the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt nine)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

“Jimmy came for the weekend and stayed eleven years.” By the early 1970s, when Schuyler had been living with the Porter family for about a decade, this was Anne Porter’s well-worn reply to puzzled acquaintances who, observing the unusual situation, would hesitantly ask, “Is Mr. Schuyler a relative of yours?” Delivered in a voice no louder than a whisper, her answer was nonetheless pointed and, in a manner typical of the woman Jimmy once called “the wittiest person I know,” deflected into wry humor a situation that started casually and warmly, but would gradually turn awkward, then painful, then traumatic over the course of those eleven or twelve years.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt eight)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Frank O’Hara came out for one memorable weekend, and a group decided to drive out to Coney Island for the day. Jimmy was scared and miserable on the famous roller coaster there, but Frank, typically, was exhilarated by it. Driving back, Frank was still somewhat punch-drunk from the park and sped up as he came into the driveway, pretending he was about to run into Fizdale and several others standing there, but stopped just in time. Fizdale and Gold were frightened and angry at this recklessness, and Jimmy assumed that this would be the last time Frank would be invited out to Snedens Landing. On the contrary. At breakfast the next morning, Fizdale sidled up to Schuyler and said, “I very much like your friend, Frank O’Hara!” Later that day, when Jimmy walked into Fizdale’s bathroom, he was surprised to find Bobby and Frank in the tub, happily taking a bath together. For the rest of the summer, to Jimmy’s great delight, Arthur Weinstein was off the scene and O’Hara and Fizdale enjoyed what would turn out to be a summer romance. There was a witty symmetry to the arrangement, noted with amusement at the time: the two poet-roommates having simultaneous affairs with the two duo-piano partners. The tandem love affairs had the incidental effect of bringing Jimmy and Frank closer together, emphasizing a sort of brotherly feeling that they seemed to have shared, particularly around this time.

Frank was an excellent pianist himself, having studied piano and composition in college. When the pair of professionals were not at their instruments, he often played for long periods. Fizdale was astonished one day to hear from the other room “some Rachmaninoff or Liszt piece being dashed off at the piano” and assumed that Gold was playing, only to come in to find that it was Frank, who he hadn’t even realized could play. This summer was the period of Frank’s life when he came closest to reconnecting with his early musical interests, and it shows in some of the references to musical forms, and to piano music in particular, in poems he wrote at the time. Living with the pianists had an influence on Jimmy’s work as well, giving him not just a greater familiarity with the literature of the piano, seen in later poems such as “Hoboken,” “Scriabin,” “Grand Duo,” and others, but also an insider’s view into the workaday practice of pianists, particularly the intimate collaboration, almost amounting to mindreading, required of duo pianists—insights somewhat applicable to his ongoing collaboration with John Ashbery on A Nest of Ninnies.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt seven)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

On December 1, a night train brought them across France and through the Alps, and they woke to find themselves in Italy. When Bill and Jimmy emerged from Santa Maria Novella station in Florence, they discovered the center of the Renaissance city largely in ruins. Three years previously, on the night of August 3, 1944, hoping to slow the advance of American and British armies, the Germans blew up five of the city’s six bridges, sparing only the Ponte Vecchio. They compensated for that omission by dynamiting all the streets leading up to the bridge on either side of the river. In 1947, most of this damage had yet to be repaired, although temporary Bailey bridges had been erected in place of the Ponte Santa Trinità and the Ponte alla Carraia.

Despite the ruinous state of the city, and the exhaustion of the people after war and hardship, preceded by years of Fascist rule, there was a mood of optimism in the air. “Early post-war Italy was glorious,” wrote the novelist Sybille Bedford. “One embraced the people for whom the springs of life were flowing again; they were at one with the staggering beauty of what there was to see, everywhere, dawdling in the sun, the sweet air, the new near quiet. Petrol was scarce, the Vespas and rattling trams were joyful toys, their noise another attribute of being alive.”

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt six)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

During the nine-or ten-day crossing, Jimmy went on deck and watched the water churning in the ship’s wake, feeling the sense of occasion. His ambition, which he hoped to realize in Italy, was to write fiction—short stories and a novel. He had no thoughts yet of writing poetry. Meanwhile, his change in name held tremendous significance, and not only because “It’s good to / have your own name,” as he later deadpanned in “A few days.” By resuming the name he had been born with, he transformed with a single stroke his unhappy high school years, aimless college years, and the trauma and disgrace of his navy expulsion, into a life lived by another person.

