Padgett’s comments on his New York School collaborations: collaboration, he says, “showed me . . . that a poem can have more than one voice in it and still not fly apart, that when it’s going well the two voices actually create a third voice, maybe even a fourth or fifth. I liked the sense of multiplicity, possibility, depth, and range that collaboration suggested” (qtd. Eshelman, “Padgett,” 17). 11. For a slightly dissenting view on the centrality of collaboration to the poetry of the New York School’s first generation, see Daniel Kane’s essay “Angel Hair Magazine.” Kane offers an interesting contrast between the kinds of collaboration engaged in by the pioneering New York School poets like O’Hara and Ashbery versus that of their followers (such as Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman) in the second generation, who seem to have taken the collaborative aesthetic much further and felt considerably less uneasy about it than did their forebears. He makes the useful point that for all the attention given to collaboration in discussions of O’Hara, Ashbery, et al., “the collaborative poem rarely makes an appearance in books of the period. . . . [I]nstead we read about them in David Lehman’s literary-biographical account of the New York school, or we hear stories about them during conversations with other poetry fans. Poetry collabo-

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rations . . . are important to the first-generation grouping more as an idea and a legend than as an accessible literary commodity. Compare this to second-generation work of the sixties and early seventies, which produced literally hundreds of collaborative poems and dozens of collaborative books. While the difference here is in terms of scale, the scale is so extreme that one recognizes a shift in aesthetics” (351). He also draws distinctions between the forms of collaboration undertaken by second-generation New York School poets with their contemporaries within the Language poetry community. 12. The letter was written 26 November 1954, and it can be found in the Koch archives, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 13. For one version of the lyrics to “Frankie and Johnny,” see Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay, eds., The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 48. 14. See also “An Interview in Warsaw” (1980), in which the interviewer says to Ashbery: “For some time you were all considered almost one poet, and only later on people began to distinguish your voices from each other. . . . Was it a sudden thing that your voice became recognized as separate?” (297, 299). 15. See, for example, William E. Leuchtenburg, A Troubled Feast: American Society since 1945; Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War; Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980, 119–30; Morris Dickstein, Leopards in the Temple; and Lary May, ed., Recasting America, a collection of essays on Cold War culture. 16. Andrew Ross ably demonstrates the insidious nature of the containment model in his chapter on “Containing Culture in the Cold War”: “Kennan’s analysis is much more like a prescription for domestic than foreign policy. In fact, it anticipates, if it doesn’t exactly advocate, the Red scare that generated much of the postwar hysteria about aliens, bugs, pods, microbes, germs, and other demonologies of the Other that pervaded the culture and politics of the Fifties” (47). See also Michael Davidson’s useful discussion of this “politics of containment” and its effects on poetry of the 1950s. Following Nadel and Ross, Davidson draws attention to “the constitutive relationship between containment as it was theorized on a geopolitical level and as it was enacted on the domestic front” (Guys, 55). Similarly, Ann Douglas insists on the “correlation between national policies and individual psyches,” arguing that “such policies sooner or later affect every aspect of that society’s cultural activity. If one remembers that the U.S. government stepped up surveillance of its citizens to unprecedented levels in the 1940s and early 1950s; that for the first time, it compiled psychological dossiers on everyone inducted into its military forces . . . that federal housing agencies were making maps of every neighborhood in the United States, ranking each according to its racial/ethnic homogeneity, social stability, and earning potential, and granting federal funds accordingly; that the nation was tightening its drug laws and defining a host of beliefs and activities, notably communism and homosexuality, as criminal, even treasonable—with all this in mind, my view of the influence that government policy had in private lives in this era may seem more plausible” (80–81). Douglas’s exhaustive notes also offer a particularly helpful guide to studies of the history, politics, and cultural life of the Cold War era. 17. To read Cold War culture through the framework of containment offers a persuasive model, and it is one that has become widespread. As Deborah Nelson points out in her recent book Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America: “It is currently impossible to talk about cold war culture without employing the word ‘containment.’ . . . [C]ultural historians, many from the field of cultural studies, extended the term to describe the peculiar social formations, aesthetic innovations, and mass cultural inventions of the cold war.” See, for example, Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound, which convincingly lays out the origins and effects of the “domestic version of containment” on women and families in the post-

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war era (14); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture; and Andrew Ross, “Containing Culture in the Cold War.” 18. For example, Lhamon takes issue with the current trend of studies that “show the Cold War determining the epoch” (xi) and refuses to see the 1950s as simply an index of the Cold War against the Soviets, in which paranoia, containment, and Eisenhower conservativism rule the day: “The art forms that emerge in the Fifties, that kick-start the Sixties and remain important a half century later, stem from flows older and deeper than Sputnik or the Red Scare could tap” (xii). Dickstein later makes a very similar argument as he critiques those who have “tried to demonstrate that nearly every cultural phenomenon of those years, from genre films and literary criticism to abstract art, was somehow a reflex of the Cold War, a ‘hegemonic’ expression of the national security state and the containment policy toward international Communism,” because such arguments ignore too many “other influential factors in postwar social life, from the baby boom and economic expansion to the education boom and shifting roles of women, blacks, and ethnic minorities” and overlook much of the turbulence, conflict, and resistance roiling beneath the apparent tranquility of the postwar years (Leopards, 2). 19. For example, the revolutionary new “Action Painting” of Jackson Pollock captured the painter’s spontaneous gestures as he danced above the canvas and splattered skeins of paint, such that the canvas became, as Harold Rosenberg put it, an “arena in which to act” (qtd. Shapiro, Abstract, 76). Similarly, as Eric Lott notes, the improvisatory art of bebop was based on an “aesthetic of speed and displacement—ostentatious virtuosity dedicated to reorienting perception even as it rocked the house. Every instrument became immediately more mobile, everything moved” (“Double V,” 600). The experiments of Ginsberg and Kerouac and their peers followed suit. “One of the most pervasive fictions surrounding the Beat writers is their cult of energy,” Michael Davidson observes, noting their “tendency to exalt the present over the past, action over reflection, movement over stasis” (San Francisco, 63). For an illuminating account of the broad “cultural style” that emerged from the subterranean depths and “cultural gumbo” of the 1950s—devoted to speed, improvisation, the appropriation of black expressive forms, cross-racial conversation, and an antiauthoritarian spirit—which is viewed as an embodiment of the era’s social crises, see W. T. Lhamon’s excellent cultural history of the 1950s, Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s. 20. The charges were dropped after Baraka defended himself before a grand jury. He read “all the good parts of Joyce’s Ulysses and Catullus aloud to the jury and then read Judge Woolsey’s decision on Ulysses,” and insisted on the literary merits of his use of taboo words (A, 251). For accounts of this incident, see Baraka’s Autobiography, 251–252, Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones, 143–144; and Sollors, Amiri Baraka, 100–101, which uses quotes from Village Voice news articles about the raid and the trial. 21. Following Blasing, Terrell Scott Herring reads the “invisibility” and slipperiness of the self in O’Hara as a “strategy,” one that is “a riposte to the pre-Stonewall silencing of homosexuals” (“Frank,” 414). For a more successful, extensive reading of “gay subjectivity” and “camp discourse” in O’Hara’s work, see the chapter “‘Vanilla Hemorraghes’: The Queer Perversities of Frank O’Hara” in Jarraway’s Going the Distance (98–138). Jarraway resists “the temptation to view O’Hara’s queer perversities as an artful dodge in response to a punishingly homophobic period in American history, and the equal temptation to read his at times maddening thematic tendentiousness and frequent stylistic density as the lubriciously transcendent gestures of political and cultural quietism” (123–124). Hazel Smith argues that O’Hara is a poet of “non-essentialist gay identity” who “espouses sexual fluidity rather than sexual transparency” (Hyperscapes, 103, 112). Other readings of O’Hara as a

296 Notes to Pages 45–54 gay poet include Caleb Crain’s “Frank O’Hara’s Fired Self,” Rudy Kikel’s “The Gay Frank O’Hara,” Andrew Ross’s “The Death of Lady Day,” and Mark Goble’s “Our Country’s Black and White Past.” 22. On Ashbery’s “low-key camp” aesthetic, see Silverberg, “Laughter and Uncertainty.” For a helpful, mildly polemical queer reading of Ashbery that takes issue with both Shoptaw’s approach and those critics who would willfully ignore and erase the actual “homosexual content” of Ashbery’s work, see John Vincent (“Reports,” 157). For an overview of O’Hara and Ashbery’s experiences as gay men at Harvard and beyond, see ShandTucci’s Crimson Letter (although nearly all of his material on these two poets is taken from Gooch’s City Poet and Lehman’s Last Avant-Garde. 23. For a useful, nuanced discussion of how American fiction responds to Cold War discourses about conformity, totalitarianism, and nonconformity, see Thomas Schaub’s chapter “Rebel Without a Cause: Norman Mailer’s White Negro and Consensus Liberalism” (137–162), as well as the rest of his American Fiction in the Cold War, a sharp exploration of the complexities of Cold War discursive paradigms, particularly the “new liberalism” of the postwar years and all it entailed, and their relation to literary developments. 24. It is quite telling that a decade later, O’Hara directly echoes the phrasing of this early journal entry. In the poem “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (10 July 1958), O’Hara is visited by the sun, who compliments the poet’s distinctive individuality by saying “You may / not be the greatest thing on earth, but / you’re different.” As the sun continues, he praises O’Hara for his independence and unwillingness to be what Riesman calls “other-directed”:“Now, I’ve heard some / say you’re crazy, they being excessively / calm themselves to my mind, and other / crazy poets think that you’re a boring / reactionary. Not me. / Just keep on / like I do and pay no attention” (CP, 306).

Chapter 2 1. Of the many excellent studies of Emerson and pragmatism and their importance to American literature, a number have been particularly useful to me in this study. These include Richard Poirier’s two groundbreaking studies, The Renewal of Literature and Poetry and Pragmatism, Jonathan Levin’s The Poetics of Transition, and Ross Posnock’s Color and Culture. For studies that examine the links between pragmatism and modernist literature, see note 3 below. 2. Of all the ongoing debates regarding Emerson, one nagging controversy bears mentioning here: the apparent incompatibility between two sides of Emerson—the idealist and the skeptic, the transcendentalist and the pragmatist. Of course, Emerson’s own deeply, intentionally contradictory writings foster such a plurality of interpretations. Although the dichotomous conflict is probably irresolvable, it still results in readings of Emerson and his influence that oppose one another. My own reading favors the more radical, experimental, secular, and skeptical side of Emerson and its legacy, the anti-foundational, proto-pragmatist over the mystical, transcendental, religious sage of Concord, without discounting the importance of the latter. This is not because I think these two strands are so easily disentangled, but because, to my mind, it is the former that has invigorated the American avant-garde poetic tradition. For a particularly nuanced discussion of the complex intertwining, rather than disjuncture, of transcendentalism and pragmatism in Emerson’s thought, and, more broadly, “how pragmatism crucially depends on its latent idealism,” see Levin’s chapter in Poetics of Transition titled “Divine Overflowings: Emerson’s Pragmatic Idealism” (17–44).

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3. For studies that are specifically concerned with charting the connections between Emerson’s and James’s philosophies, see, for example, Poirier’s Renewal of Literature and Poetry and Pragmatism, West’s American Evasion of Philosophy, McDermott’s Streams of Experience, Levin’s Poetics of Transition, and Mitchell’s Individualism and Its Discontents. For studies that take up the relationship between Emersonian pragmatism and literary modernism, see Lentricchia’s Modernist Quartet, Poirier’s Renewal and Poetry, Ruddick’s “Fluid Symbols,” Levin’s Poetics, Mitchell’s Individualism, Wolfe’s Limits, Albrecht’s “Saying Yes,” and Posnock’s “Influence” and Color and Culture, among others. For dissenting views on Emerson’s connection to pragmatism, see Paul Jay’s Contingency Blues, and Stanley Cavell’s “What’s the Use of Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?” Also, see Harold Bloom’s “Grandfather Emerson,” where he takes issue with Poirier’s take on Emerson and emphasizes instead his own sense of Emerson’s transcendentalism rather than his incipient pragmatism. 4.There are several important exceptions to the general critical neglect of the connections between Emersonian pragmatism and contemporary American poetry in general, or the poetry of O’Hara, Ashbery, and Baraka in particular, including Richard Poirier’s “The Scenes of the Self,” a brief yet illuminating 1993 review essay on O’Hara that ostensibly evaluates Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Hara. Poirier implicitly argues for O’Hara’s role in the Emersonian pragmatist tradition he sketches in The Renewal of Literature and Poetry and Pragmatism. (The essay was reprinted as “Reaching Frank O’Hara” in Poirier’s Trying It Out in America). Perhaps the most extensive discussion to date of the relationship between pragmatism and postwar American literature can be found in Michael Magee’s recently published book Emancipating Pragmatism: Emerson, Jazz, and Experimental Writing, which makes a strong case for pragmatism’s influence on postwar writers, including O’Hara, Ralph Ellison, and Robert Duncan. In “Summary of an Imaginary Study of Pluralism” and “Art as Collaboration,” the second-generation New York School poet and critic David Shapiro has suggested some intriguing connections between American pluralism and avant-garde poetry and art. Ross Posnock’s Color and Culture includes the early Baraka in his canon of African-American pragmatist-inspired intellectuals. David Herd’s recent study of Ashbery briefly considers the poet’s debt to Jamesian pragmatism—and even goes so far as to say that James’s “Pragmatism is a guidebook to American poetics before and since itself ”—a claim that supports one of this study’s central premises (John Ashbery, 13). See also David Jarraway’s recently published Going the Distance, which uses pragmatism to frame its argument about subjectivity in “modernist American literature” (within which he includes Frank O’Hara). 5. This is a cardinal, omnipresent theme in Emerson’s writings, but it appears with perhaps the greatest force in “The Method of Nature,” “Intellect,” “Circles,” and “Experience,” all of which can be found in Essays and Lectures. See, for example, the following memorable passages (some of which I shall return to later): “Nothing solid is secure; every thing tilts and rocks” (“Method,” 116); “Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but falsehood . . . . How wearisome the grammarian, the phrenologist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed mortal whose balance is lost by the exaggeration of a single topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also” (“Intellect,” 424); “For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as, for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and hem in the life” (“Circles,” 404); “We need change of objects. Dedication to one thought is quickly odious” (“Experience,” 476). James’s philosophy begins with this Emersonian premise:“Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over

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everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes. ‘Ever not quite’ has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness” (Writings, 806). 6. For a discussion of existentialism’s effects on the postwar avant-garde, see Daniel Belgrad’s The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America, which focuses mostly on de Kooning, Pollock, and Abstract Expressionism. Note, however, that Belgrad begins by pointing out that “existentialism was far less central to the work of the postwar avant-garde than it has made out to be” (104). For accounts of existentialism’s effects on Abstract Expressionism, see Jachec’s “Existentialism in the United States” (in Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 62–104); Ashton’s New York School; and Cotkin’s discussion of Harold Rosenberg in Existential America, 130–133. 7. For a useful primer on existentialism as a school of philosophy, see David E. Cooper’s Existentialism: A Reconstruction. 8. Despite the common refrain that pragmatism was invisible during the postwar reign of existentialism, recent criticism on existentialism has actually looked closely at the affinities and differences between the two philosophical modes. For example, George Cotkin discusses William James (along with Melville, Dickinson, and other American authors) as “existential precursors,” in order to demonstrate that “the history of existential thinking in America began before Sartre first uttered the word ‘existential’” (Existential America, 6). For Cotkin’s discussion of James as a forerunner of existentialism, see pp. 19–22; for his discussion of Hazel Barnes and her attempt to highlight common ground between the two philosophies, see pp. 151–158. Taking up the reception of Sartre within American philosophy, Ann Fulton more fully shows the similarities and differences between existential and pragmatist thought, and argues that “one important channel through which” Sartre’s philosophy was legitimized “was William James’s radical empiricism” (3; see 122–124 for her account of similarities and differences). In her study of The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism, 1940–1960, Nancy Jachec analyzes the complex intersection between existentialism, pragmatism, and Left/liberal politics in postwar thinking. For example, she notes that the painter Robert Motherwell’s “sustained interest in John Dewey, conjoined with his lasting engagement with existentialist thought from 1946 onward, suggest a perceived compatibility from early on between pragmatism and existentialism that would be exploited by most of the independent left by the end of the decade” (38–39). 9. As I mentioned in the introduction, commentators including Poirier, Hassan, Gunn, and Posnock agree with Dickstein that pragmatism offers a more constructive alternative to the pessimism of modernism and the nihilism of postmodernism. For example, Ross Posnock notes that “what is particularly compelling about this world without foundations is James’s insouciant attitude toward it: he describes the ‘radical pragmatist’ as a ‘happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature’ who doesn’t mind the looseness at all” (“Influence,” 325). 10. For a useful account of the standard narrative within professional philosophy about how and why “by the mid-twentieth century, many philosophers in America thought of pragmatism as a movement that had exhausted itself ” (390) because of the popularity of positivism and Anglo-American analytic philosophy, see Richard J. Bernstein, 390–393. See also Cornel West (182–210). 11. Elsewhere, even Menand points out that the “notion that pragmatism was eclipsed by other schools of thought in the twentieth century is also a little misleading,” in part because pragmatism always resisted being turned into a discipline or a “school of thought” (Pragmatism, xxv).

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12. In quite similar fashion, Cornel West makes a strong case for the perseverance of American pragmatism during the Cold War years in his “The Dilemma of the MidCentury Pragmatic Intellectual” (American Evasion, 112–181), which charts the thought of a series of figures he (in some cases, idiosyncratically but often convincingly) identifies as pragmatists: Sidney Hook, C. Wright Mills, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rienhold Niebuhr, Lionel Trilling. West focuses on how these “intellectuals in the pragmatist grain” confronted the postwar “crisis of American pragmatism” which forced them to consider “how to keep alive the intellectual and political possibility of an Emersonian culture of creative democracy in a world of shrinking options” (114, 124). Also see Nancy Jachec for a treatment of postwar intellectual thought that parallels Jumonville’s. Jachec is highly sensitive to the intertwining of the pragmatism of Dewey and James with other commitments, including existentialism, in the writings of New York intellectuals, leftist and liberal thinkers, interpreters of Abstract Expressionism, and painters, and she is especially attuned to the Cold War political contexts in which such allegiances were performed. 13. Although George Cotkin also writes that “pragmatism was essentially moribund” in the postwar years, killed off by analytic philosophy, he usefully (and somewhat surprisingly) argues that “the introduction of French existentialism, with the help of [Hazel] Barnes’ efforts [to connect existentialism with pragmatism], helped pragmatism to make a comeback” (Existential America, 154). 14. Ashbery has acknowledged his familiarity with Western philosophy and with James in particular. When Mark Ford asked Ashbery in a recent interview “Did you read philosophy ever?” he answered “I read philosophy that is close to poetry: Plato, Epictetus, Montaigne, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, William James. Wittgenstein a little. Not Spinoza, Hume or Kant” (John Ashbery in Conversation with Mark Ford 60). David Herd, one of the few critics to have examined Ashbery’s debt to pragmatism, points out that “My Philosophy of Life,” with its reference to James, demonstrates that “Ashbery has of late given considerable energy to drawing the reader’s attention to the origins and fundamentals of his writing” (John, 215). In an intriguing footnote to his introduction to pragmatism, Morris Dickstein connects the familiar idea that pragmatism is a “way out of the cul-de-sac of theory” with this particular poem, when he mentions that “John Ashbery develops a philosophy for living without philosophy in an amusing but serious poem, ‘My Philosophy of Life’” (Revival, 15, 18 n. 22). As I will suggest in my discussion of his poem “The System” in chapter 4, Ashbery is fond of playing coyly with his interest in pragmatism, hinting here and there about its influence while downplaying his own understanding and knowledge of philosophy proper. In another recent poem, “Memories of Imperialism,” he playfully blurs the identity of philosopher John Dewey with Admiral George Dewey, who led the U.S. forces at Manila Bay in the Spanish-American War, and Melvil Dewey, the founder of the Dewey Decimal System. Though all this is performed with faux naiveté for great comic effect, Ashbery again seems to be both hinting at and deflecting the seriousness of his interest in pragmatist philosophy (Your Name Here, 34–35). 15. For example, Frank O’Hara was exposed to both Whitman’s poetry and Emerson’s thought at an early, particularly formative moment in his poetic evolution. For his eighteenth birthday, his parents gave him a copy of Leaves of Grass, and later that year, his favorite aunt, Margaret, gave him Emerson’s Selected Essays. As Brad Gooch notes, while O’Hara was in the South Pacific with the Navy, he immersed himself in reading Emerson, which gave the young, remarkably precocious O’Hara confidence in “voicing his opinions, even if they sounded reckless” (79). Apparently, Emerson made quite an impression on the eighteen-year-old O’Hara: in a letter to his parents, he wrote that “Emerson says something to the effect that ‘I have no patience with consistency. Only a stupid man is consistent”