Bill’s self-transformation had begun with his entering Columbia in 1944, graduating in 1947. While in Europe, he was planning to conduct research for two separate books: one on the theory and tactics of guerrilla warfare, the other a general history of Spain and the Mediterranean. Although Auden doubted Bill’s ability to see either of his book projects through, telling him, “You’re never going to write that book,” he helped with practical suggestions and contacts, giving him the name of a Professor Passonatti of Yale, who suggested he work in Florence and gave him a list of possible contacts there. Following this advice, the pair settled on Florence as their destination, but they would stop in Amsterdam and Paris on the way.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt five)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

The idea of leaving New York and going to live in Italy began to take shape in the summer of 1947, when Jimmy learned that the farm he had inherited ten years previously was finally able to be sold. It brought $6,000, with Jimmy keeping $ 4,000, and his mother, for some reason, getting the remaining $2,000. What better use for the windfall than going off to Europe, where living was cheap and they could “goof off and be somewhere beautiful,” as Jimmy later claimed, for as long as the money held out? Also, more seriously, there Jimmy could pursue his writing and Bill conduct research for the history of Spain he hoped to write.

When they went to apply for passports in June, both Bill and Jimmy had issues in determining what names to use. Bill’s old passport for Spain had used his birth name, William Aalstrom. However, his new one was issued in the name Aalto, which had become his legal name when his mother’s husband Otto Aalto adopted him as a boy. Jimmy, on the other hand, found, or claimed, that his name had never in fact been legally changed to Ridenour when his mother married Berton. Whether or not this was true, he submitted only his birth certificate to the State Department, giving his name as James Schuyler, taking this opportunity to cast off his stepfather’s name. It felt like a rebirth.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt four)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Jimmy was sent to the temporary U.S. Navy prison, or brig, on Hart Island. The 101-acre Hart Island, situated in Long Island Sound a few miles north and east of Manhattan, has a checkered history. At the end of the Civil War, it was briefly a federal prison camp for Confederate soldiers. In 1868, it was purchased by the City of New York for use as a potter’s field, which it still is, with burials there carried out by prisoners from neighboring Rikers Island. At different times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it also housed a tuberculosis hospital, an insane asylum, a boys’ reformatory, a women’s prison, a drug abuse center, a shoe factory, and a Cold War intercontinental missile base.

During World War II, the greater New York City area was a busy navy harbor, teeming with thousands of sailors on shore leave in the city. Disciplinary problems were inevitable, and beginning in April 1943, and until to the end of the war, a portion of Hart Island was requisitioned by the navy as a disciplinary barracks. During its wartime use as a prison camp, the island held about sixty buildings of various kinds, including a mess hall, heating plant, firehouse, butcher, commissary, laundry, garbage disposal plant, hospital, visitors’ house, theater, officers’ quarters, kennels, and two churches. Remnants of many of these buildings stand today as crumbling brick ruins, overgrown with foliage.

the last book I ever read (A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, excerpt three)

from A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan:

Schuyler credited Smeltzer with opening “windows for me on / flowering fields and bays where the water greenly danced, / Knifed into waves by wind: the day he disclosed William Carlos / Williams to us, writing a short and seemingly / Senseless poem on the blackboard.” Smeltzer also piqued Jimmy’s interest with a mention of James Joyce’s Ulysses. However, when Jimmy asked after class for more information about Ulysses, which had been banned in this country as obscene until 1933, Smeltzer chuckled and said, “When you’re in college it will be time enough.” Annoyed by Smeltzer’s coy hypocrisy, Jimmy went to Buffalo and, as he related in “The Morning of the Poem,” bought a copy of the book from Otto Ulrich’s bookshop, where John Bernard Myers, later a prominent figure in the New York art and poetry world, then worked as a salesclerk. Jimmy recalled him as a “big white whale” who loomed over him one day as he was reading in a corner of the shop, and said “You look like an interesting boy,” and gave him a copy of his magazine, Upstate. Jimmy’s rumored possession of Ulysses lent him unwonted status in the eyes of the high school jocks, normally oblivious to his very existence. He managed to get the book into the house, past his suspicious stepfather, by telling Berton it was a socially conscious book “about poor people in Ireland.”

Despite Smeltzer’s introducing him to William Carlos Williams’s poetry, Jimmy did not read him in earnest until he was in college, when he especially loved the “complete freedom” in his work. Through anthologies he also discovered Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, D. H. Lawrence, and other modernist poets. Lawrence and Stevens had probably the most impact, and over the next few years he came to feel he had memorized Harmonium and The Man with the Blue Guitar and Ideas of Order.