300 Notes to Page 62 (21 Feb. 1945, Gooch, City Poet, 79). Ashbery has also referred to his great appreciation for Emerson. In a 1980 interview, Ashbery explained that he is “a very scattered, disorganized kind of person,” but that he “felt very much confirmed in my careless ways by this quotation by Emerson that I read recently. It’s something like ‘a man should have aunts and cousins, should have a barn and a woodshed, should buy turnips and potatoes, should saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.’ Emerson is really an extraordinary writer” (Sommer, “An Interview in Warsaw,” 303–304). 16. As David Bergman observes: “Today [Matthiessen] is regarded as the most influential writer on American culture of the 1930s and 1940s. As a teacher at Harvard, he personally influenced an entire generation of students and scholars” (“Matthiessen,” 62). Matthiessen specialized in the American tradition stretching from Emerson through the Jameses to the modern poetry of Eliot and Stevens and was an expert on pragmatism, having published his book The James Family (1947) while O’Hara and Ashbery were at Harvard. The American Renaissance (1941), his massive study of nineteenth-century literature, did much to crystallize the critical consensus about the innovative, distinctive genius of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman. Ashbery studied “Twentieth Century American Poetry,” and particularly Wallace Stevens, with Matthiessen and wrote a long paper for him about Stevens’s “Chocurura to Its Neighbor” (Gooch, City Poet, 137, Shoptaw, On the Outside, 35). Ashbery has recalled that Matthiessen introduced him to the work of Wallace Stevens, the poet who, by most accounts, would become his greatest poetic influence: “I also had a modern poetry class from F. O. Matthiessen, which is where I really began to read Wallace Stevens” (“Art of Poetry,” 42). Apparently, O’Hara also came into the professor’s orbit: as a student, he sent a letter to Matthiessen expressing his support for the professor’s campaigning efforts on behalf of the progressive presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948. Matthiessen reacted with gratitude, replying, “Your letter came at a time when I happened to need that kind of heartening” (Gooch, City Poet, 129). Matthiessen was also homosexual and politically radical, which may have made him even more of an admired mentor for the young poets. Unfortunately, Matthiessen, and the political reaction to these facets of his life, came to symbolize the repressive atmosphere of the early Cold War years. After having been called before the House Un-American Affairs Committee at the zenith of the McCarthy hysteria, Matthiessen jumped to his death in Boston in April 1950, just months before O’Hara graduated from college. For more on this tragic episode in light of Cold War homophobia and politics, see Bergman’s “Matthiessen”; on Ashbery’s poem “Illustration” and Matthiessen, see Shoptaw, On the Outside, 35. 17. Michael Magee maps out some of the contours of this heritage in his argument that O’Hara should be read as a pragmatist, emphasizing his connections to the pragmatist poetics of Stein, Williams, Paul Goodman, and, ultimately, jazz. See “Tribes of New York.” 18. Whitehead, though no card-carrying pragmatist, greatly admired James, and his philosophy of “process” and empiricism was an extremely important influence on the theoretical underpinnings of postwar avant-garde art, especially for the Abstract Expressionist painters (such as Robert Motherwell), for Williams’s notion of the “poem as a field of action,” and for Charles Olson’s development of the kinetic “composition by field.” On Whitehead’s influence on the Abstract Expressionists, Williams, and Olson, see Belgrad (120–141). O’Hara’s familiarity with the Harvard philosopher is suggested by one of his early poems, “A Pleasant Thought from Whitehead” (CP, 23); see Perloff for a brief discussion of the connections between the poem and Whitehead’s thought (O’Hara, 55–56). 19. For more on The Club and O’Hara’s participation with the Abstract Expressionists at discussions and events held there, see Gooch (City Poet, 214–217) and Perloff (O’Hara,

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58–59). For his relationships with painters more broadly, see Perloff ’s Frank O’Hara, in which O’Hara’s “Gods” are said to include “Pollock, Kline, and Motherwell” (85). 20. Gooch discusses O’Hara’s relationship with Motherwell, which was somewhat controversial among his friends, on 445–447. He mentions that “O’Hara had first met Motherwell in East Hampton in 1952. Whenever they talked, their talk was intellectual” (446). O’Hara wrote two substantial pieces of prose on the painter’s work, the catalog essay for the large exhibit of Motherwell’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (reprinted as “Robert Motherwell” in AC, 65–79, and published as a book in 1965) and “The Grand Manner of Motherwell” (SS, 174–179). Gooch also mentions O’Hara’s friendship with Barnett Newman on 379. 21. I am indebted to Michael Magee for bringing to my attention Robert Duncan’s explicit interest in Emerson and pragmatism. He argues that “Duncan reads pragmatism as a kind of democratic symbolic action and reads the New American Poetry as a kind of pragmatism” (Emancipating, 138). Although O’Hara and Ashbery cannot really be said to have been influenced by Duncan’s poetry (he and O’Hara had an interesting, tense, and nearly hostile relationship, and it seems that their poetics were developing simultaneously rather than in tandem), Baraka was quite influenced by Duncan’s ideas and his poetry. A fuller study of Duncan’s pragmatist poetics, its differences from O’Hara’s, its mystical stance, and its influence on Baraka would be quite fruitful. 22. See, for example, such ideological critiques of the Emersonian legacy as Christopher Newfield’s 1996 The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America, which argues that Emersonian individualism actually involves the self ’s submission to authoritarian control, conservatism, and corporate capitalism; Cyrus R. K. Patell’s 2001 Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology, which critiques the “official narrative” (“the popular, individualist mythologies”) of American individualism for the way clichés about personal autonomy have effectively obscured the realities of oppression and exclusion in American culture (Patell begins by asserting that the tradition of Emersonian individualism leads straight to Ronald Reagan); and Cary Wolfe’s 1993 The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson, which contends that the liberating potential of Emerson’s individualism is dangerously undermined by its reliance on a logic of private property. For Wolfe as for the others, Emerson’s philosophy founders on its implicit authoritarian tendency, a shortcoming horrifically exemplified for Wolfe in what he argues is the latent Emersonianism in Ezra Pound’s fascism. These are all excellent studies, and there are certainly fascinating arguments to consider regarding links between Emersonian individualism and the language of the marketplace and capitalism (see also Cornel West and Charles Mitchell in this regard), and, more broadly, between “Emersonian liberalism” and Patell’s “official narratives” of American culture. However, I will be concerned with what the later poets take from the rich and contradictory tradition of Emersonian individualism, rather than its appropriation as a simplified doctrine by the culture at large. In other words, the poets themselves do not naively adopt the narrow individualism familiar from clichés about America—although, as I will argue, they continually contemplate both the heroic and dismaying aspects of self-reliance—but rather they take on a more nuanced vision of what individualism, and the “self ” in self-reliance, might mean. For an argument that parallels my own, see James Albrecht’s claim that Ralph Ellison “rejects canonical Emersonianism, as well as the political blindnesses commonly associated with it, in order to appropriate the ethical possibilities of a more pragmatic Emersonian individualism” (“Saying Yes,” 47). 23. For more on the challenge that Emerson offers to conventional notions of individualism, see Robert D. Richardson Jr.’s Emerson, where he discusses Emerson’s “repeated

302 Notes to Pages 66–73 and consistent attack on individualism as commonly understood” (258); Charles Mitchell’s entire study Individualism and Its Discontents; Levin’s Poetics of Transition; and George Kateb’s Inner Ocean, which focuses on “the idea of democratic individuality” that he associates with “its principle theorists,” Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, who “all encourage democratic individuality, not individualism pure and simple” (27, 83). Kateb argues that “the theory of democratic individuality is not to be confused with the theory of possessive individualism” (97). 24. In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand concurs with Wolfe’s assessment: “For there is a division within Emerson’s thought itself. Nothing sounds more uplifting, for example, than Emerson’s key term ‘self-reliance,’ and so it was understood by many of his contemporaries. But the term describes a paradox—a matchstick propped up by leaning against . . . itself. What is the ‘I’ that is being urged to rely on this ‘self ’? Emerson’s thought plays continually with the limits of thought, and his greatest essays are efforts to get at the way life is held up, in the end, by nothing” (19, ellipsis in original). 25. I am grateful to David Jarraway’s book Going the Distance for pointing out not only this quotation from Dewey, but also the similarity between the Dewey comment and the frequent appearance of the metaphor of the “chameleon” to describe O’Hara’s identity, both in his own and others’ words. Jarraway’s provocative chapter on O’Hara, like the rest of his study, keeps up a running, secondary, slightly indirect argument about pragmatism as an important context for twentieth-century American poetry. 26. For more on pragmatism’s contradictory version of the self in the context of its “poetics of transition,” see Levin, The Poetics of Transition. (For example: “Transition and abandonment figure a power that at once supports and shatters the self.This may seem odd, given the emphasis critics have traditionally placed on Emersonian self-reliance. Nevertheless, transition and abandonment mark the limit of the self ’s agency and self-control”) (3). 27. Highlighting this aspect of Emerson’s thought, Jonathan Levin observes that “Emerson rejects a conception of the self as isolated from its world. The strength of the individual is in its complex attachments, the relational matrix from which it derives its strengths and to which it returns that strength” (Poetics, 27). 28. In his useful discussion of Emerson’s brand of individualism, Cary Wolfe rightly calls this parable “a brief but potent scene of instruction.” He observes that for Emerson, “the work of ‘the active soul’” takes place “in a world where every action and circle not only can but must be immediately outdone, where that outdoing constitutes one’s social— or antisocial—relations with others. The world of ‘Circles,’ in other words, is a world not simply of individualism, but of competitive individualism” (“Alone,” 153). 29. For an intriguing discussion of the originary split between Henry James Sr. and Emerson that has reverberated in American philosophy ever since, see Giles Gunn’s “Henry James, Senior: Pragmatism’s Forgotten Precursor.” Gunn argues that “pragmatism would have been inconceivable without the contribution of Henry James, Senior,” and explains that James’s rejection of individualism and self-interest put him at odds with his friend Emerson: “Where Emerson subordinated the community to the individual and then raised the individual to a level coequal with God, James and Melville held onto the older and wider perception that the individual finds his completion only in relation to others” (54). 30. For more on James’s concept of the social self, see Alkana’s study, The Social Self. See also Charles Mitchell’s Individualism, which counters Cornel West’s claim that Emerson and James and other pragmatists “promoted separateness, detachment, and the individual at the expense of, and in opposition to, solidarity, association, and the community,” by arguing that West “ignores the far more compelling argument that Emerson and William

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James shared a deep conviction of the complex and necessary interrelationship between the individual’s quest for self-fulfillment and the community’s offer of structure and recognition” (10). 31. Richard E. Hart and Douglas Anderson note the increasing emphasis on the social as one moves from James to Peirce to Dewey and observe that “the transition from an emphasis on self to an emphasis on community has been gradual in the career of American philosophy. Yet the basis for the dialectic was present in the initial individualism. . . . Emerson, despite common claims to the contrary, recognized the necessity of transactions between self and community” (Philosophy in Experience, 89). 32. My general thinking about the avant-garde and its contradictions has benefited from studies by Paul Mann, Peter Bürger, Renato Poggioli, Harold Rosenberg, Beret Strong, and Marjorie Perloff. For a useful discussion of O’Hara and Ashbery’s uneasiness with the avant-garde and its inevitable assimilation by the co-opting mainstream, see Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Politics and Form; on O’Hara and the problems of the avant-garde, see John Lowney, The American Avant-Garde Tradition. For a look at the paradoxes of the avant-garde and its institutionalization in the case of Language poetry, see my article “Verse vs.Verse.” 33. In his biography of Emerson, Robert D. Richardson Jr. discusses Emerson’s mixed feelings toward this commune and examines the terms of the “hard choice” Emerson was forced to make in deciding not to live at Brook Farm: “Between the community of others, which he believed in and which he was always trying to gather and foster around him, and the self-determination and independence of his present way of life, he took the latter. . . . He could join no association that was not based on the recognition that each person is the center of his or her own world . . . . His faith in the power and infinitude of the individual was greater than his faith in collective action” (Emerson, 343–344). 34. On the mini-controversy surrounding Ashbery’s comments, including Louis Simpson’s angry response to them, see Longenbach’s Modern Poetry after Modernism, especially 85–90; that chapter investigates Ashbery’s refusal to abide by the strict divisions of the poetry wars of the 1960s and his unwillingness to blur poetry with political protest. For Longenbach, “Ashbery is necessarily the least oppositional of poets” (87). For a similar argument, see Blasing’s chapter on Ashbery in Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry. 35. In interviews, Ashbery routinely dismisses the validity of the name, and even the concept, of a “New York School of poets” (a tendency that surfaces in other ways in the poems I discuss in chapter 4). He often emphasizes the accidental and unimportant nature of these bonds. For example, see the interview with John Murphy, where Ashbery says: “That [the name ‘New York School’] all came about without my knowledge and consent. . . . I never felt it meant very much, merely a group of friends who happened to find themselves in New York. It was a convenient place to be, to find jobs, friends, theater, whatever. . . . The thing which we all had in common, I think, was a desire to experiment” (“John Ashbery,” 22). See also the interview with Stitt: “I don’t think we were ever a school. There are vast differences between my poetry and Koch’s and O’Hara’s and Schuyler’s and Guest’s. We were a bunch of poets who happened to know each other; we would get together and read our poems to each other and sometimes we would write collaborations” (“Art of Poetry,” 39–40). See also “Experience of Experience,” 232. 36. In addition to Ashbery, the panel consisted of his fellow New American poets Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, along with the aggressively Dadaistic poet Dick Higgins, who was an important member of the Fluxus group. The discussion was reported in the New York Times on 6 March 1968. 37. Larry Rivers recalls that he and O’Hara were “driven to it by articles on art, half of them incomprehensible, by name-dropping exhibitions, and of course by other artists

304 Notes to Pages 81–85 and their statements about art receiving more attention than we could bear” (What Did I Do? 241–242). 38. In addition to alluding ironically to A. A. Milne, the essay’s title is also a reference to a 1925 hit song credited to Jelly Roll Morton, “Milneburg Joys.” Milneburg (named after an eighteenth-century Scottish émigré, Alexander Milne) was a summer resort on the outskirts of New Orleans on Lake Pontchartrain that was known as a place for dancing, parties, and jam sessions for early jazz musicians. 39. In her discussion of the limitations and problems posed by poetic communities like that which gave rise to her own movement, Language poetry, Lyn Hejinian similarly mentions the prevalence of “key words or phrases that designate particular or general ideas of mutual concern and around which there is some shared excitement (though not necessarily always agreement)” (Language, 36). Like Baraka, she worries that such “code words” can grow oppressive: “There is, of course, the danger that such terms can become tyrannical—that they will circumscribe the community or that the power embedded in them is of the kind that some persons can wield over others”; such key words can become “exclusionary—marking the difference between the inside and the outside of the community and effectively discouraging participation,” and they can “become a form of closure, the means to a community’s self-destruction” (36). 40. In addition to filling his art criticism, Ashbery’s deep admiration for such artistic oddballs, eccentrics, and outsiders is amply demonstrated in Other Traditions, his collection of essays about “some poets who have probably influenced me,” all of whom are, in his words, “certifiably minor poets” (4). The six incisive and appreciative pieces, based on the lectures he gave in Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton series, are devoted to John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Raymond Roussel, John Wheelwright, Laura Riding, and David Schubert. In his introduction to Ashbery’s art criticism, Reported Sightings, David Bergman notes this ubiquitous theme in the poet’s essays; he observes that Ashbery “is fascinated by artists like Michaux and Joseph Cornell who lived reclusive lives. His favorite artists, like Fairfield Porter and R. B. Kitaj, kept their distance from fashionable (or unfashionable) centers to work independently on their own. . . . Not that these artists necessarily swam cross-current, but they did not care to float with the crowds in midstream. Instead they spawned in the quiet waters in relative seclusion” (xiv). 41. Ashbery has remarked on a number of occasions that “poets when they write about other artists always tend to write about themselves”; at such moments, Ashbery seems to invite us to read his art criticism in relation to his own work, which, in my eyes, can be an extremely revealing endeavor (RS, 313). See also his remark, “Painters when they write on other painters often involuntarily describe their own work” (RS, 208), and, following his quotation of Fairfield Porter’s estimation of de Kooning, his comment that “as so often, the critic’s words apply to his own art as well” (RS, 314). 42. Ashbery’s exasperation with the co-optation of the avant-garde’s rebellious energies by the mid-1960s parallels O’Hara’s viewpoint in a 1965 interview as he scoffs at the idea that “an embattled vanguard” exists: “Embattled? That’s interesting.There is no underground and there is certainly no embattlement. Andy Warhol gets more publicity than any other single living American artist right this minute” (SS, 8). 43. Shetley’s comments come from a review of David Lehman’s The Last AvantGarde, in which he offers an argument that parallels the one I have been making about the New York School poets’ ambivalence and skepticism toward the avant-garde itself. He usefully points out that “the relationship between the New York School and the whole notion of avant-gardism is rather more troubled than Lehman’s account would suggest, though he hints at qualifications and complexities throughout. The poets, at the same

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time that they were dedicated to experimentation, were also skeptical about the narratives of progress or historical inevitability that so often were deployed in defenses of vanguard art” (134). He also notes that “Ashbery in particular grasped early on the problem of the commodification of artistic dissent” in such works as ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’” (“New York School,” 135).

Chapter 3 1. Not only is this the image of O’Hara that predominates in the plethora of memoirs, homages, and biographical portrayals of the poet, but it is also central to any critical discussions of the poet that take up issues of friendship or community in his work. For example, see David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde, which stresses O’Hara’s “tremendous personal magnetism” and his role as collaborator and catalyst whose “celebration of friendship in poetry represented an ideal” for later poets (7, 73). See also Lytle Shaw’s sophisticated treatment in “On Coterie” of O’Hara’s use of proper names of friends, which emphasizes O’Hara as the ultimate coterie poet whose “coterie writing” functions as a substitute for “natural” kinship; Shaw attempts to rescue the notion of coterie from its negative connotations and to stress how O’Hara’s work exhibits its progressive and positive possibilities. Other examples include Geoff Ward’s discussion of how in O’Hara’s work “the coterie is still a humanist refuge against temporality, seeking by the mutual support of its members to stave off the negative impact of time on each individual subject” and that his poems “attempt to lift the contemporary coterie up to the status of the gallery of heroes” (Statutes, 61–62); Daniel Kane, who stresses “sociability” as the “guiding principle” of O’Hara’s poetics (All Poets, 178, 265 n. 78) and, in a later essay, cites O’Hara as the prime model for the second-generation New York School’s “poetics of sociability” (“Angel Hair,” 336); and Reva Wolf (whose study of Andy Warhol and 1960s poetry communities highlights O’Hara as the very center of an artistic clique, whose poetics and art criticism rest on “gossip” and community). As useful as such studies are, I feel they tend to stint on half the story, and, as will be clear in what follows, I suggest a quite different approach to O’Hara’s work. 2. It is not surprising that some of O’Hara’s best readers have regarded movement and quickness as absolutely essential to his work. For example, James Breslin’s study of O’Hara notes near the start: “More concerned with the activity of creation than with fetishizing its products, O’Hara eluded the stability of any theoretical position, any style. . . . His imagination remains uncommitted—mobile, protean, contradictory, and alive” (“Frank O’Hara,” 254). Similarly, Marjorie Perloff points out that “photographs, monuments, static memories—‘all things that don’t change’—these have no place in the poet’s world. We can now understand why O’Hara loves the motion picture, action painting, and all forms of dance—art forms that capture the present rather than the past, the present in all its chaotic splendor” (O’Hara, 21). And Kenneth Koch observes that “the speed and accidental aspect of his writing are not carelessness but are essential to what the poems are about: the will to catch what is there while it is really there and still taking place . . . catching a feeling in the process of coming into being, or as it first explodes into a thousand refractions” (“All the Imagination,” 206). 3. For two useful and anecdotal renderings of O’Hara’s artistic and social milieu, see Brad Gooch’s biography, City Poet, and David Lehman’s Last Avant-Garde. For memoirs, poems, and paintings which suggest the extraordinary range of O’Hara’s friends and admirers, also see the wonderful Homage to Frank O’Hara, edited by Berkson and LeSueur, and Russell Ferguson’s excellent companion to the recent exhibit In Memory of My Feelings.

306 Notes to Pages 91–98 4. To take an obvious example, one could consider Spicer’s series “Admonitions,” in which the poet dedicates sixteen poems and two letters to different friends and associates in the poetry world. In the prefatory letter to Joe Dunn, Spicer lays out some of his ideas about a social poetics: “Each one of them is a mirror, dedicated to the person that I particularly want to look into it. But mirrors can be arranged. The frightening hall of mirrors in a fun house is universal beyond each particular reflection. . . . Mirror makers know the secret—one does not make a mirror to resemble a person, one brings a person to the mirror” (55). 5. On the Spicer circle as an insular gay community marked by exclusivity, “compulsory homosociality,” and homophobia, see Davidson, both in San Francisco (150–171) and especially in Guys Like Us (40–48), in which he argues that “the poets in Spicer’s circle, like those at Black Mountain, preferred a kind of hard-drinking, macho ethos, supplemented by sports, pinball, and verbal fisticuffs,” where much of the “contention is related to power dynamics based around gender” (41, 42). As I have mentioned, the O’Hara circle does not seem to share this set of tendencies with the Spicer circle. 6. Helen Vendler remarks that “O’Hara’s designedly light explanation of his theory of poetry (which he winsomely named ‘Personism’) rests on intimacy and immediacy”; while she’s right about the link between his theory of poetry and friendship, her comment glosses over the fact that O’Hara declares that “Personism” “does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it!” (“Virtues,” 239; CP, 499). 7. I have found Breslin’s essay ”Frank O’Hara” to be one of the most useful critical works on the poet thus far, and my discussion of O’Hara is informed by his insightful readings and overall approach. He makes the most thorough case for O’Hara’s presentation of a self that is fluid, paradoxical, and artificial, and his interpretations of the poems are refreshingly attentive to their pervasive contradictions and slipperiness. My own approach to O’Hara intends to extend and deepen Breslin’s by focusing on the effect such a sense of self has on O’Hara’s ideas and poems about friendship, and by suggesting that these attitudes are born from a dialogue with the Emersonian tradition that takes up precisely the same issues. 8. Along with Breslin, numerous critical readings have stressed the variability of O’Hara’s “selves.” Among those I have benefited from are studies by Poirier (“Scenes”) and Perloff (O’Hara). See also Hazel Smith’s discussion in Hyperscapes of “splintered subjectivity” in O’Hara (“O’Hara’s poems swing between a focused, idiosyncratic voice and personality, and a sense of fragmented, dispersed subjectivity,” 13), 12–15. In his compelling article “Frank O’Hara’s Fired Self,” Caleb Crain uses the object-relations psychology of D. W. Winnicott to investigate O’Hara’s projection of false, slippery selves and to postulate some psychological and cultural reasons (including homophobia) to explain why O’Hara is driven to be what Blasing calls “a quick-change artist” (Politics, 56). 9. This aspect of O’Hara has not received much attention; for an exception, see Blasing, who writes: “While O’Hara affirms the values of change and process, they are not all that positive.The imperative to change is less an essential or a historical value than a defensive response to a state of emergency; indeed, it signifies less a freedom than a necessity. . . . Anything that stops or freezes is dead—not only metaphorically speaking, but, just possibly, literally. To resist a reified identity is necessary for survival—as a gay man, for example. But being a quick-change artist exacts a cost, as ‘In Memory of My Feelings,’ and other poems . . . tell us” (Politics, 56). Although Blasing mentions these examples, she does not discuss them in any detail. 10. See Frank Lentricchia’s chapter on Stevens (as pragmatist) in Modernist Quartet, which takes up this desire for changes (124–179) and Richard Poirier’s extended discussions of this kind of “linguistic skepticism” in Renewal and Poetry.

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11. On these aspects of Stevens, see Levin, who emphasizes Stevens’s discomfort with definition and fixity. See especially 176–177: “For Stevens, poetry is a means to realize identity as a series of open-ended, unfolding relations. Such poetry represents things as they are irreducibly suffused by processes of imagining. Nor is there any one definitive or ideal imagination of things in Stevens’s poetry. Everything is in transition because imagination is an implicitly unfinished process.” 12.The fullest and most insightful analysis of the poem, and especially of the complexity of its treatment of selfhood, is Breslin’s extensive discussion of this work that he calls “one of the major accomplishments of contemporary poetry” (“Frank O’Hara,” 289–296). I have found several other readings of “In Memory of My Feelings” to be particularly useful, such as Perloff ’s (“one of the great poems of our time,” Frank O’Hara, 141–146), Alan Feldman’s Frank O’Hara (92–97), and Poirier’s “Scenes” (“probably O’Hara’s most splendid achievement,” 36–38). 13. O’Hara’s proximity to the pragmatist belief in a radically contingent self leads me to be uncomfortable with claims about O’Hara’s quest for essential selfhood, such as Caleb Crain’s comment that “O’Hara is often attempting to recuperate a true self that many false selves have occluded” (“Frank,” 295); Feldman’s claim in his Frank O’Hara that the poem is about “saving the essential self ”; and Perloff ’’s emphasis on the poem’s “reintegration of the inner self ” (Frank O’Hara, 141), its hunt for a “true self ” (142) and the “triumphant” conclusion in which the poet is “reborn” as a “real self ” (145–146). 14. In Emersonian thought, the radically unstable nature of the self is both its cross to bear and its reason and impetus for continuing to exist and change. Cary Wolfe’s remarks in his study of Emerson and individualism are useful in thinking about O’Hara’s poem: “The project of Emersonian self-reliance . . . is thus driven by, and follows through on, the challenge of skepticism: just as the inability to apprehend the world is the very rationale of philosophy, so the very transience of the self, the provisionality of any proof of selfhood, is the rationale for its ‘onwardness,’ its continued ‘enacting’ of its existence” (“Alone,” 141). 15.The poem’s emphasis on immediacy and openness have been read by several critics as complicated and contradictory. In Breslin’s reading, the immediacy that O’Hara longs for is inseparable from artifice and disguise. “Rather than struggling to recover a lost core of identity, O’Hara creates a theatricalized self that is never completely disclosed in any of its scenes” (“O’Hara,” 275). Poirier later makes a similar point about “My Heart”: “What is immediacy, as O’Hara himself sometimes wonders, if not simply an idea, a pretense, a guise, a fiction out of which the poet manages to generate more poetry? . . . As O’Hara knows, his ‘immediacy’ is not only a fabrication, it is an ‘overproduced’ one” (“Scenes,” 37). 16. Personal conversation with Koch, 15 August 2000. 17. However, it should be noted that the “white-haired genius of the painter” seems to refer to O’Hara’s intense admiration for Willem de Kooning rather than Goldberg. Goldberg was a young man, not at all white-haired at the time, and Kenneth Koch recalls the line as an allusion to the white-haired de Kooning, who was one of O’Hara’s great heroes (personal conversation, 26 March 1999). Koch said: “For me, and for some of our other friends, being friends with Frank was sometimes kind of trying because of his vast amounts of enthusiasm for other people as well as for us. We’d get jealous. . . . So when he thought Willem de Kooning was the greatest thing in the world, it was hard on my vanity” (personal conversation, 15 August 2000). 18. For example, see Ashbery’s introduction to O’Hara’s Collected Poems: “What was needed was a vernacular corresponding to the creatively messy New York environment to ventilate the concentrated Surrealist imagery of poems like ‘Hatred,’ ‘Easter,’ and ‘Second Avenue.’ . . . In the poems he was to write during the remainder of his life—from about

308 Notes to Pages 105–117 1954 to 1966, the year of his death—this vernacular took over, shaping his already considerable gifts toward a new poetry” (x). 19. In her discussion of “the poem-as-gossip” in O’Hara’s work, Hazel Smith makes a similar point: this sort of work “may sometimes transform into a strategy for regulating relationships: a way of bringing out into the open, and at the same time containing, tensions which might be difficult, even dangerous to verbalise in private” (Hyperscapes, 149). I think this is one useful way to think about the social as well as literary “work” that a poem like “To a Poet” is enacting. 20.The quoted lines are from Gary Snyder’s poem “For a Far-Out Friend,” in his 1959 volume, Riprap, and Cold Mountain Poems. See Donald Allen’s editorial note in O’Hara’s Collected Poems, 546. 21. An entire essay could be devoted to O’Hara’s use of wind imagery; it is nearly ubiquitous in his Collected Poems. For just some of the many examples, see CP, 26, 73, 79, 188, 190, 196, 225, 263, 269, 275, 284, 330, 340, 342, and 469. 22. For a study of Emerson’s attitudes toward love and marriage and how the legacy he left shaped later attitudes toward love in American poetry, see Selinger’s What Is It Then. 23. In thinking about this issue, I found John Vincent’s discussion of how queer poetics responds to “the broad binarisms” and “linguistic productions” of a straight culture to be useful.Vincent points out that because of “the felt exclusion and misrepresentativeness” experienced by gays in a heterosexual society, the “linguistic markers ‘single’ or ‘married’ [are] active sites of anger, comfort, capitulation, and resistance” (“Reports of Looting,” 157). O’Hara also occasionally broaches the question of procreation, taking up his own exclusion, as a gay man, from what Vincent calls the “comforting/troubling narrative of reproductive continuation” available to heterosexuals (156). See, for example, “Cornkind” (“do I really want a son / to carry on my idiocy past the Horned Gates / poor kid a staggering load”) (CP, 387). 24. As discussed in chapter 1, many recent studies have explored the exaggerated domesticity of the 1950s as a key component in the ideology of containment in Cold War American culture. Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound is an important study of this phenomenon, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Hearts of Men persuasively demonstrates the dramatic effect that the omnipotent breadwinner ethic and its attendant accoutrements, like the pressure to marry and raise children, had on men during the period. It seems only logical, and extremely useful, to read O’Hara’s epithalamion, along with Corso’s “Marriage,” in terms of this increasingly well-understood cultural dynamic. 25. O’Hara’s lurking doubts proved to be correct, for his relationship with Freilicher would never resume its earlier closeness. As Joe LeSueur observes in his memoir, “The marriage poem for Jane and Joe can be regarded as a grand and poignant gesture on Frank’s part, a farewell to Jane as well as an acknowledgement of [her husband] Joe’s signal importance in her life. For she will now virtually disappear from Frank’s poetry” (Digressions, 125). LeSueur’s gloss on this poem is useful for providing context and facts about its composition and O’Hara’s fading friendship with Freilicher (122–128). Gooch reports Freilicher’s recollection about O’Hara’s “gift”: “The poem was very nice, but somehow I felt there was a certain resignation in the tone” (City Poet, 293). 26. See Diggory’s reference to this passage in “Day and Night in 1952” as a “curious form of disrelation” that suggests the New York poets’ ambivalence toward intimate community (“Community,” 25). 27. In a letter written three years earlier, O’Hara had used similar phrasing to describe the electrical give-and-take of poetic inspiration between himself and Koch, which suggests that in this poem he is subtly hoping that a creative spark will come from his friend. In

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the midst of a particularly serious case of writer’s block while a fellow at the Poets Theater in Cambridge, O’Hara wrote to Koch: “[I] wish the poetry wires would start humming between us. Have ANY of you written poems lately?” (12 February 1956). 28. For detailed biographical information on the actual events and tensions of this weekend, see Gooch, City Poet, 331–336. Joe LeSueur’s illuminating personal take on these events and the poems they spawned is also a valuable resource (Digressions, 213–222). 29. Although Perloff argues that “Frank and Kenneth are working away on the latter’s libretto, totally absorbed in their task,” an act that dispels O’Hara’s unhappiness, Gooch explains that on this particular day, Koch read his new libretto aloud to O’Hara and Vincent (and the evidence from the correspondence bears this out) (Perloff, O’Hara, 151; Gooch, City Poet, 334–335). In this case, it is not an act of collaboration that buoys O’Hara’s spirit but rather simply hearing a friend’s work. 30. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman chose to include Lawrence’s essay in their 1973 anthology of foundational texts, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, which was intended as a companion to the New American Poetry (69–74). Lawrence’s Whitmanian call for spontaneity, impulse, and improvisation, and his antipathy toward perfection, closure, and finality found fruition in the experimental aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s. Although O’Hara mentions Lawrence in a number of poems, his greatest influence was perhaps exerted on the Beats, who especially responded to the Romantic, erotic, Whitman-like fervor of his rhetoric. 31. As I mentioned in an earlier note, both Gooch and LeSueur offer useful accounts of O’Hara’s meeting Warren, the reaction of friends like Patsy Southgate, and the events of the week of 6 August to 13 August, 1959, including the weekend of “Joe’s Jacket” (Gooch, City Poet, 329–336; LeSueur, Digressions, 213–222). In her reading of the poem, Perloff emphasizes the emotional conflict between O’Hara and LeSueur: “Joe’s jacket is his straitjacket: ‘Entraining’ with Vincent, he ultimately returns to Joe” (Frank, 152). It is interesting to learn that LeSueur himself, in his recent, posthumously published memoir about O’Hara (Digressions), concurs with Perloff ’s reading, which he says “hits the mark”—“picking up from there, I would add that Frank in his resentment (which may be too strong a word) is beginning to feel the urge to free himself of the ‘precaution I loathe’ symbolized by the jacket. Ambivalent about me—how can it be otherwise, given the ambiguous, less than satisfying nature of our relationship?—he wants something else and realizes, in Vincent, that he may have found it at last” (220).

Chapter 4 1. The poem “My Friends,” which dates from Ashbery’s college years (9 April 1948), was apparently never published. It can be found in the Ashbery Archives at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 2. One of the few essays to have considered Ashbery as a poet of the interpersonal in any sustained manner is “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social,” by S. P. Mohanty and Jonathan Monroe. They write: “As against the popular misconception of Ashbery as a poet obsessed with the solitary Self and its varying fortunes, we suggest that the central concern of Ashbery’s poetic career can only be defined as the self-world relationship, with an investment in exploring the features of a social voice and identity as they can be genuinely available today” (37). Although they do not specifically examine Ashbery’s attitudes about friendship per se, nor his latent individualism, nor his attitudes toward avant-garde community, I fully concur with the essay’s central argument, that “the most distinctive

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aspect of Ashbery’s work, and its most significant contribution to contemporary poetry in the United States, resides not in its emphasis on the self in isolation but rather in its counter-emphasis on the self as an ineluctably social construction” (44). See also Charles Altieri, “Ashbery as Love Poet.” 3. In most critical accounts, Ashbery is portrayed as what Helen Vendler calls “a generalizing poet, allegorizing and speculating as he goes, leaving behind, except for occasional traces, the formative ‘world of circumstances.’” (“Understanding Ashbery,” 180). For just a few examples, see Marjorie Perloff, who contrasts Ashbery and O’Hara, claiming that “the personal elegy has never been an Ashbery genre; his is a poetic mode that absorbs personality into larger metaphysical structures” (O’Hara, 190); David Bergman, who praises Ashbery’s “power to explore the workings of consciousness stripped of personality” (“Choosing,” 397); Mutlu Konuk Blasing, who suggests that Ashbery’s “personal poetry has little interest in self-revelation, veiled or otherwise; rather, his work investigates rhetorical questions of how to figure a self and communicate a private vision” (Politics, 130); and Richard Howard, who argues that “the great innovation of Ashbery’s poems is that they do not explain or symbolize or even refer to some experience the poet has had, something outside themselves in the world, something precedent.The poems are not about anything, they are something” (“John Ashbery,” 38). 4. I have found Libbie Rifkin’s emphasis in Career Moves on “reading the poetic career,” and the theoretical framework she employs, useful in thinking about what I am calling Ashbery’s “narratives of career” (see, for example, her introduction, 3–12). 5. In a letter to the painter R. B. Kitaj, who had offered to contribute a cover painting for the book, Ashbery further examined his interest in the idea of a “houseboat”: “I suppose I like the idea of stasis within motion, freedom within constraint (as in Donne’s ‘we are born but to the liberty of the house’ (sermon of March 28, 1619), which is a certain amount of liberty after all; houses seem to be a recurring theme in my poetry” (7 December 1976). 6. Though many critics (like Helen Vendler, below) have discussed Ashbery’s preoccupation with motion, for a particularly useful and suggestive treatment of this aspect of Ashbery, see Jeffrey Gray’s recently published study Mastery’s End:Travel and Postwar American Poetry. In his chapter on Ashbery, Gray highlights not only Ashbery’s obsession with travel (via his ubiquitous references to movement), but also how Ashbery’s is a “version of travel in which movement is paralyzed, stopped at its origin, or in which the voyage is, at least, subjectively constructed. . . . Some of Ashbery’s book titles reflect this dynamic stasis or static movement—The Mooring of Starting Out, for example, or Houseboat Days” (108). 7. In chapter 2, I discussed Ashbery’s occasional, playful hints about the connections between this “philosophy of life” and pragmatism. There are some exceptions to this general critical neglect of Ashbery’s links to pragmatism. Shapiro’s John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry does emphasize Ashbery’s embrace of contingency and his implicitly pluralistic outlook. David Herd’s John Ashbery and American Poetry (2000) connects Ashbery with William James in a number of places. Herd actually concurs with the general premise of my study when, after tracing similarities among Ashbery, James, and the “Emerson-Whitman line,” he writes that William James’s “Pragmatism is a guidebook to American poetics before and since itself ” (13). He goes on to note that “the affinity between James’s philosophy and Ashbery’s poetry has to do with their shared emphasis on contingency and change” (16). Harold Bloom has argued at length that Ashbery should be viewed as an inheritor of Emerson and Stevens, but Bloom’s insistence on his idiosyncratic ratios, the poet’s defensive anxieties, and Ashbery’s role as a visionary poet seems to twist Ashbery into his model of the visionary poet rather than allowing the poet’s native and profound skepticism

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and experimental spirit to speak for itself. Further, Bloom is unwilling to see connections between Ashbery’s Emersonian heritage and his concern with friendship and his writing peers, issues that Bloom never finds operative in Ashbery’s poems (see “Charity” and Agon). One other exception to the general critical neglect of Ashbery’s interest in the Emersonian strain is Benjamin Sloan’s unpublished 1990 dissertation, “‘Set Free on an Ocean of Language That Comes to Be a Part of Us,’” which connects middle- to late-period Ashbery (from the mid-’70s through the mid-’80s) to Emerson and Henry James (although without ever mentioning pragmatism). 8. Critics have frequently argued that the book is one of Ashbery’s best and most important works and that it is a major expression of his philosophical and aesthetic outlook. For example, John Shoptaw writes that “Three Poems is Ashbery’s favorite book. It is also his most important book both in the sense that it continues his project of revitalizing (not parodying) ordinary languages for the purposes of prose poetry and because it spells out, hesitantly, Ashbery’s ‘philosophy of life and writing’” (“John Ashbery”). 9. The philosophy of William James begins, of course, by “rejecting the idea of oneness in favor of a plurality of experiences.” Again and again James critiques monism and espouses pluralism; see, for example, the sections titled “The One and the Many” (Writings, 258–270) and “An Overview” from A Pluralistic Universe (800–810). 10. Ashbery has explained the importance of interpersonal relationships to the writing of Three Poems, which began at the suggestion of his analyst, who said “‘Why don’t you try thinking about people who have meant a lot to you in your life and then instead of writing about them, write about what you feel when you think about them?’ So I did. I thought about various people whom I was in love with and my dead brother and my parents, and so on” (“An Interview with John Ashbery,” 180). In another interview, Ashbery says that “part of it [Three Poems] was a deliberate exercise in writing, not about but off my feelings about various people who’d been very important to me in my life” (“An Interview in Warsaw,” 303). 11. For a reading of how Three Poems deploys (and constantly collapses) images of motion and stasis, see Jeffrey Gray’s discussion of the sequence in light of his argument about travel in Ashbery’s work (Mastery’s End, 133–134). 12. For some examples of this common phrase in the Old and New Testaments, see Esther 4:1 (“When Mordecai perceived all that was done, Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and cried with a loud and bitter cry”) and Daniel 9:3 (“And I set my face unto the Lord God, to seek by prayer and supplications, with fasting, and sackcloth and ashes”). 13. See also his interview with Piotr Sommer: “Life is very difficult, and it seems very often that we’re in a situation that is impossible to deal with, but somehow it does go on, so it’s very difficult and easy at the same time. It happens by itself and we’re part of its happening” (“An Interview in Warsaw,” 313), and the interview with Kostelanetz, in which Ashbery makes a similar comment in defending the obscurity of his poetry: “It is meant to reflect the ‘difficulty’ of living, the ever-changing minute adjustments that go on around us and which we respond to from moment to moment—the difficulty of living in passing time, which is both difficult and automatic, since we all somehow manage it” (“John Ashbery,” 108). 14. Ashbery’s affection for “The System” is evident in the fact that the forward-looking conclusion to his recent long poem, published as Girls on the Run (1999), directly echoes the sonorous conclusion of this poem he wrote nearly 30 years earlier. This later poem refers to a lost past (with a “burning” childhood carousel echoing “The System”’s “ashes”) and the “wide” way to the future: “Somewhere, darkness churns and answers are riveting, / taking on a fresh look, a twist. A carousel is burning. The wide avenue smiles” (55).

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15. Surely Berger’s argument here is an example of an Ashbery or O’Hara critic tacitly drawing on Emersonian concepts and terminology without making the connections explicit. This is most obvious in his equation of “movement” away from stable but confining centers with “freedom” and “power” (echoing Emerson’s point that “power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim” [“Self-Reliance,” EL, 271]). Berger’s imagery of the self moving from one center outward to another, only to begin again there, also resembles Emerson’s “Circles” and its guiding trope. 16. Ashbery’s lines, as translated from Cravan in 1969, noticeably echo the title and theme of George Oppen’s 1968 Pulitzer Prize–winning volume, Of Being Numerous. In a well-known passage, Oppen writes: “Obsessed, bewildered // By the shipwreck / Of the singular // We have chosen the meaning // Of being numerous” (151). The similarity of the two lines and the view of pluralistic selfhood they contain offers an interesting parallel between two poets not usually associated. On Oppen as a poet in the pragmatist tradition, see Jefferson Hansen, The Edge of the Local. 17. In Poetry and Pragmatism, Richard Poirier has a useful discussion of the importance of the metaphor of “skating” in Emerson, Frost, and other pragmatists that suggests an intriguing way to think about Ashbery’s poem “The Skaters”: “Action, or ‘skating,’ is a way of getting around intellectual concepts, which would be among the things [Emerson] would call surfaces. Surfaces include ideas and texts.We live among these as among so many ‘circles’ or discursive formations. ‘Art’ itself—meaning the performative acts out of which texts are produced— allows us a stylish, studied, graceful, and cool way of moving around these surfaces, with an always forward-looking superfluity of motion. Style represents a movement of mind as against the stasis achieved by former movements that have become textualized and intellectualized” (65). 18. In the essay “American Sanctuary in Paris” (1966), which serves as an interesting counterpart to “The Skaters,” Ashbery discusses a new generation of American expatriate artists who at the time were living in Paris despite that city’s newly unfashionable status, given the postwar crowning of New York as the capital of the art world. Ashbery examines the motivations of a small number of Americans—himself tacitly included—“who still continue to live and work in France, in spite of everything” (RS, 87). These artists “differ from their predecessors,” the modernist expatriates, “in not being a lost generation, though they frequently prefer France for reasons of privacy and isolation” (87). Convinced that whether faced with acclaim or hostility, artists must forever strive to be different and individual, Ashbery argues that “what is especially moving in the work of Americans abroad is a general resolution in the face of apathy and apartheid to determine their individuality, to create something independent of fashion” (RS, 91). 19. Shoptaw tells us that this passage, along with several others, is appropriated verbatim from a book called Three Hundred Things a Bright Boy Can Do, a book for children containing activities and crafts projects, which Ashbery drew upon to create the collage that is “The Skaters” (Outside, 96). 20. Earlier draft versions of “The Bungalows” can be found in the Ashbery Archives, Houghton Library, Harvard University. A piece of yellow legal paper contains handwritten fragments of this poem, with the title “Turning to Loss” at the top, with “e?” written above the “o.” Under those words appears the alternative title “Page of Imbalance.” A typed manuscript of the poem bears the title “Turning to Less.” “The Bungalows” was published in Paris Review (winter/spring 1967) (see Kermani, John, 84). 21. In an earlier draft of this poem, Ashbery wrote on the bottom of the page “escaped into heaven” (Ashbery archives).

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22. An Ashbery allegory obviously differs from traditional examples of the form because it remains utterly indeterminate and nonspecific; we can find no exact or one-toone correspondence between any image or event and the literal thing it might be standing for. As such, his works are potent examples of what Brian McHale has described as “postmodernist allegory,” a genre that derives from those riddling texts of Beckett, Kafka, and Joyce that “seem to promise allegorical meaning, soliciting an allegorical interpretation from the reader, yet withholding any indication of specific allegorical content” (Postmodernist, 140). Much of Ashbery’s poetry works in a manner similar to Waiting for Godot or Finnegans Wake, as it “invites us to read allegorically but refuses to satisfy our drive” because it has “too many interpretations, more than can possibly be integrated in a univocal reading” (142). 23. See also Longenbach, who seems to adopt Berger’s reading implicitly, when he singles out “Clouds” (of the many poems with similar concerns) as a poem in which Ashbery “considered his isolated place” among various artistic camps of the 1960s (Modern, 89). 24. Not only does the phrase resemble “New York School,” but both Koch and O’Hara (and Baraka) taught poetry writing at the university known as the New School in Manhattan in the early 1960s. Their courses there did much to inspire and ferment the socalled second and third generation of New York School poets who by the late 1960s were emerging as a significant literary community, so Ashbery’s use of the phrase is doubly suggestive. In O’Hara’s class alone were future New York School-affiliated poets Tony Towle, Gerard Malanga, Joseph Ceravolo, James Brody, and Frank Lima. On O’Hara, Koch, and the New School, see Gooch, City Poet, 400–401. 25. See Lehman, “Shield,” who points out in passing that “Variations” “demonstrates the fun Ashbery has with clichés and bad poetry” (110). Shoptaw identifies the Wilcox poem as “Wishing,” and discusses Ashbery’s poem in the context of I. A. Richards’s influential essay “Badness in Poetry,” which uses a Wilcox sonnet as an example of “triteness” (Outside, 107). By far the most extensive discussion of the poem to date is Mark Silverberg’s excellent essay “Laughter and Uncertainty: John Ashbery’s Low-Key Camp.” Silverberg dissects Ashbery’s brand of camp and emphasizes throughout the indeterminate, unsettling mixture of humor and seriousness, play and critique, high and low in his employment of a camp aesthetic in poems like “Variations.” Silverberg notes that Ashbery “asks to be taken seriously and humorously, sincerely and facetiously, at the same time” (287), and that his “enjoyment and deployment of the quackery of Daffy Duck, or outpourings of Helen Topping Miller’s or Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s ‘fertile escritoire,’ have a provocative doubleness which functions both as a source of entertainment and a source of meaning” (299). 26. In his discussion of the predominantly homosexual San Francisco Renaissance poets, Michael Davidson refers to their utopian vision of “an Arcadian community of poets” (San Francisco, 32). 27. That Ashbery intends this echo of Virgillian motifs in the poems of this volume is suggested by the meaning behind the title of another long poem in the book, “Sortes Vergilianae,” which, as the author explains in a note, “refers to the ancient practice of fortunetelling by choosing a passage from Virgil’s poetry at random” (MSO, 306). 28. Lynn Keller makes the astute point that Ashbery’s “apparently parodic versions of traditional motifs—such as those involving quest and pilgrimage—and of traditional lyric forms, such as the aphoristic rhymed couplets of ‘Some Words’—are seriously, as well as mockingly, intended.The element of parody, indicating the author’s half-apologetic embarrassment, protects him against charges of sentimentality while allowing him to use these formulas as genuine expressions of his ideas” (Re-Making, 36). Silverberg discusses the same

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idea throughout his essay “Laughter and Uncertainty”: “As with the best instances of camp, there is a doubleness to many of Ashbery’s gestures, especially his endings, which seem to offer traditional moments of lyrical closure, but whose slight oddness or offness forecloses on a completely unironic reading” (291). I think this strategy is especially important to the seriousness underlying the obviously parodic “Variations.” 29.“Rural Objects,” another poem in the book that explicitly draws on pastoral imagery (with the title alone), opens with questions about whether “a golden moment, full of life and health” ever existed, and if it did, “Why can’t this moment be enough for us as we have become?” (MSO, 256). The answer seems to be that time will not allow such a moment to be sustaining: “Even at the beginning the manner of the hourglass / Was allsevering.” 30. See Shoptaw, who (not surprisingly, given On the Outside’s interest in Ashbery’s homosexuality) argues that a “homotextual note [i.e., a coded homosexual subtext, which Ashbery has intentionally presented indirectly] sounds in his Whitmanian variation on the idyllic oaken experience” of growing up with one’s brothers all around (108). 31. According to Shoptaw, “this passage is lifted verbatim from Roy Rockwood’s 1925 sci-fi mystery, The City Beyond the Clouds: or, Captured by the Red Dwarfs, which Ashbery found on 95th St. while on the lookout for an ending to his poem” (On the Outside, 110). I agree with Shoptaw that this conclusion suggests “the artist’s right to privacy” and stands for “the wary experimentalist who will tell his inquisitive readers nothing.” 32. Ashbery will draw on this image of a “picnic” in the later poem “Street Musicians” to allude to a similar primal site of creative ferment with friends (SP, 207). 33. As David Lehman notes, “Fairfield Porter characterized Ashbery as ‘lazy and quick,’ two adjectives that don’t usually go together. Both apply” (Last, 111). 34. Despite—or perhaps because of—the slipperiness of the poem and the typical Ashbery reticence implicit in its title (half the proverb “least said, soonest mended”), we must be wary about accepting his proposition that this could be “anybody else’s” story as well as the poet’s own. Perhaps steered by Ashbery’s comments and his suggestion that the less said the better, most critics have all but ignored the suggestive backdrop and more specific contexts out of which the poem arises. Although Charles Berger has discussed the poem’s ambivalence toward the poet’s own generation and toward his memories of growing up within and away from a community that “this poet must find dissatisfying,” even this useful reading would benefit from greater attention to contextual cues, as well as to the reasons why Ashbery might feel that community must be transcended (“Vision,” 183). Bloom says that “the poem speaks for the artistic life of Ashbery’s generation” without much elaboration (“Charity,” 61). 35. Ashbery has frequently commented on the general hostility toward experimental art that existed in American culture when he was emerging as an artist. See, for example, “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” in which he says that in that climate, “to experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink. In other words if one wanted to depart, even moderately, from the norm, one was taking one’s life—one’s life as an artist—into one’s hands” (RS, 390). In “A Reminiscence,” Ashbery’s memoir about Frank O’Hara, he recalls the atmosphere at Harvard: “Cambridge seemed to me then a place where anything adventurous in poetry or the arts was subtly discouraged” (21). 36. Ashbery’s statement from “Soonest Mended” has become an influential declaration of aesthetic freedom, pluralism, and inclusivity for later poets. The name and aesthetic sensibility of the influential contemporary literary magazine, Fence, edited by Rebecca Wolff, seem to have been at least partially inspired by Ashbery’s credo. Fence’s editorial mission is to be more inclusive than most contemporary journals, to publish “academic” poets

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like Gerald Stern and Michael Harper alongside avant-garde writers like Charles Bernstein and Eileen Myles, choosing to print poets “from the experimental mainstream and the academic mainstream.” In a provocative “manifesto/press release,” the editors of Fence explained, “Our contributors are those whose work sits resolutely on the fence, resisting easy definition.” They hope their journal will encourage “a willful ambiguity, an informed non-commitment,” and they wish it to be “a resting place for work that we recognize by its singularity, its reluctance to take a seat in any established camp, its insistence on the reader’s close attention to what is not already understood, digested, judged. . . . Our editorial strategy is a balancing act, undertaken in a spirit of inquiry rather than critique. From John Ashbery’s poem ‘Soonest Mended’: ‘But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting/ Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.’ Taken entirely out of context, these lines refer to our own aim and fantasy: to support poetry and fiction that is written without the safety of received theory or streamlined tradition but wholly out of impulse, knowledge, and the experience of necessity” (Wolff, “Story of Fence”). Even taken in context, Ashbery’s lines surely propose the kind of aesthetics of noncommitment, unpredictability, individualism and openness—the refusal to fall into step with one established camp or the other—that the editors espouse in their journal. 37. Note the similarity to Emerson’s comment in a letter to his brother: “All my life is a sort of College examination. I shall never graduate. I have always some torments ahead” (qtd. in Richardson, Emerson, 439). 38. Many commentators have noted this aspect of Ashbery’s project, but Nicholas Jenkins’s comments in a review of The Mooring of Starting Out seem particularly concise and astute, as well as useful for an understanding of the close of “Soonest Mended.” “Certainly no other poet,” Jenkins writes, “has been more diligent about finding new ways of ‘starting out’ again—of continuously emerging from the shadow of his own previous work” (“Life,” 14). This process is a complex one, since for Ashbery “new beginnings are always moments of poignant self-awareness, of nostalgia as well as potential release.” In “Soonest Mended,” for example, “‘starting out’ is revealed always to be ‘coming back’—whether to be revitalized or newly disenchanted—to one’s original conditions” (14). 39. “The self for Emerson,” Richard Poirier writes, “appears only in its own doings, in its workings, in its actions with words—in movements which turn back against any self, or on any assemblage of words as it may have been constituted even a moment ago. That immediately prior self becomes only one more object of scrutiny” (Poetry, 67). 40. Ashbery’s carefully chosen diction also suggests that Frank O’Hara lurks behind the poem’s climactic phrase—the striking image of “the mooring” directly recalls O’Hara’s poem “To the Harbormaster,” which (not coincidentally) Ashbery had chosen to read at O’Hara’s funeral less than three years earlier (“I wanted to be sure to reach you; / though my ship was on the way it got caught / in some moorings”) (CP, 217). To end this particular poem, which deals with how “we” grew up together, Ashbery borrows his friend’s trope. In a way, Ashbery’s intertextual echo of O’Hara’s poem implies that O’Hara himself, and his poems, serve as a kind of dock, a place of both security and departure, a touchstone not unlike a distant memory of some shared point of origin, for Ashbery’s own poetic explorations. Ashbery apparently still feels close to this phrase: The Mooring of Starting Out is the title given to the recent republication of his first five books of poetry in one volume. 41. Despite the common impression Ashbery never wrote an elegy for O’Hara, “Lithuanian Dance Band” clearly is a poem for and about O’Hara, not least because it addresses a missing friend and uses O’Hara’s own voice and style to do so. If that were not tantalizing enough, John Shoptaw reports that the poet told him that the poem was “written with

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Frank O’Hara in mind” (although Shoptaw does not make much of this information) (Outside 158, 364 n. 1). Other than Shoptaw’s, there has been virtually no critical mention, let alone commentary, about this intriguing poem, which appears in Ashbery’s most celebrated book, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. One exception is Lynn Keller, who discusses the poem’s “epistolary form” and how “it represents an attempt to alleviate one’s aloneness” (Re-Making, 61–62). 42. In an earlier draft of the poem, in the Ashbery archives at Harvard, the last line reads “the crows peacefully pecking in the combed furrows”; perhaps Ashbery changed the line so as to include the oblique reference to O’Hara in “harrow.”

Chapter 5 1. William J. Harris usefully draws attention to Baraka’s interest in “the concept of turning—even the verb to turn” (Poetry, 21). However, for Harris, whose study focuses on what he terms Baraka’s “jazz aesthetic” and its practice of reversing or inverting “white” forms and making them “blacker,” “turning” is linked to Baraka’s habit of “taking a white stereotype of blacks . . . and transforming it into a symbol of its opposite” (21). In contrast, I argue that for Baraka “turning” is a more general process of troping, departing, or pushing away from that which is constraining with dramatic social, psychological, and aesthetic effects, and that this concept is absolutely essential to Baraka’s aesthetic. 2. See, for example, the pioneering book-length studies of Baraka by Werner Sollors (Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones), Kimberly W. Benston (Baraka:The Renegade and the Mask), William J. Harris (The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka), and Theodore Hudson (From LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka), which tend to treat Baraka’s so-called “Beat” period as a mistaken and temporary pit stop on his way to arriving at his distinctive genius and political and racial clarity. Although these books have contributed a great deal to our understanding of Baraka’s interactions with the white avant-garde, the emphases of their studies (and, to some extent, their introductory nature) often detract from an understanding of the specifics and the scope of those dialogues. 3. After its heyday in the 1970s, Baraka criticism lay more or less dormant for quite a long period, but there have been recent signs of a renewal of critical interest in Baraka’s work. For example, a recent double issue of African-American Review (2003) devoted to his work offers many intriguing essays on many aspects of his work and career. Several of these essays do focus on Baraka’s early career and reexamine his writing in light of its connections to New American poetics and the cultural politics of the postwar period. See, for example, John Gennari’s “Baraka’s Bohemian Blues” (which is primarily about Baraka’s jazz criticism), and especially, Ben Lee’s suggestive reading of Baraka’s complex relationship to the ideology of “open” form espoused by the New American poets in “LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka and the Limits of Open Form.” It is worth noting, however, that throughout these 18 new essays about Baraka’s writing, virtually no mention is made of his relationship with Frank O’Hara and the New York School of poets. Also see Jerry Gafio Watts’s exhaustive, and largely critical/polemical, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual (2001), which chronicles the twists and turns of his entire career. Over the course of the book’s first 150 pages, he examines the political dimensions of Baraka’s immersion in the bohemian/Beat scene, his interracial marriage and friendships, and their effect on his writing—without mentioning Frank O’Hara once, or analyzing the importance of Baraka’s literary affiliations with the New American poets with sufficient detail or critical rigor. For a powerful example of an alternative approach, see the work of Aldon Nielsen (one critic

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who has written frequently and incisively about Baraka over the past fifteen years). For example, in his most recent book, Integral Music, Nielsen reexamines Baraka’s role within the New American poetry and uncovers “what must be seen in retrospect as America’s first racially integrated avant-garde,” before looking closely at Baraka’s “close and fruitful relationship” with Charles Olson (118, 129). 4. My intention here is to argue that the early Baraka exemplifies the long-standing intertwining of African-American and pragmatist thought, as well as some of the tensions inherent in that conversation. Ross Posnock’s Color and Culture is an important study of this intertwining, and it includes the early Baraka in his canon of African-American pragmatist-inspired intellectuals. For other pioneering studies that have focused on this intersection, see Cornel West’s American Evasion of Philosophy, Nancy Fraser’s “Another Pragmatism: Alain Locke, Critical ‘Race’ Theory, and the Politics of Culture”, Mark Sanders’s Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown, and James Albrecht’s “Saying Yes and Saying No.” 5. For another version of this argument about “turning,” see Ross Posnock’s similar observation that “the revisionary act of turning from and toward, is . . . the imperative of the Jamesian pragmatist” (Color, 19). 6. That Baraka was still this fiercely opposed to the mixing of “social protest” and art in the winter of 1962 undermines the usual argument that shortly after his trip to Cuba in 1960, Baraka espoused an aesthetic of political commitment and racial protest, and it reveals the messy, complicated nature of Baraka’s ideas on this subject until as late as 1965–66 and his nearly total conversion to a militant Black Arts aesthetic. 7. Posnock builds a very similar argument, though unlike Mackey, he usefully links this outlook to pragmatism. For example, Posnock points out that Alain Locke’s William James–inspired refusal of such closed systems taught him that “identitarianism in whatever form . . . was a disciplinary regime to be avoided, especially by those racially marked” (Color, 24). 8. See Baraka’s retrospective self-criticism in his Autobiography, written in 1981, in which he assesses the errors of black cultural nationalism: “All the traps we did not understand. Crying blackness and for all the strength and goodness of that, not understanding the normal contradictions and the specific foolishness of white-hating black nationalism. The solution is not to become the enemy in blackface, that’s what one of the black intellectuals’ problems was in the first place. And even hating whites, being the white-baiting black nationalist is, might seem, justifiable but it is still a supremacy game” (458). 9. As one measure of the great distance Baraka traveled in a short time, consider this remark from less than a decade later, in 1970: “We [black nationalists] simply believe we are a people from Africa and it is in our best interests to remain such” (C, 82). 10. Besides Baraka’s famous essay about his trip,“Cuba Libre” (H, 11–62), see his retelling of the experience and reflection on its aftermath in his Autobiography (243–246). See also his comments in a 1977 interview with Kimberly Benston, who asked the poet, “[Did] the poem ‘Betancourt’ and the ‘Cuba Libre’ essay—the works that grew directly from your Cuba experience—effect a self-conscious turning point?” Baraka replied: “Yes. See, when I went to Cuba, it was like a revelation to me. . . . It blew my mind. I was never the same.” He explains that “when I came back to the States, I wrote the ‘Betancourt’ poem. It was written to a woman whom I’d met down there who was a Mexican communist” (C, 108). For summary and analysis of the trip’s import, see Sollors, Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 64–72; and Harris, Poetry and Poetics, 7–8, 76–77. 11. Given the familiar, tidy conversion narrative of Baraka’s career, it is worth reiterating that Baraka’s attack on Charlie Mingus’s mixing of politics and art that I discussed

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above was written two full years after his trip to Cuba and thus reveals how gradual and halting his embrace of an aesthetic of direct political protest actually was. 12. This attitude is extended, of course, in William James’s and pragmatism’s conception of the truth as an evolving process: “We have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood” (Writings, 438). For other statements by Emerson that resonate with the Baraka passage, see also “Intellect,” where Emerson writes: “If a man fasten his attention on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but falsehood . . . . Every thought is a prison also” (EL, 424); and “Circles”: “For it is the inert effort of each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of circumstance,—as, for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a local usage, a religious rite,—to heap itself on that ridge, and to solidify and hem in the life” (EL, 404). 13. Critics do not seem to have addressed Baraka’s important definition of a poem as “a turning away” adequately. In addition to Harris’s discussion, mentioned in note 1, see, for example, Houston A. Baker, who in Afro-American Poetics lifts the lines out of context to point to them as a symptom of the early Baraka’s solipsistic malaise: “Caught in his hermetic room, the poet can still critique the outside environment and recognize his need for a broader range. His despair, in any case, may derive from a definition of writing that sees the poem as ‘A / turning away / from what / it was / had moved / us / A madness.’ Clearly, influences would be irrelevant to a canon conforming perfectly to such a view. Furthermore, the individual poem might be reduced to the experience of ‘the spent lover / smelling his fingers’ (Preface 41)” (119). Baker’s analysis underestimates the complexity of Baraka’s trope and sees this definition of poetry as a source of despair rather than a crucial definition of the poem as a form of “aversive thinking,” an aggression against the given that is central to all of Baraka’s work. 14. Werner Sollors’s reading in Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones of these opening lines contrasts with mine. After tracing “the image of sun as a Black father and a touchstone for a black identity,” Sollors says that the opening of “Ostriches and Grandmothers” “employs the sun imagery to urge a stronger expression of a Black identity beyond all masks and stances” (48–49). Though Baraka does associate the sun with blackness (especially in the connection of sun and “genealogy” in “Hymn for Lanie Poo”), it hardly functions as such a rigid code word for black identity, leaving Sollors’s reductive interpretation unconvincing. Partially because he wishes to read Baraka’s poems as expressing an inexorable march toward “blackness,” Sollors interprets the poet’s expression of his multiplicity (“all my faces turned up to the sun”) as urging a purer “black” identity, even though the poem is replete with references to motion, inconstancy, and “unbelievable changes.” 15. To give a specific example, the “head” of John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” is the recurring and familiar melody, taken from the popular song, that the band departs from and returns to. The “changes,” in traditional and bebop jazz, are the set of harmonies, the chord progression, around which an improvisational performance of that piece is based. The more adventurous, post-bop/avant-garde jazz of the late 1950s and early 1960s that Baraka was immersed in introduced faster, more “difficult,” and less predictable changes, or dispensed with them altogether in the name of sheer spontaneity and “free” improvisation. See Nathaniel Mackey’s useful analysis of “The Bridge,” where he notes Baraka’s “punning use” of musical terminology (Discrepant, 37–38). 16. Little attention has been given to this poem’s relationship to Hart Crane. The imagery of suicide by drowning (after the speaker has leapt from the bridge itself) which dominates the poem’s ending should certainly be considered in the context of Crane’s own self-destruction by leaping overboard into the “unmentionable black” of the ocean.

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Furthermore, Baraka would presumably have known a poem by one of his early mentors, Robert Creeley, titled “Hart Crane,” which features similar imagery and concerns: it begins with an image of a man half clinging to stability—“He had been stuttering, by the edge / of the street, one foot still / on the sidewalk, and the other / in the gutter . . .”—and contemplates the poet’s heroic and tragic “push / beyond and / into” (Collected, 109). 17. By titling this poem “The Bridge,” Baraka probably intends an allusion to the work of saxophonist Sonny Rollins, whose 1957 album Way Out West is alluded to in the title of the poem just preceding “The Bridge” in Preface (a book that the author’s note informs us is arranged in chronological order). Rollins controversially withdrew from the jazz world from 1959 to 1961 and, during this time, supposedly attempted to achieve a new and refined style by living and playing his sax outside on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City. Rollins returned to jazz in 1961, and released an album titled The Bridge in 1962 to much fanfare (accompanied by criticism complaining that his work sounded much as it did before his well-publicized retreat). What complicates the allusion is the fact that Baraka’s poem was written before 1961, and thus, prior to Rollins’s album; however, the poet/jazz critic presumably knew of Rollins’s strange abandonment of his successful jazz career while it was happening, and thus may very well be alluding to it. Furthermore, the poem’s themes and jazz references dovetail with the story of a jazz virtuoso who has turned his back on convention, “here at the bridge.” However, it should be pointed out that Werner Sollors’s footnote that “the title of the poem is taken from Sonny Rollins’ first album” seems to be in error, since Rollins’s first album (Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet) appeared in 1951, and his album The Bridge did not appear until in 1962, after Preface was published (273 n. 21).

Chapter 6 1. As I mentioned earlier, one significant exception is Aldon L. Nielsen’s work on Baraka, especially Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality. Nielsen’s book refuses to disentangle “white” and “black” signifying systems, and it instead attends to crossings and intertextual collisions between and across races. See especially, in that book, his chapter on The System of Dante’s Hell and its relation to white tradition and the chapter on the fascinating appearances Baraka makes in the poetry of his white contemporaries, including O’Hara (“LeRoi Jones as Intertext”) (71–99; 214–251); and the chapter titled “The Largest Ocean in the World” in Nielsen’s recent book Integral Music (98–147). Another exception is Ross Posnock’s perceptive discussion in Color and Culture of the ambivalence that complicates and enriches The Toilet and System (243–253). See also Nathaniel Mackey’s 25-yearold essay on Baraka, “The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka” (Discrepant, 22–48), which is still perhaps the best account of how his difficult, early poetry actually works. Mackey usefully discusses Baraka’s poetics in the context of the Black Mountain poetry of Creeley and Olson, pointing to a wealth of interesting similarities and differences between Baraka and other New American poets. 2. My attention to O’Hara is not meant to minimize the importance of Baraka’s close personal relationships with other white poets, including Edward Dorn, Joel Oppenheimer, and Diane di Prima; his ties to black poets such as Stephen Jonas, A. B. Spellman, or Bob Kaufman; or his equally profound literary debts to Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Duncan, poets with whom he was never as intimate as with O’Hara but who had a tremendous influence on his work, as has often been noted by critics. The bohemian poetry scene that Baraka was immersed in was a complex and fluid one, with a

320 Notes to Pages 196–199 multitude of ties, alliances, and rivalries; by highlighting Baraka’s friendship with O’Hara I wish to illuminate one particularly important and undervalued bond in his life and writing and to stress its relevance to his development of a poetics of friendship and individualism. 3. Although Baraka’s friendship with O’Hara is often cited in passing, his early phase is almost always more closely associated with the Beat and Black Mountain poets. For example, Michael Davidson conspicuously omits O’Hara when he writes that Baraka’s “exodus uptown entailed leaving his white wife and mixed-race children, his former Beat and Black Mountain colleagues, and his Lower East Side bohemian milieu” (Guys, 136). Similarly, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, despite the exhaustive treatment of Baraka’s “bohemian immersions” (and discussions of Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Charles Olson) found in Jerry Gafio Watts’s 500-page tome on Baraka, Frank O’Hara’s name does not even appear in the index (44). However, there have been some more extended treatments of O’Hara’s relationship with Baraka, including Aldon Nielsen’s chapter “LeRoi Jones as Intertext,” which discusses Baraka’s appearances in his friend’s poems (214–251); and Michael Magee’s “Tribes of New York” (also chapter 4 of Emancipating).Though “Tribes” is primarily a study of O’Hara, Magee has mounted the most extensive argument about Baraka’s influence on his friend (primarily in the service of advancing an argument about O’Hara’s fascination with jazz). 4. Joe LeSueur suggests that O’Hara’s friendship with Baraka may even have inspired one of his most forceful, eloquent poems about race and cross-racial brotherhood: “Is there a connection, I wonder, between Frank’s meeting Roi and his writing ‘Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets’? It was summer, we were still at University Place, and Frank was impressed with the young black poet who didn’t seem to either of us like an American Negro, perhaps because of his small frame and delicate features. Well, I suppose we had a stereotyped idea of the American Negro. The ode is dated July 9, 1958, which was around the time Frank met LeRoi—at the Cedar, I believe” (245). Note that there is some discrepancy over when exactly O’Hara and Baraka met. The generally reliable chronology at the front of O’Hara’s Collected Poems says the two met in 1959, but LeSueur suggests it was the previous year, making it possible that Baraka served as an impetus for this ode. 5. Benjamin Friedlander offers the most sophisticated discussion of O’Hara’s controversial treatment of race in his poetry. Aiming for “neither apology nor critique, but a kind of negative capability,” he argues that O’Hara’s consciousness and representation of race is much more nuanced than the merely racist, fetishizing exoticization of the “other” as primal sexual being that some have taken it to be (140). Observing that O’Hara’s “fears and fantasies and memories of black power and black victimization . . . defy a simple or single explanation,” Friedlander goes so far as to conclude that “O’Hara’s strange and even vexing treatment of race” is “the deepest preoccupation of his work” (140). As Friedlander notes, Aldon Nielsen was one of the first critics to condemn the handling of race in O’Hara’s work in his Reading Race and Writing between the Lines; other assessments include Andrew Ross’s “Death of Lady Day,” Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s Politics and Form, and Michael Magee’s “Tribes.” In The Last Avant-Garde, David Lehman concedes that O’Hara may “idealize the Negro as a cultural icon and jazz as a form of vanguard art” in “White Negro” hipster fashion, but he defends O’Hara against the charge that he simply exoticizes blacks in his work: “I think the suggestion that blacks are ‘dehumanized’ in O’Hara’s poetry is too harsh. The handshake between LeRoi Jones and Frank O’Hara at the end of ‘Personal Poem’ evokes not stereotypes but a vision of friendship across the racial divide; it calls to mind the pacts between Huck and Jim and between Ishmael and Queequeg in the great American novels of Mark Twain and Herman Melville. (O’Hara’s personal disappointment when Jones rejected his erstwhile white friends was profound)” (197). On Lehman’s remark, see

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Lytle Shaw’s review “Poet as Action Figure,” which takes Lehman to task for what Shaw views as the patronizing and offensive remark about Huck and Jim: “Lehman’s comparison re-instills those stereotypes by casting Jones, embarrassingly, in the role of illiterate black friend/helper to the white explorer” (116). 6. In The Last Avant-Garde, David Lehman spends several pages discussing the significance of this reference to Miles Davis’s beating: “The incident was a rank example of racial harassment. The great trumpeter had accompanied a white woman to her taxi in front of the club” Birdland in New York. He was accosted by the police and told to move on; when he protested, there was a struggle, and Davis was badly beaten and jailed overnight, only to be cleared of all charges three months later. For Lehman, the incident is representative of the fact that “the racial tension in New York was reaching ominous levels,” and that O’Hara’s incorporation of both Baraka and Davis in his poem “aligns the poet on the side of the protesters on the eve of the decade of the Civil Rights Movement” (195–196). 7. Magee argues that O’Hara was “willing to let Baraka’s influence impress upon and shape his identity and aesthetic,” and that Baraka was a crucial factor in O’Hara’s vision of jazz as an embodiment of pragmatist, democratic symbolic action: “O’Hara’s Personism, his ‘personal pragmatism,’ evolves in the context of his relationship with Baraka and his response to the ‘new thing’ jazz of the period” (“Tribes,” 705, 723). 8. As far as I can tell, this poem—a very intriguing addition to the O’Hara canon—has never been published or collected, commented on or acknowledged, and I am aware of no copies other than the one in the Koch archives. Like other fugitive O’Hara pieces, it is very possible that it simply fell through the cracks, as it was not included in Donald Allen’s meticulously edited posthumous collections of O’Hara’s poems, including Poems Retrieved. Baraka was arrested on obscenity charges in October 1961, and poem seems to have been written shortly thereafter. 9. For a thorough discussion of the background of System, see Aldon Nielsen’s Writing Between the Lines (71–99). 10. The oft-repeated narrative surrounding System and Baraka’s search for his own style, which has grown out of Baraka’s own commentary, has its problems—for one thing, it seems unfair to characterize his earlier work as mere imitation or “little, stylized, Creeley-esque stuff,” and, for another, his post-System (and pre–Black Arts) work of the early 1960s is not drastically different from the previous style. But the dramatic context in which Baraka recalls composing the work, and the role of friendship and the anxieties about influence and independence that motivate the writing of System, are important factors to consider. 11. Although critics commonly refer to the host of literary presences in System, they generally ignore O’Hara’s important appearances. For example, see Nielsen’s seemingly exhaustive tally:“a list of the authorial shades encountered in these ditches includes Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, Baudelaire, Dante himself, John Wieners, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Yeats, Olson, Ginsberg, Pound, Cummings, Apollinaire, Odysseus,Virgil, Beckett, Fielding Dawson, Bertran de Born,Thomas Jefferson . . .” (Writing, 87). See also Sollors, whose earlier list Nielsen apparently extends: “Baraka invokes visionary company, from Ishmael to Beckett, Olson, Ginsberg, Eliot, Pound, Cummings, Apollinaire, and reaches a state of ‘transparency’ which places Dante in the tradition of Emerson’s ‘Nature’” (Amiri, 141). 12. A major exception to this general rule is Posnock’s recent discussion of Baraka in Color and Culture, which does address Baraka’s conflation of “intellectual” and “homosexual” in such works as System and The Toilet (243–253). 13. “In Wyoming Territory” appears in The Floating Bear #28 (1963). In addition to the four people mentioned, there is a fifth installment in the series, dedicated to “George.”

322 Notes to Pages 212–219 I am less certain of the identity of this figure than the others, but it is probably Baraka’s friend George Stade, the Columbia University English professor and novelist. (A less likely possibility is the San Francisco poet George Stanley, as Baraka published and corresponded with both writers). 14. As part of his case about Baraka’s ambivalence toward “the intellectual,” Posnock points out that in this passage Baraka makes “an association between the literary and the homosexual” via references to Joyce, Proust, and Eliot (Color, 249–250). The association actually runs even deeper: in his autobiography, Baraka recalls that on trips to Chicago from his Air Force base in Illinois, he stumbled on a literary bookstore called the Green Door, where he experienced a life-changing epiphany. Seeing Ulysses in the window, opened up to its first page, and books by Pound and Eliot, Baraka suddenly felt a whole world open up. He bought books by Joyce and Thomas, and went home “having leaped past myself, to myself. All kinds of new connections yammered in my head” (150). In System, the awakening to homosexuality and to literature are inextricable. 15. Sollors’s discussion in Amiri of “The Eighth Ditch” emphasizes its importance as a bridge between Baraka’s poetry and his drama of the early 1960s, as a transitional work in which “lyrical monologue becomes lyrical dialogue,” thus preceding plays like Dutchman (95; see 94–102). Baraka was arrested on obscenity charges when this play appeared in The Floating Bear in 1961. 16. The ambiguity has led to differing interpretations of the play’s setting and players. Sollors narrows the range of possibilities and says definitively that it is “set in 1947 in a Black boy scout camp,” as does Posnock (95; Color, 249). However, Baraka says, in his Autobiography, that “The Eighth Ditch” is “about a homosexual rape in the army” (251). The cues actually imply both settings at once. The narrator does say “this is 1947” at one point (when Baraka was thirteen, implying the incident is drawn from a childhood memory), but the characters, who in the first speech are referred to as “four men asleep,” talk and act more like men in the army than like thirteen year-old Boy Scouts. The surreal and unsettling play deliberately blurs such distinctions and thus manages to occur on numerous levels at once. 17. In both his own autobiography and in his ex-wife’s memoir (How I Became Hettie Jones), one finds reminiscences about Baraka’s frequent infidelities, Hettie Jones’s subsequent affair with painter Mike Kanemitsu, and contrasting depictions of Baraka’s violent reaction to that development. 18. I agree with Kimberly Benston’s observation that “this passage is one of the most revealing in all of Jones’s corpus, and it provides the key to a final appraisal of The System of Dante’s Hell,” though, for a different reading of its meaning, see Benston’s analysis, which stresses Baraka’s “calling upon his pilgrim’s strength to continue the quest for a perfectly refined desire, to ‘keep on keepin’ on’ until an absolute black communality has been achieved through fully conscious, willful effort” (Baraka, 28–29). 19. For example, Nielsen argues that “the narrator denies his racial history in an act of heresy and treason” by failing to embrace the sights and sounds of black culture, and though he may not achieve that embrace by the close of the book, he has “seen the sins he must expiate” (Writing, 95–96). See also Benston, who describes the chapter’s narration of “a bizarre, shattering, but ultimately redemptive experience” (Baraka, 18). Nielsen similarly argues for the novel’s progress toward “blackness” and deliverance into fully realized selfhood, although he at least acknowledges that “for Baraka there is, in the early 1960s, no easy step out of torment”: “He has been to the Bottom and found there is no exit there. But he has become palpable as he has made his style, his poem, a black thing made out of words. . . . By the close of the fast narrative things have clarified for him. He is not playing

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someone else’s riff but is improvising against the other given, the cultural lead sheet left to him in the Africanized West” (98–99).Though he sees that “the affirmation of his blackness and the rejection of imitation whiteness are not complete when the novel ends,” Lloyd Brown argues that the ending “amounts to the beginning of his progression from the hell of racial heresy” (Amiri, 80). 20. The Toilet was first published in Kulchur 3, no. 9 (spring 1963), but according to Sollors, it was written in 1961, which means it would have been composed either just after System or alongside it. The Grove Press edition of the play indicates that it was first performed on December 16, 1964, at the St. Marks Playhouse, New York, with a set by Baraka’s (and O’Hara’s) friend Larry Rivers, but Sollors points out that although this production “is often referred to as ‘first,’” the play was “first performed by the Playwright’s Unit of the Actor’s Studio in 1962” (282 n. 25). 21. Baraka’s words from his introduction to the play, quoted in Sollors, Amiri, 110. Sollors explains that this introduction was printed on the playbill “of the famous 1964 production” (282 n. 25). 22. Sollors observes that “while Foots denotes a ‘lower’ kind of ‘plebian’ existence, that is closer to the ethnic roots and the soil, ‘Ray’ suggests a more spiritual personality,” while also resembling the name “Roi.” He points out that the protagonist must choose between “his generic identity as ‘Foots’ and his individual peculiarity as ‘Ray’” (Amiri, 109). 23. See Benston, who points out: “The basic root of the pathos in The Toilet, especially as it relates to Ray, is twofold: first, his inability to articulate any aspect of his own tragic dilemma; and second his exclusion from the social groups (black gang, white friendship) to which he is trying to belong” (Baraka, 193). 24. In a later (1978) interview, Baraka claims that he “tacked on” the ending because “it actually invokes my own social situation at the time—not so much the event that I used to build the play on. . . . [T]here was a question of wanting to offer that kind of friendship that existed across traditional social lines. At the time I was married to a white woman, and most of the friends I had were white, on the Lower East Side.” He also says: “When I think of The Toilet I just think of it as the product of a particular time and place and condition as far as my own development was concerned, and I think it is a legitimate play, even though the ending was tacked on. If you ever look at the manuscript you’ll see that the manuscript stops at the end of the fight. But then I sat there for a while thinking, was that really the way it had to end?” (C, 131). See also his very similar comments in 1981: “And then I tacked it on, I guess, as some kind of attempt to show some kind of, you know, reconciliation, or something like that. And I think that’s where I was at that time” (C, 217). 25. See Gooch’s biography of O’Hara, City Poet, for a colorful discussion of the entire incident (322–324). O’Hara’s side of the story is reported in a terrific letter to Ashbery (16 March 1959). 26. See Gerald Early, “The Case of Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka,” for a sharp critique of Baraka’s career on these very grounds. For Early, Baraka’s ongoing rebellion against the conventional, respectable, and “bourgeois” within himself is “philosophically absurd not only because its affirmation is the quest for a fictive purer self—as expressed by Baraka’s fervent wish to be ‘blacker’ during his cultural nationalist days and to be more ‘revolutionary’ now during his Marxist present—but because it requires the constant denial of previous selves as impure or incorrect. Only the present avatar calling himself LeRoi Jones or Amiri Baraka can be trusted as true and real; all others are repudiated. But how can the present form of Baraka be trusted, according to his own philosophical coordinates, when the present world is itself a lie where the truth must be reflected in its own inversions? For Baraka, iconoclasm begets further and endless iconoclasm, so that one seems no longer

324 Notes to Pages 229–233 to be responding to the world at all but to one’s previous selves. We arrive, in short, at an elaborate sort of solipsism” (345–346). 27. Baraka’s ensuing transformations (personal, political, philosophical, and aesthetic), his motivations for his actions, his changing attitudes about race and politics as the period progresses, and the changes in his writing through his various phases are too complicated to be dealt with adequately in this space. What follows merely suggests some aspects of these changes that seem most relevant to this study. For fuller discussions of Baraka’s gradual and then sudden transition to the Black Arts aesthetic, the effect on his relationships with his wife and friends, and changes in his writing and poetics, see Baraka’s Autobiography; Hettie Jones’s memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones; Nielsen’s “Amiri Baraka: LeRoi Jones as Intertext” (Writing, 214–251); Sollors’s Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (especially chapters 8 and 9); Benston’s Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask; and Harris’s Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka. 28. LeSueur remains quite bitter about how Baraka handled the demise of this friendship. After recounting the Bernstein incident, he writes: “And how did Roi repay Frank for his loyalty? Fortunately, it didn’t get back to Frank what I was told by a black playwright and founder of a Negro theater group: ‘I asked Roi how he could have accepted Frank and Joe’s hospitality all those years, and he said, ‘I was just pissing in their beer’” (248). 29. However, for one of the more unusual, telling signs of Baraka’s post-conversion attitudes about his old friend and how far he traveled from his earlier incarnation, see the exchange captured in Homage to Frank O’Hara. At a reading in 1977, a young poet in the audience asks Baraka: “How does the work of Frank O’Hara stand up under this committee?” Baraka answers, “Franco Harris?” (the star NFL running back). The person responds, “Yeah, you once had a personal relationship with him . . .” and Baraka says “Not the Pittsburgh Steeler?” At last he realizes his error and says: “Frank O’Hara? Oh, I thought you said Franco Harris, the Pittsburgh Steeler. I think Frank O’Hara’s work stands up to what it was. I think Frank’s great quality was that he rebelled against the dry academic bourgeois poetry that all of us came out to accept, that we were given, ‘this is great art.’ And Frank put that down, like many of us. . . . But the difference between a petty bourgeois radical being sickened by society, and a revolutionary who actually wants to change it, I think is a qualitative difference, and I think that’s the thing that we need to concern ourselves with and deal with” (Berkson and LeSueur, 186). 30. In his critique of Baraka, Gerald Early points out with annoyance that Baraka’s restless repudiation of his previous selves is directly tied to his writing and its force: “It is obvious to anyone even slightly familiar with Baraka’s writings that he needed and continues to need these sleight-of-hand identity swaps in order to create the psychological tension he must have to write” (“Case,” 346).

Chapter 7 1.The comment appears in a letter O’Hara wrote to Fairfield Porter on 7 July 1955. A typescript of the letter can be found at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut, along with the other O’Hara letters I quote from in this chapter. 2. Several studies have compared the two poets more concertedly. For example, see Perloff ’s early and helpful comparison (O’Hara, 190–195), as well as Davidson (“Ekphrasis”), Finkelstein (Utopian), Moramarco (“John”), and Cook (“Expressionism”). It is worth noting here that by all accounts the very close relationship between O’Hara and Ashbery seems to have been, from first to last, a platonic one.

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3. For a similar approach, see Rifkin’s discussion of Olson and Creeley’s collaborative friendship. She argues that “in the context of poetic careers, oppositions such as professional versus amateur, technical versus organic, closed versus open—binaries employed by literary historians for heuristic purposes—become sites of intentional activity, socially charged choices that poets make and remake. Collaborating on career, Olson and Creeley rendered such choices dialogic, legible” (Career, 35). 4. For a typical discussion of O’Hara’s attitude toward Stevens, see Perloff: “O’Hara’s view of Wallace Stevens is respectful but somewhat distanced. . . . A great poet, in short, but one who looks to the past rather than to the future” (Frank, 61). She claims he “never seemed to have much interest in . . . Stevens” (62). Perloff, like many other critics, overlooks O’Hara’s early enthusiasm for Stevens and his later, subtle responses to Stevensian motifs and ideas, some of which I discussed in chapter 3. 5. Rifkin discusses Olson and Creeley’s “strategic self-positioning” (Career, 35). In thinking about what is stake in poets’ choosing predecessors, and the way this process relates to canon formation, I have found Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic, like Rifkin’s book, to be particularly useful. 6. For a similar instance, see O’Hara’s 1956 letter to the painter Grace Hartigan, in which he again seems a bit miffed by Ashbery’s critique of his work. O’Hara tells Hartigan about a recently completed poem, “Cambridge,” in which he compares himself on a wintry Massachusetts morning to “Pasternak / in Marburg,” adding parenthetically that “they say Italy and France are colder, but / I’m sure that Germany’s at least as cold as this” (CP, 239). After explaining to her that a friend passed on this odd information about the relative climates of these countries, he adds with some annoyance that Ashbery “otherwise liked the poem but said he didn’t think that information ‘got us very far’—but then, I’m not so sure he knows that Marburg is in Germany!” (19 February 1956). 7. The “beautiful long” Ashbery poem that O’Hara mentions reading in March of 1957 is most likely “A Last World,” which Shoptaw refers to as being written in the spring of 1957 (Outside, 69). (It is also possible that the poem he refers to is a piece that was never published or another work from this period.) The poem could easily have made O’Hara uncomfortable with its brilliance, since it marks a turning point in Ashbery’s developing poetics. Harold Bloom, who deems The Tennis Court Oath a disaster, feels “A Last World” is “the one good poem” in the volume; Shoptaw sees the poem as inaugurating a “new phase” for the poet, and as one of his most “far-reaching” and “ambitious” early poems (“Charity,” 52; Outside, 69). 8. As far as I know, no critic has yet discussed O’Hara and Ashbery’s contrasting approaches to homosexuality in their lives or poems. In Ashbery criticism, the most significant recent works that take up the issue of homosexuality have been John Shoptaw’s extensive and provocative book, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry; Catherine Imbriglio’s “‘Our Days Put on Such Reticence’: The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery’s Some Trees”; John Vincent’s “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics”; and David Bergman’s “Choosing Our Fathers: Gender and Identity in Whitman, Ashbery, and Richard Howard.” For essays that deal with O’Hara’s homosexuality, see Caleb Crain, “Frank O’Hara’s ‘Fired Self ’”; Rudy Kikel, “The Gay Frank O’Hara”; Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day”; Terrell Scott Herring’s “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet”; Mark Goble’s treatment of how O’Hara “irresistibly associates film with the performance of homosexuality as a cultural identity” (“‘Our Country’s Black and White Past,’” 86); David Jarraway’s “‘Vanilla Hemorraghes’: The Queer Perversities of Frank O’Hara” (Going the Distance, 98–138); and Hazel Smith’s recent book Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara, particularly chapter 4, “The Gay New Yorker: The Morphing

326 Notes to Pages 243–250 Sexuality.” Crain is especially useful in pointing out (in a brief introductory comment) how O’Hara’s “brash, anomalous” approach to being gay contrasts with that of his “more diffident friend John Ashbery,” and, in general, with the “egolessness of the gay male poet” found (by David Bergman) to be a hallmark of gay male poetry such as Ashbery’s (287). 9. In an interview with A. Poulin Jr., Ashbery comments that “I’m trying to set down a generalized transcript of what’s really going on in our minds all day long” (“Experience,” 245). Shoptaw remarks that Ashbery’s poetry is “the stream of everybody’s or anybody’s consciousness,” that he “creates an all-purpose subjectivity” (Outside, 3). My opposition here between O’Hara’s personal and direct poetry and Ashbery’s impersonality is a simplified version of this important distinction. I do not mean to suggest that O’Hara actually is more “open” or “honest,” but rather that he espouses a rhetoric of daring openness and is more forthright about his sexuality. O’Hara’s poetry is driven by tensions between his desire to create a personal, open poetry and a constant sense of the artificial, theatrical, and constructed nature of such versions of the “self.” Conversely, in chapter 4, I suggested that Ashbery’s allegedly impersonal poetry is actually enmeshed with the details of his life, especially his friendships and love affairs. 10. It should be noted that of these poems, only “Poem (At night Chinamen)” was published during O’Hara’s lifetime; nevertheless, unconcealed references to the poet’s homosexuality abound throughout his published works of the 1950s (see, for example, “Meditations in an Emergency”). 11. The question of being open about one’s sexual identity surfaces in Ashbery’s later poetry, such as in “Saying It to Keep It from Happening” twenty years later (SP, 226). The poem begins by addressing how some forms of deviance from the “norm” (e.g., homosexuality) eventually become less shocking and more accepted: “Some departure from the norm / Will occur as time grows more open about it. / The consensus gradually changed; nobody / Lies about it any more.” Ashbery, who even in 1977 was evasive about “saying it,” had opted for “lies” and reticence before the “consensus gradually changed,” while O’Hara was more open about his own departures from the norm in the 1950s. 12. Koch’s comment comes from a 1955 letter in which he remarks on O’Hara’s use of the word “xiphias” in his French poem, “Choses Passagères” (discussed below): “I’m perfectly willing to accept it as part of your diet without knowing what it is, it’s a nice word; but knowing your exactitude about ephemera I suspect it may be in some Larousse bigger and more orange than mine” (to O’Hara, May 1955, n.d.). 13. With its parody of Eastern mysticism, this poem prefigures O’Hara’s significant differences from his fellow New American poets, the Beats, whom he was soon to befriend and to read: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Gary Snyder. O’Hara’s skepticism and distrust of the transcendent often leads him to mock the religious pretensions of this bohemian movement so closely linked to his own. In several poems, he characterizes Ginsberg the mystical seeker as a slightly ridiculous figure (e.g.,“Allen is back talking about god a lot” [CP, 328]). Similarly, these ironic lines from “Les Luths” about Snyder studying Buddhism in Japan recall the imagery of “To John Ashbery”: “where is Gary Snyder I wonder if he’s reading under a dwarf pine / stretched out so his book and his head fit under the lowest branch / while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting through to him / not caring particularly because the light in Japan respects poets” (CP, 343). 14. See Philip Auslander, The New York School Poets as Playwrights, for the one sustained discussion of the play. See also Charles Altieri, who rather idiosyncratically uses Try! Try! to open his discussion of O’Hara’s oeuvre, noting that it “provides the most ready access to many characteristic qualities of his fictive world”; Altieri focuses on the play as an example of O’Hara’s depthless Pop Art and points out how O’Hara “manipulates absolutely trivial

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and conventional materials,” but does not comment on the play’s central conflict or themes (“From ‘Varieties,’” 189). 15. Gooch’s chapter in City Poet titled “Ann Arbor Variations” (157–188) discusses O’Hara’s year at Michigan. O’Hara admitted to feeling jealous of the intimacy of Jane Freilicher and John Ashbery in his absence, emotions which become even more palpable in the second version of Try! Try! discussed below: “I do feel as if you and John are always doing things that my spirit needs to know about in intimate detail” (6 June 1951). 16. In this sense, the play could be read in terms of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “homosociality,” which is a concept central to Michael Davidson’s study of masculinity in postwar poetry. As he explains, “homosociality, in Sedgwick’s usage, implies a triangulated erotics between two men in which a woman serves as a shared object, a fulcrum of heterosexual legitimacy to mask repressed homosexual desire” (Guys, 16). 17. Freilicher is probably as important to the dynamic of this play as is Bunny Lang, particularly since Ashbery’s relationship with Jane was considerably closer than his relationship with Bunny, who was more O’Hara’s friend. Another bit of background is also important to Try! Try!: the play can be seen as a vehicle by which O’Hara works through the emotions sparked by the “increasingly complicated three-way relationship between O’Hara, [Larry] Rivers, and [Jane] Freilicher,” a love triangle Gooch discusses in City Poet (227–232). 18. For more on the relationship between the poets of the New York School and Auden, and, in particular, the growing sense among the young poets during the 1950s that the increasingly conservative Auden’s best and most innovative work was behind him, see my piece “Auden and the New York School Poets.” 19. Jane Freilicher recollects that although “Fairfield was more admiring of John [Ashbery] and Jimmy [Schuyler] than of Frank,” “he liked Frank, who stayed at his house a lot. Somehow Frank managed to make himself a member of the family” (qtd. Gooch, City, 264). If Porter did indeed feel more warmly toward Ashbery and Schuyler than O’Hara, this may suggest one impetus behind this letter’s depiction of the family constellation. 20. On this letter’s relation to the Auden situation, see Lehman, who also relates the two poets’ feelings about the movie to their “competition for Auden’s nod” (Last, 88–92). 21. In a 14 July 1955 letter to Koch about his ardent love for this movie, O’Hara moves without a pause from discussing the merits of this film to discussing his own experimental and daring writing. “I have seen East of Eden four times and loved it more each. It is the La Strada of our set. I have written several lyrics lately, some of which cannot be sent lest I be deported. It is so relaxing to write an unmarketable poem, or as some say, a sincere work.” I think the link O’Hara implicitly makes here between this movie about the rebellious Cal and his own “unmarketable” poems underlines my point: that O’Hara’s passionate and complex reaction to East of Eden reveals how ambivalent he is about the apparent “marketability” of Ashbery’s prize-winning work in contrast to his own. 22. O’Hara’s effort to distinguish himself from his friend may have actually influenced Porter’s understanding of their works, with lasting results: it was Fairfield Porter who wrote one of the first critical assessments of the poetry of four central New York School poets—O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, and Schuyler—several years later, in which he stressed that “the poets differ more than they resemble each other” (Art, 221). 23. For the most part, my version of “Choses Passagères” follows a rather simple, if unorthodox, translation procedure, that may make more sense after reading the discussion which follows: when the phrase O’Hara uses is one lifted directly from the dictionary, I have usually chosen to reproduce the English version exactly as given in Cassell’s FrenchEnglish English-French Dictionary (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 1951). (In subsequent

328 Notes to Pages 269–276 editions of this dictionary, many of the phrases O’Hara uses, and/or their translations, have been omitted or substantially revised.) Though this has occasionally led to somewhat awkward phrases and stilted diction, I have left the language as is, because the very intent of O’Hara’s poem is to foreground and defamiliarize the strange qualities of idioms and received phrases, and because O’Hara presumably had these English words and phrases that he found in the dictionary in mind as he composed the poem. 24. See Gooch, City Poet, for details on O’Hara’s aborted earlier trip to Europe in 1954, his envy of his friends’ Fulbright travels, and his own first European experience in 1958 (309–310). 25. See the poem in Poems Retrieved, “And leaving in a great smoky fury” (169), which replays the tension between Williams and Ezra Pound/T. S. Eliot over the question of expatriation; O’Hara seems to chastise Ashbery for going to Europe. See also the poem “Aix-en-Provence” in Collected Poems (236). 26. Kenneth Koch’s letter to O’Hara can be found in the Koch Archives in the Berg Collection, New York Public Library. 27. James Breslin highlights the verbal fluidity that is O’Hara’s trademark:“Ambiguous words, floating phrases, and pronouns with multiple referents create a language in which grammatical functions (and meaning) are not stable. Words become fluid, shifting nodes of energy” (“O’Hara,” 281). In this regard, “Choses Passagères” is exemplary O’Hara. 28. See, for example, “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s” (1957) (“I think of our / friends who are not here, of John and the nuptial quality / of his verses”); “John Button Birthday” (1957) (“I remember JA / staggering over to me in the San Remo”); “The ‘Unfinished’” (1959) (“meanwhile, back at the Paris branch of contemporary depression . . . I sit with Ashbery / in the Flore because of his poem about himself in a flower-bed”); “Joe’s Jacket” (1959) (I “sat opposite Ashes in an enormous leather chair in the Continental”);“Les Luths” (1959) (“while in Paris Monsieur Martory and his brother Jean the poet,” a reference to John Ashbery and his lover Pierre Martory); and “A Little Travel Diary” (1960) (the entire poem is a chronicle of travels with Ashbery in Europe) (CP, 266, 267, 318, 330, 343). 29. The last poem in Poems Retrieved, which appeared in 1977 and contains the bulk of O’Hara’s remaining unpublished writings, is the poem beginning “Why are there flies” (220), and is dated 2 February 1966. The last poem in Collected Poems is dated 27 March 1966 (“Little Elegy for Antonio Machado” [557]), and is the only one from 1966 that the editor, Donald Allen, included in the collection.

Conclusion 1. See Perloff for a partial list of these elegies (O’Hara, 183). A number of these and others can be found in Berkson and LeSueur’s Homage to Frank O’Hara. 2. Commentators have yet to really examine this or other Ashbery poems in relation to O’Hara’s death. There is one exception: at the close of a chapter that deals with O’Hara and Ashbery, Norman Finkelstein invokes Perloff ’s belief that Ashbery never wrote an elegy for O’Hara, only to counter “but perhaps he has, despite himself. The poem is called ‘Street Musicians’” (66–67). Finkelstein goes on to quote from the poem to close his chapter, but doesn’t elaborate on his rare, intriguing claim that Ashbery’s 1977 poem is actually an elegy to O’Hara, which I believe is most certainly the case. 3.With its reference to a musical group, the title “Street Musicians” resembles the title of another poem that playfully hints at the New York School, “Lithuanian Dance Band,” as

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well as the reference to the dispersed “troubadours” in “The Other Tradition,” while having an even closer link to the poets of New York because of the urban motif (SP, 208). 4. This is not the only time in Ashbery’s oeuvre that he distinctly echoes the final line of O’Hara’s “Blocks” (“and thus they grew like giggling fir trees”). In his 1999 volume Girls on the Run Ashbery writes: “So all grew. The tainted fir-trees / fell over and were loam. All were” (24). Also, see Shoptaw, who points out that Ashbery’s phrase is (what he calls) a “misrepresentation,” or linguistic distortion, of a familiar phrase (“to forgive and forget”) into something darker: “to hate and forget” (Outside, 208).

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WORKS CITED

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INDEX

abandonment. See Emerson: abandonment Abstract Expressionism, 5, 17, 32, 57, 58, 62–63, 156, 214 New York School poets influenced by, 6, 62, 131 and individualism, 49, 82–83 Acocella, Joan, 86 Albee, Edward, 58, 200 Albrecht, James, 68, 181, 301 n.22 Allen, Donald, 5, 201, 287–288 nn.2–3 Altieri, Charles, 326 n.14 Anderson, Quentin, 66 antifoundationalism, social implications of, 16, 22 (see also under pragmatism; Emerson) Apollinaire, Guillaume, 110–111, 197 Aragon, Louis, 34 Ashbery, John, 3, 11, 13, 102, 117, 127–165, 229–230 and abandonment, 23, 68, 141–142, 153, 162, 278 and Amiri Baraka, 165, 229–230

345

art and political protest, reluctance to mix, 75, 77, 155–158, 174–175, 180, 303 n.34 the avant-garde allegories about, 129, 143, 147, 155, 158, 159–163, 277–281, 313 n.22 ambivalence toward, 28, 74, 77–79, 83–85, 129, 147–148, 155–158, 277–281 brother’s death, 152, 276–277 and conformity, aversion to, 77–79, 83– 85, 128–129, 146, 162–163 and Frank O’Hara collaboration with, 36–40 contrasted with, 102, 113, 128, 157–158, 163–165, 234, 243–246, 259–260, 324 n.2, 326 n.9 fear of being indistinguishable from, 39, 236–237, 259–260 friendship and rivalry with, 9, 19–20, 138, 151, 163–165, 233–274, 275– 280, 315 n.40

346

Index

Ashbery, John (continued) and Frank O’Hara reaction to death of, 142, 147, 163– 165, 275–280 and friendship, ambivalence toward, 12, 135, 147–148, 163–165, 234–237, 275–281 as brotherhood, 147–148, 151–152, 276–280 importance to his writing, 15, 127– 129, 151–152, 164–165, 311 n.10 and Harold Bloom’s championing of, 4–5, 310 n.7 and homosexuality, 151–152, 159, 243– 246, 259, 296 n.22, 314 n.30, 325 n.8, 326 n.11 and Cold War homophobia, 17, 43– 45, 244–246 and growing up, the theme of, 147, 152–153, 155, 158–161, 165, 277– 278 and individualism and community, 68, 77–79, 83–85, 128, 130, 143–146, 150–154, 157–163, 258–259, 276– 281, 304 n.40, 312 n.18 interpersonal, reputation for ignoring the, 127–131 and motion and flux, 44, 129–130, 131–143, 145, 267, 278–280, 310 nn.5–6 linked to doubt and skepticism, 133– 134, 137–140, 162 and the New York School, ambivalence toward, 78–79, 128, 149–150, 164– 165, 276–281, 303 n.35 and pragmatism, 19, 61–62, 128–129, 131–142, 152, 161–162, 299 n.14, 310 n.7 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 62, 128, 131–142, 145, 160, 300 n.15 and the self as protean, 44–45, 68, 142–143, 162–163 the social character of, 74, 128–129, 163–165, 309 n.2

Works “American Sanctuary in Paris” (essay), 83, 146, 312 n.18 “The Bungalows,” 147, 159, 160 “Clepsydra,” 272 “Clouds,” 148 The Double Dream of Spring, 146–147, 149 “Europe,” 11 “Fragment,” 130, 142, 272 “Frank O’Hara’s Question” (essay), 77 “French Poems,” 265 “The Friend at Midnight,” 3, 11, 290 n.14 Girls on the Run, 311 n.14, 329 n.4 “The History of My Life,” 152, 277 Houseboat Days, 129, 278 “The Invisible Avant-Garde” (essay), 83–85, 146, 159 “A Last World,” 240, 325 n.7 “Litany,” 128 “Lithuanian Dance Band,” 130, 163– 165, 276 “Memories of Imperialism,” 299 n.14 “My Friends,” 127 “My Philosophy of Life,” 61–62, 299 n.14 “The New Spirit,” 74, 135, 164 “The Other Tradition,” 275 “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” 242 “Plainness in Diversity,” 143 “A Reminiscence” (essay), 151, 236– 237, 272–273 “Saying It to Keep It From Happening,” 326 n.11 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 278 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” 128 “The Skaters,” 11, 143–146, 272 “Some Trees,” 152, 246, 280 Some Trees, 254–255, 258, 271 “Some Words,” 143 “Song,” 148

Index “Soonest Mended,” 79, 158–163 “Sortes Vergilianae,” 155–158, 160 “Street Musicians,” 276–280 “Summer,” 127 “The System,” 23, 134–142, 152 “The Task,” 148 The Tennis Court Oath, 157, 241, 272 Three Poems, 133–135, 140 “Variations, Calypso, and Fugue on a Theme by Ella Wheeler Wilcox,” 150–154, 313 n.25 Where Shall I Wander, 280 “Wolf Ridge,” 280 “A Wave,” 130 Ashton, Dore, 49 Auden, W. H. as influence on New York School, 64, 133, 327 n.18 as judge of Yale Younger Poets Prize, 254–261 Auslander, Philip, 252, 253 the avant-garde and collaboration, 34–40 and community importance of, 5–8, 10, 17, 20–22, 26–34, 110, 280, 282, 283–285, 289 n.8 linked to writing of poetry, 7–8, 10, 20–21, 26–28, 29–31, 33–36, 91–92, 110, 113, 283–284, 289 n.8 as conflicted and contradictory, 17, 28, 39–40, 49, 74–85, 155, 161–162, 282 and conformity, aversion to. See avantgarde: individualism and individualism, 8–9, 17, 21–22, 28, 34, 39, 49–52, 68, 74–85, 112, 145–146, 155, 157–158, 180–181, 193, 230, 234, 258–260, 282 military connotations of, 27, 85, 150– 154, 156–158 and motion and flux, embrace of, 15–17, 22, 24–25, 41–42, 44, 57, 63–64, 68, 87–89, 129–130, 167, 175, 193 and pragmatism, 54, 57, 59, 61–64

347

as response to Cold War culture 17, 29–31, 41–52, 60, 91 Baker, Houston A., 318 n.13 Balanchine, George, 89, 198 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 3, 27, 43, 165, 166–232 and abandonment, 23, 167, 171–172, 182–183, 215, 232 art and political protest, reluctance to mix, 174–176, 180, 317 n.6 and the avant-garde, ambivalence toward, 28, 74, 81–82, 155, 168– 170, 180–181, 193, 195, 204–205, 209–210, 214–215, 221, 224–226, 228, 232 break with white community and first wife, 168–170, 172, 194–195, 229–232 and conformity, aversion to. See Amiri Baraka: individualism and existentialism, 58 and Frank O’Hara, friendship with, 9, 13, 89, 92, 195– 204, 209, 210–212, 222–224, 229, 320 n.4, 324 nn.28–29, impact on, 200–204 influenced by, 170, 186, 194, 196–197 and friendship, 27, 191 ambivalence toward, 81–82, 169, 193, 194–195, 204–232 as contentious dialogue, 12, 81–82, 166, 181, 204–205, 224–225, 232 importance to his writing, 15, 166, 194–195, 228 interracial, 168, 194–204, 209–210, 219–226, 228–229, 232 and homosexuality, ambivalence toward, 174, 195, 197, 199, 209–224, 231, 322 n.14 and inconsistency, 171, 184, 227, 323 n.26 and individualism, 12, 22, 46, 50, 166–167, 170–171, 180, 183–186, 219–220, 225–226, 230

348

Index

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones) (continued) and jazz, 12, 174–175, 191–193, 194, 202, 207–208, 214, 318 n.15, 321 n.7 and mobility and flux, embrace of, 44, 166–167, 175, 185, 189, 193, 204, 206–207, 231 and New American Poetry, central role within, 13–14, 167–169, 229–230 and New York School, 6, 12–15, 167, 169–170, 195–196, 198, 232, 290 n.15 and pragmatism, 19, 57, 63, 166, 169–171, 172–174, 193, 231 and race and identity, 45–46, 168–169, 192–193, 205, 213–219, 229–232 racial essentialism, resistance to, 46, 172–176, 179, 192–193, 219, 231 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 63, 170, 183 and Robert Duncan, 189–190, 228, 230, 301 n.21 and the self, as protean, 167, 175–176, 179, 184– 193, 213, 226–227, 232, 323 n.26 self-criticism and self-division, 186, 188, 190, 195, 206–208, 212–224 the social character of, 22, 74, 181, 193, 207 and turning away, 166, 171, 179, 185, 188–189, 193, 204–205, 208–209, 232, 316 n.1, 318 n.13 Works “Audobon, Drafted,” 188 “Balboa, the Entertainer,” 186 The Baptism, 174, 210 “Betancourt,” 166, 179–186, 215, 226 “Black Art,” 230–231 “Black People!” 231 Blues People, 168 “The Bridge,” 191–193 “Charlie Mingus” (essay), 174–175 “Cuba Libre” (essay), 180, 197 “The Dance,” 189 The Dead Lecturer, 180, 186, 189, 195, 224–232

“Duncan Spoke of a Process,” 189, 228 Dutchman, 173, 200, 221 “For Hettie,” 50 “Green Lantern’s Solo,” 57, 225–226 “How You Sound??” 50, 166 “Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall” (essay), 167 “I Don’t Love You,” 204 “In Wyoming Territory,” 211 “Joseph to His Brothers,” 9, 195, 204, 225 “The Liar,” 226–227 “Look for You Yesterday, Here You Come Today,” 222–224 “Milneburg Joys (or Against ‘Hipness’ as Such)” (essay), 81–82, 155 “Notes for a Speech,” 176–179, 193, 219 “One Night Stand,” 27 “Ostriches and Grandmothers!” 186–187, 193 “A Poem for Democrats,” 204 “A Poem for Speculative Hipsters,” 204 Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 176, 180, 186, 208 “Reggae or Not!” 231 “Rhythm & Blues,” 208 “A Short Speech to My Friends,” 204 The Slave, 195, 221 The System of Dante’s Hell, 58, 167, 195, 200, 205–219, 232 The Toilet, 168, 173, 195, 198, 200, 210, 219–224 “The Turncoat,” 188–189 “Vice,” 188 “Way Out West,” 186 “Will They Cry When You’re Gone, You Bet,” 204 Barnes, Hazel, 58 Barrett, William, 58–59 Bátki, John, 263–264 Beats, the, 5–6, 17, 29, 49, 77, 79, 81–82, 88, 140, 167–169, 180, 194, 196, 223, 288 nn.3–4, 326 n.13

Index Beauvoir, Simone de, 57 Beckett, Samuel, 237 Belgrad, Daniel, 41, 42, 88 Bell, Bernard Iddings, 47 Bell, Daniel, 46 Benston, Kimberly W., 167, 169, 186, 205, 207, 322 nn.18–19 Berger, Charles, 143–144, 148, 314 n.34 Bergman, David, 44–45, 300 n.16 Berkson, Bill, 6, 13, 36, 90, 91, 115, 196, 210, 240 Bernstein, Charles, 20 and community, the idea of, 21–22, 283–285 and Emersonian pragmatism, 64, 283– 285, 291 n.17 Bernstein, Leonard, 198, 229 Bernstein, Richard J., 55 Berrigan, Ted, 13, 150, 196, 290 n.15 Black Arts movement, 13, 168–169, 210, 230 Black Mountain poets, 5, 12–13, 17, 27, 31, 167, 194, 288 n.3 Blaser, Robin, 27, 28, 234 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 45, 97, 306 n.9 Bloom, Harold, 4–5, 7, 10, 125, 131, 164, 237, 310 n.7 Bluhm, Norman, 91 Bourdieu, Pierre, 10, 113–114, 129, 164, 235, 293 n.7 Brainard, Joe, 91, 290 n.15 Breslin, James, 94, 96, 102, 288 n.3, 305 n.2, 306 n.7 Breton, Andre, 34, 155 Brodey, Jim, 196 Brodkey, Harold, 237 Brook Farm, 76, 303 n.33 Brown, Lloyd, 177 Brown, Sterling A., 170 Bürger, Peter, 31 Burke, Kenneth, 53 Burroughs, William S., 43, 200 Busoni, Ferruccio Benevuto, 83 Cage, John, 49, 83, 89, 198

349

Cain and Abel story, 9, 10, 38, 225, 255–260, 267 and Cain as figure for the “strong poet,” 259 Camus, Albert, 57 Carter, Elliott, 83 Cavell, Stanely, 23–24, 64, 66, 93, 124, 139, 185, 283 Ceravolo, Joseph, 13 Chirico, Giorgio de, 83, 133 Clay, Stephen, 31 Cohen, Rachel, 287 n.1 Cold War culture, and conformity versus individualism, 16–18, 29–30, 40–41, 43, 46–52, 75, 76–77, 84–85, 89, 112, 193, 281–282 and containment, 16–17, 40–52, 97, 112, 294 nn.16–17, 308 n.23 and existentialism, 57–59 and homophobia, 17, 41–45, 159, 210, 243–246, 300 n.16 and movement and speed, 17, 41–42, 44, 88–89, 129 and normative masculinity, 9, 112, 234 and the nuclear family, 9, 112, 234, 308 n.23 and pragmatism, 18, 53–54, 57, 59–64 and race, 17, 45–46, 172 Coleman, Ornette, 89 Coltrane, John, 204, 207–208, 318 n.15 collaboration, 34–40, 90–91, 293 nn.9–11 community, and poetry, 5–8, 10, 20–22, 26–34 as an instrument of community formation, 8, 29–32, 91, 110–113 See also avant-garde: community; friendship; specific poets conformity. See Cold War culture: conformity; avant-garde: and individualism; Emerson: and individualism; specific poets containment. See Cold War culture: containment Corber, Robert, 42

350

Index

Cornell, Joseph, 83, 304 n.40 Corso, Gregory, 51, 89, 112, 223, 225, 230 Cotkin, George, 58, 298 n.8, 299 n.13 Crane, Hart, 158, 191, 247, 318 n.16 Cravan, Arthur, 143 Creeley, Robert, 9, 13, 27, 149, 204, 206, 225, 230, 319 n.16, 325 n.3 Cunningham, Merce, 49, 89, 198 Dada, 19, 31, 34, 80, 287 n.2 Dante, 136, 172, 205, 207–208, 216, 218–219 Darger, Henry, 83 Davidson, Michael, 7–9, 27, 33–34, 46, 91, 151, 290 n.10, 293 n.8, 294 n.16, 306 n.5 Davis, Miles, 198, 201, 321 n.6 Dean, James, 102, 162, 243, 245, 255–260 D’Emilio, John, 42 de Kooning, Willem, 83, 89–90, 157–158, 198, 307 n.17 Denby, Edwin, 89–90, 275 Derrida, Jacques, 10, 38, 120, 234–235, 290 n.12 Dewey, John, 10, 53, 60–62, 173, 190, 299 n.14 and individual and community, tension between, 72–73 and the self, 67, 73–74 See also pragmatism Dickinson, Emily, 3, 269 Dickstein, Morris, 24, 41, 54, 59–60, 138, 161, 295 n.18, 299 n.14 Diggory, Terence, 7, 30, 92, 292 nn.3–4 di Prima, Diane, 31, 43, 89, 199, 209, 211, 224, 230 Dorn, Edward, 225 Douglas, Ann, 294 n.16 Du Bois, W. E. B., 46, 53, 170, 173, 176 Duchamp, Marcel, 32 Duncan, Robert, 9, 27, 29, 234 and Baraka, 189, 228, 230 and Emersonian pragmatism, 62, 170, 189–190, 301 n.21 Early, Gerald, 323 n.26

East of Eden (movie), 9, 38, 243, 255–260, 267, 327 n.21 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 46–47, 281, 308 n.24 Eliot, T. S., 6, 64, 172, 186, 218, 237 Ellington, Duke, 198 Ellison, Ralph, 46, 58, 207 and jazz, 12, 194 and pragmatism, 53, 170, 173 and racial identity, 172–174, 176, 192 Elmslie, Kenward, 13, 199 Eluard, Paul, 34 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 21, 53–56, 61–76, 80, 83, 89, 96, 108, 120, 122–123, 161, 183, 248 and abandonment, 23–24, 67–68, 98–99, 101, 124, 141–142, 153, 167, 171– 172, 182–183, 215, 234, 249, 278 and antifoundationalism, 18, 55–56, 67, 69, 132, 297 n.5 collectives and institutions, wariness of, 22, 75–76, 77–78, 84, 303 n.33 and conformity. See Emerson: collectives and institutions, wariness of; individualism and friendship, theories of, 3, 64–65, 68–72, 235 as contentious dialogue, 69, 71, 103, 238, and enmity, proximity to, 3, 9, 71, 260, 290 n.10 as indispensable, 3, 9, 69–70 as paradox, 3, 9, 68–72, 235–236 as provocation, 11, 69–70, 71–72, 181, 183, 190, 204, 235, 239, 260 as transient and contingent, 70, 109, 249 and inconsistency, 56, 102, 171, 184, 318 n.12. See also Emerson: mobility and flux and individualism, 17–18, 50, 63, 64–69, 75–77, 204, 301 n.22, 303 n.33, 307 n.14 Emerson’s challenge to conventional notions of, 65, 66 as fundamentally social, 18, 54, 68–69,

Index 128–129 and influence, 71, 106–108. See also Emerson: friendship, as provocation marriage, ambivalence toward, 70, 111, 308 n.22 and mobility and flux, 19, 22, 55–76, 97, 102, 129, 132, 135, 139, 140–141, 249, 253, 297 n.5, 318 n.12 and the postwar avant-garde, influence on, 53–54, 62–64, 283–284, 291 n.17 and pragmatism, 18–19, 54, 296–7 nn.2–3 the self as protean, 18, 65–68, 93–94, 101, 307 n.14 the social character of the, 68–72, 128–129, 181, 207, 303 n.31 self-reliance. See Emerson: individualism Works “The American Scholar,” 71 “Circles,” 23, 69–70, 98, 140, 142, 171, 190 “Divinity School Address,” 71 “Experience,” 70, 140, 145, 184 “Fate,” 66 “Friendship,” 3, 70–72 “Literary Ethics,” 108 “The Method of Nature,” 56, 132 “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic” 56, 140 “Nature,” 161 “Self-Reliance,” 24, 65, 71, 95, 184, 204 “The Uses of Great Men,” 69 Emersonian pragmatism, 53–54. See also Emerson; pragmatism Everett, Percival, 46 existentialism, 19, 57–59, 298 nn.6–8 Feldman, Alan, 113, 114 Feldman, Morton, 89–90 Fence, 314 n.36 Finkelstein, Norman, 328 n.2 Firbank, Ronald, 237

351

The Floating Bear, 31, 43, 81–82, 167–168, 196, 203, 211 Frank, Waldo, 247 Frankenthaler, Helen, 89 Freilicher, Jane, 6, 30, 104, 109–115, 157, 253, 257–260, 308 n.25, 327 n.17 Friedlander, Benjamin, 320 n.5 friendship, as brotherhood, conceived of, 9–10, 31, 147–148, 151–152, 196, 225, 233– 234, 256–260, 267, 276–280 as confining, 10, 16, 21–22, 81–82, 124– 126, 204–205, 280 and conformity. See friendship: as confining; avant-garde; Cold War culture and competition, 7, 9, 69–70, 90, 104–105, 113–114, 148, 234–235, 239–241, 254–260, 268–271 as contentious dialogue, 15, 28, 69, 71, 90–93, 101, 103–106, 128, 148, 166, 234–241, 276 and enmity, proximity to, 3, 10, 15, 38, 71, 148, 165, 195, 235, 254, 260, 266–267, 278–281 and fratricide, 9–10, 255–260, 267. See also friendship: enmity, proximity to and individualism, tension between, 3–4, 7, 8–9, 16, 68, 81–82, 87, 126, 228–229, 232, 234, 266, 282–285, passim and influence, 71, 106–108, 128, 163– 165, 246–248, 273, 278–279. See also friendship: as provocation interracial, 13–14, 168, 195–204, 209–210, 219–226, 228–229, 232, 320 n.4 mobility and flux, effects on, 16, 22, 24–25, 89, 93, 142 as paradoxical and contradictory, 3, 7–9, 10, 25, 69–74, 93, 195, 266, 274, 285, and passim and postwar American poetry importance of connections between, 3–5, 7, 8, 15, 26–40, 91–92, 117, 282–285. See also community

352

Index

friendship (continued) as a vehicle for dramatizing, 15, 25, 26, 30–31, 36–40, 91, 103–106, 235, 274, 284–285 as provocation and inspiration, 10–12, 26–27, 71–72, 115–117, 120–121, 123–124, 181, 235, 239–241, 246–247 as sibling rivalry, conceived of, 9, 225, 234, 238–239, 250–260, 276–280 as transient and contingent, 23–25, 70– 71, 87, 109, 135, 147, 249, 267–268, 278–280 See also avant-garde: community; individualism; Emerson: friendship; specific poets Frost, Robert, 23, 53–54, 96, 138, 265 Fuller, Margaret, 76 Fulton, Ann, 58 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 47 Garbo, Greta, 76–77, 93 Ginsberg, Allen, 9, 13, 26, 29, 50, 89, 149, 168, 197, 199, 206, 225, 230, 275 Golding, Alan, 5, 7, 31, 260, 287–288 nn.2–3 Goldberg, Michael, 104, 245 Gooch, Brad, 6, 30, 198–199, 238, 246, 250, 255 Goodman, Paul, 29–32, 62, 110, 292 nn.2–5 Gray, Jeffrey, 310 n.6 Gregson, Ian, 44–45 Greenberg, Clement, 32, 214 Gris, Juan, 82 Gruen, John, 89, 91, 244 Guest, Barbara, 6, 13, 50, 89, 149 Gunn, Giles, 55, 61, 73, 302 n.29 Guston, Philip, 89 Habermas, Jürgen, 73 Halliday, Mark, 127–128, 130–131 Harris, William J., 169, 177, 316 n.1 Hartigan, Grace, 325 n.6 Hassan, Ihab, 291 n.19

Hejinian, Lyn, 3, 283 and community, the idea of, 20–22, 304 n.39 and Emersonian pragmatism, 64, 291 n.17 Herd, David, 13, 35–36, 289 n.9, 292 n.6, 299 n.14, 310 n.7 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 60–61 homosexuality gay community and brotherhood, 30, 151, 234–235, 314 n.30 and identity in poetry, 44–45, 243–246 See also Cold War culture: and homophobia; specific poets Hook, Sidney, 60 Howe, Irving, 47, 60 Howe, Susan, 64 Hurston, Zora Neale, 173 identity. See self; individualism Imbriglio, Catherine, 45 individualism, 3–4, 12, 17, 49–52, 64–85, 101–103, 157–163, 281–283 and abandonment, 23–24, 67–68, 124, 153, 167, 234 critiques of official, mythic version of, 65–69, 126, 301 nn.22–23 “experimental individualism,” 8–9, 44, 67–68, 88, 93–101, 124–126, 167, 302 n.24 and friendship. See friendship: and individualism, tension between and the self, as protean, 65–68, 93–101, 302 n.24 as social, 18, 54, 68–69, 72–74, 128–129, 282, 302 n.30, 303 n.31 See also avant-garde: individualism; Cold War culture; Emerson: individualism; friendship; specific poets influence. See Emerson; friendship interracial friendship. See friendship: interracial; Amiri Baraka: and Frank O’Hara Izenberg, Oren, 7, 291 n.17

Index Jachec, Nancy, 60, 62, 298 n.8, 299 n.12 James, Henry, 53, 133 James, Sr., Henry, 72, 302 n.29 James, William, 18–19, 53, 55–57, 58, 60–64, 89, 122, 132–134, 138–139, 152, 170, 172–173, 188, 190, 284 collectives and institutions, wariness of, 22, 65–66 essentialism and “identity logic,” critique of, 67, 172–173 and individualism, 65–66, 72–74 and mobility and flux, 19, 55–57, 132, 134, 140–141, 152, 318 n.12. See also pragmatism: antifoundationalism and the self, 67, 72–74, 302 n.30 See also pragmatism Jarraway, David, 295 n.21 Jarrell, Randall, 63 Jay, Paul, 61 jazz, 17, 42, 49, 57, 191–193, 194, 202, 207–208, 214, 295 n.19, 318 n.15, 321 n.7 tension between individual and collective within, 12 Jenkins, Nicholas, 315 n.38 Johns, Jasper, 83, 89, 117 Jones, Hettie, 43, 167, 178, 196, 211, 322 n.17 Jones, LeRoi. See Amiri Baraka Joyce, James, 172 Jumonville, Neil, 60 Kafka, Franz, 214 Kane, Daniel, 7, 27, 31, 113, 289 n.9, 293 n.11, 305 n.1 Kateb, George, 24, 302 n.23 Keats, John, 120, 133, 239–240, 248, 253 friendship and rivalry with Percy Bysshe Shelley, 238–239, 240, 289 n.8 Keller, Lynn, 130, 313 n.28 Kennan, George, 40 Kerouac, Jack, 9, 13, 26, 29, 41, 88, 129, 140, 200, 210, and Frank O’Hara, 223

353

Kierkegaard, Soren, 57, 214 Kirstein, Lincoln, 198 Kitaj, R. B., 83 Kline, Franz, 82–83, 89–90, 223 Koch, Kenneth, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 31, 36–40, 78, 91, 108, 113, 146, 149, 151, 198–199, 202, 203, 211, 230, 248, 259–260, 268–271, 305 n.2 and collaboration, 35, 91, 261, 293 n.10 friendship with Frank O’Hara, 104–106, 115–117, 258, 307 n.17 Koestenbaum, Wayne, 35, 38, 259, 260, 293 n.10 Kulchur, 196 Lang, Bunny, 245, 250–254 Language poetry, 20–22, 283–285, 303 n.32 and pragmatism, 64, 283, 291 n.17 Laskin, David, 287 n.1 Lauterbach, Ann, 25 Lawrence, D. H., 119–122, 309 n.30 Lears, Jackson, 47–48 Lee, Ben, 316 n.3 Lehman, David, 6–7, 33, 34, 83, 87, 244, 255, 289 n.7, 320 n.5, 321 n.6 Lentricchia, Frank, 61, 73, 74 Leslie, Alfred, 91 LeSueur, Joe, 6, 90, 121, 123–124, 196, 199, 229, 308 n.25, 309 n.31 Levertov, Denise, 27 Levin, Jonathan, 23, 24, 61, 180, 296 nn.1– 3, 302 nn.26–27 Lhamon, Jr., W. T., 41, 42, 88, 295 nn.18–19 Li Po, 248 Lima, Frank, 196 Lindner, Robert, 47 Locke, Alain, 170, 173, 176 Locus Solus, 7, 13, 31, 34, 82, 168, 202, 260– 261, 271, 292 n.6 Lott, Eric, 295 n.19 Lowell, Robert, 41, 63–64, 136 Lowney, John, 109 Mackey, Nathaniel, 12, 46, 175, 185, 192– 193, 291 n.16, 319 n.1

354

Index

Macdonald, Dwight, 48, 60 Magee, Michael, 8, 63, 201–202, 292 n.2, 292 n.4, 297 n.4, 301 n.21, 320 n.3 Mailer, Norman, 41, 58, 88, 96 Malcolm X, 170, 229 marriage, 51, 109–115, 308 n.23 Mathews, Harry, 13, 271 Matthiessen, F. O., 62, 300 n.16 Mayakovsky,Vladimir, 197 May, Elaine Tyler, 308 n.24 McCarthyism, 17, 40–43, 46, 244–246, 281–282, 300 n.16 McClure, Michael, 27, 191, 206 McDermott, John, 66 McHale, Brian, 313 n.22 Mead, George Herbert, 18, 73–74 Melville, Herman, 174 Menand, Louis, 19, 55, 59–61, 72, 77, 302 n.24 Mills, C. Wright, 47, 48 Milne, A. A., 81–82 Mingus, Charles, 174–175 Mitchell, Charles, 68, 302 n.30 Mitchell, Joan, 109 mobility, motion, and flux and antifoundationalism, 16, 18, 56, 66–68, 88, 153 loss and crisis as a result of, 24, 88–89, 95–97, 126, 135–136, 141 as power and strength, 95, 102, 312 n.15 social implications of, 16, 22, 24–25, 87, 89, 124–126, 142 See also avant-garde: motion and flux, embrace of; Cold War culture: movement and speed; specific writers Mohanty, S. P., 309 n.2 Monk, Thelonious, 49 Monroe, Jonathan, 309 n.2 Montaigne, Michel de, 290 n.12 Moore, Marianne, 23, 83, 87 Motherwell, Robert, 62, 89, 242, 301 n.20 motion. See mobility, motion, and flux Murray, Albert, 46, 172

Nadel, Alan, 40 Nelson, Deborah, 294 n.17 New, Elisa, 61 The New American Poetry, 6, 27, 50, 81–82, 187, 189, 200, 218, 287 nn.2–3 Newfield, Christopher, 65 Newman, Barnett, 62, 90 New York School of poetry, the, 4–5, 276–280, 289 n.5, 293 n.8, 304 n.43 and Amiri Baraka, See Amiri Baraka: New York School and collaboration, 34–40 as community and coterie, 7, 13, 109– 115, 278, 289 n.5. See also avantgarde: community group aesthetic, ambivalence about, 38–40, 78–81, 85 limitations of the label, 12, 78, 303 n.35 origins and definition of, 6, 303 n.35 Nielsen, Aldon Lynn, 14, 197, 205, 291 n.16, 316 n.3, 319 n.1, 322 n.19 nonconformity. See avant-garde: individualism; Cold War culture: conformity; Emerson: individualism; individualism O’Brien, Flann, 237 O’Hara, Frank, 3, 6, 24–25, 86–126, 127, 168, 193–204, 233–274 and abandonment, 23–24, 68, 98, 101, 124, 234, 249 and Amiri Baraka, friendship with, 9, 13, 92, 195–204, 209, 210–212, 222–224, 320 n.4, 324 nn.28–29 influenced by, 200–202 reaction to Baraka’s break with white friends, 229–230 art and political protest, reluctance to mix, 76–77, 93, 174–175, 180 and the avant-garde, ambivalence toward, 28, 74, 76–77, 79–81, 82–83, 85, 93, 109, 112, 157–158, 304 n.42

Index and Cold War cultural politics, 51–52, 76–77, 93, 94, 97, 111, 198–199 and collaboration, 36–40, 86, 90–91 and conformity, aversion to, 49, 93, 101– 108, 111–112, 256, 258, 266. See also Frank O’Hara: individualism as coterie poet, 29–31, 86–87, 93, 110– 114, 305 n.1 death of, 86, 138, 147, 163, 272–273, 275–280 and East of Eden (movie), 9, 38, 243, 255–260, 327 n.21 and friendship, 305 n.1 ambivalence toward, 24, 38–40, 87–89, 92–93, 103–109, 115–126, 202–204, 234–237, 240–241, 247, 250–260, 266–271 as brotherhood, 9, 31, 233, 250–260, 266–271 and competition, 90, 104, 105, 113–114, 239, 250–261, 268–271, 273–274 as contentious dialogue, 90–93, 101, 103–106, 234–235, 238, 256 dependence on friends’ poetry for inspiration, 11, 101, 106–108, 115– 117, 120–121, 123–124, 239–241, 243, 246, 273 importance to his writing, 15, 30–31, 86–87, 91–93, 117, 125–126, 274 interracial, 201–204, 229, 320 nn.4–5 O’Hara’s legendary capacity for, 86–88, 89–91, 275, 305 n.1 as provocation. See Frank O’Hara: dependence on friend’s poetry for inspiration as transient and contingent, 71, 109, 114, 201, 247, 249, 268 and homosexuality, 45, 111, 199, 243– 246, 295 n.21, 325 n.8 and Cold War homophobia, 17, 44– 45, 94, 243–246 and individualism, 49–50, 76–77, 79–81, 101–108, 113–114, 124–126, 157–158,

355

234–235, 256, 258, 266–271, 274 and Jack Kerouac, 223 and Jack Spicer, 91–92 and John Ashbery cast in roles by O’Hara, 235, 238–240, 247–254, 256–260, 269 collaboration with, 36–40 correspondence with, 239–241, 271–272 contrasted with, 102, 113, 128, 157–158, 163–165, 234, 243–246, 259–260, 324 n.2, 326 n.9 fear of being indistinguishable from, 39, 236–237, 259–260 friendship and rivalry with, 9, 19–20, 138, 151, 163–165, 233–274, 275– 280, 315 n.40 and Kenneth Koch, 103–106, 113, 115– 117, 258, 270–271 marriage, attitudes about, 109–115 and mobility and flux, 44, 57, 67, 87–90, 93–101, 102–103, 106, 118, 122– 124, 129, 138, 242, 265–266, 267, 274, 305 n.2 and Paul Goodman, influence of, 29–31, 110, 292 nn. 4–5 and pragmatism, 19, 57, 62–63, 101, 107, 124 and race, 198–199, 229, 320 nn.4–5 and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 62, 102, 248, 299 n.15 and the self, as protean, 44–45, 68, 93–101, 102, 104, 116–117, 124, 197, 243–244, 306 n.7–9 Works “Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul,” 115, 117 “Ashes on Saturday Afternoon,” 242–246 “At the Old Place,” 245 “Autobiographical Fragments” (essay), 246 “Blocks,” 279 “Brothers,” 31 “Cambridge,” 325 n.6

356

Index

O’Hara, Frank (continued) Works “Choses Passagères,” 260–271, 274, 278 “Cornkind,” 308 n.23 “The Critic,” 251 “Day and Nights in 1952,” 116 “The Day Lady Died,” 115, 203 “Easter,” 104, 245 “Essay on Style,” 138 “Finding LeRoi a Lawyer,” 202–204 “For Grace, After a Party,” 247 “For Kenneth and Janice Au Voyage,” 247 “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun),” 115 “Hatred,” 76, 104 “Homosexuality,” 245 “How to Proceed in the Arts” (essay), 80–81 “In Favor of One’s Time,” 115 “In Memory of My Feelings,” 99– 101, 109, 186, 213, 227 “Joe’s Jacket,” 112, 115, 117–124 “John Button Birthday,” 51, 110, 247 “Larry,” 247 “Les Luths,” 115 “Letter to Bunny,” 247 “Meditations in an Emergency,” 95–96 “My Heart,” 101–103, 184 “Naphtha,” 115 “A Note to John Ashbery,” 241–242, 274 “Notes On Second Avenue,” 57 “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets,” 157, 202, 320 n.4 “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births),” 50, 157–158 “Ode to Willem de Kooning,” 157 “Passing Things,” 263–271 “Personal Poem,” 115, 198, 202 “Personism: A Manifesto,” 79–80, 92–93, 111, 115, 197, 200–202, 203, 246, 270, 306 n.6

“Poem (At night Chinamen jump),” 245 “Poem (The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles),” 115–117, 203 “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day),” 88, 115 “Poem (Now it is the 27th),” 94–95 “Poem (So many echoes in my head”), 106–108 “Poem en Forme de Saw,” 96, 125–126 “Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s,” 109–114 “Rare Modern” (essay), 76 “Rhapsody,” 115 “Second Avenue,” 104, 105 “Sleeping on the Wing,” 23 “To a Poet,” 103 “To John Ashbery,” 247–249, 280, 326 n.13 “To the Harbormaster,” 71, 120, 315 n.40 “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” 92, 107, 296 n.24 Try! Try! 249–254, 267, 274 “Why I Am Not a Painter,” 223 “[Why are there flies on the floor],” 273–274 “Wind,” 97 Olson, Charles, 9, 13, 27, 31, 50, 63, 204, 206–207, 225, 230, 283, 325 n.3 “Projective Verse,” 79, 81, 288 n.2 Oppen, George, 312 n.16 Padgett, Ron, 150, 196, 272, 290 n.15, 293 n.10 Parker, Charlie, 49 Patell, Cyrus, 65, 301 n.22 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 291 n.1 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 18, 53, 60, 63, 64, 72 Pells, Richard H., 47–49, 84 Perelman, Bob, 20

Index Perkins, David, 288 n.3 Perloff, Marjorie, 87, 97, 118, 121, 124, 275, 305 n.2, 309 n.31 Phillips, Rodney, 31 Plath, Sylvia, 63 Po Chü-i, 247–248 Poggioli, Renato, 31 Poirier, Richard, 18, 23, 54, 66–67, 103, 108, 162, 171, 183, 297 n.4, 312 n.17, 315 n.39 Pollock, Jackson, 83, 162, 214, 295 n.19 Porter, Fairfield, 6, 9, 83, 89, 255–260, 304 n.40, 327 n.22 Posnock, Ross, 66–67, 172–173, 176, 210, 212, 216, 231, 298 n.9, 317 nn.4–7, 321 n.12 postmodernism, 45, 97, 99, 131, 282 Poulenc, Francis, 236 Pound, Ezra, 47, 54, 64, 164, 168, 283, 301 n.22 pragmatism, 16, 18, 29, 53–74, 124, 131–142 and African-American intellectuals, 63, 170, 172–173, 317 n.4 and antifoundationalism, 18–19, 23–25, 54–57, 66–68, 153. See also pragmatism: motion and flux in Cold War era, 18, 53, 57–64, 299 n.12 existentialism, compared to, 57–59, 298 n.8 “identity logic,” critique of, 18, 67, 172–173 and individualism individual and community, tensions between, 18–19, 22, 72–74 based on paradoxical notions of the self, 18, 65–68 as fundamentally social, 18, 72–74, 128 key features described, 18–19, 54–56 and motion and flux, 18–19, 22, 23–25, 54–57, 64, 98, 132–142, 171, 253, 297 n.5 as optimistic and affirmative, 24, 58–59, 114, 291 n.17 and the postwar avant-garde, influence

357

on, 18–19, 53–64, 134, 171, 190, 283, 291 n.17, 297 n.4 and the self as protean, 66–67, 93–94, 97–101(see also under specific authors) the social character of the, 19, 54–55, 72–74, 128, 207, 284, 303 n.31 See also specific authors and skepticism, 55–57, 133–134, 137–139, 173 See also William James; Emerson; specific poets Pynchon, Thomas, 41 Ransom, John Crowe, 64 Rauschenberg, Robert, 89, 168 Reed, Ishmael, 166 Richardson, Robert D., 68, 303 n.33 Riding, Laura, 83 Riesman, David, 47–49, 51–52, 84–85 Rifkin, Libbie, 7, 235, 310 n.4 Rimbaud, Arthur, 131 Rivers, Larry, 6, 13, 80–81, 86, 91, 93, 101, 151, 198, 200, 210, 258 Rollins, Sonny, 319 n.17 Romanticism, 4, 10, 19, 57, 131 Rorem, Ned, 89, 203 Rorty, Richard, 18, 98 Rosenberg, Harold, 32, 60 Ross, Andrew, 294 n.16 Roth, Philip, 200 Rothko, Mark, 62 Roussel, Raymond, 83, 133 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 57–59, 126, 214 self-reliance. See Emerson, individualism self and homosexuality, 44–45, 243–246 and individualism. See under specific authors as protean. See under specific authors and racial identity, 45–46, 172–175, 320 n.4 as social. See under specific authors Schjeldahl, Peter, 90, 126, 275

358

Index

Schuyler, James, 4, 6, 31, 36, 78, 149, 151, 254, 256, 260, 275 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy, 327 n.16 Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 66, 73 Selinger, Eric Murphy, 68 Shakespeare, William, 172, 239–240 Shapiro, David, 35, 109, 115, 132, 196, 198 Shaw, Lytle, 7, 113, 305 n.1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 193, 248 friendship and rivalry with John Keats, 238–239, 240, 289 n.8 Shetley,Vernon, 85, 304 n.43 Shoptaw, John, 45, 164, 244, 311 n.8, 314 nn.30–31 Silliman, Ron, 20 Silverberg, Mark, 150–151, 313 n.25, 313 n.28 Simon, John, 39 Smith, David, 89 Smith, Hazel, 35, 38, 113, 243, 295 n.21, 308 n.19 Snyder, Gary, 106–107 Sollors, Werner, 169, 177, 221, 318 n.14 Southern, Terry, 89 Southgate, Patsy, 124 Spellman, A. B., 89, 211 Spicer, Jack, 9, 27, 29 and friendship, 91–92, 234, 306 n.4–5 Stein, Gertrude, 84, 283 and New York School, 6, 62–64 and pragmatism, 18, 53–54, 62–64, 170 Steinbeck, John, 255 Stevens, Wallace, 4, 23, 98, 127, 130, 134, 141, 158, 307 n.11 and Frank O’Hara, 98, 237, 325 n.4 and New York School, 62–63, 131, 237– 238, 257, 258, 300 n.16, 325 n.4 and pragmatism, 18, 53–54, 62–64, 98, 170 and William Carlos Williams, friendship and rivalry with, 235, 238, 240, 259–260 Works “Asides on the Oboe,” 148

“Evening Without Angels,” 249 “The Man on the Dump,” 137 “A Motive for Metaphor,” 98 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” 161 “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” 188, 190 “Three Academic Pieces” (essay), 146 Stitt, Peter, 139, 277 Stravinsky, Igor, 236 Strong, Beret, 7, 31 surrealism, 19, 31, 34, 62, 80, 131, 254, 258 Tate, Allen, 64 Theocritus, 151 Thomas, Lorenzo, 290 n.15 Thompson,Virgil, 89 Thoreau, Henry David, 64 Towle, Tony, 196 Traherne, Thomas, 133 Trilling, Lionel, 60, 77, 201 Transcendentalists, the, 76 Tu Fu, 247–248 Twain, Mark, 174 Vendler, Helen, 132, 306 n.6 Vincent, John, 308 n.23 Vincente, Estaban, 137 Virgil, 151, 216 Ward, Geoff, 5, 113, 124, 130, 305 n.1 Warhol, Andy, 84, 89, 162 Warren,Vincent, 117, 123–124, 200, 201 Watts, Jerry Gafio, 316 n.3 Weinstein, Arnold, 91 West, Cornel, 18, 60, 66, 72, 299 n.12 Wheelwright, John, 83 Whitman, Walt, 3, 56, 94, 100, 102, 122, 164, 183, 226, 266–267, 283, 287 n.2 and New York School, 6, 62, 64, 131, 197, 299 n.15 White, Winston, 47 Whitehead, Alfred North, 62, 300 n.18 Whyte, William H., 47–49, 81, 85

Index Wieners, John, 119, 168, 191, 206 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 150–151 Williams, William Carlos, 87, 105–106, 112, 183, 283, 287 n.2 and New York School, 6, 64, 237–238, 257 and pragmatism, 18, 53–54, 62–64, 170 and Wallace Stevens, friendship and rivalry with, 235, 238, 240, 259–260 Wolf, Reva, 7, 31

359

Wolfe, Cary, 66–67, 301 n.22, 302 n.28, 307 n.14 Wolff, Rebecca, 315 n.36 Wordsworth, William, 131 Yale Younger Poets Prize, 254–260, 271 Yates, Richard, 281–282 Yugen, 167, 196, 199, 202 Zukofsky, Louis, 283